Jeeves Stories P. G. Wodehouse (websites to read books for free txt) 📖

of animal from which you would have expected a noise like a squeaking slate-pencil: but it was simply baying. It had retired into a corner, and was leaning against the wall with bulging eyes; and every two seconds it chucked its head back in a kind of pained way and let out another terrific bellow.

Well, I know when I’m licked. I was sorry for Bingo and regretted the necessity of having to let him down; but the time had come, I felt, to shift. “Outside for Bertram!” was the slogan, and I took a running leap at the window and scrambled through.

And there on the path, as if they had been waiting for me by appointment, stood a policeman and a parlourmaid.

It was an embarrassing moment.

“Oh⁠—er⁠—there you are!” I said. And there was what you might call a contemplative silence for a moment.

“I told you I heard something,” said the parlourmaid.

The policeman was regarding me in a boiled way.

“What’s all this?” he asked.

I smiled in a sort of saintlike manner.

“It’s a little hard to explain,” I said.

“Yes, it is!” said the policeman.

“I was just⁠—er⁠—just having a look round, you know. Old friend of the family, you understand.”

“How did you get in?”

“Through the window. Being an old friend of the family, if you follow me.”

“Old friend of the family, are you?”

“Oh, very. Very. Very old. Oh, a very old friend of the family.”

“I’ve never seen him before,” said the parlourmaid.

I looked at the girl with positive loathing. How she could have inspired affection in anyone, even a French cook, beat me. Not that she was a bad looking girl, mind you. Not at all. On another and happier occasion I might even have thought her rather pretty. But now she seemed one of the most unpleasant females I had ever encountered.

“No,” I said. “You have never seen me before. But I’m an old friend of the family.”

“Then why didn’t you ring at the front door?”

“I didn’t want to give any trouble.”

“It’s no trouble answering front doors, that being what you’re paid for,” said the parlourmaid, virtuously. “I’ve never seen him before in my life,” she added, perfectly gratuitously. A horrid girl.

“Well, look here,” I said, with an inspiration, “the undertaker knows me.”

“What undertaker?”

“The cove who was waiting at table when I dined here the night before last.”

“Did the undertaker wait at table on the sixteenth instant?” asked the policeman.

“Of course he didn’t,” said the parlourmaid.

“Well, he looked like⁠—By Jove, no. I remember now. He was the greengrocer.”

“On the sixteenth instant,” said the policeman⁠—pompous ass!⁠—“did the greengrocer⁠—?”

“Yes, he did, if you want to know,” said the parlourmaid. She seemed disappointed and baffled, like a tigress that sees its prey being sneaked away from it. Then she brightened. “But this fellow could easily have found that out by asking round about.”

A perfectly poisonous girl.

“What’s your name?” asked the policeman.

“Well, I say, do you mind awfully if I don’t give my name, because⁠—”

“Suit yourself. You’ll have to tell it to the magistrate.”

“Oh, no, I say, dash it!”

“I think you’d better come along.”

“But I say, really, you know, I am an old friend of the family. Why, by Jove, now I remember, there’s a photograph of me in the drawing-room. Well, I mean, that shows you!”

“If there is,” said the policeman.

“I’ve never seen it,” said the parlourmaid.

I absolutely hated this girl.

“You would have seen it if you had done your dusting more conscientiously,” I said, severely. And I meant it to sting, by Jove!

“It is not a parlourmaid’s place to dust the drawing-room,” she sniffed, haughtily.

“No,” I said, bitterly. “It seems to be a parlourmaid’s place to lurk about and hang about and⁠—er⁠—waste her time fooling about in the garden with policemen who ought to be busy about their duties elsewhere.”

“It’s a parlourmaid’s place to open the front door to visitors. Them that don’t come in through windows.”

I perceived that I was getting the loser’s end of the thing. I tried to be conciliatory.

“My dear old parlourmaid,” I said, “don’t let us descend to vulgar wrangling. All I’m driving at is that there is a photograph of me in the drawing-room, cared for and dusted by whom I know not; and this photograph will, I think, prove to you that I am an old friend of the family. I fancy so, officer?”

“If it’s there,” said the man, in a grudging way.

“Oh, it’s there all right. Oh, yes, it’s there.”

“Well, we’ll go to the drawing-room and see.”

“Spoken like a man, my dear old policeman,” I said.

The drawing-room was on the first floor, and the photograph was on the table by the fireplace. Only, if you understand me, it wasn’t. What I mean is, there was the fireplace, and there was the table by the fireplace, but, by Jove, not a sign of any photograph of me whatsoever. A photograph of Bingo, yes. A photograph of Bingo’s uncle, Lord Bittlesham, right. A photograph of Mrs. Bingo, three-quarter face, with a tender smile on her lips, all present and correct. But of anything resembling Bertram Wooster, not a trace.

“Ho!” said the policeman.

“But, dash it, it was there the night before last.”

“Ho!” he said again. “Ho! Ho!” As if he were starting a drinking-chorus in a comic opera, confound him.

Then I got what amounted to the brainwave of a lifetime.

“Who dusts these things?” I said, turning on the parlourmaid.

“I don’t.”

“I didn’t say you did. I said who did.”

“Mary. The housemaid, of course.”

“Exactly. As I suspected. As I foresaw. Mary, officer, is notoriously the worst smasher in London. There have been complaints about her on all sides. You see what has happened? The wretched girl has broken the glass of my photograph and, not being willing to come forward and admit it in an honest, manly way, has taken the thing off and concealed it somewhere.”

“Ho!” said the policeman, still working through the drinking-chorus.

“Well, ask her. Go down and ask her.”

“You go down and ask her,” said the policeman to the parlourmaid. “If it’s going to make him any happier.”

The parlourmaid