Mike - Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (the reading strategies book TXT) 📗
- Author: Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
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Book online «Mike - Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (the reading strategies book TXT) 📗». Author Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
Such a moment came to Mr. Downing then. If he had been wise, he would
have achieved his object, the getting a glimpse of Mike’s boots, by a
devious and snaky route. As it was, he rushed straight on.
“His boots, sir? He has them on. I noticed them as he went out just
now.”
“Where is the pair he wore yesterday?”
“Where are the boots of yester-year?” murmured Psmith to himself. “I
should say at a venture, sir, that they would be in the basket
downstairs. Edmund, our genial knife-and-boot boy, collects them, I
believe, at early dawn.”
“Would they have been cleaned yet?”
“If I know Edmund, sir—no.”
“Smith,” said Mr. Downing, trembling with excitement, “go and bring
that basket to me here.”
Psmith’s brain was working rapidly as he went downstairs. What exactly
was at the back of the sleuth’s mind, prompting these manoeuvres, he
did not know. But that there was something, and that that something
was directed in a hostile manner against Mike, probably in connection
with last night’s wild happenings, he was certain. Psmith had noticed,
on leaving his bed at the sound of the alarm bell, that he and
Jellicoe were alone in the room. That might mean that Mike had gone
out through the door when the bell sounded, or it might mean that he
had been out all the time. It began to look as if the latter solution
were the correct one.
*
He staggered back with the basket, painfully conscious the while that
it was creasing his waistcoat, and dumped is down on the study floor.
Mr. Downing stooped eagerly over it. Psmith leaned against the wall,
and straightened out the damaged garment.
“We have here, sir,” he said, “a fair selection of our various
bootings.”
Mr. Downing looked up.
“You dropped none of the boots on your way up, Smith?”
“Not one, sir. It was a fine performance.”
Mr. Downing uttered a grunt of satisfaction, and bent once more to his
task. Boots flew about the room. Mr. Downing knelt on the floor beside
the basket, and dug like a terrier at a rat-hole.
At last he made a dive, and, with an exclamation of triumph, rose to
his feet. In his hand he held a boot.
“Put those back again, Smith,” he said.
The ex-Etonian, wearing an expression such as a martyr might have worn
on being told off for the stake, began to pick up the scattered
footgear, whistling softly the tune of “I do all the dirty work,” as
he did so.
“That’s the lot, sir,” he said, rising.
“Ah. Now come across with me to the headmaster’s house. Leave the
basket here. You can carry it back when you return.”
“Shall I put back that boot, sir?”
“Certainly not. I shall take this with me, of course.”
“Shall I carry it, sir?”
Mr. Downing reflected.
“Yes, Smith,” he said. “I think it would be best.”
It occurred to him that the spectacle of a housemaster wandering
abroad on the public highway, carrying a dirty boot, might be a trifle
undignified. You never knew whom you might meet on Sunday afternoon.
Psmith took the boot, and doing so, understood what before had puzzled
him.
Across the toe of the boot was a broad splash of red paint.
He knew nothing, of course, of the upset tin in the bicycle shed;
but when a housemaster’s dog has been painted red in the night, and
when, on the following day, the housemaster goes about in search of a
paint-splashed boot, one puts two and two together. Psmith looked at
the name inside the boot. It was “Brown, boot-maker, Bridgnorth.”
Bridgnorth was only a few miles from his own home and Mike’s.
Undoubtedly it was Mike’s boot.
“Can you tell me whose boot that is?” asked Mr. Downing.
Psmith looked at it again.
“No, sir. I can’t say the little chap’s familiar to me.”
“Come with me, then.”
Mr. Downing left the room. After a moment Psmith followed him.
The headmaster was in his garden. Thither Mr. Downing made his way,
the boot-bearing Psmith in close attendance.
The Head listened to the amateur detective’s statement with interest.
“Indeed?” he said, when Mr. Downing had finished.
“Indeed? Dear me! It certainly seems—It is a curiously well-connected
thread of evidence. You are certain that there was red paint on this
boot you discovered in Mr. Outwood’s house?”
“I have it with me. I brought it on purpose to show to you. Smith!”
“Sir?”
“You have the boot?”
“Ah,” said the headmaster, putting on a pair of pince-nez, “now let me
look at—This, you say, is the—? Just so. Just so. Just…. But, er,
Mr. Downing, it may be that I have not examined this boot with
sufficient care, but—Can you point out to me exactly where
this paint is that you speak of?”
Mr. Downing stood staring at the boot with a wild, fixed stare. Of any
suspicion of paint, red or otherwise, it was absolutely and entirely
innocent.
THE DESTROYER OF EVIDENCE
The boot became the centre of attraction, the cynosure of all eyes.
Mr. Downing fixed it with the piercing stare of one who feels that his
brain is tottering. The headmaster looked at it with a mildly puzzled
expression. Psmith, putting up his eyeglass, gazed at it with a sort
of affectionate interest, as if he were waiting for it to do a trick
of some kind.
Mr. Downing was the first to break the silence.
“There was paint on this boot,” he said vehemently. “I tell you there
was a splash of red paint across the toe. Smith will bear me out in
this. Smith, you saw the paint on this boot?”
“Paint, sir!”
“What! Do you mean to tell me that you did not see it?”
“No, sir. There was no paint on this boot.”
“This is foolery. I saw it with my own eyes. It was a broad splash
right across the toe.”
The headmaster interposed.
“You must have made a mistake, Mr. Downing. There is certainly no
trace of paint on this boot. These momentary optical delusions are,
I fancy, not uncommon. Any doctor will tell you–-”
“I had an aunt, sir,” said Psmith chattily, “who was remarkably
subject–-”
“It is absurd. I cannot have been mistaken,” said Mr. Downing. “I am
positively certain the toe of this boot was red when I found it.”
“It is undoubtedly black now, Mr. Downing.”
“A sort of chameleon boot,” murmured Psmith.
The goaded housemaster turned on him.
“What did you say, Smith?”
“Did I speak, sir?” said Psmith, with the start of one coming suddenly
out of a trance.
Mr. Downing looked searchingly at him.
“You had better be careful, Smith.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I strongly suspect you of having something to do with this.”
“Really, Mr. Downing,” said the headmaster, “that is surely
improbable. Smith could scarcely have cleaned the boot on his way to
my house. On one occasion I inadvertently spilt some paint on a shoe
of my own. I can assure you that it does not brush off. It needs a
very systematic cleaning before all traces are removed.”
“Exactly, sir,” said Psmith. “My theory, if I may–-?”
“Certainly, Smith.”
Psmith bowed courteously and proceeded.
“My theory, sir, is that Mr. Downing was deceived by the light and
shade effects on the toe of the boot. The afternoon sun, streaming in
through the window, must have shone on the boot in such a manner as to
give it a momentary and fictitious aspect of redness. If Mr. Downing
recollects, he did not look long at the boot. The picture on the
retina of the eye, consequently, had not time to fade. I remember
thinking myself, at the moment, that the boot appeared to have a
certain reddish tint. The mistake–-”
“Bah!” said Mr. Downing shortly.
“Well, really,” said the headmaster, “it seems to me that that is the
only explanation that will square with the facts. A boot that is
really smeared with red paint does not become black of itself in the
course of a few minutes.”
“You are very right, sir,” said Psmith with benevolent approval. “May
I go now, sir? I am in the middle of a singularly impressive passage
of Cicero’s speech De Senectute.”
“I am sorry that you should leave your preparation till Sunday, Smith.
It is a habit of which I altogether disapprove.”
“I am reading it, sir,” said Psmith, with simple dignity, “for
pleasure. Shall I take the boot with me, sir?”
“If Mr. Downing does not want it?”
The housemaster passed the fraudulent piece of evidence to Psmith
without a word, and the latter, having included both masters in a
kindly smile, left the garden.
Pedestrians who had the good fortune to be passing along the road
between the housemaster’s house and Mr. Outwood’s at that moment saw
what, if they had but known it, was a most unusual sight, the
spectacle of Psmith running. Psmith’s usual mode of progression was a
dignified walk. He believed in the contemplative style rather than the
hustling.
On this occasion, however, reckless of possible injuries to the crease
of his trousers, he raced down the road, and turning in at Outwood’s
gate, bounded upstairs like a highly trained professional athlete.
On arriving at the study, his first act was to remove a boot from the
top of the pile in the basket, place it in the small cupboard under
the bookshelf, and lock the cupboard. Then he flung himself into a
chair and panted.
“Brain,” he said to himself approvingly, “is what one chiefly needs in
matters of this kind. Without brain, where are we? In the soup, every
time. The next development will be when Comrade Downing thinks it
over, and is struck with the brilliant idea that it’s just possible
that the boot he gave me to carry and the boot I did carry were not
one boot but two boots. Meanwhile–-”
He dragged up another chair for his feet and picked up his novel.
He had not been reading long when there was a footstep in the passage,
and Mr. Downing appeared.
The possibility, in fact the probability, of Psmith having substituted
another boot for the one with the incriminating splash of paint on it
had occurred to him almost immediately on leaving the headmaster’s
garden. Psmith and Mike, he reflected, were friends. Psmith’s impulse
would be to do all that lay in his power to shield Mike. Feeling
aggrieved with himself that he had not thought of this before, he,
too, hurried over to Outwood’s.
Mr. Downing was brisk and peremptory.
“I wish to look at these boots again,” he said. Psmith, with a sigh,
laid down his novel, and rose to assist him.
“Sit down, Smith,” said the housemaster. “I can manage without your
help.”
Psmith sat down again, carefully tucking up the knees of his trousers,
and watched him with silent interest through his eyeglass.
The scrutiny irritated Mr. Downing.
“Put that thing away, Smith,” he said.
“That thing, sir?”
“Yes, that ridiculous glass. Put it away.”
“Why, sir?”
“Why! Because I tell you to do so.”
“I guessed that that was the reason, sir,” sighed Psmith replacing the
eyeglass in his waistcoat pocket. He rested his elbows on his knees,
and his
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