It was a moment fraught with embarrassment. It’s bad enough to be caught by your host prowling about his house after hours even when said host is a warm admirer and close personal friend, and I have, I think, made it clear that Pop Bassett was not one of my fans. He could barely stand the sight of me by daylight, and I suppose I looked even worse to him at one o’clock in the morning.
My feeling of having been slapped between the eyes with a custard pie was deepened by the spectacle of his dressing-gown. He was a small man . . . you got the impression, seeing him, that when they were making magistrates there wasn’t enough material left over when they came to him . . . and for some reason not easy to explain it nearly always happens that the smaller the ex-magistrate, the louder the dressing-gown. His was a bright purple number with yellow frogs, and I am not deceiving my public when I say that it smote me like a blow, rendering me speechless.
Not that I’d have felt chatty even if he had been upholstered in something quiet in dark blue. I don’t believe you can ever be completely at your ease in the company of someone before whom you’ve stood in the dock saying ‘Yes, your worship’ and ‘No, your worship’ and being told by him that you’re extremely lucky to get off with a fine and not fourteen days without the option. This is particularly so if you have just smashed a grandfather clock whose welfare is no doubt very near his heart. At any rate, be that as it may, he was the one to open the conversation, not me.
‘Good God!’ he said, speaking with every evidence of horror. ‘You!’
A thing I never know, and probably never will, is what to say when somebody says ‘You!’ to me. A mild ‘Oh, hullo’ was the best I could do on this occasion, and I felt at the time it wasn’t good. Better, of course, than ‘What ho, there, Bassett!’ but nevertheless not good.
‘Might I ask what you are doing here at this hour, Mr. Wooster?’
Well, I might have laughed a jolly laugh and replied ‘Upsetting grandfather clocks’, keeping it light, as it were, if you know what I mean, but something told me it wouldn’t go so frightfully well. I had what amounted to an inspiration.
‘I came down to get a book. I’d finished my Erie Stanley Gardner and I couldn’t seem to drop off to sleep, so I came to see if I couldn’t pick up something from your shelves. And in the dark I bumped into the clock.’
‘Indeed?’ he said, putting a wealth of sniffmess into the word. A thing about this undersized little son of a bachelor I ought to have mentioned earlier is that during his career on the bench he was one of those unpleasant sarcastic magistrates who get themselves so disliked by the criminal classes. You know the type. Their remarks are generally printed in the evening papers with the word ‘laughter’ after them in brackets, and they count the day lost when they don’t make some unfortunate pickpocket or some wretched drunk and disorderly feel like a piece of cheese. I know that on the occasion when we stood face to face in Bosher Street police court he convulsed the audience with three solid jokes at my expense in the first two minutes, bathing me in confusion. ‘Indeed?’ he said. ‘Might I inquire why you were conducting your literary researches in the dark? It would surely have been well within the scope of even your limited abilities to press a light switch.’
He had me there, of course. The best I could say was that I hadn’t thought of it, and he sniffed a nasty sniff, as much as to suggest that I was just the sort of dead-from-the-neck-up dumb brick who wouldn’t have thought of it. He then turned to the subject of the clock, one which I would willingly have left unventilated. He said he had always valued it highly, it being more or less the apple of his eye.