Part 17

“Thank you,” said Boswell, gratefully. “Shall you say anything clever during dinner, sir? If so, I might be putting it down while I’m up—”

“Get out!” roared the Doctor. “Get up as high as you can—get up with Shem on the mizzentop—”

“Very good, sir,” replied Boswell, and he was off.

“You ought to be more lenient with him, Doctor,” said Bonaparte; “he means well.”

“I know it,” observed Johnson; “but he’s so very previous. Last winter, at Chaucer’s dinner to Burns, I made a speech, which Boswell printed a week before it was delivered, with the words ‘laughter’ and ‘uproarious applause’ interspersed through it. It placed me in a false position.”

“How did he know what you were going to say?” queried Demosthenes.

“Don’t know,” replied Johnson. “Kind of mind-reader, I fancy,” he added, blushing a trifle. “But, Captain Holmes, what do you deduce from your observation of the wake of the House-boat? If she’s going to Paris, why the change?”

“I have two theories,” replied the detective.

“Which is always safe,” said Le Coq.

“Always; it doubles your chances of success,” acquiesced Holmes. “Anyhow, it gives you a choice, which makes it more interesting. The change of her course from Londonward to Parisward proves to me either that Kidd is not satisfied with the extent of the revenge he has already taken, and wishes to ruin you gentlemen financially by turning your wives, daughters, and sisters loose on the Parisian shops, or that the pirates have themselves been overthrown by the ladies, who have decided to prolong their cruise and get some fun out of their misfortune.”

“And where else than to Paris would any one in search of pleasure go?” asked Bonaparte.

“I had more fun a few miles outside of Brussels,” said Wellington, with a sly wink at Washington.

“Oh, let up on that!” retorted Bonaparte. “It wasn’t you beat me at Waterloo. You couldn’t have beaten me at a plain ordinary game of old-maid with a stacked pack of cards, much less in the game of war, if you hadn’t had the elements with you.”

“Tut!” snapped Wellington. “It was clear science laid you out, Boney.”

“Taisey-voo!” shouted the irate Corsican. “Clear science be hanged! Wet science was what did it. If it hadn’t been for the rain, my little Duke, I should have been in London within a week, my grenadiers would have been camping in your Rue Peekadeely, and the Old Guard all over everywhere else.”

“You must have had a gay army, then,” laughed Cæsar. “What are French soldiers made of, that they can’t stand the wet—unshrunk linen or flannel?”

“Bah!” observed Napoleon, shrugging his shoulders and walking a few paces away. “You do not understand the French. The Frenchman is not a pell-mell soldier like you Romans; he is the poet of arms; he does not go in for glory at the expense of his dignity; style, form, is dearer to him than honor, and he has no use for fighting in the wet and coming out of the fight conspicuous as a victor with the curl out of his feathers and his epaulets rusted with the damp. There is no glory in water. But if we had had umbrellas and mackintoshes, as every Englishman who comes to the Continent always has, and a bath-tub for everybody, then would your Waterloo have been different again, and the great democracy of Europe with a Bonaparte for emperor would have been founded for what the Americans call the keeps; and as for your little Great Britain, ha! she would have become the Blackwell’s Island of the Greater France.”

“You’re almost as funny as Punch isn’t,” drawled Wellington, with an angry gesture at Bonaparte. “You weren’t within telephoning distance of victory all day. We simply played with you, my boy. It was a regular game of golf for us. We let you keep up pretty close and win a few holes, but on the home drive we had you beaten in one stroke. Go to, my dear Bonaparte, and stop talking about the flood.”

“It’s a lucky thing for us that Noah wasn’t a Frenchman, eh?” said Frederick the Great. “How that rain would have fazed him if he had been! The human race would have been wiped out.”

“Oh, pshaw!” ejaculated Noah, deprecating the unseemliness of the quarrel, and putting his arm affectionately about Bonaparte’s shoulder. “When you come down to that, I was French—as French as one could be in those days—and these Gallic subjects of my friend here were, every one of ’em, my lineal descendants, and their hatred of rain was inherited directly from me, their ancestor.”

“Are not we English as much your descendants?” queried Wellington, arching his eyebrows.

“You are,” said Noah, “but you take after Mrs. Noah more than after me. Water never fazes a woman, and your delight in tubs is an essentially feminine trait. The first thing Mrs. Noah carried aboard was a laundry outfit, and then she went back for rugs and coats and all sorts of hand-baggage. Gad, it makes me laugh to this day when I think of it! She looked for all the world like an Englishman travelling on the Continent as she walked up the gang-plank behind the elephants, each elephant with a Gladstone bag in his trunk and a hat-box tied to his tail.” Here the venerable old weather-prophet winked at Munchausen, and the little quarrel which had been imminent passed off in a general laugh.

“Where’s Boswell? He ought to get that anecdote,” said Johnson.

“I’ve locked him up in the library,” said Holmes. “He’s in charge of the log, and as I have a pretty good general idea as to what is about to happen, I have mapped out a skeleton of the plot and set him to work writing it up.” Here the detective gave a sudden start, placed his hand to his ear, listened intently for an instant, and, taking out his watch and glancing at it, added, quietly, “In three minutes Shem will be in here to announce a discovery, and one of great importance, I judge, from the squeak.”

The assemblage gazed earnestly at Holmes for a moment.

“The squeak?” queried Raleigh.

“Precisely,” said Holmes. “The squeak is what I said, and as I always say what I mean, it follows logically that I meant what I said.”

“I heard no squeak,” observed Dr. Johnson; “and, furthermore, I fail to see how a squeak, if I had heard it, would have portended a discovery of importance.”