'Coo!' she said, having returned to terra firma and taken aboard a spot of breath. 'You gave me a start, sir!'
'Frightfully sorry, my dear old housemaid,' I responded cordially. 'As a matter of fact, you gave me a start, making two starts in all. I'm looking for Mr Cream.'
'I'm looking for a mouse.'
This opened up an interesting line of thought.
'You feel there are mice in these parts?'
'I saw one this morning, when I was doing the room. So I brought Augustus,' she said, and indicated a large black cat who until then had escaped my notice. I recognized him as an old crony with whom I had often breakfasted, I wading into the scrambled eggs, he into the saucer of milk.
'Augustus will teach him,' she said.
Now, right from the start, as may readily be imagined, I had been wondering how this housemaid was to be removed, for of course her continued presence would render my enterprise null and void. You can't search rooms with the domestic staff standing on the sidelines, but on the other hand it was impossible for anyone with any claim to be a preux chevalier to take her by the slack of her garment and heave her out. For a while the thing had seemed an impasse, but this statement of hers that Augustus would teach the mouse gave me an idea.
'I doubt it,' I said. 'You're new here, aren't you?'
She conceded this, saying that she had taken office only in the previous month.
'I thought as much, or you would be aware that Augustus is a broken reed to lean on in the matter of catching mice. My own acquaintance with him is a longstanding one, and I have come to know his psychology from soup to nuts. He hasn't caught a mouse since he was a slip of a kitten. Except when eating, he does nothing but sleep. Lethargic is the word that springs to the lips. If you cast an eye on him, you will see that he's asleep now.'
'Coo! So he is.'
'It's a sort of disease. There's a scientific name for it. Trau something. Traumatic symplegia, that's it. This cat has traumatic symplegia. In other words, putting it in simple language adapted to the lay mind, where other cats are content to get their eight hours, Augustus wants his twenty-four. If you will be ruled by me, you will abandon the whole project and take him back to the kitchen. You're simply wasting your time here.'
My eloquence was not without its effect. She said 'Coo!' again, picked up the cat, who muttered something drowsily which I couldn't follow, and went out, leaving me to carry on.
8
The first thing I noticed when at leisure to survey my surroundings was that the woman up top, carrying out her policy of leaving no stone unturned in the way of sucking up to the Cream family, had done Wilbert well where sleeping accommodation was concerned. What he had drawn when clocking in at Brinkley Court was the room known as the Blue Room, a signal honour to be accorded to a bachelor guest, amounting to being given star billing, for at Brinkley, as at most country-houses, any old nook or cranny is considered good enough for the celibate contingent. My own apartment, to take a case in point, was a sort of hermit's cell in which one would have been hard put to it to swing a cat, even a smaller one than Augustus, not of course that one often wants to do much cat-swinging. What I'm driving at is that when I blow in on Aunt Dahlia, you don't catch her saying 'Welcome to Meadowsweet Hall, my dear boy. I've put you in the Blue Room, where I am sure you will be comfortable.' I once suggested to her that I be put there, and all she said was 'You?' and the conversation turned to other topics.
The furnishing of this Blue Room was solid and Victorian, it having been the GHQ of my Uncle Tom's late father, who liked things substantial. There was a four-poster bed, a chunky dressing-table, a massive writing table, divers chairs, pictures on the walls of fellows in cocked hats bending over females in muslin and ringlets and over at the far side a cupboard or armoire in which you could have hidden a dozen corpses. In short, there was so much space and so many things to shove things behind that most people, called on to find a silver cow creamer there, would have said 'Oh, what's the use?' and thrown in the towel.
But where I had the bulge on the ordinary searcher was that I am a man of wide reading. Starting in early boyhood, long before they were called novels of suspense, I've read more mystery stories than you could shake a stick at, and they have taught me something viz. that anybody with anything to hide invariably puts it on top of the cupboard or, if you prefer it, the armoire. This is what happened in Murder at Mistleigh Manor, Three Dead on Tuesday, Excuse my Gat, Guess Who and a dozen more standard works, and I saw no reason to suppose that Wilbert Cream would have deviated from routine. My first move, accordingly, was to take a chair and prop it against the armoire, and I had climbed on this and was preparing to subject the top to a close scrutiny, when Bobbie Wickham, entering on noiseless feet and speaking from about eighteen inches behind me, said:
'How are you getting on?'
Really, one sometimes despairs of the modern girl. You'd have thought that this Wickham would have learned at her mother's knee that the last thing a fellow in a highly nervous condition wants, when he's searching someone's room, is a disembodied voice in his immediate ear asking him how he's getting on. The upshot, I need scarcely say, was that I came down like a sack of coals. The pulse was rapid, the blood pressure high, and for awhile the Blue Room pirouetted about me like an adagio dancer.
When Reason returned to its throne, I found that Bobbie, no doubt feeling after that resounding crash that she was better elsewhere, had left me and that I was closely entangled in the chair, my position being in some respects similar to that of Kipper Herring when he got both legs wrapped round his neck in Switzerland. It seemed improbable that I would ever get loose without the aid of powerful machinery.
However, by pulling this way and pushing that, I made progress, and I'd just contrived to de-chair myself and was about to rise, when another voice spoke.
'For Pete's sake!' it said, and, looking up, I found that it was not, as I had for a moment supposed, from the lips of the Brinkley Court ghost that the words had proceeded, but from those of Mrs Homer Cream. She was looking at me, as Sir Roderick Glossop had recently looked at Bobbie, with a wild surmise, her whole air that of a woman who is not abreast. This time, I noticed, she had an ink spot on her chin.
'Mr Wooster!' she yipped.
Well, there's nothing much you can say in reply to 'Mr Wooster!' except 'Oh, hullo,' so I said it.
'You are doubtless surprised,' I was continuing, when she hogged the conversation again, asking me (a) what I was doing in her son's room and (b) what in the name of goodness I thought I was up to.
'For the love of Mike,' she added, driving her point home.
It is frequently said of Bertram Wooster that he is a man who can think on his feet, and if the necessity arises he can also use his loaf when on all fours. On the present occasion I was fortunate in having had that get-together with the housemaid and the cat Augustus, for it gave me what they call in France a point d'appui. Removing a portion of chair which had got entangled in my back hair, I said with a candour that became me welclass="underline"
'I was looking for a mouse.'
If she had replied, 'Ah, yes, indeed. I understand now. A mouse, to be sure. Quite,' everything would have been nice and smooth, but she didn't.
'A mouse?' she said. 'What do you mean?'
Well, of course, if she didn't know what a mouse was, there was evidently a good deal of tedious spadework before us, and one would scarcely have known where to start. It was a relief when her next words showed that that 'What do you mean?' had not been a query but more in the nature of a sort of heart-cry.