“Slithy Tove-Whippley wouldn’t do?” It seemed to me that there was more than a meal or two to be made of Slithy’s meaty frame.
“The gentleman does not go near the pond,” Greeves said, “and has not been aboard the rocket ship since we landed.”
“Probably just as well,” I said. I finished my whiskey and rubbed decisive palms together. “Well,” I said, “I suppose we’d better go break the bad news to Baldie.”
“I’ll give you bad news,” said Baldie from the doorway. “And you can have a broken bone or two while I’m at it.”
“Ah, Baldie. What ho,” I said.
“Don’t you ‘what ho’ me!” he said, advancing into the room. I had an odd sense of déjà-vu, as if I’d recently heard just those words, though I couldn’t quite place where. But Spotts-Binkle’s next utterance drove the question from my mind. “You conniving hound! You treacherous cheat! You cad!”
I raised an eyebrow, then another. “I say, Baldie, steady on!”
“I’m steady enough,” he answered. For the first time in our long acquaintance, I saw color in Archibald Spotts-Binkle’s countenance: two bright red spots at about the height of his cheekbones, like an aging actress who has dipped once too often into the rouge pot. “Steady enough to break your eye and blacken your nose!”
“I think you’ll find you mean—” I began, but he spoke over me, in a most un-Baldie-like way.
“I mean to batter you into a shapeless mass, then trample you into the carpet!” he said.
“But I’m just about to save your life!”
“Save your own!” he said. “If you can!” He had balled his knobbly hands into fists and now he raised one as if he knew how to use it. I remembered again the short, sharp set-to with Basher Bass-Humptingdon in the junior boys’ cloakroom, and recalled that though Baldie had been deficient in the technical aspects, he had not lacked for energy. I moved to put an obstructing sofa between us.
But he was not to be stayed by sofas. He leapt onto the cushions, still brandishing his fist, and now he did so from the advantage of greater height. Suddenly the likelihood of Baldie’s doing actual damage grew less remote.
“I say, Spotts-Binkle,” I said, “what’s this all about?”
“It’s about treachery and double-dealing! And a man I thought was a friend behaving like a worm!”
Greeves, who had been standing by, quiet as a statue, now spoke. “May I inquire, sir, if it concerns the person you have named Shilistrata?”
“He knows it does!” Baldie said, without taking his feverish eyes from mine. “He was supposed to speak to her for me! Instead, he spoke for himself!”
“I praised you to the skies!” I protested. “I called you a winner and a first-rater among newt men. I counseled her to seize the day before some other newtess claimed you for her own!”
He still loomed over me, but the homicidal mania had lost some of its pep. He resembled a Viking berserker who had paused to take thought. His gaze slid toward Greeves.
“Is this true, Greeves?”
“It is, sir.”
“But when I went to her, just now,” Baldie said, climbing down from the cushions, “she spurned me. ‘Bring me Bartholomew’ she said. ‘I must have him.’ ”
“Well, she’s not getting me, nor any part thereof,” I said. “One shudders to think—”
“That’s enough of that sort of talk!” said Baldie, his color, however localized, rising again. “One does not speak thus of the woman I intend to wed!”
“Baldie …” I said, casting about for a clear avenue of approach, “it’s not a stroll down the petal-strewn aisle she has in mind.”
Again, the dismissive digits. “Oh, I know there are differences between us,” he said. “Know them better than most, I’d say. But with goodwill and growing affection, I’m sure they can be overcome.”
“Baldie—”
“I won’t hear any more against her!”
I made a silent appeal to Greeves, via eyebrows and corners of the mouth. Baldie has always had a high regard for his acumen.
As good souls will, Greeves filled the gap in the line. “Mr. Spotts-Binkle,” he said, “it grieves me to be the bearer of unhappy tidings, but the lady in question is not seeking a mate. Rather, she is thinking in terms of, shall we say, support for her children.”
“I understand that, Greeves,” Baldie said, “and I’ve assured her that my resources will be at their disposal. I mean, what’s the use of having a bob or two if you don’t use it to do some good?”
“It is not wealth, sir, that is sought,” Greeves said. “It is the candidate’s more immediate assets that the sireni has in view.”
“Baldie,” I said, “she means to drown me and bury me in the ooze at the bottom of the pond while her grubs, or whatever they are, feast upon my rotting carcass.”
As Greeves and I fed him the true gen, he once again defaulted to that pop-eyed, slow-blinking Baldie that is the classic model. After a pause to take it all in, he said, “I don’t believe it!”
“She prefers Mr. Gloster,” Greeves said, “because, as with Hudibras Gillattely, who suffered the same fate, his form is more fleshy”—he turned to me—“if you will permit my saying so, sir.”
“Not at all, Greeves. There is more on the Gloster bones than on the Spotts-Binkles. Luck of the draw in the parentage department, probably.”
There ensued another period of Baldie’s blinking, accompanied by the up-and-down course of his Adam’s apple as he metaphorically, if that’s the word, swallowed the bitter pill of truth.
Then he spat it out. “I don’t believe a word of it!” He dismissed me with a curl of the lip and rounded on Greeves. “For once, Greeves, you’ve misread the cues, followed the tracks up the wrong path.”
“I am sorry, sir, that you think so. Professor Gillattely’s notes were quite detailed.”
“Pah! Him!”
Greeves produced a bound notebook. “He wrote, sir, and I quote, ‘I will endeavor to ascertain the range of the creature’s mesmeric influence, placing a series of white stakes in the turf. I will begin with the distance at which I feel the first mental itch, then proceed to the point at which it becomes almost irresistible.’ ”
Greeves offered Baldie a view of the page. “As you’ll see, sir, that was his last entry.”
“That could mean anything, Greeves!”
“I think you’ll find, sir, that it means the professor advanced a stake too far.”
“By Jove, Baldie,” I said, “Greeves has cinched it again! I saw those stakes in a line down toward the water, with the last few all in a higgle and piggle! That must be the locus delecti or whatever the Latin is for the spot where she did the dirty on old Gillattely.”
“That was my surmise, too, sir,” said Greeves.
The two of us had clearly hung Baldie on the horns of a dilemma. Clearly, he did not want to wave in the news that his inamorata was an aquatic Nosferatu, if that’s the fellow I’m thinking of, but Greeves’s air of quiet confidence, coupled with the evidence of the stakes, was undermining his defenses.
“If I may make a suggestion, sirs,” Greeves now said, “we should depart at the earliest opportunity. Professor Gillattely’s notes also indicate that there are several other females of the species in the vicinity, some of them considerably larger than the one we have been discussing. I fear that our presence has drawn them toward the house. Mr. Tove-Whippley went to see if he could launch the rocket and bring it to this side of the stream. The fact that he has not done so indicates that our situation grows dire.”
Baldie, by this point, had lost the knack of taking action. He seemed to be contemplating some bleak inner vista—probably involving his inevitable homecoming conversation with Marilyn Spotts-Binkle, née Buffet—that was robbing him of whatever was needed to cause him to buck up and soldier on. It was time for a Gloster to take charge.