Leave it to Psmith (33 page)

The Hon. Freddie scratched his beautifully shaven chin.

‘Well, when you put it like that,’ he said, ‘I must own it does sound a bit off. But he seemed such a dashed matey sort of bird. Cheery and all that. I liked the feller.’

‘What nonsense!’

‘Well, but you liked him, too. I mean to say, you were about with him a goodish lot.’

‘I hate him!’ said Eve angrily. ‘I wish I had never seen him. And if I let him get away with that necklace and cheat poor little Phyllis out of her money, I’ll – I’ll . . .’

She raised a grimly determined chin to the stars. Freddie watched her admiringly.

‘I say, you know, you are a wonderful girl,’ he said.

‘He
shan’t
get away with it, if I have to pull the place down.’

‘When you chuck your head up like that you remind me a bit of What’s-her-name, the Famous Players star – you know, girl who was in “Wed to a Satyr”. Only,’ added Freddie hurriedly, ‘she isn’t half so pretty. I say, I was rather looking forward to that County Ball, but now this has happened I don’t mind missing it a bit. I mean, it seems to draw us closer together somehow, if you follow me. I say, honestly, all kidding aside, you think that love might some day awaken in . . .’

‘We shall want a lamp, of course,’ said Eve.

‘Eh?’

‘A lamp – to see with when we are in the cottage. Can you get one?’

Freddie reluctantly perceived that the moment for sentiment had not arrived.

‘A lamp? Oh, yes, of course. Rather.’

‘Better get two,’ said Eve. And meet me here about half an hour after everybody has gone to the ball.’

§ 2

The tiny sitting-room of Psmith’s haven of rest in the woods had never reached a high standard of decorativeness even in its best days; but as Eve paused from her labours and looked at it in the light of her lamp about an hour after her conversation with Freddie on the terrace, it presented a picture of desolation which would have startled the plain-living gamekeeper to whom it had once been a home. Even Freddie, though normally an unobservant youth, seemed awed by the ruin he had helped to create.

‘Golly!’ he observed. ‘I say, we’ve rather mucked the place up a bit!’

It was no over-statement. Eve had come to the cottage to search, and she had searched thoroughly. The torn carpet lay in a untidy heap against the wall. The table was overturned. Boards had been wrenched from the floor, bricks from the chimney-place. The horsehair sofa was in ribbons, and the one small cushion in the room lay limply in a corner, its stuffing distributed north, south, east and west. There was soot everywhere – on the walls, on the floor, on the fire-place, and on Freddie. A brace of dead bats, the further result of the latter’s groping in a chimney which had not been swept for seven months, reposed in the fender. The sitting-room had never been luxurious; it was now not even cosy.

Eve did not reply. She was struggling with what she was fair-minded enough to see was an entirely unjust fever of irritation, with her courteous and obliging assistant as its object. It was wrong, she knew, to feel like this. That she should be furious at her failure to find the jewels was excusable, but she had no possible right to be furious with Freddie. It was not his fault that soot had poured from the chimney in lieu of diamonds. If he had asked for a necklace and been given a dead bat, he was surely more to be pitied than censured. Yet Eve, eyeing his grimy face, would have given very much to have been able to scream loudly and throw something at him. The fact was, the Hon. Freddie belonged to that unfortunate type of humanity which automatically gets blamed for everything in moments of stress.

‘Well, the bally thing isn’t here,’ said Freddie. He spoke thickly, as a man will whose mouth is covered with soot.

‘I know it isn’t,’ said Eve. ‘But this isn’t the only room in the house.’

‘Think he might have hidden the stuff upstairs?’

‘Or downstairs.’

Freddie shook his head, dislodging a portion of a third bat.

‘Must be upstairs, if it’s anywhere. Mean to say, there isn’t any downstairs.’

‘There’s the cellar,’ said Eve. ‘Take your lamp and go and have a look.’

For the first time in the proceedings a spirit of disaffection seemed to manifest itself in the bosom of her assistant. Up till this moment Freddie had taken his orders placidly and executed them with promptness and civility. Even when the first shower of soot had driven him choking from the fire-place, his manly spirit had not been crushed; he had merely uttered a startled ‘Oh, I say!’ and returned gallantly to the attack. But now he obviously hesitated.

‘Go on,’ said Eve impatiently.

‘Yes, but, I say, you know . . .’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I don’t think the chap would be likely to hide a necklace in the cellar. I vote we give it a miss and try upstairs.’

‘Don’t be silly, Freddie. He may have hidden it anywhere.’

‘Well, to be absolutely honest, I’d much rather not go into any bally cellar, if it’s all the same to you.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Beetles. Always had a horror of beetles. Ever since I was a kid.’

Eve bit her lip. She was feeling, as Miss Peavey had so often felt when associated in some delicate undertaking with Edward Cootes, that exasperating sense of man’s inadequacy which comes to high-spirited girls at moments such as these. To achieve the end for which she had started out that night she would have waded waist-high through a sea of beetles. But, divining with that sixth sense which tells women when the male has been pushed just so far and can be pushed no farther, that Freddie, wax though he might be in her hands in any other circumstances, was on this one point adamant, she made no further effort to bend him to her will.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll go down into the cellar. You go and look upstairs.’

‘No. I say, sure you don’t mind?’

Eve took up her lamp and left the craven.

∗∗∗∗∗

For a girl of iron resolution and unswerving purpose, Eve’s inspection of the cellar was decidedly cursory. A distinct feeling of relief came over her as she stood at the top of the steps and saw by the light of the lamp how small and bare it was. For, impervious as she might be to the intimidation of beetles, her armour still contained a chink. She was terribly afraid of rats. And even when the rays of the lamp disclosed no scuttling horrors, she still lingered for a moment before descending. You never knew with rats. They pretended not to be there just to lure you on, and then came out and whizzed about your ankles. However, the memory of her scorn for Freddie’s pusillanimity forced her on, and she went down.

The word ‘cellar’ is an elastic one. It can be applied equally to the acres of bottle-fringed vaults which lie beneath a great pile like Blandings Castle and to a hole in the ground like the one in which she now found herself. This cellar was easily searched. She stamped on its stone flags with an ear strained to detect any note of hollowness, but none came. She moved the lamp so that it shone into every corner, but there was not even a crack in which a diamond necklace could have been concealed. Satisfied that the place contained nothing but a little coal-dust and a smell of damp decay, Eve passed thankfully out.

The law of elimination was doing its remorseless work. It had ruled out the cellar, the kitchen, and the living-room – that is to say, the whole of the lower of the two floors which made up the cottage. There now remained only the rooms upstairs. There were probably not more than two, and Freddie must already have searched one of these. The quest seemed to be nearing its end. As Eve made for the narrow staircase that led to the second floor, the lamp shook in her hand and cast weird shadows. Now that success was in sight, the strain was beginning to affect her nerves.

It was to nerves that in the first instant of hearing it she attributed what sounded like a soft cough in the sitting-room, a few feet from where she stood. Then a chill feeling of dismay gripped her. It could only, she thought, be Freddie, returned from his search; and if Freddie had returned from his search already, what could it mean except that those upstairs rooms, on which she had counted so confidently, had proved as empty as the others? Freddie was not one of your restrained, unemotional men. If he had found the necklace he would have been downstairs in two bounds, shouting. His silence was ominous. She opened the door and went quickly in.

‘Freddie,’ she began, and broke off with a gasp.

It was not Freddie who had coughed. It was Psmith. He was seated on the remains of the horsehair sofa, toying with an automatic pistol and gravely surveying through his monocle the ruins of a home.

§ 3

‘Good evening,’ said Psmith.

It was not for a philosopher like himself to display astonishment. He was, however, undeniably feeling it. When, a few minutes before, he had encountered Freddie in this same room, he had received a distinct shock; but a rough theory which would account for Freddie’s presence in his home-from-home he had been able to work out. He groped in vain for one which would explain Eve.

Mere surprise, however, was never enough to prevent Psmith talking. He began at once.

‘It was nice of you,’ he said, rising courteously, ‘to look in. Won’t you sit down? On the sofa, perhaps? Or would you prefer a brick?’

Eve was not yet equal to speech. She had been so firmly convinced that he was ten miles away at Shifley that his presence here in the sitting-room of the cottage had something of the breath-taking quality of a miracle. The explanation, if she could have known it, was simple. Two excellent reasons had kept Psmith from gracing the County Ball with his dignified support. In the first place, as Shifley was only four miles from the village where he had spent most of his life, he had regarded it as probable, if not certain, that he would have encountered there old friends to whom it would have been both tedious and embarrassing to explain why he had changed his name to McTodd. And secondly, though he had not actually anticipated a nocturnal raid on his little nook, he had thought it well to be on the premises that evening in case Mr Edward Cootes should have been getting ideas into his head. As soon, therefore, as the castle had emptied itself and the wheels of the last car had passed away down the drive, he had pocketed Mr Cootes’s revolver and proceeded to the cottage.

Eve recovered her self-possession. She was not a girl given to collapse in moments of crisis. The first shock of amazement had passed; a humiliating feeling of extreme foolishness, which came directly after, had also passed; she was now grimly ready for battle.

‘Where is Mr Threepwood?’ she asked.

‘Upstairs. I have put him in storage for a while. Do not worry about Comrade Threepwood. He has lots to think about. He is under the impression that if he stirs out he will be instantly shot.’

‘Oh? Well, I want to put this lamp down. Will you please pick up that table?’

‘By all means. But – I am a novice in these matters – ought I not first to say “Hands up!” or something?’

‘Will you please pick up that table?’

‘A friend of mine – one Cootes – you must meet him some time – generally remarks “Hey!” in a sharp, arresting voice on these occasions. Personally I consider the expression too abrupt. Still, he has had great experience . . .’

‘Will you please pick up that table?’

‘Most certainly. I take it, then, that you would prefer to dispense with the usual formalities. In that case, I will park this revolver on the mantelpiece while we chat. I have taken a curious dislike to the thing. It makes me feel like Dangerous Dan McGrew.’

Eve put down the lamp, and there was silence for a moment. Psmith looked about him thoughtfully. He picked up one of the dead bats and covered it with his handkerchief.

‘Somebody’s mother,’ he murmured reverently.

Eve sat down on the sofa.

‘Mr . . .’ She stopped. ‘I can’t call you Mr McTodd. Will you please tell me your name?’

‘Ronald,’ said Psmith. ‘Ronald Eustace.’

‘I suppose you have a surname?’ snapped Eve. ‘Or an alias?’

Psmith eyed her with a pained expression.

‘I may be hyper-sensitive,’ he said, ‘but that last remark sounded to me like a dirty dig. You seem to imply that I am some sort of a criminal.’

Eve laughed shortly.

‘I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. There’s not much sense in pretending now, is there? What is your name?’

‘Psmith. The p is silent.’

‘Well, Mr Smith, I imagine you understand why I am here?’

‘I took it for granted that you had come to fulfil your kindly promise of doing the place up a bit. Will you be wounded if I say frankly that I preferred it the way it was before? All this may be the last word in ultra-modern interior decoration, but I suppose I am old-fashioned. The whisper flies round Shropshire and adjoining counties, “Psmith is hide-bound. He is not attuned to up-to-date methods.” Honestly, don’t you think you have rather unduly stressed the bizarre note? This soot . . . these dead bats . . .’

‘I have come to get that necklace.’

‘Ah! The necklace!’

‘I’m going to get it, too.’

Psmith shook his head gently.

‘There,’ he said, ‘if you will pardon me, I take issue with you. There is nobody to whom I would rather give that necklace than you, but there are special circumstances connected with it which render such an action impossible. I fancy, Miss Halliday, that you have been misled by your young friend upstairs. No; let me speak,’ he said, raising a hand. ‘You know what a treat it is to me. The way I envisage the matter is thus. I still cannot understand as completely as I could wish how you come to be mixed up in the affair, but it is plain that in some way or other Comrade Threepwood has enlisted your services, and I regret to be obliged to inform you that the motives animating him in this quest are not pure. To put it crisply, he is engaged in what Comrade Cootes, to whom I alluded just now, would call “funny business”.’