Chapter Sixteen
“I beg your pardon, sir! May I have the honour of a moment’s confidential word with you?”
The refined, the courteous phrase, was followed by a discreet cough. The cough was a trifle mechanical, the words a little too rapidly spoken, as is (alas!) the common fate of words learned by heart for a set piece, whether by front benchers or perjuring policemen. What followed was marred by the same slight defect, but it was at least clear. It rattled out—to quote a noble simile from the Wallet of Kai Lung—“like a stream of pearls dropped into a bowl of jade.”
“There has come to my knowledge sir which would grieve my ’eart to distraction and breaking were it not overcome by the more powerful emotion of gratitude for so many happy years passed under this ’ere roof at Paulings I mean this roof at Paulings and formerly when we had a town house if I may make so bold in one hundred and twelve Curzon Street Mayfair moved by this my ’eart would not let me keep silent. Oh! sir. I know the dread secret and if I come to speak of it it is from loyal affection and no other cause and here and now I put at your service as in duty bound all that has come”... here Mr. Whaley suddenly clasped a fat right hand against his chest: He ought to have done it at the word “heart,” but the brakes had slipped and he had run past the station... “all that has come to the knowledge of these poor humble ears of mine which would rather have been closed in death than have suffered the agony of them fatal news but told it shall not be to other human soul nor yet only to you for the respect I bear to that ’igh name of Deeboon which saving your honour sir...”
Humphrey de Bohun put his lean hands on his lean knees, sat up, and stared at this high-geared human gramophone on speed.
“What on earth...” he began. “Look here, Whaley, have you been drinking?... Now, mark me, Whaley!” Humphrey de Bohun could speak with astonishing decision when he felt quite secure that the person spoken to was unable to answer back. “I’ve always made one absolute rule in this house. Any servant of mine who is found the worse for liquor—I don’t care where,” and he swept his feeble head down to the southwest, “I don’t care how”—he swept it again—“I don’t... damn it, I don’t even care on what! leaves me there and then!” He leaned back again, somewhat exhausted.
“You wound me, sir,” said George Whaley with dignity. “Ah, sir! you wound me! Indeed you do!”
“Wound your what?” said the Home Secretary, without sufficient consideration.
“My honour, sir,” said George Whaley. “And a loyal heart.”
This time he remembered the connection of the word “heart” with the appropriate gesture, and he planked his hand on his merrythought with the noise of a distant 9.2.
The Home Secretary remembered the lessons of his youth, the high traditions of the de Bohuns.
“I owe you an apology, Whaley,” he said, in the appropriate faded-earnest manner. “But the truth is, I can’t pretend to follow what you were saying. I don’t suggest that you spoke too quickly.... I was in a reverie when you came in. The fault is mine. Proceed.”
And in his turn George Whaley proceeded—but the chain was broken; he was thrown back upon impromptu too; and a native terseness, not to say inhibition of speech, returned to him.
“Well, sir,” and he coughed, “I’m afraid it’s rather a delicate matter,” and he looked at the nails of his fingers. “Perhaps I ought to plunge in medias res.” He sighed. “I’ve ’eard it’s usually the wiser plan in cases like these.”
He stood for some fifteen seconds, his bold head with its fringe of grey hair slightly on one side, and gazing at the exalted culprit with infinite compassion. Then did George Whaley begin to shake that head, and there escaped him words unusual to his daily life, but native to his reading of fiction and to his experience on the stage.
“Ah me! Ah me!” he said.
“Look here, Whaley,” said his master smartly. “What’s the matter? Are you ill? Are you mad? Have you”—in a softer voice—“have you perhaps suffered some sudden bereavement?”
“Only the bereavement of a loyal heart deceived, bewildered,” moaned George Whaley, quoting textually from The Waifs of the Whirlwind. He linked his hands before his ample waistcoat and hung his saddened head.
“Upon my word!” cried Humphrey de Bohun, moved to unexpected energy by an intolerable boredom, “this kind of thing’s got to stop. Speak out, man, and don’t make a fool of yourself!” He pulled out his watch. “I’ve not got all the time there is! Hurry up, now! Surely you can speak plainly!”
“I can,” said George Whaley, in tones of gloom, and moved by a mighty resolution. He was standing upright now; he fixed his employer with a steady glance, and each hand was half clenched at his side. “The emerald, sir!”
And he waited for his effect.
“Oh, damn the emerald!” shouted Humphrey de Bohun. “If you think this is the time, after all these two days...”
“It is the time,” said George Whaley firmly, with a reminiscence of the worthy mother who had brought him up in the Countess of Huntingdon’s connection and under all the discipline of the Jacobean Scriptures. “Yea, now is the acceptable time.”
“By God!” shouted the now inflamed minister, “this has got to stop! I’ll have you certified! I’ll... I’ll...”
But he got the thing full in the face. In a key nearly an octave lower than that he had been using for the purposes of the great interview, George Whaley stretched out a rigid solemn arm towards his master and spoke the words of doom.
“I know all... Thou art the man! It is you, sir, that have on you the lost emerald!”
Let me not do Humphrey de Bohun injustice. He had never yet in his life taken an initiative. He had never tackled any one of the human species. But there is a god latent in us all, and his name is Pan.
“The emerald!” he shrieked. “Blackmail, eh, you damned lousy son of a ——!” He sprang at the astonished servitor, seized him round the neck—a dangerous gambit between elderly men, for it leads to strokes on both sides—shook him madly from side to side, then dug his right hand into his collar behind, swerved him round, and gave him one of those enormous kicks which form epochs in the history of Britain. Savagely did the unrestrained elder statesman, all the repressed manhood of half a century bursting forth, plant his foot upon what should properly be called the person of his unfortunate dependant and with a second gesture sent him sprawling through the open door into the hall.
“The emerald!” he kept on shouting, as George Whaley, groaning, pulled himself up miserably, like a wounded sea lion. “When the hell am I to hear the last of the emerald... you and your emerald!... all of you and your emeralds!... I wish to God!...” A blasphemy was almost on his lips; he had almost said that he wished the emerald had been strangled at birth, and by such a phrase would he have forfeited the luck of the Boneses.
“Get out!” he continued, in a somewhat milder because exhausted tone, as the ill-treated Good Samaritan hobbled towards the door which led to the offices, rubbing the affected portions of his frame. “Out! Out! Out! Never let me see your face again!”
And they parted to meet no more. The conclusion of their mutual relations was concluded by correspondence.
It is not with impunity that men between fifty and sixty, especially if they have lived under constant self-repression—which doesn’t apply to colonels—let their angry passions rise. The Home Secretary was badly blown. He felt groggy. His exertion was already beginning to make him a little stiff. He halted towards the dining-room and groped for a pint of champagne which he knew to stand by. He pulled the cork with his last strength. He took a mighty draught. He felt better. He took another. Then he saw the world sanely, and he saw it whole—such is the power of the god. There was hardly a drain left. He glanced over his shoulder, found himself alone, put the neck of the bottle to his lips and sucked it down.
“Ah!” said the arbiter of Wormwood Scrubbs and Lord of Pentonville. “That’s better.”
He felt almost genial—normal, anyhow, at last. Even a trifle super-normal. With sprightlier step he regained that comfortable chair wherein he had been relaxing his overstrained mind when George Whaley had so imprudently intruded.
It was not once in a blue moon that Humphrey de Bohun thought tobacco a boon, but the occasion called for it. For the matter of that, it was not once in a blue moon that he drank more than half a glass of wine at a sitting—let alone of a Sunday morning during church time—and bubbling wine in plenty leads to smoking: hence the fortunes made by Greeks and Egyptians in their sales of hay cigarettes to the young bloods. Humphrey de Bohun groped in his daughter’s open box for a cigarette, tapped it, with a surprisingly modern gesture, on his thumbnail, and as he lit it sank back into the chair he had left and wondered whether indeed he had reached repose.
Was there anyone left, he thought drowsily, who could come with yet another story of the blasted gem? He was already half asleep, but there passed before his drooping eyes what seemed a regiment: Galton had been sure of it—he had seen it, seen it on Bill; Bill had been sure of it—he had tested it, tested it on McTaggart; McTaggart had been sure of it—he had got it by second sight, and was absolutely certain of Collop; and Collop—oh well! God bless Collop! For after all he had produced it—snatched from the talons of a fowl. The elderly gentleman’s head drooped and nodded; the cigarette fell from his lax fingers; it set fire to the Aubusson carpet, which smouldered in faint wreaths, but did no harm, and soon went out. Thus did the adventure of the Emerald of Catherine the Great end, as all things end, in smoke.
Far, far, in the less pretentious but roomy apartments of the East Wing, George Whaley, suffering untold things, sought for and found the Boy, the culprit, Ethelbert.
They met in the passage that leads from the servants’ hall to the Yard; but when I say met, I rather mean that their visages encountered the one the other at the turn of a corner separated by a space of some five yards.
The countenance of George Whaley at that moment was not one to inspire confidence in the young. There was blood on his cheek-bone. His collar was torn, and all adrift upon the starboard side; his tie was under his ear; there was a gaping tear in his coat.
“Ow! You young dose of poison!” bawled the injured man, as he lunged forward upon his prey, and with a loud cry Ethelbert fled. He fled through the open door into the coal yard, George Whaley limping after. There stood against the wall of the yard, leaning to its summit, a crazy old ladder. The light boy Ethelbert nipped up it, and at its foot stood the unhappy and ponderous victim of his misleading confidences, shaking an impotent fist.
Security lent courage to the youth.
“You look hot,” he said kindly.
“You come down!” hissed Whaley, clenching his teeth, “and I’ll flay you alive—slowly—inch by inch!”
“Sounds good,” grinned Ethelbert; with thoughtful prevision he kicked the ladder down. Its rotten wood smashed into a dozen pieces as it fell, and the youth was delighted to note that a flying fragment had caught his superior a fine smack on the side of the jaw.
For to him that hath, more shall be added.
Ethelbert feared not the future; his judgment told him, not insecurely, that the butler’s powers were at an end.
“Been havin’ a scrap?” continued Ethelbert, by way of making conversation. “’Ow’s the other man?”
George Whaley’s cup was full. “Come down,” he groaned stupidly. “Come down!”
“Me come down?” answered his former subaltern with an air. “Why, what can you be thinking of? It’s only just over church time yet. You can hear the sweet bells ringing—’ark!” and he lifted an ecstatic forefinger with heavenward-lifted eyes.
The butler put his hand upon the old red brick wall. His adventures were beginning to tell upon him. He felt sick.
“It’s all along o’ you!” he said thickly, spat, to see whether his lungs were injured, was pleased to find they were not; then, still suffering, repeated, “It’s all along o’ you! What,” he added in a higher key of tragic indignation, “what the burning hell did yer mean by telling me the boss had pinched the emerald?”
“I tell you the boss had pinched the emerald?” sneered Ethelbert from his high place. “Oh, chase me, Ananias!”
“Yes, yer did!” came again from the uplifted purple face. “Yer told me with yer own lips that you knew yerself it was in the ’ands of the ’ighest.”
“I never! You dare say I did!” cried the indignant whelp. “Liar! What I may have thought was that his lordship...”
“His lordship?” groaned the suffering man, a light breaking in upon him.
“Yes, mubbe! Don’t you dare go to say as I said so. Otherwise I’ll have the lor on yer! So mind your fat feet! I’ll be treading on ’em. I never said nuffing. I didn’t. ‘Sides which, it’s all one now. The emerald’s been found.”
“Found?” gasped Whaley with a stare.
“Yes, found,” nodded Ethelbert, from his dominion of vantage loftily.
“Then...” groaned his unfortunate elder, “I’m done!”
“That’s true, anyways! Congrats!”
Whaley had already picked up half a brick, but his tormenter had seen the gesture, and had dropped on the far side of the wall to the high bank below, and was off to rejoin his quarters. He knew that the mighty had fallen and would trouble him no more.
So ends the saga.