I say!
Archie now perceived that the door was ajar, and that on an envelope attached with a tack to one of the panels was the name “Elmer M. Moon.” He pushed the door a little farther open and tried again.
“Oh, Mr. Moon! Mr. Moon!” He waited a moment. “Oh, Mr. Moon! Mr. Moon! Are you there, Mr. Moon?”
He blushed hotly. To his sensitive ear the words had sounded exactly like the opening line of the refrain of a vaudeville song-hit. He decided to waste no further speech on a man with such an unfortunate surname until he could see him face to face and get a chance of lowering his voice a bit. Absolutely absurd to stand outside a chappie’s door singing song-hits in a lemon-coloured bathing suit. He pushed the door open and walked in; and his subconscious self, always the gentleman, closed it gently behind him.
“Up!” said a low, sinister, harsh, unfriendly, and unpleasant voice.
“Eh?” said Archie, revolving sharply on his axis.
He found himself confronting the hurried gentleman who had run upstairs. This sprinter had produced an automatic pistol, and was pointing it in a truculent manner at his head. Archie stared at his host, and his host stared at him.
“Put your hands up,” he said.
“Oh, right-o! Absolutely!” said Archie. “But I mean to say — ”
The other was drinking him in with considerable astonishment. Archie’s costume seemed to have made a powerful impression upon him.
“Who the devil are you?” he enquired.
“Me? Oh, my name’s — ”
“Never mind your name. What are you doing here?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I popped in to ask if I might use your ‘phone. You see — ”
A certain relief seemed to temper the austerity of the other’s gaze. As a visitor, Archie, though surprising, seemed to be better than he had expected.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” he said, meditatively.
“If you’d just let me toddle to the ‘phone — ”
“Likely!” said the man. He appeared to reach a decision. “Here, go into that room.”
He indicated with a jerk of his head the open door of what was apparently a bedroom at the farther end of the studio.
“I take it,” said Archie, chattily, “that all this may seem to you not a little rummy.”
“Get on!”
“I was only saying — ”
“Well, I haven’t time to listen. Get a move on!”
The bedroom was in a state of untidiness which eclipsed anything which Archie had ever witnessed. The other appeared to be moving house. Bed, furniture, and floor were covered with articles of clothing. A silk shirt wreathed itself about Archie’s ankles as he stood gaping, and, as he moved farther into the room, his path was paved with ties and collars.
“Sit down!” said Elmer M. Moon, abruptly.
“Right-o! Thanks,” said Archie, “I suppose you wouldn’t like me to explain, and what not, what?”
“No!” said Mr. Moon. “I haven’t got your spare time. Put your hands behind that chair.”
Archie did so, and found them immediately secured by what felt like a silk tie. His assiduous host then proceeded to fasten his ankles in a like manner. This done, he seemed to feel that he had done all that was required of him, and he returned to the packing of a large suitcase which stood by the window.
"I say!” said Archie.
Mr. Moon, with the air of a man who has remembered something which he had overlooked, shoved a sock in his guest’s mouth and resumed his packing. He was what might be called an impressionist packer. His aim appeared to be speed rather than neatness. He bundled his belongings in, closed the bag with some difficulty, and, stepping to the window, opened it. Then he climbed out on to the fire-escape, dragged the suit-case after him, and was gone.
Archie, left alone, addressed himself to the task of freeing his prisoned limbs. The job proved much easier than he had expected. Mr. Moon, that hustler, had wrought for the moment, not for all time. A practical man, he had been content to keep his visitor shackled merely for such a period as would permit him to make his escape unhindered. In less than ten minutes Archie, after a good deal of snake-like writhing, was pleased to discover that the thingummy attached to his wrists had loosened sufficiently to enable him to use his hands. He untied himself and got up.
He now began to tell himself that out of evil cometh good. His encounter with the elusive Mr. Moon had not been an agreeable one, but it had had this solid advantage, that it had left him right in the middle of a great many clothes. And Mr. Moon, whatever his moral defects, had the one excellent quality of taking about the same size as himself. Archie, casting a covetous eye upon a tweed suit which lay on the bed. was on the point of climbing into the trousers when on the outer door of the studio there sounded a forceful knocking.
“Open up here!”
Archie bounded silently out into the other room and stood listening tensely. He was not a naturally querulous man, but he did feel at this point that Fate was picking on him with a somewhat undue severity.
“In th’ name av th’ Law!”
There are times when the best of us lose our heads. At this juncture Archie should undoubtedly have gone to the door, opened it, explained his presence in a few well-chosen words, and generally have passed the whole thing off with ready tact. But the thought of confronting a posse of police in his present costume caused him to look earnestly about him for a hiding-place.
Up against the farther wall was a settee with a high, arching back, which might have been put there for that special purpose. He inserted himself behind this, just as a splintering crash announced that the Law, having gone through the formality of knocking with its knuckles, was now getting busy with an axe. A moment later the door had given way, and the room was full of trampling feet. Archie wedged himself against the wall with the quiet concentration of a clam nestling in its shell, and hoped for the best.
It seemed to him that his immediate future depended for better or for worse entirely on the native intelligence of the Force. If they were the bright, alert men he hoped they were, they would see all that junk in the bedroom and, deducing from it that their quarry had stood not upon the order of his going but had hopped it, would not waste time in searching a presumably empty apartment. If, on the other hand, they were the obtuse, flat-footed persons who occasionally find their way into the ranks of even the most enlightened constabularies, they would undoubtedly shift the settee and drag him into a publicity from which his modest soul shrank. He was enchanted, therefore, a few moments later, to hear a gruff voice state that th’ mutt had beaten it down th’ fire-escape. His opinion of the detective abilities of the New York police force rose with a bound.
There followed a brief council of war, which, as it took place in the bedroom, was inaudible to Archie except as a distant growling noise. He could distinguish no words, but, as it was succeeded by a general trampling of large boots in the direction of the door and then by silence, he gathered that the pack, having drawn the studio and found it empty, had decided to return to other and more profitable duties. He gave them a reasonable interval for removing themselves, and then poked his head cautiously over the settee.
All was peace. The place was empty. No sound disturbed the stillness.
Archie emerged. For the first time in this morning of disturbing occurrences he began to feel that God was in his heaven and all right with the world. At last things were beginning to brighten up a bit, and life might be said to have taken on some of the aspects of a good egg. He stretched himself, for it is cramping work lying under settees, and, proceeding to the bedroom, picked up the tweed trousers again.
Clothes had a fascination for Archie. Another man, in similar circumstances, might have hurried over his toilet; but Archie, faced by a difficult choice of ties, rather strung the thing out. He selected a specimen which did great credit to the taste of Mr. Moon, evidently one of our snappiest dressers, found that it did not harmonise with the
deeper meaning of the tweed suit, removed it, chose another, and was adjusting the bow and admiring the effect, when his attention was diverted by a slight sound which was half a cough and half a sniff; and, turning, found himself gazing into the clear blue eyes of a large man in uniform, who had stepped into the room from the fire-escape. He was swinging a substantial club in a negligent sort of way, and he looked at Archie with a total absence of bonhomie.
“Ah!” he observed.
“Oh, there you are!” said Archie, subsiding weakly against the chest of drawers. He gulped. “Of course, I can see you’re thinking all this pretty tolerably weird and all that,’’ he proceeded, in a propitiatory voice.
The policeman attempted no analysis of his emotions. He opened a mouth which a moment before had looked incapable of being opened except with the assistance of powerful machinery, and shouted a single word.
“Cassidy!”
A distant voice gave tongue in answer. It was like alligators roaring to their mates across lonely swamps.
There was a rumble of footsteps in the region of the stairs, and presently there entered an even larger guardian of the Law than the first exhibit. He, too, swung a massive club, and, like his colleague, he gazed frostily at Archie.
“God save Ireland!” he remarked.
The words appeared to be more in the nature of an expletive than a practical comment on the situation. Having uttered them, he draped himself in the doorway like a colossus, and chewed gum.
“Where ja get him?” he enquired, after a pause.
“Found him in here attimpting to disguise himself.”
“I told Cap. he was hiding somewheres, but he would have it that he’d beat it down th’ escape,” said the gum-chewer, with the sombre triumph of the underling whose sound advice has been overruled by those above him. He shifted his wholesome (or, as some say, unwholesome) morsel to the other side of his mouth, and for the first time addressed Archie directly. “Ye’re pinched!” he observed.
Archie started violently. The bleak directness of the speech roused him with a jerk from the dream-like state into which he had fallen. He had not anticipated this. He had assumed that there would be a period of tedious explanations to be gone through before he was at liberty to depart to the cosy little lunch for which his interior had been sighing wistfully this long time past; but that he should be arrested had been outside his calculations. Of course, he could put everything right eventually; he could call witnesses to his character and the purity of his intentions; but in the meantime the whole dashed business would be in all the papers, embellished with all those unpleasant flippancies to which your newspaper reporter is so prone to stoop when he sees half a chance. He would feel a frightful chump. Chappies would rot him about it, to the most fearful extent. Old Brewster’s name would come into it, and he could not disguise it from himself that his father-in-law, who liked his name in the papers as little as possible, would be sorer than a sunburned neck.
“No, I say, you know! I mean, I mean to say!”
“Pinched!” repeated the rather larger policeman.
“And anything ye say,” added his slightly smaller colleague, “will be used agenst ya ‘t the trial.”
“And if ya try t’escape,” said the first speaker, twiddling his club, “ya’ll getja block knocked off.”
And, having sketched out this admirably clear and neatly constructed scenario, the two relapsed into silence. Officer Cassidy restored his gum to circulation. Officer Donahue frowned sternly at his boots.
“But, I say,” said Archie, “it’s all a mistake, you know. Absolutely a frightful error, my dear old constables. I’m not the lad you’re after at all. The chappie you want is a different sort of fellow altogether. Another blighter entirely.”
New York policemen never laugh when on duty. There is probably something in the regulations against it. But Officer Donahue permitted the left corner of his mouth to twitch slightly, and a momentary muscular spasm disturbed the calm of Officer Cassidy’s granite features, as a passing breeze ruffles the surface of some bottomless lake.
“That’s what they all say!” observed Officer Donahue.
“It’s no use tryin’ that line of talk,” said Officer Cassidy. “Babcock’s squealed.”
“Sure. Squealed ‘s morning,” said Officer Donahue. Archie’s memory stirred vaguely.
“Babcock?” he said. “Do you know, that name seems familiar to me, somehow. I’m almost sure I’ve read it in the paper or something.”
“Ah, cut it out!” said Officer Cassidy, disgustedly. The two constables exchanged a glance of austere disapproval. This hypocrisy pained them. “Read it in th’ paper or something!”
“By Jove! I remember now. He’s the chappie who was arrested in that bond business. For goodness’ sake, my dear, merry old constables,” said Archie, astounded, “you surely aren’t labouring under the impression that I’m the MasterMind they were talking about in the paper? Why, what an absolutely priceless notion! I mean to say, I ask you, what! Frankly, laddies, do I look like a Master-Mind?”
Officer Cassidy heaved a deep sigh, which rumbled up from his interior like the first muttering of a cyclone.
“If I’d known,” he said, regretfully, “that this guy was going to turn out a ruddy Englishman, I’d have taken a slap at him with m’ stick and chanced it!”
Officer Donahue considered the point well taken.
“Ah!” he said, understandingly. He regarded Archie with an unfriendly eye. “I know th’ sort well! Trampling on th’ face av th’ poor!”
“Ya c’n trample on the poor man’s face,” said Officer Cassidy, severely; “but don’t be surprised if one day he bites you in the leg!”
“But, my dear old sir,” protested Archie, “I’ve never trampled — ”
“One of these days,” said Officer Donahue, moodily, “the Shannon will flow in blood to the sea!”
“Absolutely! But — ”
Officer Cassidy uttered a glad cry.
“Why couldn’t we hit him a lick,” he suggested, brightly, “an’ tell th’ Cap. he resisted us in th’ exercise of our jooty?”
An instant gleam of approval and enthusiasm came into Officer Donahue’s eyes. Officer Donahue was not a man who got these luminous inspirations himself, but that did not prevent him appreciating them in others and bestowing commendation in the right quarter. There was nothing petty or grudging about Officer Donahue.
“Ye’re the lad with the head, Tim!” he exclaimed admiringly.
“It just sorta came to me,” said Mr. Cassidy, modestly.
“It’s a great idea, Timmy!”
“Just happened to think of it,” said Mr. Cassidy, with a coy gesture of self-effacement.
Archie had listened to the dialogue with growing uneasiness. Not for the first time since he had made their acquaintance, he became vividly aware of the exceptional physical gifts of these two men. The New York police force demands from those who would join its ranks an extremely high standard of stature and sinew, but it was obvious that jolly old Donahue and Cassidy must have passed in first shot without any difficulty whatever.
“I say, you know,” he observed, apprehensively.
And then a sharp and commanding voice spoke from the outer room.
“Donahue! Cassidy! What the devil does this mean?”
Archie had a momentary impression that an angel had fluttered down to his rescue. If this was the case, the angel had assumed an effective disguise—that of a police captain. The new arrival was a far smaller man than his subordinates —so much smaller that it did Archie good to look at him. For a long time he had been wishing that it were possible to rest his eyes with the spectacle of something of a slightly less out-size nature than his two companions.
“Why have you left your posts?”
The effect of the interruption on the Messrs. Cassidy and Donahue was pleasingly instantaneous. They seemed to shrink to almost normal proportions, and their manner took on an attractive deference.
>
Officer Donahue saluted.
“If ye plaze, sorr — ”
Officer Cassidy also saluted, simultaneously.
“‘Twas like this, sorr — ’’
The captain froze Officer Cassidy with a glance and, leaving him congealed, turned to Officer Donahue.
“Oi wuz standing on th’ fire-escape, sorr,” said Officer Donahue, in a tone of obsequious respect which not only delighted, but astounded Archie, who hadn’t known he could talk like that, “accordin’ to instructions, when I heard a suspicious noise. I crope in, sorr, and found this duck—found the accused, sorr—in front of th’ mirror, examinin’ himself. I then called to Officer Cassidy for assistance. We pinched arrested um, sorr.”
The captain looked at Archie. It seemed to Archie that he looked at him coldly and with contempt.
Who is he?
“The Master-Mind, sorr.”
“The what?”
“The accused, sorr. The man that’s wanted.”
“You may want him. I don’t,” said the captain. Archie, though relieved, thought he might have put it more nicely. “This isn’t Moon. It’s not a bit like him.”
“Absolutely not!” agreed Archie, cordially. “It’s all a mistake, old companion, as I was trying to — ”
Cut it out!
Oh, right-o
“You’ve seen the photographs at the station. Do you mean to tell me you see any resemblance?”
“If ye plaze, sorr,” said Officer Cassidy, coming to life.
“Well?”
“We thought he’d bin disguising himself, the way he wouldn’t be recognised.”
“You’re a fool!” said the captain.
“Yes, sorr,” said Officer Cassidy, meekly.
“So are you, Donahue.”
“Yes, sorr.”
Archie’s respect for this chappie was going up all the time. He seemed to be able to take years off the lives of these massive blighters with a word. It was like the stories you read about lion-tamers. Archie did not despair of seeing Officer Donahue and his old college chum Cassidy eventually jumping through hoops.
Wodehouse On Crime Page 28