My Uncle Oswald Part 9

"That's all I'm prepared to say."

He squinted at me through the pipe smoke. "You wouldn't threaten me in some way, would you?" he said. "Or torture me?"

"Of course not. The act would be of your own free will. Would you like to bet me that I won't succeed?"

"Of my own free will, you say?"

"Yes."

"Then I'll bet you anything you like."

"Right," I said. "The bet is that if you lose, you promise the following: firstly, to withhold publication until we've each made a million. Secondly, to become a full and enthusiastic partner. Thirdly, to supply all the technical knowledge necessary for me to set up the sperm vault."

"I don't mind making a promise I'll never have to keep," he said.

"Then you promise?"

"I promise," he said.

I paid the bill and offered to drive A. R. Woresley home in my motor car. "Thank you," he said, "but I have my bicycle. We poor dons are not as affluent as some."

"You soon will be," I said.

I stood on Trinity Street and watched him pedalling away into the night. It was still only about nine thirty p.m. I decided to make my next move immediately. I got into the motor car and headed straight for Girton.

10.

GIRTON, in case you don't know it, was and still is a ladies' college and a part of the university. Within those sombre walls there dwelt in 1919 a cl.u.s.ter of young ladies so physically repulsive, so thick-necked and long-snouted I could hardly bring myself to look at them. They reminded me of crocodiles. They sent shivers down the back of my neck as I pa.s.sed them in the street. They seldom washed and the lenses of their spectacles were smudged with greasy fingermarks. Brainy they certainly were. Many were brilliant. To my mind, that was small compensation.

But wait.

Only one week before, I had discovered among these zoological specimens a creature of such dazzling loveliness I refused to believe she was a Girton girl. Yet she was. I had discovered her in a bunshop at lunchtime. She was eating a doughnut. I asked if I might sit at her table. She nodded and went on eating. And there I sat, gaping and goggling at her as though she were Cleopatra herself reincarnated. Never in my short life had I seen a girl or a woman with such a stench of salacity about her. She was absolutely soaked in s.e.x. It made no difference that there was sugar and doughnut all over her face. She was wearing a mackintosh and a woolly scarf but she might just as well have been stark naked. Only once or twice in a lifetime does one meet a girl like that. The face was beautiful beyond words, but there was a flare to the nostrils and a curious little twist of the upper lip that had me wriggling all over my chair. Not even in Paris had I met a female who inspired such instant l.u.s.t. She went on eating her doughnut. I went on goggling at her. Once, but only once, her eyes rose slowly to my face and there they rested, cool and shrewd, as if calculating something, then they fell again. She finished her doughnut and pushed back her chair.

"Hang on," I said.

She paused, and for a second time those calculating brown eyes came up and rested on my face.

"What did you say?"

"I said hang on. Don't go. Have another doughnut . or a Bath bun or something."

"If you want to talk to me, why don't you say so?"

"I want to talk to you."

She folded her hands in her lap and waited. I began to talk. Soon she joined in. She was a biology student at Girton and, like me, she had a scholarship. Her father was English, her mother Persian. Her name was Yasmin Howcomely. What we said to one another is irrelevant. We went straight from the bunshop to my rooms and stayed there until the next morning. Eighteen hours we stayed together and at the end of it all I felt like a piece of pemmican, a strip of desiccated dehydrated meat. She was electric, that girl, and wicked beyond belief. Had she been Chinese and living in Peking, she could have gotten her Diploma of Merit with her hands tied behind her back and iron shackles on her feet.

I went so dotty about her that I broke the golden rule and saw her a second time.

And now it was twenty to ten in the evening and A. R. Woresley was bicycling home and I myself was in the porter's lodge at Girton asking the old porter kindly to inform Miss Yasmin Howcomely that Mr. Oswald Cornelius wished to see her on a matter of the most urgent nature.

She came down at once. "Hop in the car," I said. "We have things to talk about." She hopped in and I drove her back to Trinity where I gave the Trinity porter half a sovereign to look the other way as she slid past him to my rooms.

"Keep your clothes on," I said to her. "This is business. How would you like to get rich?"

"I'd like it very much," she said.

"Can I trust you completely?"

"Yes," she said.

"You won't tell a soul?"

"Go on," she said. "It sounds like fun already."

I then proceeded to tell her the entire story of A. R. Woresley's discovery.

"My G.o.d!" she said when I had finished. "This is a great scientific discovery! Who the h.e.l.l is A. R. Woresley? He's going to be world famous! I'd like to meet him!"

"You soon will," I said.

"When?" Being herself a bright young scientist, she was genuinely excited.

"Wait," I said. "Here's the next installment." I then told her about my plans for exploiting the discovery and making a fortune by starting a sperm vault for the great geniuses of the world and all the kings.

When I had finished, she asked me if I had any wine. I opened a bottle of claret and poured a gla.s.s for each of us. I found some good dry biscuits to go with it.

"It's sort of a funny idea, this sperm vault of yours," she said. "But I'm afraid it's not going to work." She proceeded to put forward all the same old reasons that A. R. Woresley had given me earlier in the evening. I allowed her to spout on. Then I played my ace of spades.

"Last time we met I told you the story of my Parisian caper," I said. "You remember that?"

"The splendid Blister Beetle," she said. "I keep wishing you'd brought some back with you."

"I did."

"You're not serious!"

"When you use only a pinhead at a time, five pounds of powder goes an awful long way. I've got about a pound left."

"Then that's the answer!" she cried, clapping her hands.

"I know."

"Slip them a powder and they'll give us a thousand million of their little squigglers every time!"

"Using you as the teaser."

"Oh, I'll be the teaser all right," she said. "I'll tease them to death. Even the ancient ones will be able to deliver! Show me this magic stuff."

I fetched the famous biscuit tin and opened it. The powder lay an inch deep in the tin. Yasmin dipped a finger in it and started to put it to her mouth. I grabbed her wrist. "Are you mad?" I shouted. "You've got about six full doses sticking to the skin of that finger!" I hung onto her wrist and dragged her to the bathroom and held her finger under the tap.

"I want to try it," she said. "Come on, darling. Just give me a tiny bit."

"My G.o.d, woman," I said, "have you any idea what it does to you!"

"You already told me."

"If you want to see it working, just watch what it does to A. R. Woresley when you give it to him tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?"

"Absolutely," I said.

"Whoopee! When tomorrow?"

"You get old Woresley to deliver and I win my bet," I said. "That means he's got to join us. Woresley, you, and me. We'll make a great team."

"I like it," she said. "We'll rock the world."

"We'll rock more than that," I said. "We'll rock all the crowned heads of Europe. But we must rock Woresley first."

"He has to be alone."

"No problem," I said. "He's alone in the lab every evening between five thirty and six thirty. Then he goes home to his supper."

"How am I going to feed it to him?" she asked. "The powder?"

"In a chocolate," I said. "In a delicious little chocolate. It has to be small so that he'll pop the whole thing in his mouth in one go."

"And where pray do we get delicious little chocolates these days?" she asked. "You forget there's been a war on."

"That's the whole point," I said. "A. R. Woresley won't have had a decent bit of chocolate since 1914. He'll gobble it up."

"But do you have any?"

"Right here," I said. "Money can buy anything." I opened a drawer and produced a box of chocolate truffles. Each was identical. Each was the size of a small marble. They were supplied to me by Prestat, the great chocolateers of Oxford Street, London. I took one of them and made a hole in it with a pin. I enlarged the hole a bit. I then used the head of the same pin to measure out one dose of Blister Beetle powder. I tipped this into the hole. I measured a second dose and tipped that in also.

"Hey!" Yasmin cried. "That's two doses!"

"I know. I want to make absolutely sure Mr. Woresley delivers."

"It'll drive him round the twist."

"He'll get over it."

"What about me?"

"I think you can take care of yourself," I said. I pressed the soft chocolate together to seal up the hole. I then stuck a matchstick into the chocolate. "I'm giving you two chocolates," I said. "One for you and one for him. His is the one with the match in it." I put the chocolates in a paper bag and pa.s.sed them over. We discussed at some length the plan of battle.

"Will he become violent?" she asked.

"Just a tiny bit."

"And where do I get that thing you were talking about?"

I produced the thing in question. She examined it to make sure it was in good condition, then put it in her handbag.

"All set?"

"Yes," she said.

"Don't forget this one will be a dress rehearsal for all the others you'll be doing later on. So learn all you can."

"I wish I knew judo," she said.

"You'll be all right."

I drove her back to Girton and saw her safely in through the gates of the college.

11.

WE NOW MOVE FORWARD to five thirty in the afternoon of the following day. I myself was lying quite comfortably on the floor behind a row of wooden filing cabinets in A. R. Woresley's laboratory. I had spent much of the day wandering casually in and out of the lab, reconnoitring the terrain and gradually easing the cabinets twenty inches away from the wall so that I could squeeze in behind them. I had also left a one-inch gap between two of the cabinets so that by looking through it I was able to get an excellent view along the whole length of the lab. A. R. Woresley always worked at the far end of the room, about twenty feet from where I was stationed. He was there now. He was fooling about with a rack of test tubes and a pipette and some blue liquid. He was not wearing his usual white coat today. He was in shirt-sleeves and a pair of grey flannels. There was a knock on the door.

"Come in!" he called out, not looking up.

Yasmin entered. I had not told her I was going to be watching. Why should I? But a general must always keep an eye on his troops during battle. My girl looked ravishing in a cotton print dress that fitted tightly around her superstructure, and as she came into the room there came with her that elusive aura of l.u.s.t and lechery that followed her like a shadow wherever she went.

"Mr. Woresley?"

"Yes, I'm Woresley," he said, still not looking up. "What do you want?"

"Please forgive me for barging in on you like this, Mr. Woresley," she said. "I'm not a chemist. I'm actually a biology student. But I've run up against a rather difficult problem which is more chemical than biological. I've asked around all over the place but no one seems able to give me the answer. They all referred me to you."