Naturally I asked if Tuppy was hard up, and she said he wasn’t begging his bread and nosing about in the gutters for cigarette ends, but he hadn’t enough to marry on.
‘Thanks to L. P. Runkle. I’ll tell you the whole story.’
‘Do.’
‘Did you ever meet Tuppy’s late father?’
‘Once. I remember him as a dreamy old bird of the absentminded professor type.’
‘He was a chemical researcher or whatever they call it, employed by Runkle’s Enterprises, one of those fellows you see in the movies who go about in white coats peering into test tubes. And one day he invented what were afterwards known as Runkle’s Magic Midgets, small pills for curing headaches. You’ve probably come across them.’
‘I know them well. Excellent for a hangover, though not of course to be compared with Jeeves’s patent pick-me-up. They’re very popular at the Drones. I know a dozen fellows who swear by them. There must be a fortune in them.’
‘There was. They sell like warm winter woollies in Iceland.’
‘Then why is Tuppy short of cash? Didn’t he inherit them?’
‘Not by a jugful.
‘ ‘I don’t get it. You speak in riddles, aged relative,’ I said, and there was a touch of annoyance in my voice, for if there is one thing that gives me the pip, it is an aunt speaking in riddles. ‘If these ruddy midget things belonged to Tuppy’s father –‘
‘L. P. Runkle claimed they didn’t. Tuppy’s father was working for him on a salary, and the small print in the contract read that all inventions made on Runkle’s Enterprises’ time became the property of Runkle’s Enterprises. So when old Glossop died, he hadn’t much to leave his son, while L. P. Runkle went on flourishing like a green bay tree.’
I had never seen a green bay tree, but I gathered what she meant.
‘Couldn’t Tuppy sue?’
‘He would have been bound to lose. A contract is a contract.’
I saw what she meant. It was not unlike that time when she was running that weekly-paper of hers, Milady’s Boudoir, and I contributed to it an article, or piece as it is sometimes called, on What The Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing. She gave me a packet of cigarettes for it, and it then became her property. I didn’t actually get offers for it from France, Germany, Italy, Canada and the United States, but if I had had I couldn’t have accepted them. My pal Boko Littleworth, who makes a living by his pen, tells me I ought to have sold her only the first serial rights, but I didn’t think of it at the time. One makes these mistakes. What one needs, of course, is an agent.
All the same, I considered that L. P. Runkle ought to have stretched a point and let Tuppy’s father get something out of it. I put this to the ancestor, and she agreed with me.
‘Of course he ought. Moral obligation.’
‘It confirms one’s view that this Runkle is a stinker.’
‘The stinker supreme. And he tells me he has been tipped off that he’s going to get a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours.’
‘How can they knight a chap like that?’
‘Just the sort of chap they do knight. Prominent business man. Big deals. Services to Britain’s export trade.’
‘But a stinker.’
‘Unquestionably a stinker.’
‘Then what’s he doing here? You usually don’t go out of your way to entertain stinkers. Spode, yes. I can understand you letting him infest the premises, much as I disapprove of it. He’s making speeches on Ginger’s behalf, and according to you doing it rather well. But why Runkle?’
She said ‘Ah! ‘, and when I asked her reason for saying ‘Ah ! ‘, she replied that she was thinking of her subtle cunning, and when I asked what she meant by subtle cunning, she said ‘Ah! ‘ again. It looked as if we might go on like this indefinitely, but a moment later, having toddled to the door and opened it and to the french window and peered out, she explained.
‘Runkle came here hoping to sell Tom an old silver what-not for his collection, and as Tom had vanished and he had come a long way I had to put him up for the night, and at dinner I suddenly had an inspiration. I thought if I got him to stay on and plied him day and night with Anatole’s cooking, he might get into mellowed mood.’