“Any one else getting off here?” I demanded in English and at once repeated it in German.
He shook himself loose, dropped the bags in the shelter of the station house, doffed his cap to the imperious backs of his late passengers, and scuttled back to the car. A moment later the train was under way.
“Can you not see for yourself?” he shouted from the steps as he passed me by.
Once more I swooped down upon the guard. He was stuffing the large German lady into a small, lopsided carriage, the driver of which was taking off his cap and putting it on again after the manner of a mechanical toy.
“Go away,” hissed the guard angrily. “This is the Mayor and the Mayoress. Stand aside! Can’t you see?”
Presently the Mayor and the Mayoress were snugly stowed away in the creaking hack, and it rattled away over the cobblestones.
“When does the next train get in?” I asked for the third time. He was still bowing after the departing hack.
“Eh? The next? Oh, mein herr, is it you?”
“Yes, it is still I. Is there another train soon?”
“That was Mayor Berg and his wife,” he said, taking off his cap again in a sort of ecstasy. “The express stops for him, eh? Ha! It stops for no one else but our good Mayor. When he commands it to stop it stops—”
“Answer my question,” I thundered, “or I shall report you to the Mayor!”
“Ach, Gott!” he gasped. Collecting his thoughts, he said: “There is no train until nine o’clock in the morning. Nine, mein herr.”
“Ach, Gott!” groaned I. “Are you sure?”
“Jah! You can go home now and go to bed, sir. There will be no train until nine and I will not be on duty then. Good night!”
Britton led me into the waiting-room, where I sat down and glared at him as if he were to blame for everything connected with our present plight.
“I daresay we’d better be starting ’ome, sir,” said he timidly. “Something ’as gone wrong with the plans, I fear. They did not come, sir.”
“Do you think I am blind?” I roared.
“Not at all, sir,” he said in haste, taking a step or two backward.
Inquiries at the little eating-house only served to verify the report of the station-guard. There would be no train before nine o’clock, and that was a very slow one; what we would call a “local” in the States. Sometimes, according to the proprietress, it was so slow that it didn’t get in at all. It had been known to amble in as late as one in the afternoon, but when it happened to be later than that it ceased to have an identity of its own and came in as a part of the two o’clock train. Moreover, it carried nothing but third-class carriages and more often than not it had as many as a dozen freight cars attached.
There was not the slightest probability that the fastidious Mrs. Titus would travel by such a train, so we were forced to the conclusion that something had gone wrong with the plans. Very dismally we prepared for the long drive home. What could have happened to upset the well-arranged plan? Were Tarnowsy’s spies so hot upon the trail that it was necessary for her to abandon the attempt to enter my castle? In that case, she must have sent some sort of a message to her daughter, apprising her of the unexpected change; a message which, unhappily for me, arrived after my departure. It was not likely that she would have altered her plans without letting us know, and yet I could not shake off an exasperating sense of doubt. If I were to believe all that Bangs said about the excellent lady, it would not be unlike her to do quite as she pleased in the premises without pausing to consider the comfort or the convenience of any one else interested in the undertaking. A selfish desire to spend the day in Lucerne might have overtaken her en passant, and the rest of us could go hang for all that she cared about consequences!
I am ashamed to confess that the longer I considered the matter, the more plausible this view of the situation appeared to me. By the time we succeeded in starting the engine, after cranking for nearly half an hour, I was so consumed by wrath over the scurvy trick she had played upon us that I swore she should not enter my castle if I could prevent it; moreover, I would take fiendish delight in dumping her confounded luggage into the Danube.
I confided my views to Britton who was laboriously cranking the machine and telling me between grunts that the “bloody water ’ad got into it,” and we both resorted to painful but profound excoriations without in the least departing from our relative positions as master and man: he swore about one abomination and I another, but the gender was undeviatingly the same.
We also had trouble with the lamps.
At last we were off, Britton at the wheel. I shall not describe that diabolical trip home. It is only necessary to say that we first lost our way and went ten or twelve kilometers in the wrong direction; then we had a blow-out and no quick-detachable rim; subsequently something went wrong with the mud-caked machinery and my unfortunate valet had to lie on his back in a puddle for half an hour; eventually we sneaked into the garage with our trembling Mercedes, and quarrelled manfully with the men who had to wash her.
“Great heaven, Britton!” I groaned, stopping short in my sloshy progress down the narrow street that led to the ferry.
He looked at me in astonishment. I admit that the ejaculation must have sounded weak and effeminate to him after what had gone before.
“What is it, sir?” he asked, at once resuming his status as a servant after a splendid hiatus of five hours or more in which he had enjoyed all of the by-products of equality.
“Poopendyke!” I exclaimed, aghast. “I have just thought of him. The poor devil has been waiting for us three miles up the river since midnight! What do you think of that!”
“No such luck, sir,” said he, grumpily.
“Luck! You heartless rascal! What do you mean by that?”
“I beg pardon, sir. I mean to say, he could sit in the boat ’ouse and twiddle ’is thumbs at the elements, sir. Trust Mr. Poopendyke to keep out of the rain.”
“In any event, he is still waiting there for us, wet or dry. He and the two big Schmicks.” I took a moment for thought. “We must telephone to the castle and have Hawkes send Conrad out with word to them.” I looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes past seven. “I suppose no one in the castle went to bed last night. Good Lord, what a scene for a farce!”
We retraced our steps to the garage, where Britton went to the telephone. I stood in the doorway of the building, staring gloomily, hollow-eyed at the—well, at nothing, now that I stop to think of it. The manager of the place, an amiable, jocund descendant of Lazarus, approached me.
“Quite a storm last night, Mr. Schmarck,” he said, rubbing his hands on an oil-rag. I gruffly agreed with him in a monosyllable. “But it is lovely today, sir. Heavenly, sir.”
“Heavenly?” I gasped.
“Ah, but look at the glorious sun,” he cried, waving the oil-rag in all directions at once.
The sun! Upon my word, the sun was shining fiercely. I hadn’t noticed it before. The tops of the little red-tiled houses down the street glistened in the glare of sunshine that met my gaze as I looked up at them. Suddenly I remembered that I had witnessed the sunrise, a most doleful, dreary phenomenon that overtook us ten miles down the valley. I had seen it but it had made no impression on my tortured mind. The great god of day had sprung up out of the earth to smile upon me—or at me—and I had let him go unnoticed, so black and desolate was the memory of the night he destroyed! I had only a vague recollection of the dawn. The thing that caused me the most concern was the discovery that we had run the last half of our journey in broad daylight with our acetylene lamps going full blast. I stared at the tiles, blinking and unbelieving.
“Well, I’m—dashed,” I said, with a silly grin.
“The moon will shine tonight, Mr. Schmarck—” he began insinuatingly.
“Smart, if you please,” I snapped.
“Ah,” he sighed, rolling his eyes, “it is fine to be in love.”
A full minute passed before I grasp
ed the meaning of that soft answer, and then it was too late. He had gone about his business without waiting to see whether my wrath had been turned away. I had been joy-riding!
The excitement in Britton’s usually imperturbable countenance as he came running up to me from the telephone closet prepared me in a way for the startling news that was to come.
“Has anything serious happened?” I cried, my heart sinking a little lower.
“I had Mr. Poopendyke himself on the wire, sir. What do you think, sir?”
A premonition! “She—she has arrived?” I demanded dully.
He nodded. “She ’as, sir. Mrs.—your mother, sir, is in your midst.” The proximity of the inquisitive manager explains this extraordinary remark on the part of my valet. We both glared at the manager and he had the delicacy to move away. “She arrived by a special train at twelve lawst night, sir.”
I was speechless. The brilliant sunshine seemed to be turning into sombre night before my eyes; everything was going black.
“She’s asleep, he says, and doesn’t want to be disturbed till noon, so he says he can’t say anything more just now over the telephone because he’s afraid of waking ’er.” (Britton drops them when excited.)
“He doesn’t have to shout so loud that he can be heard on the top floor,” said I, still a trifle dazed.
“She ’appens to be sleeping in your bed, sir, he says.”
“In my bed? Good heavens, Britton! What’s to become of me?”
“Don’t take it so ’ard, sir,” he made haste to say. “Blatchford ’as fixed a place for you on the couch in your study, sir. It’s all very snug, sir.”
“But, Britton,” I said in horror, “suppose that I should have come home last night. Don’t you see?”
“I daresay she ’ad the door locked, sir,” he said.
“By special train,” I mumbled. A light broke in upon my reviving intellect. “Why, it was the train that went through at a mile a minute while we were in the coffee-house. No wonder we didn’t meet her!”
“I shudder to think of wot would ’ave ’appened if we had, sir,” said he, meaning no doubt to placate me. “Mr. Poopendyke says the Countess ’as been up all night worrying about you, sir. She has been distracted. She wanted ’im to go out and search for you at four o’clock this morning, but he says he assured ’er you’d turn up all right. He says Mrs.—the elderly lady, begging your pardon, sir,—thought she was doing for the best when she took a special. She wanted to save us all the trouble she could. He says she was very much distressed by our failure to ’ave some one meet her with a launch when she got here last night, sir. As it was, she didn’t reach the castle until nearly one, and she looked like a drowned rat when she got there, being hex—exposed to a beastly rainstorm. See wot I mean? She went to bed in a dreadful state, he says, but he thinks she’ll be more pleasant before the day is over.”
I burst into a fit of laughter. “Hurray!” I shouted, exultantly. “So she was out in it too, eh? Well, by Jove, I don’t feel half as badly as I did five minutes ago. Come! Let us be off.”
We started briskly down the street. My spirits were beginning to rebound. Poopendyke had said that she worried all night about me! She had been distracted! Poor little woman! Still I was glad to know that she had the grace to sit up and worry instead of going to sleep as she might have done. I was just mean enough to be happy over it.
Poopendyke met us on the town side of the river. He seemed a trifle haggard, I thought. He was not slow, on the other hand, to announce in horror-struck tones that I looked like a ghost.
“You must get those wet clothes off at once, Mr. Smart, and go to bed with a hot water bottle and ten grains of quinine. You’ll be very ill if you don’t. Put a lot more elbow grease into those oars, Max. Get a move on you. Do you want Mr. Smart to die of pneumonia?”
While we were crossing the muddy river, my secretary, his teeth chattering with cold and excitement combined, related the story of the night.
“We were just starting off for the boat-house up the river, according to plans, Max and Rudolph and I with the two boats, when the Countess came down in a mackintosh and a pair of gum boots and insisted upon going along with us. She said it wasn’t fair to make you do all the work, and all that sort of thing, and I was having the devil’s own time to induce her to go back to the castle with Mr. Bangs. While we were arguing with her,—and it was getting so late that I feared we wouldn’t be in time to meet you,—we heard some one shouting on the opposite side of the river. The voice sounded something like Britton’s, and the Countess insisted that there had been an accident and that you were hurt, Mr. Smart, and nothing would do but we must send Max and Rudolph over to see what the trouble was. It was raining cats and dogs, and I realised that it would be impossible for you to get a boatman on that side at that hour of the night,—it was nearly one,—so I sent the two Schmicks across. I’ve never seen a night as dark as it was. The two little lanterns bobbing in the boat could hardly be seen through the torrents of rain, and it was next to impossible to see the lights on the opposite landing stage—just a dull, misty glow.
“To make the story short, Mrs. Titus and her sons were over there, with absolutely no means of crossing the river. There were no boatmen, the ferry had stopped, and they were huddled under the eaves of the wharf building. Everything was closed and locked up for the night. The night-watchman and a policeman lit the pier lamps for them, but that’s as far as they’d go. It took two trips over to fetch the whole party across. Raining pitchforks all the time, you understand. Mrs. Titus was foaming at the mouth because you don’t own a yacht or at least a launch with a canopy top, or a limousine body, or something of the sort.
“I didn’t have much of a chance to converse with her. The Countess tried to get her upstairs in the east wing but she wouldn’t climb another step. I forgot to mention that the windlass was out of order and she had to climb the hill in mud six inches deep. The Schmicks carried her the last half of the distance. She insisted on sleeping in the hall or the study,—anywhere but upstairs. I assumed the responsibility of putting her in your bed, sir. It was either that or—”
I broke in sarcastically “You couldn’t have put her into your bed, I suppose.”
“Not very handily, Mr. Smart,” he said in an injured voice. “One of her sons occupied my bed. Of course, it was all right, because I didn’t intend to go to bed, as it happened. The older son went upstairs with the Countess. She gave up her bed to him, and then she and I sat up all night in the study waiting for a telephone message from you. The younger son explained a good many things to us that his mother absolutely refused to discuss, she was so mad when she got here. It seems she took it into her head at the last minute to charter a special train, but forgot to notify us of the switch in the plans. She travelled by the regular train from Paris to some place along the line, where she got out and waited for the special which was following along behind, straight through from Paris, too. A woeful waste of money, it seemed to me. Her idea was to throw a couple of plain-clothes men off the track, and, by George, sir, she succeeded. They thought she was changing from a train to some place in Switzerland, and went off to watch the other station. Then she sneaked aboard the special, which was chartered clear through to Vienna. See how clever she is? If they followed on the next train, or telegraphed, it would naturally be to Vienna. She got off at this place and—well, we have her with us, sir, as snug as a bug in a rug.”
“What is she like, Fred?” I inquired. I confess that I hung on his reply.
“I have never seen a wet hen, but I should say, on a guess, that she’s a good bit like one. Perhaps when she’s thoroughly dried out she may not be so bad, but—” He drew a long, deep breath. “But, upon my word of honour, she was the limit last night. Of course one couldn’t expect her to be exactly gracious, with her hair plastered over her face and her hat spoiled and her clothes soaked, but there was really no excuse for some of the things she said to me. I shall overlook them for your sake a
nd for the Countess’s.” He was painfully red in the face.
“The conditions, Fred,” I said, “were scarcely conducive to polite persiflage.”
“But, hang it all, I was as wet as she was,” he exploded, so violently that I knew his soul must have been tried to the utmost.
“We must try to make the best of it,” I said. “It will not be for long.” The thought of it somehow sent my heart back to its lowest level.
He was glum and silent for a few minutes. Then he said, as if the thought had been on his mind for some hours: “She isn’t a day over forty-five. It doesn’t seem possible, with a six-foot son twenty-six years old.”
Grimly I explained. “They marry quite young when it’s for money, Fred.”
“I suppose that’s it,” he sighed. “I fancy she’s handsome, too, when she hasn’t been rained upon.”
We were half way up the slope when he announced nervously that all of my dry clothing was in the closet off my bedroom and could not be got at under any circumstance.
“But,” he said, “I have laid out my best frock coat and trousers for you, and a complete change of linen. You are quite welcome to anything I possess, Mr. Smart. I think if you take a couple of rolls at the bottom of the trousers, they’ll be presentable. The coat may be a little long for you, but—”
My loud laughter cut him short.
“It’s the best I could do,” he said in an aggrieved voice.
I had a secret hope that the Countess would be in the courtyard to welcome me, but I was disappointed. Old Gretel met me and wept over me, as if I was not already sufficiently moist. The chef came running out to say that breakfast would be ready for me when I desired it; Blatchford felt of my coat sleeve and told me that I was quite wet; Hawkes had two large, steaming toddies waiting for us in the vestibule, apparently fearing that we could get no farther without the aid of a stimulant. But there was no sign of a single Titus.
Later I ventured forth in Poopendyke’s best suit of clothes—the one he uses when he passes the plate on Sundays in far-away Yonkers. It smelled of moth-balls, but it was gloriously dry, so why carp! We sneaked down the corridor past my own bedroom door and stole into the study.
The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack: 25 Classic Novels and Stories Page 253