The Girl on the Boat
long ago that it was shadowy and unreal to him. The ordeal of spending
the evening in this retreat had not appeared formidable when he had
contemplated it that afternoon in the lane; but, now that he was
actually undergoing it, it was extraordinary how many disadvantages it
had.
Cupboards, as a class, are badly ventilated, and this one seemed to
contain no air at all; and the warmth of the night, combined with the
cupboard’s natural stuffiness, had soon begun to reduce Sam to a
condition of pulp. He seemed to himself to be sagging like an ice-cream
in front of a fire. The darkness, too, weighed upon him. He was
abominably thirsty. Also he wanted to smoke. In addition to this, the
small of his back tickled, and he more than suspected the cupboard of
harbouring mice. Not once or twice but many hundred times he wished
that the ingenious Webster had thought of something simpler.
His was a position which would just have suited one of those Indian
mystics who sit perfectly still for twenty years, contemplating the
Infinite, but it reduced Sam to an almost imbecile state of boredom. He
tried counting sheep. He tried going over his past life in his mind
from the earliest moment he could recollect, and thought he had never
encountered a duller series of episodes. He found a temporary solace by
playing a succession of mental golf-games over all the courses he could
remember, and he was just teeing up for the sixteenth at Muirfield,
after playing Hoylake, St. Andrew’s, Westward Ho, Hanger Hill,
Mid-Surrey, Walton Heath, and Sandwich, when the light ceased to shine
through the crack under the door, and he awoke with a sense of dull
incredulity to the realisation that the occupants of the drawing-room
had called it a day and that his vigil was over.
But was it? Once more alert, Sam became cautious. True, the light
seemed to be off, but did that mean anything in a country-house, where
people had the habit of going and strolling about the garden to all
hours? Probably they were still popping about all over the place. At
any rate, it was not worth risking coming out of his lair. He
remembered that Webster had promised to come and knock an all-clear
signal on the door. It would be safer to wait for that.
But the moments went by, and there was no knock. Sam began to grow
impatient. The last few minutes of waiting in a cupboard are always the
hardest. Time seemed to stretch out again interminably. Once he thought
he heard footsteps but they led to nothing. Eventually, having strained
his ears and finding everything still, he decided to take a chance. He
fished in his pocket for the key, cautiously unlocked the door, opened
it by slow inches, and peered out.
The room was in blackness. The house was still. All was well. With the
feeling of a life-prisoner emerging from the Bastille, he began to
crawl stiffly forward; and it was just then that the first of the
disturbing events occurred which were to make this night memorable to
him. Something like a rattlesnake suddenly went off with a whirr, and
his head, jerking up, collided with the piano. It was only the
cuckoo-clock, which now, having cleared its throat as was its custom
before striking, proceeded to cuck eleven times in rapid succession
before subsiding with another rattle; but to Sam it sounded like the
end of the world.
He sat in the darkness, massaging his bruised skull. His hours of
imprisonment in the cupboard had had a bad effect on his nervous
system, and he vacillated between tears of weakness and a militant
desire to get at the cuckoo-clock with a hatchet. He felt that it had
done it on purpose and was now chuckling to itself in fancied security.
For quite a minute he raged silently, and any cuckoo-clock which had
strayed within his reach would have had a bad time of it. Then his
attention was diverted.
So concentrated was Sam on his private vendetta with the clock that no
ordinary happening would have had the power to distract him. What
occurred now was by no means ordinary, and it distracted him like an
electric shock. As he sat on the floor, passing a tender hand over the
egg-shaped bump which had already begun to manifest itself beneath his
hair, something cold and wet touched his face, and paralysed him so
completely both physically and mentally that he did not move a muscle
but just congealed where he sat into a solid block of ice. He felt
vaguely that this was the end. His heart had stopped beating and he
simply could not imagine it ever starting again, and, if your heart
refuses to beat, what hope is there for you?
At this moment something heavy and solid struck him squarely in the
chest, rolling him over. Something gurgled asthmatically in the
darkness. Something began to lick his eyes, ears, and chin in a sort of
ecstasy; and, clutching out, he found his arms full of totally
unexpected bulldog.
“Get out!” whispered Sam tensely, recovering his faculties with a jerk.
“Go away!”
Smith took the opportunity of Sam’s lips having opened to lick the roof
of his mouth. Smith’s attitude in the matter was that Providence in its
all-seeing wisdom had sent him a human being at a moment when he had
reluctantly been compelled to reconcile himself to a total absence of
such indispensable adjuncts to a good time. He had just trotted
downstairs in rather a disconsolate frame of mind after waiting with no
result in front of Webster’s bedroom door, and it was a real treat to
him to meet a man, especially one seated in such a jolly and sociable
manner on the floor. He welcomed Sam like a long-lost friend.
Between Smith and the humans who provided him with dog-biscuits and
occasionally with sweet cakes there had always existed a state of
misunderstanding which no words could remove. The position of the
humans was quite clear; they had elected Smith to his present position
on a straight watch-dog ticket. They expected him to be one of those
dogs who rouse the house and save the spoons. They looked to him to pin
burglars by the leg and hold on till the police arrived. Smith simply
could not grasp such an attitude of mind. He regarded Windles not as a
private house but as a social club, and was utterly unable to see any
difference between the human beings he knew and the strangers who
dropped in for a late chat after the place was locked up. He had no
intention of biting Sam. The idea never entered his head. At the
present moment what he felt about Sam was that he was one of the best
fellows he had ever met and that he loved him like a brother.
Sam, in his unnerved state, could not bring himself to share these
amiable sentiments. He was thinking bitterly that Webster might have
had the intelligence to warn him of bulldogs on the premises. It was
just the sort of woollen-headed thing fellows did, forgetting facts
like that. He scrambled stiffly to his feet and tried to pierce the
darkness that hemmed him in. He ignored Smith, who snuffled sportively
about his ankles, and made for the slightly less black oblong which he
took to be the door leading into the hall. He moved warily, but not
warily enough to prevent his cannoning into and almost upsetting a
small table with a vase on it. The table rocked and the vase jumped,
and the first bit of luck that had come to Sam that night was when he
reached out at a venture and caught it just as it was about to bound on
to the carpet.
He stood there, shaking. The narrowness of the escape turned him cold.
If he had been an instant later, there would have been a crash loud
enough to wake a dozen sleeping houses. This sort of thing could not go
on. He must have light. It might be a risk; there might be a chance of
somebody upstairs seeing it and coming down to investigate; but it was
a risk that must be taken. He declined to go on stumbling about in this
darkness any longer. He groped his way with infinite care to the door,
on the wall adjoining which, he presumed, the electric-light switch
would be. It was nearly ten years since he had last been inside
Windles, and it never occurred to him that in this progressive age even
a woman like his Aunt Adeline, of whom he could believe almost
anything, would still be using candles and oil-lamps as a means of
illumination. His only doubt was whether the switch was where it was in
most houses, near the door.
It is odd to reflect that, as his searching fingers touched the knob, a
delicious feeling of relief came to Samuel Marlowe. This misguided
young man actually felt at that moment that his troubles were over. He
positively smiled as he placed a thumb on the knob and shoved.
He shoved strongly and sharply, and instantaneously there leaped at him
out of the darkness a blare of music which appeared to his disordered
mind quite solid. It seemed to wrap itself round him. It was all over
the place. In a single instant the world had become one vast bellow of
Tosti’s “Good-bye.”
How long he stood there, frozen, he did not know; nor can one say how
long he would have stood there had nothing further come to invite his
notice elsewhere. But, suddenly, drowning even the impromptu concert,
there came from somewhere upstairs the roar of a gun; and, when he
heard that, Sam’s rigid limbs relaxed and a violent activity descended
upon him. He bounded out into the hall, looking to right and to left
for a hiding-place. One of the suits of armour which had been familiar
to him in his boyhood loomed up in front of him, and with the sight
came the recollection of how, when a mere child on his first visit to
Windles, playing hide and seek with his cousin Eustace, he had
concealed himself inside this very suit, and had not only baffled
Eustace through a long summer evening but had wound up by almost
scaring him into a decline by booing at him through the vizor of the
helmet. Happy days, happy days! He leaped at the suit of armour. Having
grown since he was last inside it, he found the helmet a tight fit, but
he managed to get his head into it at last, and the body of the thing
was quite roomy.
“Thank heaven!” said Sam.
He was not comfortable, but comfort just then was not his primary need.
Smith the bulldog, well satisfied with the way the entertainment had
opened, sat down, wheezing slightly, to await developments.
§ 5
He had not long to wait. In a few minutes the hall had filled up
nicely. There was Mr. Mortimer in his shirt-sleeves, Mr. Bennett in
blue pyjamas and a dressing-gown, Mrs. Hignett in a travelling costume,
Jane Hubbard with her elephant-gun, and Billie in a dinner dress. Smith
welcomed them all impartially.
Somebody lit a lamp, and Mrs. Hignett stared speechlessly at the mob.
“Mr. Bennett! Mr. Mortimer!”
“Mrs. Hignett! What are you doing here?”
Mrs. Hignett drew herself up stiffly.
“What an odd question, Mr. Mortimer! I am in my own house!”
“But you rented it to me for the summer. At least, your son did.”
“Eustace let you Windles for the summer!” said Mrs. Hignett
incredulously.
Jane Hubbard returned from the drawing-room, where she had been
switching off the orchestrion.
“Let us talk all that over cosily to-morrow,” she said. “The point now
is that there are burglars in the house.”
“Burglars!” cried Mr. Bennett aghast. “I thought it was you playing
that infernal instrument, Mortimer.”
“What on earth should I play it for at this time of night?” said Mr.
Mortimer irritably.
“It woke me up,” said Mr. Bennett complainingly. “And I had had great
difficulty in dropping off to sleep. I was in considerable pain. I
believe I’ve caught the mumps from young Hignett.”
“Nonsense! You’re always imagining yourself ill,” snapped Mr. Mortimer.
“My face hurts,” persisted Mr. Bennett.
“You can’t expect a face like that not to hurt,” said Mr. Mortimer.
It appeared only too evident that the two old friends were again on the