This, of course, was all very well, as far as it went, but I could not conceal it from myself that if Stilton were to see me wearing the uniform, his suspicions would pretty damn’ soon come unlulled. He might or might not have what it takes to make a man a master-mind of Scotland Yard, but he unquestionably had sufficient intelligence, should such a contingency occur, to put two and two together, as the expression is. I mean to say, a policeman who has had his uniform pinched and later in the day comes on someone swathed in it is practically bound to fall into a certain train of thought.
‘No, Boko,’ I said. ‘I proceed to the tryst under my own steam, and I come away the moment I have completed my share in the proceedings, driving like the wind.’
And so it was arranged.
Well, of course, it being so essential for me to get to the scene of operations in good time, you might have known what would happen. At about the half-way mark, the old two-seater suddenly faded out, coming to a placid standstill in prettily wooded country miles from anywhere. And as I don’t know the first thing about fixing a car, my talents being limited to twisting the wheel and tooting the tooter, I had to wait there till the United States Marines arrived.
These took the shape – at about a quarter to twelve – of a kindly bird in a lorry who, on being hailed, put everything right with a careless twiddle of the fingers so rapidly that he had occasion to spit only twice from start to finish. I thanked him, flung him a purse of gold and proceeded on my way, fetching up at journey’s end just as the local clocks were striking midnight.
The interior of the East Wibley Town Hall presented a gay and fairylike appearance. Coloured lanterns hung from the roof, there was a good deal of smilax here and there, and on all sides the eye detected fair women and brave men. One of the latter, a footballer in the striking colours of the Borstal Rovers, detached himself from the throng and arrested my progress, full of recriminations.
‘Bertie, you outstanding louse,’ said Boko, for it was he, ‘where the devil have you been? I was expecting you hours ago.’
I explained the reasons for my delay, and he said peevishly that I was just the sort of chap whose car would break down when every moment was precious, adding that it was a lucky thing that it hadn’t been me they sent to bring the good news from Aix to Ghent, because, if it had been, Ghent would have got it first in the Sunday papers.
‘It’s going to be touch and go, Bertie,’ he proceeded. ‘A wholly unforeseen situation has arisen. Old Worplesdon has gone to earth in the bar and is lowering the stuff by the pailful.’
‘But that’s fine,’ I said. ‘The significance of his actions has probably escaped you, but I can read between the lines. It means that he has seen Clam and that everything is satisfactorily fixed up.’
He clicked his tongue impatiently.
‘Of course it does. But the frightful danger is that at any moment he may pass completely out, and then where are we?’
I saw what he meant, and it was as if a hand of ice had been placed on my heart. No wonder he had used the words, ‘frightful danger’. The peril was hideous. Our whole plan of strategy called for an Uncle Percy in whom the neap tide of the milk of human kindness was at its height. A blind and speechless Uncle P., stacked up against the wall in a corner of the bar like an umbrella in an umbrella stand, would defeat all our aims.
‘Go to him without a second’s delay,’ said Boko, urgently. ‘Pray Heaven it may not be too late!’
The words had scarcely left his lips before I was skimming barwards like a greyhound released from the slips. And it was with profound relief that I saw that I was in time. Uncle Percy had not passed out. He was still up and doing, playing the genial host to a platoon of friends and admirers who had plainly come to look on him in the light of a public drinking fountain.
I was just starting to head in his direction, when the band struck up another tune and his pals swallowed theirs quick and streamed out, leaving the old relative leaning back in his chair with his feet on the table. I lost no time in stepping up and fraternizing.
‘What ho, Uncle Percy,’ I said.
Ah, Bertie,’ he replied. He shut one eye and scrutinized me narrowly. ‘I am right,’ he queried, ‘in supposing that that is Bertram Wooster rattling about inside that helmet?’
‘It is,’ I replied shortly. The uniform and helmet were proving even roomier than I had feared they would be, and I was about fed up with them. The almost universal merriment which had greeted me, as I passed through the crowd of revellers, had been hard to bear. The Woosters are not accustomed to getting the horse’s laugh when they lend their presence to fancy dress dances.
‘It doesn’t fit. It’s too large. You should change your hatter, or your armourer, or whatever it is. Still, be that as it may, tiddly-om-pom-pom. Sit down and have some of this disgusting champagne, Bertie. I’ll join you.’
I thought it best to speak the word in season.
‘Haven’t you had enough, Uncle Percy?’
He weighed this.
‘If what you mean by that question is, am I stinko,’ he replied, ‘in a broad, general sense you are right. I
am
stinko. But everything is relative, Bertie . . . You, for instance, are my relative, and I am your relative . . . and the point I want to make is that I am not one bit as stinko as I’m going to be later on. This is a night for unstinted rejoicing, my dear boy, and if you think I am not going to rejoice – and unstintedly, at that – then I reply “Watch me!” That is all I say. Watch me!’
The spectacle of an uncle, even if only an uncle by marriage, going down for the third time in a sea of dance champagne can never be an agreeable one. But though I mourned as a nephew, I’m bound to say I found myself pretty bucked in my capacity of ambassador for Boko. Pie-eyed, even plastered, this man might be, but there was no mistaking his geniality. It was like something out of Dickens, and I saw that he was going to be clay in my hands.
‘I’ve seen Clam,’ he proceeded.
‘You have?’
‘With the naked eye. And I refuse to believe that Edward the Confessor really looked like that. Nobody presenting such an obscene appearance as J. Chichester Clam could possibly have held the throne of England for five minutes. Lynching parties would have been organized, knights sent out to cope with the nuisance with battleaxes.’
‘Is everything all right?’
‘Everything’s fine, except that I am beginning to see two of you. And one was ample.’
‘I mean, you’ve had your conference?’
‘Oh, our conference? Yes, we had that, and I don’t mind telling you, if you can hear me from inside that helmet, that I put it all over him. When he looks at that agreement we sketched out on the back of the wine list – an agreement, I may mention, legally witnessed by the chap behind the bar and impossible to get out of – he’ll realize that he’s practically given me his bally shipping line. That is why I say – and with all the emphasis at my disposal – tiddly-om-pom-pom. Fill your glass, Bertie. Don’t spare the vitriol.’
I felt that a word of praise would not be amiss. However mellowed a man may be, it never hurts to mellow him a bit more by giving him the old oil.
‘Smooth work, Uncle Percy.’
‘You may well say so, my boy.’
‘There can’t be many fellows about with brains like yours.’
‘There aren’t.’
‘Very creditable to you, the whole thing. I mean, considering your condition.’
‘You allude to my being tight? Quite, quite. But I wasn’t tight when I was dealing with Clam. Though my shoes were. I seem,’ he said, his lips contorted by a spasm of pain, ‘to have come out in a pair of shoes about eleven sizes too small, and they’re nipping me like nobody’s business. I’m going to look for a quiet spot where I can take them off for a bit.’
I drew my breath in sharply. I had seen the way. I suppose this is how great generals win battles, by suddenly spotting the right course to pursue and immediately pulling up their socks and snapping into it.
You see, what I had been alive to all along had been the danger that this man, as soon as I switched the conversation to the subject of Boko, would turn on his heel and stalk off, leaving me flat. Catch him with his shoes off, and this problem would not arise. An uncle by marriage with only socks on finds it dashed difficult to turn on his heel, especially if he’s sitting in a car. And it was into a car that I proposed to decant this Percy.
‘What you want,’ I said, ‘is to go and sit in a car.’
‘I haven’t got a car. I tooled over on my push bike, and a hell of a sweat it was, taxing the unaccustomed calf muscles like billy-o.’
‘I’ll find a car.’
‘Not that rotten little two-seater of yours, I trust? I shall require space. I want to stretch my legs out and relax. The calves are still throbbing.’
‘No, this is a bigger, better car altogether. The property of a friend of mine.’
‘Will he object to my taking my shoes off?’
‘Not a bit.’
‘Excellent. Lead the way, then, my boy. Before starting, however, I had better procure another quart of this gooseberry cider and take it along.’
‘If you think it advisable.’
‘Not merely advisable. Imperative. One doesn’t want to lose a moment.’
I had no difficulty in spotting Boko’s car. It was a thing about the size of a young tank, which he had bought second-hand in his less oofy days and refused to part with because its admirable solidity served him so well in the give and take of traffic. He told me once that it brushed ordinary sports models aside like flies, and that his money would be on it even in the event of a collision with an omnibus.
I ushered the old relative into its cavernous depths, and he removed the shoes. Not till he was safely reclining on his spine, twiddling his toes out of the window, so that the cool night air could play on them, did I start to bring up the big item on the agenda paper.
‘So you slipped it across Clam, did you, Uncle Percy?’ I said. ‘Splendid. Capital. And after accomplishing so notable a business triumph you are, I take it, feeling pretty benevolent towards your fellow men?’
‘I love them all,’ he said handsomely. ‘I look on the entire human species with a kindly and indulgent eye.’
‘Well, that’s fine.’
‘Always excepting, of course, the foe of that species, the hellhound Fittleworth.’
This wasn’t so good.
‘Would you make exceptions, Uncle Percy? On a night like this?’
‘On this or any other night, and also by day. Fittleworth! Invites me to lunch—’
‘I know. He told me.’
‘– and wantonly causes spiders to emerge from the salt cellar.’
‘I know. But—’
‘Roams my grounds, officiously locking my business associates in potting sheds—’
‘I know. Quite. But—’
‘And, to top it all off, lurks in my grass like a ruddy grasshopper, so that I can’t stir a step without treading on him. When I reflect that I have not dissected Fittleworth, limb by limb, and danced on his remains, my moderation astounds me. Don’t talk to me about Fittleworth.’
‘But that’s just what I want to talk about. I want to plead his cause. You are aware, Uncle Percy,’ I said, bunging a bit of a tremolo into the old voice, ‘that he loves young Nobby.’
‘So I have been informed, dash his cheek.’
‘It would be an ideal match. You and he may not always have seen eye to eye in such matters as spiders in salt cellars, but you can’t get away from it that he is one of the hottest of England’s younger litterateurs. He earns more per annum than a Cabinet Minister.’
‘He ought to be ashamed of himself, if he didn’t. Have you ever met a Cabinet Minister? I know dozens, and not one of them that wouldn’t be grossly overpaid at thirty shillings a week.’
‘He could support Nobby in the style to which she is accustomed.’
‘No, he couldn’t. Ask me why not.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m jolly well not going to let him.’
‘But he loves, Uncle Percy.’
‘Has he got an Uncle Percy?’
I saw that unless prompt steps were taken, we should be getting muddled.
‘When I say He loves, Uncle Percy,’ I explained, ‘I don’t mean he loves, verb transitive, Uncle Percy, accusative. I mean he loves, comma, Uncle Percy, exclamation mark.’
Even while uttering the words, I had had a fear lest I might be making the thing a shade too complex for one in the relative’s condition. And so it proved.
‘Bertie,’ he said, gravely, ‘I should have watched you more carefully. You’re tighter than I am.’
‘No, no.’
‘Then just go over that observation of yours again slowly. I would be the last man to dispute that my faculties are a little blurred, but—’
‘I only said, that he loved, and shoved in an “Uncle Percy” at the end of my remarks.’
‘Addressing me, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the vocative, as it were?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Now we’ve got it straight. And where does it get us? Just where we were before. You say he loves my ward, Zenobia. I reply, “All right, let him, and I hope he has a fine day for it. But I’m dashed if he’s going to marry her.” I take my position as guardian of that girl pretty seriously. You might say I regard it as a sacred trust. When confiding her to my care, I remember, her poor old father, as fine a fellow as ever stepped, though too fond of pink gin, clasped my hand and said, “Watch her like a hawk, Percy, old boy, or she’ll go marrying some bally blot on the landscape.” And I said, “Roddy, old man” – his name was Roderick – “just slip a clause in the lease, saying that she’s got to get my consent first, and you need have no further uneasiness.” And what happens? First thing you know, up pops probably the worst blot any landscape was ever afflicted with. But he finds me ready, my boy. He finds me ready and prepared. There is my authority in black and white, and I intend to exercise it.’