Money for Nothing (14 page)

'Ah, Carmody,' said Mr Fish.

He waved a kindly cigarette-holder at his host. The latter regarded him with tense apprehension. Was his guest about to announce that Mr Twist, caught in the act, was now under lock and key? For some reason or other, it was plain, Hugo and this unspeakable friend of his had returned at an unexpectedly early hour from the village, and Mr Carmody feared the worst.

'I've got a bit of bad news for you, Carmody,' said Mr Fish. 'Brace up, my dear fellow.'

Mr Carmody gulped.

'What – what – what...'

'Poor old Hugo. Gone clean off his mental axis.'

'What! What do you mean?'

'I found him just now running round in circles and dashing his head against trees. He said he was chasing a burglar. Of course there wasn't anything of the sort on the premises. For, mark this, my dear Carmody: according to his statement, which I carefully checked, the burglar was a most respectable fellow named Twist, who runs a sort of health place near here. You know him, I believe?'

'Slightly,' said Mr Carmody. 'Slightly.'

'Well, would a man in that position go about burgling houses? Pure delusion of course.'

Mr Carmody breathed a deep sigh. Relief had made him feel a little faint.

'Undoubtedly,' he said. 'Hugo was always weak-minded from a boy.'

'By the way,' said Mr Fish, 'did you by any chance get up at five in the morning the other day and climb a ladder to look for swallows' nests?'

'Certainly not.'

'I thought as much. Hugo said he saw you. Delusion again. The whole truth of the matter is, my dear Carmody, living in the country has begun to soften poor old Hugo's brain. You must act swiftly. You don't want a gibbering nephew about the place. Take my tip and send him away to London at the earliest possible moment.'

It was rare for Lester Carmody to feel gratitude for the advice which this young man gave him so freely, but he was grateful now. He perceived clearly that a venture like the one on which he and his colleagues had embarked should never have been undertaken while the house was full of infernal, interfering young men. Such was his emotion that for an instant he almost liked Mr Fish.

'Hugo was saying that you wished him to become your partner in some commercial enterprise,' he said.

'A night-club. The Hot Spot. Situated just off Bond Street, in the heart of London's pleasure-seeking area.'

'You were going to give him a half-share for five hundred pounds, I believe?'

'Five hundred was the figure.'

'He shall have a cheque immediately,' said Mr Carmody. 'I will go and write it now. And tomorrow you shall take him to London. The best trains are in the morning. I quite agree with you about his mental condition. I am very much obliged to you for drawing it to my notice.'

'Don't mention it, Carmody,' said Mr Fish graciously. 'Only too glad, my dear fellow. Always a pleasure, always a pleasure.'

John had returned to his work and was deep in it when Hugo and his wounded head crossed his threshold. He was startled and concerned.

'Good heavens!' he cried. 'What's been happening?'

'Fell down a bank and bumped the old lemon against a tree,' said Hugo, with the quiet pride of a man who has had an accident. 'I looked in to see if you had got some glue or something to stick it up with.'

John, as became one who thought nothing of putting stitches in cows, exhibited a cool efficiency. He bustled about, found water and cotton wool and iodine, and threw in sympathy as a make-weight. Only when the operation was completed did he give way to a natural curiosity.

'How did it happen?'

'Well, it started when I found that bounder Twist burgling the house.'

'Twist?'

'Yes, Twist. The Healthward Ho bird.'

'You found Doctor Twist burgling the house?'

'Yes, and I made him do bending and stretching exercises. And in the middle he legged it through the window, and Emily and I chivvied him about the garden. Then he disappeared, and I saw him again at the end of that path above the shrubberies, and I dashed after him and took a toss and it wasn't Twist at all, it was Ronnie.'

John forbore to ask further questions. This incoherent tale satisfied him that his cousin, if not delirious, was certainly on the borderland. He remembered the whole-heartedness with which Hugo had drowned his sorrows only a short while back in this very room, and he was satisfied that what the other needed was rest.

'You'd better go to bed,' he said. 'I think I've fixed you up pretty well, but perhaps you had better see the doctor tomorrow.'

'Doc. Twist?'

'No, not Doctor Twist,' said John soothingly. 'Doctor Bain, down in the village.'

'Something ought to be done about the man Twist,' argued Hugo. 'Somebody ought to pop it across him.'

'If I were you I'd just forget all about Twist. Put him right out of your mind.'

'But are we going to sit still and let perishers with waxed moustaches burgle the house whenever they feel inclined and not do a thing to bring their grey hairs in sorrow to the grave?'

'I wouldn't worry about it, if I were you. I'd just go off and have a nice long sleep.'

Hugo raised his eyebrows, and, finding that the process caused exquisite agony to his wounded head, quickly lowered them again. He looked at John with cold disapproval, pained at this evidence of supineness in a member of a proud family.

'Oh?' he said. 'Well, bung-ho, then!'

'Good night.'

'Give my love to the Alpha Separator and all the little Separators.'

'I will,' said John.

He accompanied his cousin down the stairs and out into the stable-yard. Having watched him move away and feeling satisfied that he could reach the house without assistance, he felt in his pocket for the materials for the last smoke of the day, and was filling his pipe when Emily came round the corner.

Emily was in great spirits.

'Such larks!' said Emily. 'One of those big nights. Burglars dashing to and fro, people falling over banks and butting their heads against trees, and everything bright and lively. But let me tell you something. A fellow like your cousin Hugo is no use whatever to a dog in any real emergency. He's not a force. A broken reed. You should have seen him. He . . .'

'Stop that noise and get to bed,' said John.

'Right ho,' said Emily. 'You'll be coming soon, I suppose?'

She charged up the stairs, glad to get to her basket after a busy evening. John lighted his pipe, and began to meditate. Usually he smoked the last pipe of the day to the accompaniment of thoughts about Pat, but now he found his mind turning to this extraordinary delusion of Hugo's that he had caught Doctor Twist, of Healthward Ho, burgling the house.

John had never met Doctor Twist, but he knew that he was the proprietor of a flourishing health-cure establishment and assumed him to be a reputable citizen; and the idea that he had come all the way from Healthward Ho to burgle Rudge Hall was so bizarre that he could not imagine by what weird mental processes his cousin had been led to suppose that he had seen him. Why Doctor Twist, of all people? Why not the vicar or Chas Bywater?

Footsteps sounded on the gravel, and he was aware of the subject of his thoughts returning. There was a dazed expression on Hugo's face, and in his hand there fluttered a small oblong slip of paper.

'John,' said Hugo, 'look at this and tell me if you see what I see. Is it a cheque?'

'Yes.'

'For five hundred quid, made out to me and signed by Uncle Lester?'

'Yes.'

'Then there
is
a Santa Claus!' said Hugo reverently. 'John, old man, it's absolutely uncanny. Directly I got into the house just now Uncle Lester called me to his study, handed me this cheque, and told me that I could go to London with Ronnie tomorrow and help him start that night-club. You remember me telling you about Ronnie's night-club, the Hot Spot, situated just off Bond Street in the heart of London's pleasure-seeking area? Or did I? Well, anyway, he is starting a night-club there, and he offered me a half-share if I'd put up five hundred. By the way, Uncle Lester wants you to go to London tomorrow, too.'

'Me. Why?'

'I fancy he's got the wind up a bit about this burglary business tonight. He said something about wanting you to go and see the insurance people – to bump up the insurance a trifle, I suppose. He'll explain. But, listen, John. It really is the most extraordinary thing, this. Uncle Lester starting to unbelt, I mean, and scattering money all over the place. I was absolutely right when I told Pat this morning . . .'

'Have you seen Pat?'

'Met her this morning on the bridge. And I said to her . . .'

'Did she – er – ask after me?'

'No.'

'No?' said John hollowly.

'Not that I remember. I brought your name into the talk, and we had a few words about you, but I don't recollect her asking after you.' Hugo laid a hand on his cousin's arm. 'It's no use, John. Be a man! Forget her. Keep plugging away at that Molloy girl. I think you're beginning to make an impression. I think she's softening. I was watching her narrowly last night, and I fancied I saw a tender look in her eyes when they fell on you. I may have been mistaken, but that's what I fancied. A sort of shy, filmy look. I'll tell you what it is, John. You're much too modest. You underrate yourself. Keep steadily before you the fact that almost anybody can get married if they only plug away at it. Look at this man Bessemer, for instance, Ronnie's man that I told you about. As ugly a devil as you would wish to see outside the House of Commons, equipped with number sixteen feet and a face more like a walnut than anything. And yet he has clicked. The moral of which is that no one need ever lose hope. You may say to yourself that you have no chance with this Molloy girl, that she will not look at you. But consider the case of Bessemer. Compared with him, you are quite good-looking. His ears alone . . .'

'Good night,' said John.

He knocked out his pipe and turned to the stairs. Hugo thought his manner abrupt.

Sergeant-Major Flannery, that able and conscientious man, walked briskly up the main staircase of Healthward Ho. Outside a door off the second landing he stopped and knocked.

A loud sneeze sounded from within.

'Cub!' called a voice.

Chimp Twist, propped up with pillows, was sitting in bed, swathed in a woollen dressing-gown. His face was flushed, and he regarded his visitor from under swollen eyelids with a moroseness which would have wounded a more sensitive man. Sergeant-Major Flannery stood six feet two in his boots: he had a round, shiny face at which it was agony for a sick man to look, and Chimp was aware that when he spoke it would be in a rolling, barrack-square bellow which would go clean through him like a red-hot bullet through butter. One has to be in rude health and at the top of one's form to bear up against the Sergeant-Major Flannerys of this world.

'Well?' he muttered thickly.

He broke off to sniff at a steaming jug which stood beside his bed, and the Sergeant-Major, gazing down at him with the offensive superiority of a robust man in the presence of an invalid, fingered his waxed moustache. The action intensified Chimp's dislike. From the first he had been jealous of that moustache. Until it had come into his life he had always thought highly of his own fungoid growth, but one look at this rival exhibit had taken all the heart out of him. The thing was long and blond and bushy, and it shot heavenwards into two glorious needle-point ends, a shining zareba of hair quite beyond the scope of any mere civilian. Non-army men may grow moustaches and wax them and brood over them and be fond and proud of them, but to obtain a waxed moustache in the deepest and holiest sense of the words you have to be a Sergeant-Major.

'Oo-er!' said Mr Flannery. 'That's a nasty cold you've got.'

Chimp, as if to endorse this opinion, sneezed again.

'A nasty feverish cold,' proceeded the Sergeant Major in the tones in which he had once been wont to request squads of recruits to number off from the right. 'You ought to do something about that cold.'

'I am doing sobthig about it,' growled Chimp, having recourse to the jug once more.

'I don't mean sniffing at jugs, sir. You won't do yourself no good sniffing at jugs, Mr Twist. You want to go to the root of the matter, if you understand the expression. You want to attack it from the stummick. The stummick is the seat of the trouble. Get the stummick right and the rest follows natural.'

'Wad do you wad?'

'There's some say quinine and some say a drop of camphor on a lump of sugar and some say cinnamon, but you can take it from me the best thing for a nasty feverish cold in the head is taraxacum and hops. There is no occasion to damn my eyes, Mr Twist. I am only trying to be helpful. You send out for some taraxacum and hops, and before you know where you are . . .'

'Wad do you wad?'

'I'm telling you. There's a gentleman below – a gentleman who's called,' said Sergeant-Major Flannery, making his meaning clearer. 'A gentleman,' being still more precise, 'who's called at the front door in a nortermobile. He wants to see you.'

'Well, he can't.'

'Says his name's Molloy.'

'Molloy?'

'That's what he
said
,' replied Mr Flannery, as one declining to be quoted or to accept any responsibility.

'Oh? All right. Send him up.'

'Taraxacum and hops,' repeated the Sergeant-Major, pausing at the door.

He disappeared, and a few moments later returned, ushering in Soapy. He left the two old friends together, and Soapy approached the bed with rather an awestruck air.

'You've got a cold,' he said.

Chimp sniffed – twice. Once with annoyance and once at the jug.

'So would you have a code if you'd been sitting up to your neck in water for half an hour last night and had to ride home tweddy biles wriggig wet on a motor-cycle.'

'Says which?' exclaimed Soapy, astounded.

Chimp related the saga of the previous night, touching disparagingly on Hugo and saying some things about Emily which it was well she could not hear.

'And that leds me out,' he concluded.