Money for nothing

by P. G. Wodehouse

The passage leading to his goal was in darkness, but he moved steadily forward. Occasionally a chair would dart from its place to crack him over the shin, but he was not to be kept from the cellarette by trifles like that. Soon his fingers were on the handle of the door, and he flung it open and entered. And it was at this moment that there came to his ears an odd noise.

It was not the noise itself that was odd. Feet scraping on gravel always make that unmistakable sound. What impressed itself on Hugo as curious was the fact that on the gravel outside the dining-room window, feet at this hour should be scraping at all. His hand had been outstretched to switch on the light, but now he paused. He waited, listening. And presently in the oblong of the middle of the three large windows he saw dimly against the lesser darkness outside a human body. It was insinuating itself through the opening and what Hugo felt about it was that he liked its dashed nerve.

Hugo Carmody was no poltroon. Both physically and morally he possessed more than the normal store of courage. At Cambridge he had boxed for his university in the light-weight division and once, in London, the petty cash having run short, he had tipped a hat-check boy with an aspirin tablet. Moreover, although it was his impression that the few drops of whisky which he had drunk in John's room had but scratched the surface, their effect in reality had been rather pronounced. "In some diatheses," an eminent physician has laid down, "whisky is not immediately pathogenic. In other cases the spirit in question produces marked cachexia." Hugo's cachexia was very marked indeed. He would have resented keenly the suggestion that he was fried, boiled, or even sozzled, but he was unquestionably in a definite condition of cachexia.

In a situation, accordingly, in which many householders might have quailed, he was filled with gay exhilaration. He felt able and willing to chew the head off any burglar that ever packed a centrebit. Glowing with cachexia and the spirit of adventure, he switched on the light and found himself standing face to face with a small, weedy man beneath whose snub nose there nestled a waxed moustache.

"Stand ho!" said Hugo jubilantly, falling at once into the vein of the Quarrel Scene.

In the bosom of the intruder many emotions were competing for precedence, but jubilation was not one of them. If Mr. Twist had had a weak heart, he would by now have been lying on the floor breathing his last, for few people can ever have had a nastier shock. He stood congealed, blinking at Hugo.

Hugo, meanwhile, had made the interesting discovery that it was no stranger who stood before him but an old acquaintance.

"Great Scot!" he exclaimed. "Old Doc. Twist! The beautiful, tranquil-thoughts bird!" He chuckled joyously. His was a retentive memory, and he could never forget that this man had once come within an ace of ruining that big deal in cigarettes over at Healthward Ho, and had also callously refused to lend him a tenner. Of such a man he could believe anything, even that he combined with the duties of a physical culture expert a little housebreaking and burglary on the side. "Well, well, well!" said Hugo. "Remember March, the Ides of March remember! Did not great Julius bleed for justice' sake? What villain touched his body that did stab and not for justice? Answer me that, you blighter, yes or no."

Chimp Twist licked his lips nervously. He was a little uncertain as to the exact import of his companion's last words, but almost any words would have found in him at this moment a distrait listener.

"Oh, I could weep my spirit from my eyes!" said Hugo.