A Gentleman of Leisure, P. G. Wodehouse [speld decodable readers .TXT] 📗

but here everything, from the wallpaper to the smallest ornaments, was wonderfully well selected.

Business, however, was business. This was no time to stand admiring artistic efforts in room furnishing. There was that big J to be carved on the front door. If ’twere done, then ’twere well ’twere done quickly.

He was just moving to the door, when from some distant part of the house came the bark of a dog. Another joined in. The solo became a duet. The air was filled with their clamour.

“Gee!” cried Spike.

The remark seemed more or less to sum up the situation.

“ ’Tis sweet,” says Byron, “to hear the watchdog’s honest bark.” Jimmy and Spike found two watchdogs’ honest barks cloying. Spike intimated this by making a feverish dash for the open window. Unfortunately for the success of this manoeuvre, the floor of the room was covered, not with a carpet, but with tastefully scattered rugs, and underneath these rugs it was very highly polished. Spike, treading on one of these islands, was instantly undone. No power of will or muscle can save a man in such a case. Spike skidded. His feet flew from under him. There was a momentary flash of red hair, as of a passing meteor. The next moment he had fallen on his back with a thud which shook the house, and probably the rest of Manhattan Island as well. Even in that crisis the thought flashed across Jimmy’s mind that this was not Spike’s lucky night.

Upstairs the efforts of the canine choir had begun to resemble the “A che la morte” duet in Il Trovatore. Particularly good work was being done by the baritone dog.

Spike sat up, groaning. Equipped though he was by nature with a skull of the purest and most solid ivory, the fall had disconcerted him. His eyes, like those of Shakespeare’s poet, rolling a fine frenzy, did glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. He passed his fingers tenderly through his vermilion hair.

Heavy footsteps were descending the stairs. In the distance the soprano dog had reached A in alto and was holding it, while his fellow artiste executed runs in the lower register.

“Get up!” hissed Jimmy. “There’s somebody coming! Get up, you idiot, can’t you?”

It was characteristic of Jimmy that it never even occurred to him to desert the fallen one and depart alone. There was once an Italian convict who, in planning a jail-breaking, assigned to his brother felons such duties as shooting the governor and strangling the warders, reserving for himself the task of making “da gran’ escape.” Jimmy was the exact opposite of this strategist. Spike was his brother-in-arms. He would as soon have thought of deserting him as a sea captain would have abandoned his ship.

Consequently, as Spike, despite all exhortations, continued to remain on the floor, rubbing his head and uttering “Gee!” at intervals in a melancholy voice, Jimmy resigned himself to fate, and stood where he was, waiting for the door to open.

It opened the next moment as if a cyclone had been behind it.

VII Getting Acquainted

A cyclone entering the room is apt to alter the position of things. This one shifted a footstool, a small chair, a rug, and Spike. The chair struck by a massive boot, whirled against the wall. The footstool rolled away. The rug crumpled up and slid. Spike, with a yell, leaped to his feet, slipped again, fell, and finally compromised on an all-fours position, in which attitude he remained, blinking.

While these stirring acts were in progress there was the sound of a door opening upstairs, followed by a scuttering of feet and an appalling increase in the canine contribution to the current noises. The duet had now taken on quite a Wagnerian effect.

There raced into the room first a white bull terrier, he of the soprano voice, and⁠—a bad second⁠—his fellow artiste, the baritone, a massive bulldog, bearing a striking resemblance to the big man with the revolver.

And then, in theatrical parlance, the entire company “held the picture.” Upstage, with his hand still on the door, stood the large householder; downstage Jimmy. Centre, Spike and the bulldog, their noses, a couple of inches apart, inspected each other with mutual disfavour. On the extreme O.P. side the bull terrier, who had fallen foul of a wickerwork table, was crouching with extended tongue and rolling eyes, waiting for the next move.

The householder looked at Jimmy. Jimmy looked at the householder. Spike and the bulldog looked at each other. The bull terrier distributed his gaze impartially around the company.

“A typical scene of quiet American home life,” murmured Jimmy.

The man with the pistol glowered.

“Hands up, you devils!” he roared, pointing a mammoth revolver.

The two marauders humoured his whim.

“Let me explain,” said Jimmy pacifically, shuffling warily round in order to face the bull terrier, who was now strolling in his direction with an ill-assumed carelessness.

“Keep still, you blackguard!”

Jimmy kept still. The bull terrier, with the same abstracted air, was beginning a casual inspection of his right trouser leg.

Relations between Spike and the bulldog, meanwhile, had become more strained. The sudden flinging up of the former’s arms had had the worst effect on the animal’s nerves. Spike, the croucher on all-fours, he might have tolerated; but Spike, the semaphore, inspired him with thoughts of battle. He was growling in a moody, reflective manner. His eye was full of purpose.

It was probably this that caused Spike to look at the householder. Till then he had been too busy to gaze elsewhere, but now the bulldog’s eye had become so unpleasant that he cast a pathetic glance up at the man by the door.

“Gee!” he cried, as he did so. “It’s de boss! Say, boss, call off de dawg. It’s sure goin’ to nip de old head of me.”

The other lowered his revolver in surprise.

“So it’s you, is it, you limb of Satan?” he remarked. “I thought I had seen that damned red head of yours before.