Piccadilly Jim - P. G. Wodehouse (best romance ebooks TXT) 📗

“Me!”

“Precisely. You are going to play a benefit performance of your world-famed success, Chicago Ed. Let me explain further. Owing to circumstances which I need not go into, Ogden has found out that I am really Jimmy Crocker, so he refuses to have anything more to do with me. I had deceived him into believing that I was a professional kidnapper, and he came to me and offered to let me kidnap him if I would go fifty-fifty with him in the ransom!”

“Gosh!”

“Yes, he’s an intelligent child, full of that sort of bright ideas. Well, now he has found that I am not all his fancy painted me, he wouldn’t come away with me; and I want you to understudy me while the going is good. In the fifth reel, which will be released tonight after the household has retired to rest, you will be featured. It’s got to be tonight, because it has just occurred to me that Ogden, knowing that Lord Wisbeach is a crook, may go to him with the same proposal that he made to me.”

“Lord Wisbeach a crook!”

“Of the worst description. He is here to steal that explosive stuff of Willie Partridge’s. But as I have blocked that play, he may turn his attention to Ogden.”

“But, Jimmy, if that fellow is a crook⁠—how do you know he is?”

“He told me so himself.”

“Well, then, why don’t you expose him?”

“Because in order to do so, Skinner my man, I should have to explain that I was really Jimmy Crocker, and the time is not yet ripe for that. To my thinking, the time will not be ripe till you have got safely away with Ogden Ford. I can then go to Ann and say ‘I may have played you a rotten trick in the past, but I have done you a good turn now, so let’s forget the past!’ So you see that everything now depends on you, dad. I’m not asking you to do anything difficult. I’ll go round to the boardinghouse now and tell Jerry Mitchell about what we have arranged, and have him waiting outside here in a car. Then all you will have to do is to go to Ogden, play a short scene as Chicago Ed., escort him to the car, and then go back to bed and have a good sleep. Once Ogden thinks you are a professional kidnapper, you won’t have any difficulty at all. Get it into your head that he wants to be kidnapped. Surely you can tackle this light and attractive job? Why, it will be a treat for you to do a bit of character acting once more!”

Jimmy had struck the right note. His father’s eyes began to gleam with excitement. The scent of the footlights seemed to dilate his nostrils.

“I was always good at that roughneck stuff,” he murmured meditatively. “I used to eat it!”

“Exactly,” said Jimmy. “Look at it in the right way, and I am doing you a kindness in giving you this chance.”

Mr. Crocker rubbed his cheek with his forefinger.

“You’d want me to make up for the part?” he asked wistfully.

“Of course!”

“You want me to do it tonight?”

“At about two in the morning, I thought.”

“I’ll do it, Jim!”

Jimmy grasped his hand.

“I knew I could rely on you, dad.”

Mr. Crocker was following a train of thought.

“Dark wig⁠ ⁠… blue chin⁠ ⁠… heavy eyebrows⁠ ⁠… I guess I can’t do better than my old Chicago Ed. makeup. Say, Jimmy, how am I to get to the kid?”

“That’ll be all right. You can stay in my room till the time comes to go to him. Use it as a dressing-room.”

“How am I to get him out of the house?”

“Through this room. I’ll tell Jerry to wait out on the side-street with the car from two o’clock on.”

Mr. Crocker considered these arrangements.

“That seems to be about all,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s anything else.”

“I’ll slip downtown and buy the props.”

“I’ll go and tell Jerry.”

A thought struck Mr. Crocker.

“You’d better tell Jerry to make up, too. He doesn’t want the kid recognising him and squealing on him later.”

Jimmy was lost in admiration of his father’s resource.

“You think of everything, dad! That wouldn’t have occurred to me. You certainly do take to Crime in the most wonderful way. It seems to come naturally to you!”

Mr. Crocker smirked modestly.

Plot is only as strong as its weakest link. The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang agley if one of the mice is a mental defective or if one of the men is a Jerry Mitchell.⁠ ⁠…

Celestine, Mrs. Pett’s maid⁠—she who was really Maggie O’Toole and whom Jerry loved with a strength which deprived him of even that small amount of intelligence which had been bestowed upon him by Nature⁠—came into the housekeeper’s room at about ten o’clock that night. The domestic staff had gone in a body to the moving-pictures, and the only occupant of the room was the new parlourmaid, who was sitting in a hard chair, reading Schopenhauer.

Celestine’s face was flushed, her dark hair was ruffled, and her eyes were shining. She breathed a little quickly, and her left hand was out of sight behind her back. She eyed the new parlourmaid doubtfully for a moment. The latter was a woman of somewhat unencouraging exterior, not the kind that invites confidences. But Celestine had confidences to bestow, and the exodus to the movies had left her in a position where she could not pick and choose. She was faced with the alternative of locking her secret in her palpitating bosom or of revealing it to this one auditor. The choice was one which no impulsive damsel in like circumstances would have hesitated to make.

“Say!” said Celestine.

A face rose reluctantly from behind Schopenhauer. A gleaming eye met Celestine’s. A second eye⁠—no less gleaming⁠—glared at the ceiling.

“Say, I just been talking to my feller outside,” said Celestine with a coy simper. “Say, he’s a grand man!”

A snort of uncompromising disapproval proceeded from the thin-lipped mouth beneath