Bleeding Hooks Read online

  On the Major’s left sat Mr. Weston and Claude, and on his right, Mr. Winkley. Beyond Mr. Winkley, today, sat the lawyer, Mr. Proudfoot. At first sight, it might seem that neither he nor Mr. Weston qualified for a place at this table, since the former was a benedict and the latter a widower, but the happy word “bachelor” in this hotel was applied to any man who was not accompanied by a female member of his family. Thus a husband who spent his holiday alone here was a “bachelor”, while an unmarried man accompanied by his mother was not.

  In other words The Fisherman’s Rest was old enough to have developed traditions. It was, for instance, an unwritten law that no one should wear evening dress for dinner, whatever the reason. If any man did so on the evening of his arrival, he was regarded, tolerantly, as ignorant. If he did the same on the following evening, he was put down as a bounder.

  Similarly, it had become a tradition at the Bachelors’ Table that after the preliminary politeness of a conventional greeting, a newcomer should be received in silence until he proved his worth by speech, or by the lack of it. If he was by nature a rather diffident fellow, he would make no attempt to draw the others into conversation, so that for the first two courses, they would ignore him, and begin to converse among themselves. If he joined in, the conversation would be stopped immediately, but if he contented himself with an occasional inquiring look, he might be included, and would thereafter be accepted as a true “bachelor” whenever he chose to visit the hotel. If he happened to be one of those less fortunate individuals who are made uncomfortable by communal silence, he would be provoked into starting a discussion himself. Here again, if he were a well-informed man who avoided clichés, and could converse modestly with authority on some interesting subject, he would be given a hearing, and probably would be accepted as a good fellow. But woe betide the man who tried to make conversation for the sake of politeness, or who spoke before the third course!

  Mr. Proudfoot was such a man.

  He had had no necessity to change his clothes, and so was half-way through his meat course before the others could begin on the soup.

  He eyed the little tufts of hair, feather, and silk on the lapels of the four tweed jackets, and addressed Major Jeans in tones of respect, befitting his place at the head of the table. It was, perhaps, unfortunate that his opening words should be reminiscent of Miss Haddox.

  “Going fishing?”

  The Major nodded.

  “Er – roach or dace?”

  The Major choked in his soup, and dabbed at his lips with his table napkin.

  “This, sir,” he exclaimed testily, “is a hotel for the accommodation of fly fishermen. We try in our humble way to catch a few trout or salmon, but to fish for coarse fish out of season is not our sport.”

  A lesser man than Mr. Proudfoot might have been discouraged.

  “I’ve never done any – er – trout-fishing myself,” he said. “Is it very good round here?”

  “It’s damned bad, sir,” said the Major.

  “Dear, dear!” Mr. Proudfoot shook his head and assumed a sympathy he did not feel. He was so accustomed to doing this with his clients that it had become second nature to him. “But it’s the same everywhere nowadays. Trout-fishing isn’t what it – er – used to be. I can’t think why you stick to it. You ought to try fishing round the Midlands. You get a lot more – er – sport with roach and – er – dace. I think myself that all this talk about salmon and trout is overdone. You hook a great – er – salmon, and it lies down at the bottom of the river until it’s tired. Then you – er – pull it up to the surface, and knock it on the – er – head. You call that sporting!”

  The others held their breath. It was some days since anyone so foolish as Mr. Proudfoot had tried to bait the Major. They waited hopefully.

  Major Jeans did not disappoint them. He leaned across the table and gazed at the lawyer, as if fascinated.

  “Do you really mean to tell me that you sit in a flat-bottomed boat all day, and dangle a worm on the end of a bent pin into the water?”

  Mr. Proudfoot looked uneasily at the others, but they were busily eating.

  “Well – er – not exactly,” he replied, “The – er – bait is attached to a float and when the – er – fish bites –”

  “– a bell rings,” said Claude solemnly.

  The lawyer turned startled eyes towards the sound of this new attack, but everyone looked perfectly serious, so he went on:

  “Oh no, no. I never heard of that kind of float. You must be thinking of deep-sea fishing. No, the – er – fish drag the float under the – er – water, and you just land them in the ordinary way.”

  “Do they ever take the bait without hooking themselves?” asked Mr. Winkley.

  “Oh yes,” replied Mr. Proudfoot eagerly. “They often do that.”

  “Ah, the little rascals!” cried the Major. “The tricks they do get down to, to be sure!”

  “What can you expect from such coarse fish?” asked Claude.

  “I suppose they don’t run to much of a size,” went on Mr. Winkley. “Half-pounders mostly, aren’t they?”

  Mr. Proudfoot had just realized that the company was not in sympathy with him. He seized upon this innocuous question with fervour.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised. We get some very good – er – fish. They run to a very good – er – size, I assure you. I’ve seen a man playing a roach of several pounds in weight and it took some – er – playing.”

  “Ah yes, I don’t doubt you, sir,” said Major Jeans. “But have you ever seen a fish playing a man?”

  Mr. Proudfoot laughed miserably.

  “Now you’re really pulling my – er – leg,” he protested. “I can’t swallow that – er – bait.”

  “This fellow did, though,” the Major said, quite solemnly. “It was on this lake, curiously enough. It happened to an army friend of mine, so I know it’s true. He hooked a fish and felt the very father-and-mother of a tug, and before he realized what had happened, he’d been pulled out of the boat into the lake. A fellow in the next boat heard him shout out, and went for help. When he came back he thought he could see my friend in the boat playing the fish. Called out to him, and when he turned his head, what was it but a walloping big salmon sitting in the boat playing the Colonel. As true as I’m alive.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Proudfoot weakly, “and – er – what happened to the – er – fish?”

  “They shot it,” came the reply. “You can’t have that sort of thing happening on a lake. And now everyone has to take a ghillie in the boat with him for safety. Oh, must you go!”

  “Train to catch,” murmured Mr. Proudfoot. “Forgot the time. Good-bye, ladies. Good-bye – er – er –”

  He walked away hurriedly.

  “I want a clean cup, let’s all move one place up!” said Claude. “Oh my! Don’t I wish I’d had my cards in my pocket! Wouldn’t he just make the perfect stooge?”

  “You must be careful, Claude,” remarked his father. “If you say things like that, people will mistake you for a card-sharper.”

  He smiled in delight at his son’s newly-found high spirits.

  And indeed Claude’s return to the normal was most noticeable. Pussy found herself thinking that it almost looked as if he had only been worried so long as Mrs. Mumsby’s body had remained above ground. As if, now, he had nothing to fear.

  She thrust the thought away from her mind, but shuddered a little when she noticed Mr. Winkley eying Claude speculatively, as if he, too, were thinking the same thing.

  “It makes me sick to hear a fellow talk like that about trout-fishing!” said Major Jeans. “Talking to me about dangling a bait to roach and dace as sport! Cannibalism, that’s what it is! Cannibalism!” He got up from his chair with a yawn. “Oo-ah-h! An indoor lunch is the death of a fisherman. I suppose I’d better go and throw a fly at the little – er – rascals, or they won’t go to – er – sleep happy.”

  “Going out?” queried Claude, in a croaking imitation of Mi
ss Haddox’s voice. “Well – tight lines!”

  “Bleeding hooks!” replied the Major. Then, as if for the first time aware of the implication of the words, he corrected himself. “Er – tight lines!” he said, and stumped out of the room.

  Chapter 22

  Whether Mrs. Mumsby’s funeral had had an upsetting effect on the fishermen, whether it was that they had missed the all-important one o’clock rise, or whether it was just a bad day for fishing, no one knew. But when Gunn and Pussy came back to the hotel from their walk after tea, the floor of the hall was empty, save for Mr. and Mrs. Pindar’s bag of sea-fish; two enormous pollack, a few herrings and plaice, a large crab, and two green, glass net floats, which Mr. Pindar insisted on referring to as “ship’s eggs”.

  “Did you enjoy yourself?” Pussy asked Mrs. Pindar, who was looking particularly well in a canary-coloured polo sweater and orange-flecked tweed skirt.

  “It was simply marvellous!” she said. “We sailed as far as that rocky island, and saw the puffins and all kinds of queer sea-birds. It was grand, wasn’t it, darling?”

  She turned to Mr. Pindar, who nodded in agreement.

  “Yes,” he said. “She,” – indicating his wife with the stem of his pipe – “was sick. It was grand!”

  Mrs. Pindar laughed.

  “It wasn’t the sea,” she protested. “It was watching the boatman cutting up those horrid pieces of live, raw mackerel for bait, and thinking of other fish eating them. Ugh!”

  “And when Owen said, ‘Cough it up, mum’, you coughed!”

  “You look as if it has done you good, anyway,” said Pussy. “You look like one of those coloured advertisements for a Keep-Fit Food.”

  The hall door opened, and Major Jeans’ thickset figure strode towards them, his legs in their riding breeches looking slightly bowed.

  Hallo, hallo!” he hailed them. “Somebody caught some fish, eh?” He pushed forward through the little square which the four of them made, catching Pussy unnecessarily round the waist and squeezing her. “God bless my buttons! Roach and dace! You’d better clear them away before the cat sees them.”

  In spite of herself, Pussy could not help laughing, and the Major took advantage of her unwonted good humour towards him to whisk her away from the others, and whisper, “I’ve got some chocolates for you up in my room.”

  She-flung herself away from him, and sought the comforting bulk of Gunn, who was talking to Mr. Pindar, and had not noticed this little contretemps.

  He must be mad, thought Pussy contemptuously. Half the time he looks at me as if he loathes the sight of me, and the other half, he’s making love to me. Why on earth can’t he be his age, and behave like the General or Mr. Winkley? Why does he have to pick on me? Does he really expect me to go to his beastly room for a bribe of rotten chocolates? I wish I could tell Piggy about him, but if I did, there’d be another murder in the hotel. Oh, hell!

  “Some girls wear queer things behind their ears,” said a voice behind her.

  She turned, to find Claude producing a cascade of tiny cards from the back of her head.

  “You are an ass, Claude,” she exclaimed, laughing. “Don’t you ever get tired of doing that stuff?”

  “I can’t get tired of it,” he said, his eyes admiring her slim figure. “My fingers would soon get stiff if I did, and it’s my living, you know. I’ve got to make good at it for the old man’s sake.” He changed the Lilliputian cards imperceptibly for a pack of standard size, and swung them in a loose concertina from one hand to the other, dropping one. “There,” he said, as he stooped to pick it up. “That’s fishing for you. Good for the brain, but bad for the fingers. I’m out of practice. I haven’t touched them for two days.”

  “You haven’t got that monkey of yours up your sleeve, have you?” asked Pussy rather apprehensively.

  “No. I left him upstairs this afternoon. Poor Petkins! He’ll feel slighted. If I’d known that we shouldn’t get any fish, I’d have taken him with me, but I couldn’t stand him patting them again, not – not after...”

  He left the sentence unfinished, and Pussy nodded sympathetically. He turned, and ran lightly upstairs, flicking the cards as he went.

  Pussy turned, to find Major Jeans greeting General Haddox who had just come in.

  “What, no fish?” he cried. “Not even Cuthbert? Lord! What is the Army coming to?”

  Mrs. Partridge had just come down the stairs, and was standing close to them, her head on one side like a listening bird. She looked rather like a robin, too, in a brown angora suit which she wore with a vermilion jumper, and the effect was so attractive that her daughter envied her.

  “Who’s Cuthbert?” she asked.

  “Eh? Oh, it’s you, my dear,” the Major smiled. “It’s a joke between the General and me. There’s an old salmon that lives just beyond the ledges in the lake – you know, I showed them to you the other day – and whenever it sees Haddox, it jumps out of the lake and puts its tongue out at him. Fact. It makes the General hoppin’ mad, and he’s sworn to take it, dead or alive. I just call him Cuthbert – the salmon, not the General.”

  Mrs. Partridge smiled, and turned to Sir Courtney.

  “What have you done with Miss Haddox?” she asked. “Hasn’t she come in yet? I thought she went up to the small lake with you.”

  The General looked down at her through his rather prominent blue eyes, which were as expressionless as those of a china doll.

  “Yes,” he said, loosening the strap of his fishing bag with trembling fingers. “She came in with me, but I think she went straight up to her room. It was cold up in the mountains and she found it tiring. Who’s responsible for the fish?”

  “The Pandas,” replied Major Jeans. He laughed at Mrs. Partridge’s puzzled expression. “Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “Haven’t you heard me say that before? I should have thought you’d got used to my little habit of nicknaming people. Pindar the Panda, you see.”

  “Thousands wouldn’t,” laughed Mrs. Partridge. “I’d like to know what you call me behind my back.”

  The Major squeezed her shoulder, and Pussy shuddered at his philandering.

  “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “Not in public.”

  They all turned as the hall door opened again.

  “Hallo! Winkley as ever is! Come and redeem the reputation of the bulldog breed in this fishless hall!” was the Major’s greeting.

  “Have you got any?” asked the General, peering anxiously at the ghillie’s net.

  “A few,” returned Mr. Winkley, stretching his arms above his head, and yawning. “Why is it that it’s twice as tiring to go fishing for half a day as it is for a whole day?”

  “It sounds like the old problem about a herring and a half costing three-halfpence,” said Gunn, but his words were drowned among the exclamations of wonder and congratulation which greeted the line of sea-trout which the ghillie, aware of his own importance on this occasion, was graduating as carefully as if they were a string of priceless pearls.

  “Seven, eight, nine!” sang out Major Jeans. “And all out of a few empty cigar-boxes, or whatever he keeps his tackle in. I don’t know how you do it, old chap.”

  “Nice fish,” commented Mr. Weston, who had joined them unobtrusively from somewhere or other.

  “Not too bad.” said Mr. Winkley deprecatingly, although he secretly thought them very nice indeed. “Not very big, you know, but in good condition for this time of the year.”

  “How about a drink?” asked the Major as he drew him away from the admiring group.

  “Dad!” Claude’s voice shouted down from the landing before he came into sight. “Have you got Pet?”

  Mr. Weston caught his breath in a hard little exclamation, as if he had a premonition of some piece of bad news.

  “No, Claude,” he shouted back. “Isn’t he in your room?”

  Claude appeared at the top step of the ten straight stairs which ascended from the hall, and stood motionless for a moment, staring down at the
m with scared eyes. Then his slim, straight body seemed to bend like a blade of supple steel, and like steel released, he cleared the stairs and dived towards Gunn, tearing at his coat, and peering inside it, like a demented creature.

  Gunn thrust out one of his long, bony arms, and clamped it on the boy’s shoulder with a force that nearly lifted him off his feet.

  “Now then, what’s the trouble?” he asked, in the manner of an unperturbed policeman.

  Claude looked at him, his eyes blazing with hatred and fear.

  “You know what it is. It’s my monkey. I left him in my bedroom when I went fishing, and now he’s gone, lost! You’ve been here all afternoon. If anything’s happened to him, you’ve done it! You always hated him. You said you’d drown him! Oh, I knew something dreadful would happen after she died!”

  Chapter 23

  A careful search outside the hotel revealed no sign of the missing monkey. Pussy and Gunn joined Claude and his father in a search outside, but the night was pitch dark, and this also proved fruitless.

  “Perhaps the call of the wild has been too much for it, and it’s somewhere up a tree,” suggested Pussy, but Claude shook his head.

  “No, he’d be more likely to go where it was warm, into a cottage perhaps. He’d be half-dead from cold by now, and he wasn’t even wearing Mrs. Mumsby’s knitted jacket.”

  So they began a cottage-to-cottage inquiry, calling at the constable’s, the doctor’s and the vicar’s, without any result. No one had seen the monkey.

  The following morning, Mr. Weston, who appeared to be as much upset as Claude about the monkey’s disappearance, formed a search-party of some dozen men who worked as ghillies in summer and as beaters in autumn, and systematically combed the village and the country around. The monkey remained hidden and Claude was disconsolate.

  “I can’t understand what he sees in that verminous little brute,” remarked Gunn. “If it weren’t that I like old Claude in spite of these queer fits of his, and don’t like to see him looking miserable, I should say it’s a jolly good job if it is dead. It makes him look effeminate to be always petting a chattering monkey.”