‘Whence I took it’ would have been better, but it was not to comment on her prose style that I interposed. I was thinking that if she was allowed to do the putting back, she might quite possibly change her mind on the way to Runkle’s room and decide to stick to the loot after all. Jeeves’s arguments had been convincing to the last drop, but you can never be sure that the effect of convincing arguments won’t wear off, especially with aunts who don’t know the difference between right and wrong, and it might be that she would take the view that if she pocketed the porringer and kept it among her souvenirs, she would at least be saving something from the wreck. ‘Always difficult to know what to give Tom for his birthday’, she might say to herself. ‘This will be just the thing’.
‘I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘Unless you’d rather, Jeeves.’
‘No thank you, sir.’
‘Only take a minute of your time.’
‘No, thank you, sir.’
‘Then you may leave us, Jeeves. Much obliged for your Daniel come to judgmenting.’
‘A pleasure, sir.’
‘Give Uncle Charlie my love.’
‘I will indeed, sir.’ As the door closed behind him, I started to make my plans and dispositions, as I believe the word is, and I found the blood relation docile and helpful. Runkle’s room, she told me, was the one known as the Blue Room, and the porringer should be inserted in the left top drawer of the chest of drawers, whence she had removed it. I asked if she was sure he was still in the hammock, and she said he must be, because on her departure he was bound to have gone to sleep again. Taking a line through the cat Augustus, I found this plausible. With these traumatic symplegia cases waking is never more than a temporary thing. I have known Augustus to re- sume his slumbers within fifteen seconds of having had a shopping bag containing tins of cat food fall on him. A stifled oath, and he was off to dreamland once more.
As I climbed the stairs, I was impressed by the fact that L. P. Runkle had been given the Blue Room, for in this house it amounted to getting star billing. It was the biggest and most luxurious of the rooms allotted to bachelors. I once suggested to the aged relative that I be put there, but all she said was ‘You?’ and the conversation turned to other topics. Runkle having got it in spite of the presence on the premises of a seventh Earl showed how determined the a.r. had been that no stone should be left unturned and no avenue unexplored in her efforts to soften him up; and it seemed ironical that all her carefully thought-out plans should have gone agley. Just shows Burns knew what he was talking about. You can generally rely on these poets to hit the mark and entitle themselves to a cigar or coconut according to choice.
The old sweats will remember, though later arrivals will have to be told, that this was not the first time I had gone on a secret mission to the Blue Room. That other visit, the old sweats will recall, had ended in disaster and not knowing which way to look, for Mrs. Homer Cream, the well-known writer of suspense novels, had found me on the floor with a chair round my neck, and it had not been easy to explain. This was no doubt why on the pr’esent occasion I approached the door with emotions somewhat similar to those I had had in the old days when approaching that of Arnold Abney M.A. at the conclusion of morning prayers. A voice seemed to whisper in my ear that beyond that door there lurked something that wasn’t going to do me a bit of good.
The voice was perfectly right, It had got its facts correct first shot. What met my eyes as I entered was L. P. Runkle asleep on the bed, and with my customary quickness I divined what must have happened. After being cornered there by the old ancestor he must have come to the conclusion that a hammock out in the middle of a lawn, with access to it from all directions, was no place for a man who wanted peace and seclusion, and that these were to be obtained only in his bedroom. Thither, accordingly, he had gone, and there he was. Voild tout, as one might say if one had made a study of the French language.