Thank You, Jeeves

She interrupted my reasoning.

'But wait a minute. You keep babbling about Brinkley, but there isn't a Brinkley.'

'There is a Brinkley. One Brinkley. And one Brinkley coming into this room at nine o'clock to-morrow morning and finding you in that bed will be enough to start a scandal which will stagger humanity.'

'I mean, he can't be in the house.'

'Of course he's in the house.'

'Well, he must be deaf, then. I made enough noise getting in to wake six gentlemen's gentlemen. Apart from smashing a window at the back ...'

'Did you smash a window at the back?'

'I had to, or I couldn't have got in. It was the window of some sort of bedroom on the ground floor.'

'Why, dash it, that's Brinkley's bedroom.'

'Well, he wasn't in it.'

'Why on earth not? I gave him the evening off, not the night.'

'I can see what has happened. He's away on a toot somewhere, and won't be back for days. Father had a man who did that once. He went out for his evening from our house on East Sixty-Seventh Street, New York, on April the fourth in a bowler hat, grey gloves and a check suit, and the next we heard of him was a telegram from Portland, Oregon, on April the tenth, saying he had overslept himself and would be back shortly. That's what your Brinkley must have done.'

I must say I drew a good deal of comfort from the idea.

'Let us hope so,' I said. 'If he is really trying to drown his sorrows, it ought to take him weeks.'

'So, you see, you've been making a fuss about nothing. I always say...'

But what it was she always said, I was not privileged to learn. For at that moment she broke off with a sharp squeak.

Somebody was knocking on the front door.

8 POLICE PERSECUTION

We looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a first floor back in Chuffnell Regis. That frightful sound, coming unexpectedly like that in the middle of the peaceful summer night, had been enough to strike the chit-chat from anybody's lips. And what rendered it so particularly unpleasant to us, personally, was the fact that we had both jumped simultaneously to the same ghastly conclusion.

'It's father!' Pauline gargled, and with a swift flip of her finger she doused the candle.

'What did you do that for?' I said, a good deal pipped. The sudden darkness seemed to make things worse.

'So that he shouldn't see a light in the window, of course. If he thinks you're asleep he may go away.'

'What a hope!' I retorted, as the knocking, which had eased off for a moment, started again with more follow-through than ever.

'Well, I suppose you had better go down,' said the girl in a subdued sort of voice. 'Or' – she seemed to brighten – 'shall we pour water on him from the staircase window?'

I started violently. She had made the suggestion as if she considered it one of her best and brightest, and I suddenly realized what it meant to play the host to a girl of her temperament and personality. All that I had ever heard or read about the reckless younger generation seemed to come back to me.

'Don't dream of it!' I whispered urgently. 'Dismiss the project utterly and absolutely from your mind.'

I mean to say, a dry J. Washburn Stoker seeking an errant daughter was bad enough. A J. Washburn Stoker stimulated to additional acerbity by a jugful of H2O on his head, I declined to contemplate. Goodness knows, I wasn't keen on going down and passing the time of night with the man, but if the alternative was to allow his loved ones to drench him to the skin and then wait while he tore the walls down with his bare hands I proposed to do so immediately.

'I'll have to see him,' I said.

'Well, be careful.'

'How do you mean, careful?'

'Oh, just careful. Still, of course, he may not have a gun.'

I swallowed a trifle.

'What exactly would you say the odds were, for and against?'

She mused awhile.

'I'm trying to remember if father is a Southerner or not.'

'A what?'

'I know he was born at a place called Carterville, but I can't recollect if it was Carterville, Kentucky, or Carterville, Massachusetts.'

'What the dickens difference does it make?'

'Well, if you smirch the honour of a Southerner's family, he's apt to shoot.'

'Would your father consider it smirched the family honour, your being here?'

'Bound to, I should think.'

I couldn't help agreeing with her. It did seem to me offhand that a purist might consider the smirching pretty good, but I hadn't time to weigh the point, because the knocker got going again with renewed vim.

'Well, dash it,' I said, 'wherever this ghastly parent of yours was born, I shall have to go down and talk to him. That door will be splitting asunder soon.'

'Don't get closer to him than you can help.'

'I won't.'

'He was a great wrestler when he was a young man.'

'You needn't tell me any more about your father.'

'I only meant, I wouldn't let him get hold of you, if you can help. Is there anywhere I can hide?'

'No.'

'Why not?'

'I don't know why not,' I replied, a little curtly. 'They don't build these country cottages with secret rooms and underground passages. When you hear me open the front door, stop breathing.'

'Do you want me to suffocate?'

Well, of course, a Wooster does not put such thoughts into words, but I'm bound to say this struck me as a jolly good idea. Forbearing to reply, I hurried down the stairs and flung open the front door. Well, when I say flung, I opened it a matter of six inches, not omitting to keep it on the chain.

'Hallo?' I said. 'Yes?'

I don't know when I've felt such a chunk of relief as surged over me the next moment.

'Oy!' said a voice. 'Taken your time, haven't you? What's the matter with you, young man? Deaf or something?'

It wasn't in its essentials a musical voice, being on the thick side and a shade roopy. If I'd been its owner, I'd have given more than a little thought to the subject of tonsils. But it had one supreme merit which outweighed all its defects. It wasn't the voice of J. Washburn Stoker.

'Frightfully sorry,' I said. 'I was thinking of this and that. Sort of reverie, if you know what I mean.'

The voice spoke again, not without a pretty goodish modicum of suavity this time.

'Oh, I beg your pardon, sir. I thought you was the young man Brinkley'

'Brinkley's out,' I said, feeling that if he ever returned I would have a word to say to him about the hours at which his pals paid social calls. 'Who are you?'

'Sergeant Voules, sir.'

I opened the door. It was pretty dark outside, but I could recognize the arm of the Law all right. This Voules was a bird built rather on the lines of the Albert Hall, round in the middle and not much above. He always looked to me as if Nature had really intended to make two police sergeants and had forgotten to split them up.

'Ah, Sergeant!' I said.

Careless, debonair. Not a thing on Bertram's mind, you would have supposed, but his hair.

'Anything I can do for you, Sergeant?'

My eyes were getting accustomed to the darkness by this time, and I was enabled to spot certain objects of interest by the wayside. The principal one was another policeman. Tall and lean and stringy, this one.

'This is my young nephew, sir. Constable Dobson.'

Well, I wasn't exactly in the mood for a social reunion, and I could have wished that the sergeant, if he wanted to make me one of the family and all pals together, so to speak, had selected some other time, but I inclined the bean gracefully in the constable's direction and uttered a kindly 'Ah, Dobson!' I rather think, if I remember, that I also said something about its being a fine night.