Summer Moonshine by P G Wodehouse

Author:P G Wodehouse [P G Wodehouse]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409063988
Publisher: Arrow

CHAPTER 15

MR Samuel Bulpitt was one of those thinkers whose minds are at their briskest when the body is in gentle motion. He liked to formulate his plans and schemes while strolling to and fro, as if on a quarter-deck, his hands clasped behind his back and some sentimental ballad on his lips. Many of his best coups had been thought out on that bush-bordered gravel path that runs beside the eastern border of Central Park at 59th Street, to the accompaniment of 'Alice Blue Gown' or 'What'll I Do?'

For some considerable time after Lady Abbott had left him, he had been walking up and down the towpath downstream from the houseboat Mignonette, crooning the latter of these two melodies. He was still doing so when Sir Buckstone set out on his punitive expedition to the Goose and Gander.

His mood, as he promenaded, was pensive. Bravely though he had scoffed in his sister's presence at the idea that the problem of establishing contact with a Tubby Vanringham who sat tight under distant cedar trees would present any difficulties to the expert mind, he had not really been so confident as he affected to be. The situation which confronted him, he could see, was different from those which he had handled so triumphantly in his native New York. The methods so effective there would not serve him here. It would be necessary to dish out something new.

Mr Bulpitt, as plasterer, resembled Adrian Peake in that he was a man who was at his best in urban surroundings. He liked to shout 'Fire!' on staircases in order to bring his prospects bolting out of the front doors of flats. He liked to bluff his way into offices under the pretence of being an important customer from the West. If a prominent actress happened to be his quarry, no one knew better than he how to wait at the stage door, a bouquet in one hand, the fatal papers behind his back in the other. ('Oh, how sweet! Are these really for me!' 'No, lady, but this is.') Put Mr Bulpitt in the heart of a big city and he could not go wrong.

But in the English countryside things were different. An Englishman's country home is his castle. It possesses stairs, but only those invited to tread them can use them as a base for shouting 'Fire!' It does not welcome customers from the West. Nor has it a stage door.

'What'll I do?' murmured Mr Bulpitt to his immortal soul. 'What'll I do, ti-um ti-um ti-ay?'

And he had fallen to wondering whether, scornfully though he had rejected the suggestion when it had been made, some form of rude disguise might not, after all, be his best plan, when the whole situation, as is so often the way on these occasions, suddenly lost its complexity. Out of the welter of his thoughts, springing fully armed like Minerva from the brow of Jove, there had emerged a scheme, a simple but ingenious device for the

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