Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

“Surely there must be a house somewhere along here.” Reaching the top of the rise, he looked about. “There! That one!” About a quarter mile off, set back in grounds quickly being cloaked in coming night, was a large mansion.

The man in the smock seemed to shiver. “That gurt äouze? Ow, zur, daon’t ee troy they’m. Ghowsties and bowgles…” His voice died away into a mumble, and when Stirrup turned to him again, he was gone. Some village idiot, perhaps, unschooled because unschoolable. Well, it didn’t matter. The house—

At first glance the house had seemed a mere dark huddle, but now there were lights. He made his way quickly ahead. A footman answered his knock. Self-consciously, Stirrup spoke the words he had so often written. “I’m afraid my car has broken down. May I use your telephone?” The footman asked — of course — If he might take his hat and coat. Feeling very odd, Stirrup let him. Then another man appeared. He was stout and tall and silver-haired.

“Had a breakdown? Too bad.” Voices sounded and glasses clinked in the room he had left. It was warm. “My name is Blenkinsop,” he said.

“Mine is Stirrup — Rodney Stirrup.” Would Mr. Blenkinsop recognize — Evidently Mr. Blenkinsop did. He stared, his eyes wide.

“Rod-ney Stirrup ?” he cried. “ The writer? ” His voice was like thunder.

Another man appeared. He was thin, with small white side whiskers — lamb chop rather than mutton chop. “My dear Blenkinsop, pray modulate your voice,” he said. “Richards is telling a capital story. And whom have we here?”

“This gentleman, my dear Arbuthnot,” said Blenkinsop in clear and even tones, “is Mr. Rodney Stirrup. The wri-ter. He’s come here! ”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“Oh, ho-ho-ho!” Mr. Arbuthnot laughed.

“Ah, ha-ha-ha!” Mr. Blenkinsop laughed.

Stirrup, first puzzled, grew annoyed. Young men, the kind who wear fuzzy beards and duffle coats, read avant-garde publications and live in attics where they entertain amoral young women, might understandably be moved to laugh at a writer of the Classical Detective Story. But there seemed no excuse at all for men older than himself, contemporaries of Hall Caine and Mrs. Belloc Lowndes and other all but forgotten literary figures, to laugh.

The two men stopped and looked at him, then at each other.

“I fear we must seem very boorish to you,” Mr. Arbuthnot said. He looked very much like Gladstone, a picture of whom had hung in the home of Malachi Quimby, the Radical cobbler, Stirrup’s long dead father. Something of the awe felt for his father had transferred itself to the Grand Old Man; and even now a remnant of it was left for Mr. Arbuthnot. “Pray accept my apologies,” Mr. Arbuthnot said.

“Oh, don’t mention it.”

“The fact is,” explained Blenkinsop, “that we are all of us very great followers of your books, Mr. Stirrup. It is the coincidence of meeting our favorite author, via a fortuitous accident, which provoked our untimely risability. Do excuse us.”

Stirrup said that it was pleasant to realize he was not forgotten.

“Oh, not here,” said Arbuthnot. “Never. Pray come and meet our friends.”

“Do,” urged Blenkinsop, leading the way. “Oh, no, indeed, we’ve not forgotten you. We have a little celebration tonight. We often do… Right through this door, Mr. Stirrup.”

The room to which they led him contained perhaps a dozen men, all distinguished in mien, all well on in years. They looked up as Stirrup entered. Glasses were in their hands, and cigars. Several of them were still chuckling, presumably at the “capital” story told by Richards, whichever one he was. A tall and heavy man, with a nose like the Duke of Wellington’s, sipped from his glass and smacked his lips.

“Excellent, my dear Richards,” he said.

“I thought you’d like it, Peebles,” Richards said. He was a red-faced, husky-voiced, many-chinned man. “Whom have we here, Arbuthnot, Blenkinsop?”

Arbuthnot smiled on the right side of his face. Blenkinsop rubbed his hands. “This gentleman has had the ill chance to suffer a breakdown of his motorcar. I am sure — quite sure — that we shall endeavor to welcome him in a fitting manner. He is no ordinary guest. He is a well-known author.”

There was a stir of interest. “He writes thrillers.” Another stir. “He is none other than—” a dramatic pause—“ Mr. Rodney Stirrup! ”

The reaction was immense.

Three men jumped to their feet, one dropped a lit cigar, one snapped the stem of his wine glass, another crashed his fist into his palm.

“I told Mr. Stirrup—” Blenkinsop lifted his voice; the hum subsided—“that few writers, if any, have received the attention which we have given to the works through which his name became famous. We followed his tales of crime and detection very carefully here, I told him.”

Peebles said, “You told him no more than the truth, Mr. Blenkinsop. Do us the honor, sir, of taking a glass of wine. This is a great occasion, indeed, Mr. Stirrup.” He poured, proferred.

Stirrup drank. It was a good wine. He said so. The company smiled.

“We have kept a good cellar here, Mr. Stirrup,” said Peebles. “It has been well attended to.” Stirrup said that they must have a good butler, then. A good butler was hard to find, he said. Between the men there passed a look, a sort of spark. Mr. Peebles carefully put down his glass. It was empty. “How curious you should mention butlers,” he said.

Stirrup said that it was not so curious, that he was, in a way, very fond of butlers, that he had put them to good use in his books. Then he turned, surprised. A noise very like a growl had come from a corner of the room where stood a little man with a red face and bristly white hair.

“Ye-e-es,” said Mr. Peebles, in an odd tone of voice. “It is generally conceded, is it not, that you, Mr. Stirrup, were the very first man to employ a butler as the one who stands revealed, at story’s end, as the murderer? That it is you who coined the phrase which so rapidly became a household word wherever the English tongue is spoken? I refer, of course, to: ‘The butler did it. ’?”

Rather proudly, rather fondly, Stirrup nodded. “You are correct, sir.”

“And in novel after novel, though the victims varied and the criminal methods changed, the murderer was almost invariably — a butler. Until finally you were paid the supreme compliment one writer can pay another — that of imitation. A line of thrillers long enough to reach from here to London — to say nothing of short stories, stage plays, music hall acts, movie and television dramas — each with a murderous butler, poured forth upon the world, Mr. Stirrup — beginning, if I am not mistaken, with Padraic, the butler of Ballydooly House, in Murder By The Bogs. ”

Stirrup was pleased. “Ah, do you remember Padraic? Dear me. Yes, that was my very first detective novel. Couldn’t do it today, of course. Irish butlers are dreadfully passé, obsolete. De Valera and Irish Land Reform have extinguished the species, so to speak.”

The red-faced little man dashed from his corner, seized a poker, and brandished it in Stirrup’s face. “The truth is not in ye!” he shouted. “Ye lie, ye scribbling Sassenach!” Stirrup could not have said with any degree of accuracy if the brogue was that of Ulster, or Munster, or Leinster, or Connaught — the four provinces of Northern Ireland — but he recognized as being of sound British workmanship the heavy iron in the speaker’s hand.

In a rather quavering tone, Stirrup demanded, “What is the meaning of this?”

“Allow me to introduce you,” Peebles said, “to O’Donnell, for fifty years butler to Count Daniel Donavan of Castle Donavan. O’Donnell, put that away.”