Probably if I’d been one of the topnotchers, about to do a ten years stretch for burglary or arson or what not, it would have been different, but I was only one of the small fry who get twenty-eight days in the second division, and I couldn’t help thinking the officer was looking down on me. Not actually sneering, perhaps, but aloof in his manner, as if feeling I wasn’t much for a cop to get his teeth into.
And, of course, there was another thing. Speaking of my earlier visit to Totleigh Towers, I mentioned that when Pop Bassett immured me in my room, he stationed the local police force on the lawn below to see that I didn’t nip out of the window. That local police force was this same Oates, and as it was raining like the dickens at the time, no doubt the episode had rankled. Only a very sunny constable can look with an indulgent eye on the fellow responsible for his getting the nastiest cold in the head of his career.
At any rate, he showed himself now a man of few words, though good at locking people up in cells. There was only one at the Totleigh-in-the-Wold emporium, and I had it all to myself, a cosy little apartment with a window, not barred but too small to get out of, a grille in the door, a plank bed and that rather powerful aroma of drunks and disorderlies which you always find in these homes from home. Whether it was superior or inferior to the one they had given me at Bosher Street, I was unable to decide. Not much in it either way, it seemed to me.
To say that when I turned in on the plank bed I fell into a dreamless sleep would be deceiving my public. I passed a somewhat restless night. I could have sworn, indeed, that I didn’t drop off at all, but I suppose I must have done, because the next thing I knew sunlight was coming through the window and mine host was bringing me breakfast.
I got outside it with an appetite unusual with me at such an early hour, and at the conclusion of the meal I fished out an old envelope and did what I have sometimes done before when the bludgeonings of Fate were up and about to any extent – viz. make a list of Credits and Debits, as I believe Robinson Crusoe used to. The idea being to see whether I was ahead of or behind the game at moment of going to press.
The final score worked out as follows:
Credit Debit
Not at all a bad breakfast, that. Don’t always be thinking of your
Coffee quite good. I was sur- stomach, you jailbird,
prised.
Who’s a jailbird? You’re a jailbird.
Well, yes, I suppose I am, if you More than your face is.
care to put it that way. But I am
innocent. My hands are clean.
Not looking my best, what? You look like something the cat
brought in.
A bath will put that right. And you’ll get one in prison.
You really think it’ll come to Well, you heard what Pop Bassett
that? said.
I wonder what it’s like, doing You’ll hate it. It’ll bore you stiff,
twenty-eight days? Hitherto, I’ve
always just come for the night.
I don’t know so much. They give What’s the good of a cake of soap
you a cake of soap and a hymn- and a hymnbook?
book, don’t they?
I’ll be able to whack up some
sort of indoor game with them. And
don’t forget that I’ve not got to
marry Madeline Bassett. Let’s
hear what you have to say to that.
And the Debit account didn’t utter. I had baffled it.
Yes, I felt, as I hunted around in case there might be a crumb of bread which I had overlooked, that amply compensated me for the vicissitudes I was undergoing. And I had been musing along these lines for a while, getting more and more reconciled to my lot, when a silvery voice spoke, making me jump like a startled grasshopper. I couldn’t think where it was coming from at first, and speculated for a moment on the possibility of it being my guardian angel, though I had always thought of him, I don’t know why, as being of the male sex. Then I saw something not unlike a human face at the grille, and a closer inspection told me that it was Stiffy.