Leave it to Psmith (4 page)

Mr Keeble, who had been endeavouring with some energy to get a word in during this harangue, now contrived to speak.

‘And do you seriously suppose that I would . . . But what’s the use of wasting time talking? I have no means of laying my hands on the sum you mention. If I had,’ said Mr Keeble wistfully. ‘If I had . . .’ And his eye strayed to the letter on the desk, the letter which had got as far as ‘My dear Phyllis’ and stuck there.

Freddie gazed upon him with cordial sympathy.

‘Oh, I know how you’re situated, Uncle Joe, and I’m dashed sorry for you. I mean, Aunt Constance and all that.’

‘What!’ Irksome as Mr Keeble sometimes found the peculiar condition of his financial arrangements, he had always had the consolation of supposing that they were a secret between his wife and himself. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I know that Aunt Constance keeps an eye on the doubloons and checks the outgoings pretty narrowly. And I think it’s a dashed shame that she won’t unbuckle to help poor old Phyllis. A girl,’ said Freddie, ‘I always liked. Bally shame! Why the dickens shouldn’t she marry that fellow Jackson? I mean, love’s love,’ said Freddie, who felt strongly on this point.

Mr Keeble was making curious gulping noises.

‘Perhaps I ought to explain,’ said Freddie, ‘that I was having a quiet after-breakfast smoke outside the window there and heard the whole thing. I mean, you and Aunt Constance going to the mat about poor old Phyllis and you trying to bite the guv’nor’s ear and so forth.’

Mr Keeble bubbled for a while.

‘You – you listened!’ he managed to ejaculate at length.

‘And dashed lucky for you,’ said Freddie with a cordiality unimpaired by the frankly unfriendly stare under which a nicer-minded youth would have withered; ‘dashed lucky for you that I did. Because I’ve got a scheme.’

Mr Keeble’s estimate of his young relative’s sagacity was not a high one, and it is doubtful whether, had the latter caught him in a less despondent mood, he would have wasted time in inquiring into the details of this scheme, the mention of which had been playing in and out of Freddie’s conversation like a will-o’-the-wisp. But such was his reduced state at the moment that a reluctant gleam of hope crept into his troubled eye.

‘A scheme? Do you mean a scheme to help me out of – out of my difficulty?’

‘Absolutely! You want the best seats, we have ’em. I mean,’ Freddie went on in interpretation of these peculiar words, ‘you want three thousand quid, and I can show you how to get it.’

‘Then kindly do so,’ said Mr Keeble; and, having opened the door, peered cautiously out, and closed it again, he crossed the room and shut the window.

‘Makes it a bit fuggy, but perhaps you’re right,’ said Freddie, eyeing these manoeuvres. ‘Well, it’s like this, Uncle Joe. You remember what you were saying to Aunt Constance about some bird being apt to sneak up and pinch her necklace?’

‘I do.’

‘Well, why not?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, why don’t you?’

Mr Keeble regarded his nephew with unconcealed astonishment. He had been prepared for imbecility, but this exceeded his expectations.

‘Steal my wife’s necklace!’

‘That’s it. Frightfully quick you are, getting on to an idea. Pinch Aunt Connie’s necklace. For, mark you,’ continued Freddie, so far forgetting the respect due from a nephew as to tap his uncle sharply on the chest, ‘if a husband pinches anything from a wife, it isn’t stealing. That’s law. I found that out from a movie I saw in town.’

The Hon. Freddie was a great student of the movies. He could tell a super-film from a super-super-film at a glance, and what he did not know about erring wives and licentious clubmen could have been written in a sub-title.

‘Are you insane?’ growled Mr Keeble.

‘It wouldn’t be hard for you to get hold of it. And once you’d got it everybody would be happy. I mean, all you’d have to do would be to draw a cheque to pay for another one for Aunt Connie – which would make her perfectly chirpy, as well as putting you one up, if you follow me. Then you would have the other necklace, the pinched one, to play about with. See what I mean? You could sell it privily and by stealth, ship Phyllis her three thousand, push across my thousand, and what was left over would be a nice little private account for you to tuck away somewhere where Aunt Connie wouldn’t know anything about it. And a dashed useful thing,’ said Freddie, ‘to have up your sleeve in case of emergencies.’

‘Are you . . . ?’

Mr Keeble was on the point of repeating his previous remark when suddenly there came the realisation that, despite all preconceived opinions, the young man was anything but insane. The scheme, at which he had been prepared to scoff, was so brilliant, yet simple, that it seemed almost incredible that its sponsor could have worked it out for himself.

‘Not my own,’ said Freddie modestly, as if in answer to the thought. ‘Saw much the same thing in a movie once. Only there the fellow, if I remember, wanted to do down an insurance company, and it wasn’t a necklace that he pinched but bonds. Still, the principle’s the same. Well, how do we go, Uncle Joe? How about it? Is that worth a thousand quid or not?’

Even though he had seen in person to the closing of the door and the window, Mr Keeble could not refrain from a conspirator-like glance about him. They had been speaking with lowered voices, but now words came from him in an almost inaudible whisper.

‘Could it really be done? Is it feasible?’

‘Feasible? Why, dash it, what the dickens is there to stop you? You could do it in a second. And the beauty of the whole thing is that, if you were copped, nobody could say a word, because husband pinching from wife isn’t stealing. Law.’

The statement that in the circumstances indicated nobody could say a word seemed to Mr Keeble so at variance with the facts that he was compelled to challenge it.

‘Your aunt would have a good deal to say,’ he observed ruefully.

‘Eh? Oh, yes, I see what you mean. Well, you would have to risk that. After all, the chances would be dead against her finding out.’

‘But she might.’

‘Oh, well, if you put it like that, I suppose she might.’

‘Freddie, my boy’ said Mr Keeble weakly, ‘I daren’t do it!’

The vision of his thousand pounds slipping from his grasp so wrought upon Freddie that he expressed himself in a manner far from fitting in one of his years towards an older man.

‘Oh, I say, don’t be such a rabbit!’

Mr Keeble shook his head.

‘No,’ he repeated, ‘I daren’t.’

It might have seemed that the negotiations had reached a deadlock, but Freddie, with a thousand pounds in sight, was in far too stimulated a condition to permit so tame an ending to such a promising plot. As he stood there, chafing at his uncle’s pusillanimity, an idea was vouchsafed to him.

‘By Jove! I’ll tell you what!’ he cried.

‘Not so loud!’ moaned the apprehensive Mr Keeble. ‘Not so loud!’

‘I’ll tell you what,’ repeated Freddie in a hoarse whisper. ‘How would it be if
I
did the pinching?’

‘What!’

‘How would it . . .’

‘Would you?’ Hope, which had vanished from Mr Keeble’s face, came flooding back. ‘My boy, would you really?’

‘For a thousand quid you bet I would.’

Mr Keeble clutched at his young relative’s hand and gripped it feverishly.

‘Freddie,’ he said, ‘the moment you place that necklace in my hands, I will give you not a thousand but two thousand pounds.’

‘Uncle Joe,’ said Freddie with equal intensity, ‘it’s a bet!’

Mr Keeble mopped at his forehead.

‘You think you can manage it?’

‘Manage it?’ Freddie laughed a light laugh. ‘Just watch me!’

Mr Keeble grasped his hand again with the utmost warmth.

‘I must go out and get some air,’ he said. ‘I’m all upset. May I really leave this matter to you, Freddie?’

‘Rather!’

‘Good! Then to-night I will write to Phyllis and say that I may be able to do what she wishes.’

‘Don’t say “may”,’ cried Freddie buoyantly. ‘The word is “will”. Bally will! What ho!’

§ 4

Exhilaration is a heady drug; but, like other drugs, it has the disadvantage that its stimulating effects seldom last for very long. For perhaps ten minutes after his uncle had left him, Freddie Threepwood lay back in his chair in a sort of ecstasy. He felt strong, vigorous, alert. Then by degrees, like a chilling wind, doubt began to creep upon him – faintly at first, then more and more insistently, till by the end of a quarter of an hour he was in a state of pronounced self-mistrust. Or, to put it with less elegance, he was suffering from an exceedingly severe attack of cold feet.

The more he contemplated the venture which he had undertaken, the less alluring did it appear to him. His was not a keen imagination, but even he could shape with a gruesome clearness a vision of the frightful bust-up that would ensue should he be detected stealing his Aunt Constance’s diamond necklace. Common decency would in such an event seal his lips as regarded his Uncle Joseph’s share in the matter. And even if – as might conceivably happen – common decency failed at the crisis, reason told him that his Uncle Joseph would infallibly disclaim any knowledge of or connection with the rash act. And then where would he be? In the soup, undoubtedly. For Freddie could not conceal it from himself that there was nothing in his previous record to make it seem inconceivable to his nearest and dearest that he should steal the jewellery of a female relative for purely personal ends. The verdict in the event of detection would be one of uncompromising condemnation.

And yet he hated the idea of meekly allowing that two thousand pounds to escape from his clutch . . .

A young man’s cross-roads.

∗∗∗∗∗

The agony of spirit into which these meditations cast him had brought him up with a bound from the comfortable depths of his arm-chair and had set him prowling restlessly about the room. His wanderings led him at this point to collide somewhat painfully with the long table on which Beach the butler, a tidy soul, was in the habit of arranging in a neat row the daily papers, weekly papers, and magazines which found their way into the castle. The shock had the effect of rousing him from his stupor, and in an absent way he clutched the nearest daily paper, which happened to be the
Morning Globe,
and returned to his chair in the hope of quieting his nerves with a perusal of the racing intelligence. For, though far removed now from any practical share in the doings of the racing world, he still took a faint melancholy interest in ascertaining what Captain Curb, the Head Lad, Little Brighteyes, and the rest of the newspaper experts fancied for the day’s big event. He lit a cigarette and unfolded the journal.

The next moment, instead of passing directly, as was his usual practice, to the last page, which was devoted to sport, he was gazing with a strange dry feeling in his throat at a certain advertisement on page one.

It was a well-displayed advertisement, and one that had caught the eye of many other readers of the paper that morning. It was worded to attract attention, and it had achieved its object. But where others who read it had merely smiled and marvelled idly how anybody could spend good money putting nonsense like this in the paper, to Freddie its import was wholly serious. It read to him like the Real Thing. His motion-picture-trained mind accepted this advertisement at its face-value.

It ran as follows:-

Freddie laid the paper down with a deep intake of breath. He picked it up again, and read the advertisement a second time. Yes, it sounded good.

More, it had something of the quality of a direct answer to prayer. Very vividly now Freddie realised that what he had been wishing for was a partner to share the perils of this enterprise which he had so rashly undertaken. In fact, not so much to share them as to take them off his shoulders altogether. And such a partner he was now in a position to command. Uncle Joe was going to give him two thousand if he brought the thing off. This advertisement fellow would probably be charmed to come in for a few hundred . . .

∗∗∗∗∗

Two minutes later, Freddie was at the writing-desk, scribbling a letter. From time to time he glanced furtively over his shoulder at the door. But the house was still. No footsteps came to interrupt him at his task.

§ 5

Freddie went out into the garden. He had not wandered far when from somewhere close at hand there was borne to him on the breeze a remark in a high voice about Scottish obstinacy, which could only have proceeded from one source. He quickened his steps.

‘Hallo, guv’nor.’

‘Well, Frederick?’

Freddie shuffled.

‘I say, guv’nor, do you think I might go up to town with you this afternoon?’

‘What!’

‘Fact is, I ought to see my dentist. Haven’t been to him for a deuce of a time.’

‘I cannot see the necessity for you to visit a London dentist. There is an excellent man in Shrewsbury, and you know I have the strongest objection to your going to London.’

‘Well, you see, this fellow understands my snappers. Always been to him, I mean to say. Anybody who knows anything about these things will tell you greatest mistake go buzzing about to different dentists.’