Charles has no sympathy with Spartans and did not answer. "I think you'll find everything you want. There's a telephone by the bed." I said that I was not given to talking in my sleep. "Then," said he, "if you prefer to write here is the apparatus," and he pointed to a desk that would have satisfied all the needs of a daily editor.
"Thanks," I said, looking at the attractive bed, "but I expect to be too busy in the morning even to write." I yawned comfortably. "Though it may be that I shall dictate, from where I lie, a note or two to my stenographer."
Charles doubted, with all solemnity, whether Perkins could manage shorthand, but promised to enquire about it. He's a dear solid fellow, is Charles, and he does enjoy being rich. Moreover, he means his friends to enjoy it, too. Lastly, "If you don't find everything you want," he said, "you've only to ring," and he pointed to a, row of pear-shaped appendages hanging by silken cords from the cornice.
"Heavens," said I, seizing his arm, "you're never going to leave a defenceless man alone with half-a-dozen bell-pushes!"
Charles softened; he admits to a weakness for electricity. "Some are switches, some are bell-pushes, and one," he said, blushing, "is a fire-alarm."
I climbed on to a chair forthwith and tied a big knot in the cord of the fire-alarm. "We'll get that safe out of the way first," said I, and then he tutored me in the use of the others. After some repetition it was drummed into me that the one nearest the bed was the switch of the getting-into-bed light, and the next one to that the bell which rang in Perkins' upstairs quarters, The other four or five I found, when I came to study them alone, I had forgotten.
I clambered into bed and with great intelligence pressed the correct switch. Had I left it at that my problem would never have arisen.
I have, however, a confession to make which ill accords with my luxurious surroundings of the moment. It is that I am accustomed to press my trousers myself by the homely and ignoble expedient of sleeping on them. My only excuse is that I am a heavy sleeper. So automatic is the process, that I was wrapped in sheets and darkness before it occurred to me that I had placed the trousers I had just doffed under the mattress on which I now lay. I could not help thinking how the masterful Perkins would take it when he came to look for them in the morning. I conceived him picking up my dinner-jacket here, my waistcoat there, and wandering round the room in a hopeless quest for the complement of my suit, trying to recall the events of the previous night and to remember whether I was English or Scottish ... and then, more in sorrow than in anger, spotting the lost ones....
As I contemplated this picture I was moved to pity Perkins, torn asunder between two dreadful alternatives, the one of leaving the trousers there and committing a dereliction of duty, the other of removing them stealthily and committing an indelicacy. I was also moved to pity myself, lying supine under his speechless contempt. I resolved to spare us both, to get out of bed and put things right. I stretched out a hand for the switch. I grasped it with an effort. I pressed the button.
No light ensued.