Pelham Wodehouse - The Little Nugget

The main outline of my plan was that he should slip away to London, during the afternoon, go to my rooms, where he would find Smith, and with Smith travel to his mother at Monaco. I had written to Smith, bidding him be in readiness for the expedition. There was no flaw in the scheme as I had mapped it out, and though Ogden had complicated it a little by gratuitously luring away Augustus Beckford to bear him company, he had not endangered its success.

But now an utterly unforeseen complication had arisen. My one desire now was to undo everything for which I had been plotting.

I stood there, looking at her dumbly, hating myself for being the cause of the anxiety in her eyes. If I had struck her, I could not have felt more despicable. In my misery I cursed Cynthia for leading me into this tangle.

I heard my name spoken, and turned to find White at my elbow.

'Mr Abney would like to see you, sir.'

I went upstairs, glad to escape. The tension of the situation had begun to tear at my nerves.

'Cub id, Bister Burds,' said my employer, swallowing a lozenge. His aspect was more dazed than ever. 'White has just bade an—ah—extraordinary cobbudicatiod to me. It seebs he is in reality a detective, an employee of Pidkertod's Agedcy, of which you have, of course—ah—heard.'

So White had revealed himself. On the whole, I was not surprised. Certainly his motive for concealment, the fear of making Mr Abney nervous, was removed. An inrush of Red Indians with tomahawks could hardly have added greatly to Mr Abney's nervousness at the present juncture.

'Sent here by Mr Ford, I suppose?' I said. I had to say something.

'Exactly. Ah—precisely.' He sneezed. 'Bister Ford, without codsulting me—I do not cobbedt on the good taste or wisdob of his actiod—dispatched White to apply for the post of butler at this—ah—house, his predecessor having left at a bobedt's dotice, bribed to do so, I strodgly suspect, by Bister Ford himself. I bay be wrodging Bister Ford, but do dot thig so.'

I thought the reasoning sound.

'All thad, however,' resumed Mr Abney, removing his face from a jug of menthol at which he had been sniffing with the tense concentration of a dog at a rabbit-hole, 'is beside the poidt. I berely bedtiod it to explaid why White will accompady you to London.'

'What!'

The exclamation was forced from me by my dismay. This was appalling. If this infernal detective was to accompany me, my chance of bringing Ogden back was gone. It had been my intention to go straight to my rooms, in the hope of finding him not yet departed. But how was I to explain his presence there to White?

'I don't think it's necessary, Mr Abney,' I protested. 'I am sure I can manage this affair by myself.'

'Two heads are better thad wud,' said the invalid sententiously, burying his features in the jug once more.

'Too many cooks spoil the broth,' I replied. If the conversation was to consist of copybook maxims, I could match him as long as he pleased.

He did not keep up the intellectual level of the discussion.

'Dodseds!' he snapped, with the irritation of a man whose proverb has been capped by another. I had seldom heard him speak so sharply. White's revelation had evidently impressed him. He had all the ordinary peaceful man's reverence for the professional detective.

'White will accompany you, Bister Burds,' he said doggedly.

'Very well,' I said.

After all, it might be that I should get an opportunity of giving him the slip. London is a large city.

A few minutes later the cab arrived, and White and I set forth on our mission.

We did not talk much in the cab. I was too busy with my thoughts to volunteer remarks, and White, apparently, had meditations of his own to occupy him.

It was when we had settled ourselves in an empty compartment and the train had started that he found speech. I had provided myself with a book as a barrier against conversation, and began at once to make a pretence of reading, but he broke through my defences.

'Interesting book, Mr Burns?'

'Very,' I said.

'Life's more interesting than books.'

I made no comment on this profound observation. He was not discouraged.

'Mr Burns,' he said, after the silence had lasted a few moments.

'Yes?'

'Let's talk for a spell. These train-journeys are pretty slow.'

Again I seemed to detect that curious undercurrent of meaning in his voice which I had noticed in the course of our brief exchange of remarks in the hall. I glanced up and met his eye. He was looking at me in a way that struck me as curious. There was something in those bright brown eyes of his which had the effect of making me vaguely uneasy. Something seemed to tell me that he had a definite motive in forcing his conversation on me.

'I guess I can interest you a heap more than that book, even if it's the darndest best seller that was ever hatched.'

'Oh!'

He lit a cigarette.

'You didn't want me around on this trip, did you?'

'It seemed rather unnecessary for both of us to go,' I said indifferently. 'Still, perhaps two heads are better than one, as Mr Abney remarked. What do you propose to do when you get to London?'

He bent forward and tapped me on the knee.

'I propose to stick to you like a label on a bottle, sonny,' he said. 'That's what I propose to do.'

'What do you mean?'

I was finding it difficult, such is the effect of a guilty conscience, to meet his eye, and the fact irritated me.

'I want to find out that address you gave the Ford kid this morning out in the stable-yard.'

It is strange how really literal figurative expressions are. I had read stories in which some astonished character's heart leaped into his mouth. For an instant I could have supposed that mine had actually done so. The illusion of some solid object blocking up my throat was extraordinarily vivid, and there certainly seemed to be a vacuum in the spot where my heart should have been. Not for a substantial reward could I have uttered a word at that moment. I could not even breathe. The horrible unexpectedness of the blow had paralysed me.

White, however, was apparently prepared to continue the chat without my assistance.

'I guess you didn't know I was around, or you wouldn't have talked that way. Well, I was, and I heard every word you said. Here was the money, you said, and he was to take it and break for London, and go to the address on this card, and your pal Smith would look after him. I guess there had been some talk before that, but I didn't arrive in time to hear it. But I heard all I wanted, except that address. And that's what I'm going to find out when we get to London.'

He gave out this appalling information in a rich and soothing voice, as if it were some ordinary commonplace. To me it seemed to end everything. I imagined I was already as good as under arrest. What a fool I had been to discuss such a matter in a place like a stable yard, however apparently empty. I might have known that at a school there are no empty places.

'I must say it jarred me when I heard you pulling that stuff,' continued White. 'I haven't what you might call a childlike faith in my fellow-man as a rule, but it had never occurred to me for a moment that you could be playing that game. It only shows,' he added philosophically, 'that you've got to suspect everybody when it comes to a gilt-edged proposition like the Little Nugget.'

The train rattled on. I tried to reduce my mind to working order, to formulate some plan, but could not.

Beyond the realization that I was in the tightest corner of my life, I seemed to have lost the power of thought.

White resumed his monologue.

'You had me guessing,' he admitted. 'I couldn't figure you out. First thing, of course, I thought you must be working in with Buck MacGinnis and his crowd. Then all that happened tonight, and I saw that, whoever you might be working in with, it wasn't Buck. And now I've placed you. You're not in with any one. You're just playing it by yourself. I shouldn't mind betting this was your first job, and that you saw your chance of making a pile by holding up old man Ford, and thought it was better than schoolmastering, and grabbed it.'