I went to the door and switched on the electric light, and there, staring him in the face, were the two empty frames. He stood goggling at them in silence. Then he gave a sort of wheezy grunt.
“The gang! The burglars! They have been here, and they have taken Clarence’s picture!” He paused. “It might have been mine! My Venus!” he whispered It was getting most fearfully painful, you know, but he had to know the truth.
“I’m awfully sorry, you know,” I said. “But it was.”
He started, poor old chap.
“Eh? What do you mean?”
“They did take your Venus.”
“But I have it here.”
I shook my head.
“That’s Clarence’s ‘Jocund Spring,’“ I said.
He jumped at it and straightened it out.
“What! What are you talking about? Do you think I don’t know my own picture—my child—my Venus. See! My own signature in the corner. Can you read, boy? Look: ‘Matthew Yeardsley.’ This is my picture!”
And—well, by Jove, it was, don’t you know!
* * * * *
Well, we got him off to bed, him and his infernal Venus, and we settled down to take a steady look at the position of affairs. Bill said it was my fault for getting hold of the wrong picture, and I said it was Bill’s fault for fetching me such a crack on the jaw that I couldn’t be expected to see what I was getting hold of, and then there was a pretty massive silence for a bit.
“Reggie,” said Bill at last, “how exactly do you feel about facing Clarence and Elizabeth at breakfast?”
“Old scout,” I said. “I was thinking much the same myself.”
“Reggie,” said Bill, “I happen to know there’s a milk-train leaving Midford at three-fifteen. It isn’t what you’d call a flier. It gets to London at about half-past nine. Well—er—in the circumstances, how about it?”
THE AUNT AND THE SLUGGARD
Now that it’s all over, I may as well admit that there was a time during the rather funny affair of Rockmetteller Todd when I thought that Jeeves was going to let me down. The man had the appearance of being baffled.
Jeeves is my man, you know. Officially he pulls in his weekly wages for pressing my clothes and all that sort of thing; but actually he’s more like what the poet Johnnie called some bird of his acquaintance who was apt to rally round him in times of need—a guide, don’t you know; philosopher, if I remember rightly, and—I rather fancy—friend. I rely on him at every turn.
So naturally, when Rocky Todd told me about his aunt, I didn’t hesitate. Jeeves was in on the thing from the start.
The affair of Rocky Todd broke loose early one morning of spring. I was in bed, restoring the good old tissues with about nine hours of the dreamless, when the door flew open and somebody prodded me in the lower ribs and began to shake the bedclothes. After blinking a bit and generally pulling myself together, I located Rocky, and my first impression was that it was some horrid dream.
Rocky, you see, lived down on Long Island somewhere, miles away from New York; and not only that, but he had told me himself more than once that he never got up before twelve, and seldom earlier than one. Constitutionally the laziest young devil in America, he had hit on a walk in life which enabled him to go the limit in that direction. He was a poet. At least, he wrote poems when he did anything; but most of his time, as far as I could make out, he spent in a sort of trance. He told me once that he could sit on a fence, watching a worm and wondering what on earth it was up to, for hours at a stretch.
He had his scheme of life worked out to a fine point. About once a month he would take three days writing a few poems; the other three hundred and twenty-nine days of the year he rested. I didn’t know there was enough money in poetry to support a chappie, even in the way in which Rocky lived; but it seems that, if you stick to exhortations to young men to lead the strenuous life and don’t shove in any rhymes, American editors fight for the stuff. Rocky showed me one of his things once. It began: