Summer Moonshine (24 page)

Tubby was lightly clad in a towel and a small Union Jack, and he would not have approached even as closely as that to the standards of the well-dressed man, had he not possessed a stronger will than Adrian Peake, and so been able to dominate him when it came to the division of the few wearable objects which Lady Abbott had left behind her after visiting the houseboat
Mignonette.
Adrian had had to make out with a piece of sacking.

For a long instant, Prudence Whittaker stood staring, as terror wrestled with outraged modesty within her. Then, uttering a low, honking cry like that of some refined creature of the wild caught in a trap, she staggered back against the wall.

I
NTO
the emotions of Tubby Vanringham and Adrian Peake when, returning from their swim, they discovered what had taken place on board the houseboat
Mignonette
during their absence, it is not necessary for the chronicler to go with any wealth of detailed analysis, for he had already indicated how men react to such discoveries. It is enough to say that both had taken it big. Their sense of loss was, indeed, even deeper than that of Mr Bulpitt, for he had at least had a comfortable bed to which to retire while shaping his plans for the future. Only after a search through the saloon had yielded an unopened bottle of whisky had Tubby been able to face with anything approaching a cool, reasoning mind the situation in which he found himself.

It was rather an inferior brand of whisky, for J. B. Attwater, who had supplied it to Mr Bulpitt, specialized in draught ale and did not bother much about the rest of his cellar, but it had bite and authority. It stimulated the thought processes. And it was not long, in consequence, before Tubby remembered that in his bedroom at Walsingford Hall he had left behind him a large and varied wardrobe, and realized that if he was prepared to wait patiently for the psychological moment and did not shrink from a walk across country in bare feet, it would be possible for him to avail himself of this.

There would, he knew, come a time, between the hours of eight and nine, when the residents of the Hall would be at dinner, leaving nobody loitering about the stairs and corridors to observe the entry of two young men, one in a towel and a Union Jack, the other swathed in sacking. From that moment, it may be said that the sun had begun to shine through the clouds for Tubby Vanringham.

For Adrian Peake, who had not had his fair share of the bottle and shrank from the idea of venturing near Walsingford Hall in any kind of costume, it had shone more faintly Indeed, it was only the horror of the prospect of being left indefinitely on the boat with only a piece of sacking to keep him warm that had finally nerved him to undertake the perilous journey. But in the end he had accompanied Tubby, and was now in retirement in the cupboard in Sir Buckstone's study, awaiting the moment when his leader should return laden with garments. Seated in pitch darkness on a bound volume of the 'Illustrated Country Gentleman's Gazette', he was hoping for the best.

After that first brief exclamation from Tubby and that first sharp scream from his room-mate, there had fallen a silence. Tubby had become anxious about the stability of the Union Jack and was clutching it nervously, and it was Miss Whittaker who eventually opened the conversation. In the struggle between panic and offended modesty, the latter had now gained the upper hand. Lowering the trousers which she had been holding before her like a shield, she drew herself up coldly.

'How dare you come here dressed like that?' she demanded.

In a situation that called above all things for the tactful and conciliatory word, she could scarcely have selected a question less calculated to ease the strain. The injustice of it cut Tubby
like a knife. His eyes rolled. His face became a deeper pink. He raised his hands heavenwards in a passionate gesture, to lower them immediately and grab at the Union Jack.

'Well, I'm darned! How dare I come here? I like that. My own room! How dare you come here, is what I want to know. What are you doing in my room?'

'Never mind,' said Prudence Whittaker.

It was another unfortunate remark, and it affected Tubby as powerfully as her previous one. He did not raise his hands, for he had had his lesson, but they twitched, and his eyes revolved as freely as before.

'So that's the attitude you take, is it? After all that has occurred, I come here and find you sauntering coolly about my bedroom as if it belonged to you, and when I ask you civilly what you're doing there, all you reply is— What's that you've got hold of?' he asked, breaking off and eyeing the trousers sharply. He seemed unable to believe his eyes. 'Pants? What are you doing with my pants?'

Even in this supreme moment, Prudence Whittaker could not let this pass.

'Trousers,' she corrected.

'Pants!'

'Don't make such a noise.'

'I will make such a noise. We're going to have a showdown. There's something sinister about this. What are you doing with my pants?'

Prudence Whittaker was beginning to feel the strain. Her tiptilted nose quivered like a rabbit's.

'I – I wanted them,' she said.

'I see.' Tubby's manner became heavily satirical. He sneered unpleasantly. 'Fancy-dress ball, I suppose? You required pants for your costume, eh, and felt that we were such buddies that
I wouldn't object if you came and swiped mine? Just strolled in and helped yourself. He won't mind! Of course he won't. I see.'

'I wanted them for someone.'

'Oh, yes? Who did you want them for?'

'Whom,' corrected Miss Whittaker.

'Who,' thundered Tubby.

'Hush!'

'I won't hush. Who did you want them for?'

'Mr Bulpitt.'

'What?'

'He has lost his.'

Once more, she had said the wrong thing. It was impossible for Tubby to register emotion more intensely than he had been doing, but he maintained his previous high level. On the word 'What?' he had quivered as if he had been harpooned, and as he spoke he continued to quiver:

'Bulpitt! You wanted them for Bulpitt? Well, that's the top. That's the pay-off. Don't try to beat that, because you'll never be able to. Bulpitt! That's a honey. You introduce this slavering human bloodhound into my life, you incite him to harry and pursue me till I feel like Eliza crossing the ice, and then you calmly sneak my pants to give to him! A little present, with compliments of T P. Vanringham, eh? A slight testimonial from one of his warmest admirers. Just a trifling something from an old pal to keep among his souvenirs. Of all the—'

He had to pause to master his feelings, and it was as he did so that there flashed upon him an idea so bizarre, so stunning that he choked and could not proceed. He stood there rigid, blinking dazedly and putting two and two together. Then life returned to his paralysed frame and speech to his trembling lips.

'I see it all! It was Bulpitt!'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'You and he are that way. You love the little son of a bachelor.'

'You're quate absurd.'

'You can't get out of it like that. "Quate absurd", forsooth! He's the man. He's the guy. He's the fellow who sent you that jewellery. Is he? Come on, now. This is where we probe that jewellery sequence to the bottom. Is he the bird? Is he? Is he?'

'I refuse to discuss the mattah.'

'You do, do you?'

He turned quickly, and Miss Whittaker uttered a piercing cry.

'Unlock that door!'

'I won't.'

'Mr Vanringham, let me go immediatelah!'

'I'll do nothing of the kind. We're going to sift this – sift it to its foundations. You don't leave here till you have told all. And let me mention that if you persist in this – this—' Tubby paused. He knew that there was a phrase which exactly expressed what he wished to say, and later he remembered that it was 'recalcitrant attitude', but at the moment he could not think of it. He went back and reconstructed his sentence. 'And let me mention that if you persist in refusing to come clean, I'll poke you in the snoot.'

It was a policy which had suggested itself to him once or twice since this interview had begun, and he had found himself more and more drawn to it. It had worked wonders, he reminded himself, in the case of Mr Bulpitt, and who could say that it would not prove equally effective now? Snoot-poking, moreover, is a thing which grows on a man. Once let him acquire the appetite, and he becomes like the tiger that has tasted blood. Just
as such a tiger goes about calling for more blood and refusing to be put off with just-as-good substitutes, so does he yearn for more snoots to poke. He gets the feeling that he wants to do it to everyone he meets, sparing neither age nor sex.

Prudence Whittaker's fortitude was ebbing. Kensington trains its daughters well, sending them out into the world equipped for almost every emergency. But there are limits. It requires a poise which even Kensington cannot inculcate to enable a girl to bear herself composedly when confronted with cave men in locked rooms. Prudence Whittaker had an elementary knowledge of ju-jitsu – she knew the grip required for quelling footpads – but she felt herself helpless against a menace like this.

Theodore!' she cried, quailing visibly. She had never been personally poked in the snoot, but she had seen it done in the pictures and had always thought that it looked most unpleasant.

Tubby remained the man of chilled steel.

'Less of the "Theodore",' he replied sternly, 'and more facts about this Bulpitt piece of cheese. How long have you known him? Where did you meet him?'

'I have not met him.'

'Tchah!'

'I haven't.'

'Then why did he send you jewellery?'

'He did not send me jewellery.'

'He did too.'

'He did not.'

'So,' said Tubby, 'you persist in your recalcitrant attitude!'

A throbbing silence fell. Tubby's chest was swelling beneath its towel, and he had begun to flex the muscles of his arms. And so plainly did these phenomena, taken in conjunction with the
gleam in his eyes and the way he was puffing out his cheeks, indicate that he was working up steam and would shortly be in a position to begin, that Prudence Whittaker cracked under the strain. With a wailing cry, she flung herself on the bed and burst into tears.

The effect on Tubby was immediate. The toughest male becomes as wax in the presence of a crying woman. He stopped puffing out his cheeks and looked at her uncertainly. It was plain that a situation had arisen which cramped his freedom of action.

'That's all very well,' he said weakly.

The sobbing continued. His discomfort increased. And he was fast approaching the point where the melting process would have been complete, when his eye, roving uneasily about the room, fell on the trousers lying on the floor. He went to them, picked them up, put them on, and instantly felt a marked improvement in his morale.

That's all very well,' he said, more resolutely.

He crossed to the chest of drawers and took out shirt and tie. A few moments later, fully clad, he was his own stern self again.

'That's all very well,' he said, the dominant male once more. 'Just like a girl, thinking she can square anything by crying.'

Words, an observation of some nature, caught his ear through the sobs. He turned sharply.

'What was that?'

It appeared that Miss Whittaker had reproached him for being so unkind, and he took the point up with a forceful briskness which he could never have achieved in a towel and a Union Jack.

'A fellow's got a licence to be unkind when the girl he loves starts cheating on him,' he said austerely. 'I can tell you it pretty
near broke me up when I found you were two-timing me that way. Letting another guy send you jewellery. And Bulpitt of all people.'

'He didn't send me jewellery. Nobody sent me jewellery.'

'I was there when the package arrived.'

'There wasn't jewellery in that parcel. It – it was something else.'

'Then why wouldn't you let me see it?'

'Because I didn't want you to.'

'Ha!' said Tubby, with one of those hacking laughs of his.

A far less spirited girl than Prudence Whittaker would have resented having 'Ha!' said to her in such a tone. Add a hacking laugh, and it is not to be wondered at that she ceased to weep and sat up with cold defiance in her eye.

'If you really wish to know,' she said, 'it was a nose thing.'

Ever since three o'clock that afternoon when, pausing at the second milestone on the Walsingford Road and making a noise as nearly resembling the rough song of the linnet as was within the scope of one who had never been a good bird imitator, he had observed Mr Bulpitt bound from the bushes at the roadside, Tubby Vanringham had been under a severe and continuous mental strain. It was possibly this that now rendered him slow at the uptake. He did not know what a nose thing was, and said so.

Prudence Whittaker's face was pale and drawn. She was revealing a secret which she had hoped to withhold from the world – one, indeed, which she had supposed only wild horses would have had the power to draw from her – and the agony was intense. But she spoke out bravely.

'A thing for changing the shape of the nose.'

'What?'

'I saw an advertisement in a magazine,' she went on in a low, toneless voice. 'Ugly noses of all kinds remedied, it said. Scientific yet simple. Can be worn during sleep. You had to fill up the coupon and send it off with ten shillings, so I filled it up and sent it off. And the thing arrived while we were talking. How could I tell you what it was?' Her voice broke and her eyes started to fill with tears again. 'I thought you would have trusted me.'

The reproach was a keen one, and at another time Tubby would have winced beneath it. But now he was too bewildered to be aware of reproaches.

'But what the heck did you want to change the shape of your nose for?'

She averted her face and picked at the coverlet.

'It turns up at the end,' she whispered, almost inaudibly.

He stared, amazed.

'But I like it turning up at the end.'

She looked at him quickly, incredulously, a new light dawning in her eyes.

'Do you?'

'Of course I do. Gee, whiz! That's what makes it so wonderful.'

'Oh, Theodore!'

'Why, it's great. It's swell. You don't want to touch a nose like that. Leave it be. It's perfect. It's terrific. It's colossal. Do you mean that that was really all there was in that packet?'

He was groping his way to where she sat, stumbling like a blind man. Once again, he was puffing out his cheeks, but in how different a spirit.

'Oh, hell, what a fool I've been!'

'No, you haven't.'

'Yes, I have.'

'It wasn't your fault.'

'Yes, it was.'

'No, it wasn't. I should have told you.'