“Those references to myself----”
“Those were what I liked next best. I thought they were fine. Is it
true that you cheated when you won that Scripture-knowledge prize?”
“Certainly not. My victory was the outcome of the most strenuous and
unremitting efforts.”
“And how about this pessimism we hear of? Are you a pessimist, Bertie?”
I could have told her that what was occurring in this house was rapidly
making me one, but I said no, I wasn’t.
“That’s right. Never be a pessimist. Everything is for the best in this
best of all possible worlds. It’s a long lane that has no turning. It’s
always darkest before the dawn. Have patience and all will come right.
The sun will shine, although the day’s a grey one.... Try some of this
salad.”
I followed her advice, but even as I plied the spoon my thoughts were
elsewhere. I was perplexed. It may have been the fact that I had
recently been hobnobbing with so many bowed-down hearts that made this
cheeriness of hers seem so bizarre, but bizarre was certainly what I
found it.
“I thought you might have been a trifle peeved,” I said.
“Peeved?”
“By Gussie’s manoeuvres on the platform this afternoon. I confess that
I had rather expected the tapping foot and the drawn brow.”
“Nonsense. What was there to be peeved about? I took the whole thing as
a great compliment, proud to feel that any drink from my cellars could
have produced such a majestic jag. It restores one’s faith in post-war
whisky. Besides, I couldn’t be peeved at anything tonight. I am like
a little child clapping its hands and dancing in the sunshine. For
though it has been some time getting a move on, Bertie, the sun has at
last broken through the clouds. Ring out those joy bells. Anatole has
withdrawn his notice.”
“What? Oh, very hearty congratulations.”
“Thanks. Yes, I worked on him like a beaver after I got back this
afternoon, and finally, vowing he would ne’er consent, he consented. He
stays on, praises be, and the way I look at it now is that God’s in His
heaven and all’s right with----”
She broke off. The door had opened, and we were plus a butler.
“Hullo, Seppings,” said Aunt Dahlia. “I thought you had gone.”
“Not yet, madam.”
“Well, I hope you will all have a good time.”
“Thank you, madam.”
“Was there something you wanted to see me about?”
“Yes, madam. It is with reference to Monsieur Anatole. Is it by your
wish, madam, that Mr. Fink-Nottle is making faces at Monsieur Anatole
through the skylight of his bedroom?”
-20-
There was one of those long silences. Pregnant, I believe, is what
they’re generally called. Aunt looked at butler. Butler looked at aunt.
I looked at both of them. An eerie stillness seemed to envelop the room
like a linseed poultice. I happened to be biting on a slice of apple in
my fruit salad at the moment, and it sounded as if Carnera had jumped
off the top of the Eiffel Tower on to a cucumber frame.
Aunt Dahlia steadied herself against the sideboard, and spoke in a low,
husky voice:
“Faces?”
“Yes, madam.”
“Through the skylight?”
“Yes, madam.”
“You mean he’s sitting on the roof?”
“Yes, madam. It has upset Monsieur Anatole very much.”
I suppose it was that word “upset” that touched Aunt Dahlia off.
Experience had taught her what happened when Anatole got upset. I had
always known her as a woman who was quite active on her pins, but I
had never suspected her of being capable of the magnificent burst of
speed which she now showed. Pausing merely to get a rich hunting-field
expletive off her chest, she was out of the room and making for the
stairs before I could swallow a sliver of--I think--banana. And
feeling, as I had felt when I got that telegram of hers about Angela
and Tuppy, that my place was by her side, I put down my plate and
hastened after her, Seppings following at a loping gallop.
I say that my place was by her side, but it was not so dashed easy to
get there, for she was setting a cracking pace. At the top of the first
flight she must have led by a matter of half a dozen lengths, and was
still shaking off my challenge when she rounded into the second. At the
next landing, however, the gruelling going appeared to tell on her, for
she slackened off a trifle and showed symptoms of roaring, and by the
time we were in the straight we were running practically neck and neck.
Our entry into Anatole’s room was as close a finish as you could have
wished to see.
Result:
1. _Aunt Dahlia._
2. _Bertram._
3. _Seppings._
_Won by a short head. Half a staircase separated second and third._
The first thing that met the eye on entering was Anatole. This wizard
of the cooking-stove is a tubby little man with a moustache of the
outsize or soup-strainer type, and you can generally take a line
through it as to the state of his emotions. When all is well, it turns
up at the ends like a sergeant-major’s. When the soul is bruised, it
droops.
It was drooping now, striking a sinister note. And if any shadow of
doubt had remained as to how he was feeling, the way he was carrying on
would have dispelled it. He was standing by the bed in pink pyjamas,
waving his fists at the skylight. Through the glass, Gussie was staring
down. His eyes were bulging and his mouth was open, giving him so
striking a resemblance to some rare fish in an aquarium that one’s
primary impulse was to offer him an ant’s egg.
Watching this fist-waving cook and this goggling guest, I must say
that my sympathies were completely with the former. I considered him
thoroughly justified in waving all the fists he wanted to.
Review the facts, I mean to say. There he had been, lying in bed,
thinking idly of whatever French cooks do think about when in bed, and
he had suddenly become aware of that frightful face at the window. A
thing to jar the most phlegmatic. I know I should hate to be lying in
bed and have Gussie popping up like that. A chap’s bedroom--you can’t
get away from it--is his castle, and he has every right to look askance
if gargoyles come glaring in at him.
While I stood musing thus, Aunt Dahlia, in her practical way, was
coming straight to the point:
“What’s all this?”
Anatole did a sort of Swedish exercise, starting at the base of the
spine, carrying on through the shoulder-blades and finishing up among
the back hair.
Then he told her.
In the chats I have had with this wonder man, I have always found his
English fluent, but a bit on the mixed side. If you remember, he was
with Mrs. Bingo Little for a time before coming to Brinkley, and no
doubt he picked up a good deal from Bingo. Before that, he had been a
couple of years with an American family at Nice and had studied under
their chauffeur, one of the Maloneys of Brooklyn. So, what with Bingo
and what with Maloney, he is, as I say, fluent but a bit mixed.
He spoke, in part, as follows:
“Hot dog! You ask me what is it? Listen. Make some attention a little.
Me, I have hit the hay, but I do not sleep so good, and presently I
wake and up I look, and there is one who make faces against me through
the dashed window. Is that a pretty affair? Is that convenient? If
you think I like it, you jolly well mistake yourself. I am so mad as
a wet hen. And why not? I am somebody, isn’t it? This is a bedroom,
what-what, not a house for some apes? Then for what do blighters sit on
my window so cool as a few cucumbers, making some faces?”
“Quite,” I said. Dashed reasonable, was my verdict.
He threw another look up at Gussie, and did Exercise 2--the one where
you clutch the moustache, give it a tug and then start catching flies.
“Wait yet a little. I am not finish. I say I see this type on my
window, making a few faces. But what then? Does he buzz off when I
shout a cry, and leave me peaceable? Not on your life. He remain
planted there, not giving any damns, and sit regarding me like a cat
watching a duck. He make faces against me and again he make faces
against me, and the more I command that he should get to hell out of
here, the more he do not get to hell out of here. He cry something
towards me, and I demand what is his desire, but he do not explain.
Oh, no, that arrives never. He does but shrug his head. What damn
silliness! Is this amusing for me? You think I like it? I am not
content with such folly. I think the poor mutt’s loony. _Je me
fiche de ce type infect. C’est idiot de faire comme ça l’oiseau....
Allez-vous-en, louffier_.... Tell the boob to go away. He is mad as
some March hatters.”
I must say I thought he was making out a jolly good case, and evidently
Aunt Dahlia felt the same. She laid a quivering hand on his shoulder.
“I will, Monsieur Anatole, I will,” she said, and I couldn’t have
believed that robust voice capable of sinking to such an absolute coo.
More like a turtle dove calling to its mate than anything else. “It’s
quite all right.”
She had said the wrong thing. He did Exercise 3.
“All right? _Nom d’un nom d’un nom_! The hell you say it’s all right!
Of what use to pull stuff like that? Wait one half-moment. Not yet
quite so quick, my old sport. It is by no means all right. See yet
again a little. It is some very different dishes of fish. I can take a
few smooths with a rough, it is true, but I do not find it agreeable
when one play larks against me on my windows. That cannot do. A nice
thing, no. I am a serious man. I do not wish a few larks on my windows.
I enjoy larks on my windows worse as any. It is very little all right.
If such rannygazoo is to arrive, I do not remain any longer in this
house no more. I buzz off and do not stay planted.”
Sinister words, I had to admit, and I was not surprised that Aunt
Dahlia, hearing them, should have uttered a cry like the wail of a
master of hounds seeing a fox shot. Anatole had begun to wave his fists
again at Gussie, and she now joined him. Seppings, who was puffing
respectfully in the background, didn’t actually wave his fists, but
he gave Gussie a pretty austere look. It was plain to the thoughtful
observer that this Fink-Nottle, in getting on to that skylight, had
done a mistaken thing. He couldn’t have been more unpopular in the home
of G.G. Simmons.
“Go away, you crazy loon!” cried Aunt Dahlia, in that ringing voice
of hers which had once caused nervous members of the Quorn to lose
stirrups and take tosses from the saddle.
Gussie’s reply was to waggle his eyebrows. I could read the message he
was trying to convey.
“I think he means,” I said--reasonable old Bertram, always trying to
throw oil on the troubled w’s----“that if he does he will fall down the
side of the house and break his neck.”
“Well, why not?” said Aunt Dahlia.
I could see her point, of course, but it seemed to me that there might
be a nearer solution. This skylight happened to be the only window in
the house which Uncle Tom had not festooned with his bally bars. I
suppose he felt that if a burglar had the nerve to climb up as far as
this, he deserved what was coming to him.
“If you opened the skylight, he could jump in.”
The idea got across.
“Seppings, how does this skylight open?”
“With a pole, madam.”
“Then get a pole. Get two poles. Ten.”
And presently Gussie was mixing with the company, Like one of those
chaps you read about in the papers, the wretched man seemed deeply
conscious of his position.
I must say Aunt Dahlia’s bearing and demeanour did nothing to assist
toward a restored composure. Of the amiability which she had exhibited
when discussing this unhappy chump’s activities with me over the fruit
salad, no trace remained, and I was not surprised that speech more or
less froze on the Fink-Nottle lips. It isn’t often that Aunt Dahlia,
normally as genial a bird as ever encouraged a gaggle of hounds to get
their noses down to it, lets her angry passions rise, but when she
does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.
“Well?” she said.
In answer to this, all that Gussie could produce was a sort of
strangled hiccough.
“Well?”
Aunt Dahlia’s face grew darker. Hunting, if indulged in regularly over
a period of years, is a pastime that seldom fails to lend a fairly
deepish tinge to the patient’s complexion, and her best friends could
not have denied that even at normal times the relative’s map tended a
little toward the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on
so pronounced a richness as now. She looked like a tomato struggling
for self-expression.
“Well?”
Gussie tried hard. And for a moment it seemed as if something was going
to come through. But in the end it turned out nothing more than a sort
of death-rattle.
“Oh, take him away, Bertie, and put ice on his head,” said Aunt Dahlia,
giving the thing up. And she turned to tackle what looked like the
rather man’s size job of soothing Anatole, who was now carrying on a
muttered conversation with himself in a rapid sort of way.
Seeming to feel that the situation was one to which he could not do
justice in Bingo-cum-Maloney Anglo-American, he had fallen back on
his native tongue. Words like “_marmiton de Domange,” “pignouf,”
“hurluberlu_” and “_roustisseur_” were fluttering from him like bats
out of a barn. Lost on me, of course, because, though I sweated a bit
at the Gallic language during that Cannes visit, I’m still more or less
in the Esker-vous-avez stage. I regretted this, for they sounded good.
I assisted Gussie down the stairs. A cooler thinker than Aunt Dahlia, I
had already guessed the hidden springs and motives which had led him to
the roof. Where she had seen only a cockeyed reveller indulging himself
in a drunken prank or whimsy, I had spotted the hunted fawn.
“Was Tuppy after you?” I asked sympathetically.
What I believe is called a _frisson_ shook him.
“He nearly got me on the top landing. I shinned out through a passage
window and scrambled along a sort of ledge.”
“That baffled him, what?”
“Yes. But then I found I had stuck. The roof sloped down in all
directions. I couldn’t go back. I had to go on, crawling along this
ledge. And then I found myself looking down the skylight. Who was that
chap?”
“That was Anatole, Aunt Dahlia’s chef.”
“French?”
“To the core.”
“That explains why I couldn’t make him understand. What asses these
Frenchmen are. They don’t seem able to grasp the simplest thing. You’d
have thought if a chap saw a chap on a skylight, the chap would realize
the chap wanted to be let in. But no, he just stood there.”
“Waving a few fists.”
“Yes. Silly idiot. Still, here I am.”
“Here you are, yes--for the moment.”
“Eh?”
“I was thinking that Tuppy is probably lurking somewhere.”
He leaped like a lamb in springtime.
“What shall I do?”