Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of The Autolycan. Many thanks to those of you who have felt other people might like these stories and have forwarded the link. Since the last post in April The Autolycan has now apparently acquired some readers in Romania, to whom we say Bine ai venit - Sper să vă bucurati de aceste povesti! and trust that Google Translate is strutting its usual impeccable stuff. Do please forward this one on as well if you like it.
Just one story this time, although in a slightly different vein from previous ones. If you’re new to the blog – or if you want to refresh your memory - can I suggest you flip back to the January post and read The Party’s Over before looking at this story. It doesn’t mean this latest effort will make any more sense, but it does sort of follow on. A bit.
Shreeves boxes clever owes rather a lot to the incomparable P.G Wodehouse and I’ve had a go at imitating his style. So the story comes with (abject) apologies to him, his heirs and assigns and particularly of course their lawyers.
SHREEVES BOXES CLEVER
Builders working in an old pub in the Irish Republic have unearthed one of the most significant finds of gold coins ever recorded in the country.
Sky news
I think I’ve expounded before on Schuster’s General Theory of Life, rule one of which states that it’s often when you’re feeling most awfully braced with everything that Fate wanders in at the dead of night and rigs the old tripwire over the stairs. It occurred to me only the other day that the reverse can be true as well – that sometimes when things look black as night, storm cones hoisted, everyone busy b’ing down the h’s, along comes a cloudless blue sky, crickets chirruping in the lush grass, bees droning lazily, long sunny afternoons - well, you get the picture. When this happens you can invariably detect the masterly hand of my man Shreeves somewhere in the background.
Take the case of the Hon Reginald Bough. We’d been pals at school, and I’d always rather taken to him since his sheer helplessness in the face of Latin grammar and Tudor Kings and whatnot rather took the heat off me. Reggie sort of shot up the school pecking order though when he took up the noble art of fisticuffs and to everyone’s surprise including his own turned out to be rather a whizz at it. Almost overnight Reggie was transformed from plain old Reggie Bough into Biff Bough, prince amongst pugilists.
After we left school I sort of lost touch with old Biff a bit. We were like bees who roomed in the same hive, and always said pip pip when we buzzed across each other’s paths, but there was never the sort of close camaraderie of the true hivemate, if you see what I mean.
All that changed though when I ran into Biff in the Drones one day. I’d had a bit of a stand off with Shreeves that morning as a matter of fact, after the fellow had looked rather askance at some new cufflinks I was sporting. I’d bought them only the previous day, and thought I cut a pretty dashing figure in them, flamboyant even. Shreeves though can say more by raising an eyebrow a quarter inch than most chaps can say in a couple of thousand words, and it was obvious he disapproved.
‘If I might make the suggestion sir, I think something a little more discreet with the Prince of Wales check’.
‘Nonsense, Shreeves, I think they’re perfectly ripping, jolly cheerful and whatnot. Just the thing for the Drones. No, my mind is made up. The cufflinks stay’.
‘Very good, sir’ he said heavily, and I somehow guessed this was not the end of the matter.
Biff was already in the Drones when I got there. He looked as though he’d swallowed a couple of the aforementioned bees, and had a rather hunted look, so I offered him lunch in the hope of bucking him up a bit. And that’s when it all came out. Biff, I gathered, had taken rather more than the proverbial shine to Lady Honoria Trumpton – he was quite besotted in fact – but old Honoria was unmoved, mostly because they’d rather stopped doling out the gravy when they got to Biff and the poor old bird had had to take up prizefighting in order that ends should not merely meet but overlap comfortably. Honoria apparently took a dim view of hitching her wagon to a brawler and scrapper, but Biff had no way other than fighting of sweeping together the sort of pile on which his future happiness depended.
I put the matter to Shreeves later that day. I could see he was still a bit miffed about the cufflinks, but he rallied round and shoulders were applied to wheels and noses to grindstones in that curious anatomical contortion at which he excels. When Shreeves engages that enormous brain of his you can almost see stokers busily feeding the fires, cogs whirring, pistons clanking and so forth, with pristine ideas coming out all shiny and new the other end.
It was when he brought me my tea the next morning that I asked him if he’d got anywhere with the sad case of old Biff.
‘Indeed, sir’ he replied, ‘I rather fancy the solution has been staring us in the face all along. Mr Bough is in need of funds to pursue his suit with Lady Honoria, but his only means of procuring them is disagreeable to Her Ladyship. It follows that Mr Bough must raise the necessary cash somewhat secretively.’
‘But how is he to do that, Shreeves?’
‘I have been reading in the newspapers, sir, of prizefighting competitions in Ireland where the rewards for winners are most substantial. I judge that the results of Irish prizefights will attract little or no attention here, and that if Mr Bough is a good enough fighter he will be able to amass some considerable wealth which he can then with perfect veracity represent to Her Ladyship as his fortune in that country.’
Biff immediately saw the possibilities in this when I put it to him, and before long he and I along with Shreeves were embarked on the steam packet to Dublin where he entered several competitions. Biff, it turned out, was good, the punters flocked and the needful soon started rolling in by the cartload. Shreeves positively preened himself.
The defining moment, as it were, came when he was matched against a real bruiser called Hammer O’Hagan who turned out to have been all Ireland champion for the past five years. Hammer had never been beaten and when he climbed into the ring set up at a pretty little pub outside Dublin you could see why. Hammer was a giant of a man - pretty nearly broad enough to stand in the middle of the ring and lean on both the red and blue corner posts at the same time. I was all for throwing in the towel there and then, but Shreeves had a sort of faraway look in his eyes and laid a restraining arm on mine as the towel was about to wing its way.
To cut to the chase, as they say, the fight was hard and brutal, but astonishingly Hammer eventually hit the canvas like a landslide and Biff was jolly sportingly cheered to the rafters.
Later that night we were in the kitchen of the pub counting the jolly old lucre, when there came a loud thumping at the door. Biff and I looked at each other in some alarm, and didn’t notice Shreeves glide noiselessly out. I swear the man is capable of locomotion without actually moving his legs. He flickered back into the room escorting three newcomers.
‘Mr The Brain, Mr Scarface and Mr Crusher, sir’ he intoned. The Brain fellow appeared to be the leader of the group and his eyes immediately fell on the loot.
Well, you know me, always happy to see new faces and so on, so I let fly with a cheery ‘What ho!’ expecting the same by return. I got the impression though that this Brain bird must have done one of those course thingies where fellows go to bone up on wine or gundogs or whatever, only his course was in snarling. He snarled.
‘What ho, what ho I say!’ I said brightly, feeling that the conversation was perhaps flagging a little, but received only another snarl by way of reply. The thing was starting to smell rummy.
‘Ain’t nobody fights and gambles round here widout me and the boys say so’ announced our new guest. ‘You put on da prizefights, you needa protection, ain’t dat so boys?’
We Schusters may not have perfected the snarl, but have always purveyed a pretty good line in sneering. I sneered. He snarled. I re-sneered. He re-snarled. It was pretty clear that communication was breaking down, and I looked across at his two companions to see what they made of it all. I must say that the hearts of the Scarface and Crusher beans didn’t really seem to be in it, if you know what I mean. It was partly to do with the way they had immediately fallen to exclaiming about the beams and the mullions and whatnot, and partly to do with the way the Crusher bird had very promptly ordered a couple of glasses of Chardonnay while they perused the menu.
Things looked frankly pretty rummy at this point, but then I noticed Shreeves draw this Brain bloke aside and whisper meaningfully in his ear. The Brain character then started moving all the cash into a downstairs cellar, and although he asked the other two to help they were too busy debating whether to start with the potted shrimps or the smoked mackerel. So he moved the whole lot downstairs by himself and then scarpered. And after the other two had finished a jolly decent dinner and decided they would have another digestif after all, they paid and cleared off too.
‘Shreeves’, I said at last ‘you’re up to something’.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I mean, dash it, what’s going on? That O’Hagan fellow should have left Biff seeing stars in the first, and I sort of formed the view that the rather coarse chappie who wanted to protect the dosh wanted to protect it chiefly for himself.’
‘I adopted similar stratagems with both gentlemen, sir. I informed Mr O’Hagan that I had in my possession a pair of vintage cufflinks, the property of royalty, that were far more valuable than the night’s takings. I encouraged him to lose the fight by giving him one cufflink and promising to help him locate the other after Mr Bough had been victorious’.
I flabbered. I may even have gasted. ‘Shreeves!’ I eventually expostulated, which might have been a bit feeble but was the best I could come up with in the circs. I looked hard at the man.
‘Similarly with Mr The Brain sir, I felt some cheap gaudy trinket which he believed to be valuable would distract him. I gave him the other cufflink and implied that I would be able to produce its mate in a few days. I advised him that until then the money would be safer in the cellar.’
‘But if they’ve each got one cufflink, won’t they both be back looking for the other?’ I thought I had him there.
‘I have foreseen the probability, sir.’
‘Well?’
‘I have informed each gentleman, sir, of the identity of the current owner of the other cufflink. I have gone on to impart to each the intelligence that the other is embarking for New York, along with the matching cufflink.’
‘But that isn’t even true!’
‘I fancy it will be, sir, when each considers his next move.’
‘But won’t they come back and set about us or whatever ruffians do when they find out?’
‘I believe not, sir. Tomorrow’s Irish Times will carry front page news of a police raid on this establishment and the removal of the funds.’
‘But there hasn’t been a police raid!’
‘No, sir. A small fabrication, sir. The money is now quite safe, and belongs, I believe, to Mr Bough. He may now inform Lady Honoria that he is a well to do gentleman who has no further need of participating in what she believes to be a distasteful activity. I trust you are not too distressed by the loss of the cufflinks, sir?’
‘Shreeves,’ I breathed, ‘you’re a marvel.’
‘I endeavour to give satisfaction, sir.’
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ANAGRAM CORNER
SIR BRADLEY WIGGINS
SLY RIDER AN' BIGWIGS!
