Dorothy Sayers - The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

“I swear I’ve nothing to do with anybody following you about. Honestly, I haven’t. I wouldn’t employ a man, anyway, who’d let a bloke see that he was being followed. No. When I start huntin’ you, I shall be as silent and stealthy as a gas-leak. What’s this incompetent bloodhound like to look at?”

“Looks like a tout. Small, thin, with his hat pulled down over his eyes and an old rain-coat with the collar turned up. And a very blue chin.”

“Sounds like a stage detective. He’s a silly ass anyway.”

“He gets on my nerves.”

“Oh, all right. Next time you see him, punch his head.”

“But what does he want?”

“How should I know? What have you been doing?”

“Nothing, of course. I tell you, Wimsey, I believe there’s some sort of conspiracy going on to get me into trouble, or do away with me, or something. I can’t stand it. It’s simply damnable. Suppose this fellow starts hanging round the Walmisley-Hubbard place. Look nice, won’t it, for the salesman to have a ’tec on his heels all the time? Just as I hoped things were coming right—”

“Bosh!” said Wimsey. “Don’t let yourself get rattled. It’s probably all imagination, or just a coincidence.”

“It isn’t. I wouldn’t mind betting he’s outside in the street now.”

“Well, then, we’ll settle his hash when we get outside. Give him in charge for annoying you. Look here, forget him for a bit. Tell me about the old General. How did he seem, that last time you saw him?”

“Oh, he seemed fit enough. Crusty, as usual.”

“Crusty, was he? What about?”

“Private matters,” said George, sullenly.

Wimsey cursed himself for having started his questions tactlessly. The only thing now was to retrieve the situation as far as possible.

“I’m not at all sure,” he said, “that relations shouldn’t all be painlessly put away after three-score and ten. Or at any rate segregated. Or have their tongues sterilised, so that they can’t be poisonously interferin’.”

“I wish they were,” growled George “The old man — damn it all, I know he was in the Crimea, but he’s no idea what a real war’s like. He thinks things can go on just as they did half a century ago. I daresay he never did behave as I do. Anyway, I know he never had to go to his wife for his pocket-money, let alone having the inside gassed out of him. Coming preaching to me — and I couldn’t say anything, because he was so confoundedly old, you know.”

“Very trying,” murmured Wimsey, sympathetically.

“It’s all so damned unfair,” said George. “Do you know,” he burst out, the sense of grievance suddenly overpowering his wounded vanity, “the old devil actually threatened to cut me out of the miserable little bit of money he had to leave me if I didn’t ‘reform my domestic behaviour.’ That’s the way he talked. Just as if I was carrying on with another woman or something. I know did have an awful row with Sheila one day, but of course I didn’t mean half I said. She knows that, but the old man took it all seriously.”

“Half a moment,” broke in Wimsey, “did he say all this to you in the taxi that day?”

“Yes he did. A long lecture, all about the purity and courage of a good woman, driving round and round Regent’s Park. I had to promise to turn over a new leaf and all that. Like being back at one’s prep. school.”

“But didn’t he mention anything about the money Lady Dormer was leaving to him?”

“Not a word. I don’t suppose he knew about it.”

“I think he did. He’d just come from seeing her, you know, and I’ve a very good idea she explained matters to him then.”

“Did she? Well, that rather explains it. I thought he was being very pompous and stiff about it. He said what a responsibility money was, you know, and how he would like to feel that anything he left to me was being properly used and all that. And he rubbed it in about my not having been able to make good for myself — that was what got my goat — and about Sheila. Said I ought to appreciate a good woman’s love more, my boy, and cherish her and so on. As if I needed him to tell me that. But of course if he knew he was in the running for this half-million, it makes rather a difference. By Jove, yes! I expect he would feel a bit anxious at the idea of leaving it all to a fellow he looked on as a waster.”

“I wonder he didn’t mention it.”

“You didn’t know grandfather. I bet he was thinking over in his mind whether it wouldn’t be better to give my share to Sheila, and he was sounding me, to see what sort of disposition I’d got. The old fox! Well, I did my best to put myself in a good light, of course, because just at the moment I didn’t want to lose my chance of his two thousand. But I don’t think he found me satisfactory. I say,” went on George, with rather a sheepish laugh, “perhaps it’s just as well he popped off when he did. He might have cut me off with a shilling, eh?”

“Your brother would have seen you through in any case.”

“I suppose he would. Robert’s quite a decent sort, really, though he does get on one’s nerves so.”

“Does he?”

“He’s so thick-skinned; the regular unimaginative Briton. I believe Robert would cheerfully go through another five years of war and think it all a very good rag. Robert was proverbial, you know, for never turning a hair. I remember Robert, at that ghastly hole at Carency, where the whole ground was rotten with corpses — ugh! — potting those swollen great rats for a penny a time, and laughing at them. Rats. Alive and putrid with what they’d been feeding on. Oh, yes. Robert was thought a damn good soldier.”

“Very fortunate for him,” said Wimsey.

“Yes. He’s the same sort as grandfather. They liked each other. Still, Grandfather was very decent about me. A beast, as the schoolboy said, but a just beast. And Sheila was a great favourite of his.”

“Nobody could help liking her,” said Wimsey, politely.

Lunch ended on a more cheerful note than it had begun. As they came out into the street, however, George Fentiman glanced round uneasily. A small man in a buttoned-up overcoat and with a soft hat pulled down over his eyes, was gazing into the window of a shop near at hand.

George strode up to him.

“Look here, you!” he said. “What the devil do you mean by following me about? You clear off, d’you hear?”

“I think you are mistaken, sir,” said the man, quietly enough. “I have never seen you before.”

“Haven’t you, by Jove? Well, I’ve seen you hanging about, and if you do it any more, I’ll give you something to remember me by. D’you hear?”

“Hallo!” said Wimsey, who had stopped to speak to the commissionaire, “what’s up — Here, you, wait a moment!”

But at sight of Wimsey, the man had slipped like an eel among the roaring Strand traffic, and was lost to view.

George Fentiman turned to his companion triumphantly.

“Did you see that? That lousy little beggar! Made off like a shot when I threatened him. That’s the fellow who’s been dogging me about for three days.”

“I’m sorry,” said Wimsey, “but it was not your prowess, Fentiman. It was my awful aspect that drove him away. What is it about me? Have I a front like Jove to threaten and command? Or am I wearing a repulsive tie?”

“He’s gone, anyway.”

“I wish I’d had a better squint at him. Because I’ve got a sort of idea that I’ve seen those lovely features before, and not so long ago, either. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? No, I don’t think it was that.”

“All I can say is,” said George, “that if I see him again, I’ll put such a face on him that his mother won’t know him.”