A minute or two later Spode returned with most of the stuffing removed from his person.
‘I seem to have done you an injustice, Wooster,’ he said, and I was amazed that he had it in him to speak so meekly.
The Woosters are always magnanimous. We do not crush the vanquished beneath the iron heel.
‘Oh, was the thing there all right?’
‘Er – yes. Yes, it was.’
‘Ah well, we all make mistakes.’
‘I could have sworn it had gone.’
‘But wasn’t the door locked?’
‘Yes.’
‘Reminds you of one of those mystery stories, doesn’t it, where there’s a locked room with no windows, and blowed if one fine morning you don’t find a millionaire inside with a dagger of Oriental design sticking in his wishbone. You’ve got some oil on your nose.’
‘Oh, have I?’ he said, feeling.
‘Now you’ve got it on your cheek. I’d go and join Bartholomew in the bath tub if I were you.’
‘I will. Thank you, Wooster.’
‘Not at all, Spode, or rather, Sidcup. Don’t spare the soap.’ I suppose there’s nothing that braces one more thoroughly than the spectacle of the forces of darkness stubbing their toe, and the heart was light as I made my way to the house. What with this and what with that, it was as though a great weight had rolled off me. Birds sang, insects buzzed, and I felt that what they were trying to say was ‘All is well. Bertram has come through.’
But a thing I’ve often noticed is that when I’ve got something off my mind, it pretty nearly always happens that Fate sidles up and shoves on something else, as if curious to see how much the traffic will bear. It went into its act on the present occasion. Feeling that I needed something else to worry about, it spat on its hands and got down to it, allowing Madeline Bassett to corner me as I was passing through the hall.
Even if she had been her normal soupy self, she would have been the last person I wanted to have a word with, but this she was far from being. Something had happened to remove the droopiness, and her eyes had a gleam in them which filled me with a nameless fear. She was obviously all steamed up for some reason, and it was plain that what she was about to say was not going to make the last of the Woosters clap his hands in glee and start chanting hosannas like the Cherubim and Seraphim, if I’ve got the names right. A moment later she revealed what it was that was eating her, dishing it out without what I believe is called preamble.
‘I am furious with Augustus!’ she said, and my heart stood still. It was as if the Totleigh Towers spectre, if there was one, had laid an icy hand on it. ‘Why, what’s happened?’
‘He was very rude to Roderick.’
This seemed incredible. Nobody but an all-in wrestling champion would be rude to a fellow as big as Spode. ‘Surely not?’
‘I mean he was very rude about Roderick. He said he was sick and tired of seeing him clumping about the place as if it belonged to him, and hadn’t he got a home of his own, and if Daddy had an ounce more sense than a billiard ball he would charge him rent. He was most offensive.’
My h. stood stiller. It is not stretching the facts to say that I was appalled and all of a doodah. It just showed, I was telling myself, what a vegetarian diet can do to a chap, changing him in a flash from a soft boiled to a hard boiled egg. I have no doubt the poet Shelley’s circle noticed the same thing with the poet Shelley.
I tried to pour oil on the troubled w’s.
‘Probably just kidding, don’t you think?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘He didn’t say it with a twinkle in his eye?’
‘No.’
‘Nor with a light laugh?’
‘No.’
‘You might not have noticed it. Very easy to miss, these light laughs.’
‘He meant every word he said.’
‘Then it was probably j«st a momentary spasm of what-d’you-call-it. Irritability. We all have them.’