No. XI.
The Q-Loan Problem
The problem which came up for adjudication on this occasion was as follows:—
‘It is required in three days to borrow as many things as possible, the name of each thing to begin with the letter Q. Nothing counts for the competition if its name is on the list of more than one member. No money may be given or promised in respect of any loan.’
‘I’ve arranged this,’ said Mr Austin, who was the chairman for the evening, ‘so as to avoid any overstrain for myself. I shall call on that notorious painter and decorator, Mr Wildersley, to begin with his list. When he has finished he will call on somebody else. The second man in his turn will name the third, and so on. If anything is read out by another member which is also down on your own list, hold up your hand. The secretary will keep the score. That leaves me absolutely nothing to do until it is time to announce the winner, and I shall probably go to sleep. So don’t make any disturbing noises, please. You can begin now, Wildersley.’
‘My score is six,’ said Wildersley, ‘unless some of you selfish men have had the same ideas as I have. On my first day I borrowed two things—one of which people seem to show hesitation about lending, while the other was a thing that very few people have got to lend nowadays. In fact, I borrowed a quid and a quill-pen.’
Many hands went up.
‘This is painful and surprising,’ said Wildersley, ‘and reduces my score to four. On the second day I visited a female relative, said that I had a cold coming on, and had no difficulty in borrowing some quinine and a quilt.’
But a show of hands indicated that others had found it equally easy.
‘That brings me down to two, but the last two are good. I doubt if any other member could have thought of them, or could have borrowed them in any case. But I happen to know a painter who has got whole wardrobes full of costumes—uses them for his alleged pictures. From him I borrowed, firstly, a queue.’
‘I appeal to the chairman,’ said Jimmy Feldane confidently. ‘That word is spelled with a K.’
‘No,’ said the chairman. ‘You are probably thinking of the Gardens of the same name.’
‘In any case it’s the thing they have outside the pit entrance, and you can’t borrow it.’
‘That will be for Mr Wildersley to explain.’
‘I did not borrow a crowd outside a pit entrance,’ said Wildersley. ‘But I did borrow the tie of a wig, which is another meaning of the word. That’s one to me, anyhow. And I also borrowed a quoif.’
‘Surely, sir,’ said Mr Quillian, ‘that word is spelled with a C?’
The chairman consulted a useful work of reference, and announced that the word was spelled in both ways.
‘May we have your authority for that statement?’
‘Standard dictionary.’
‘And will you define a standard dictionary for the purposes of this competition?’
‘For the purposes of this competition a standard dictionary is any dictionary that was published subsequently to the eighteenth century and cost more than fivepence-halfpenny originally.’
‘It doesn’t much matter really, for as the word is also on my own list neither Wildersley nor I can score it.’
‘You might have said that before,’ said the chairman. ‘It looks as if you were giving me trouble on purpose.’
And it is quite possible that his surmise was correct. The Problem Club does not allow its chairman to sleep when on duty. Sir Charles Bunford requested him to state what Mr Wildersley’s score was; and it may not have been from inadvertence that Wildersley neglected to name his successor and left it to the chairman to do so. He called upon Dr Alden.
‘Well,’ said the Doctor, ‘I had borrowed quinine, of course, but that has been ruled out. I also borrowed some quassia from the same man. No hands up? I think I score one for quassia, if the chairman admits it.’
The chairman consulted his dictionary and said that quassia appeared to be all right. He was immediately asked by Mr Pusely-Smythe if he could inform the members whether quassia was a summer drink or an intermittent fever.
‘At the present moment,’ said Mr Austin severely, ‘I am giving my most eager and concentrated attention to the conscientious discharge of my arduous duties. I cannot be interrupted by purely frivolous questions. Dr Alden will proceed.’
‘I further borrowed a quadrant and a thermometer.’
‘I fear,’ said the chairman, ‘that I must rule that the word thermometer does not begin with the letter Q.’
‘Your rapid grasp of these fine points, sir, impels my admiration. But with great respect I would point out that this thermometer contained mercury, and therefore in borrowing the thermometer I borrowed quicksilver. My remaining loans consisted of a quarto and a quotation.’
But other members had borrowed both a quarto and a quotation. Dr Alden was accordingly left with a score of three.
Major Byles, who came next, had done better. In the course of a morning stroll with a neighbouring landowner over his property, he had borrowed some weird things. His list consisted of a quarry, a quicksand, some quickset, quitch-grass, and quick-lime. And as none of these things had been borrowed by any other member he scored five. But he did not seem entirely happy about it.
‘The trouble with these problems,’ he said, ‘is that one has to do absolutely idiotic things, and consequently one is likely to be thought an absolute idiot. I did the best I could. I invented quite a plausible story about a geological friend to account for the quarry and the quicksand. But I believe that my neighbour goes about saying that poor old Byles is far from well, and tapping his forehead to indicate the nature of my complaint. It’s most unpleasant. Still, five ain’t such a bad score. How did you get on with that quagga, Jimmy?’
‘Nothing doing,’ said Jimmy. ‘I went to the Zoo, just as I said I would. But, if you ask me, the whole place is rotten with red tape and officialism. They wouldn’t lend me the blessed quagga, though I promised them I’d return it in five minutes. Said it was not customary to lend out the animals, and a lot of silly talk like that. Quite obstinate about it, too. I’d got Hesseltine there to take a snapshot of me shepherding the quagga in the wilds of Regent’s Park, and it simply meant our valuable time thrown away. Also, it appeared that quaggas are out of print and they’d not got one.
‘But quite apart from that I’m not claiming to have won. I’ve only got two things down on my list that have not been claimed so far. The first was the queen of spades from a pack of cards, and the second is the four kings from the same pack. I don’t spell the word king with a Q, but the four of them are a quatorse, at piquet. But a score of two’s no use, and I shall probably be described on my tombstone as brainy but unfortunate. Meanwhile I notice a sunny smile on the face of our padre, as if he were a prize-winner. He might tell us how he did it.’
The Rev. Septimus Cunliffe had certainly been energetic and industrious. To start with he had called upon an old friend of his, a man of some learning, with an interest in music and a fair library. Here he had no difficulty in borrowing Quixote, Quivedo, Quintillian, Quain, and some quadrilles, quartets, and quintets. He engaged his host in a discussion as to the precise meaning of a quip, a quirk, and a quiddity, persuaded him to write down an instance of each, and borrowed the instances. He borrowed a quatrain of his host’s composition, and twenty-four sheets of notepaper, which make a quire.
The next two days were less productive, but he borrowed a specimen of quartz from one man, and a dog, which was unquestionably a quadruped, from another. A lady who was interested in archery lent him a quiver. Loans of a quoit, a quart of milk, and a quarter of coal were also negotiated.
But all the same, his smile of self-congratulation was premature. He was not destined to score eighteen, for the simple reason that he had not borrowed a single thing which was not on the list of either Lord Herngill, or Mr Quillian, or Mr Pusely-Smythe. And they in their turn could not score because everything on their lists was also on the parson’s. Industry had cancelled industry; ingenuity had destroyed ingenuity.
The only other member who could produce a score at all was Mr Matthews. He registered a modest score of one for having borrowed a quarrel. It was in vain that Hesseltine maintained that you could pick a quarrel but could not borrow one. The chairman referred to his standard dictionary and learned that a quarrel was not necessarily a dispute; it might be a diamond-shaped pane of glass, which was, in fact, what Mr Matthews had borrowed.
‘Well,’ said the chairman, ‘Major Byles is the winner, and I think he deserves to be. The rest of you were a tame set of sheep, laborious and ingenious, but without any proper spirit of enterprise. But nobody could walk out calmly one morning and borrow a quarry and a quicksand unless he were really adventurous. To do that was magnificent and Elizabethan. I confess that I should like to know what the neighbour said when the Major borrowed the quitch-grass.’
‘Oh, the old chap didn’t say much,’ said Major Byles. ‘That was the last thing I borrowed, and by that time he seemed rather worried and nervous. I told him quite a good story, too, about a nephew in London who wanted a specimen for botanical purposes. The real trouble was that, as it had to be a loan, I sent the beastly weed back to him three days later. That was when he decided I really must have had a touch of the sun, or had given way to the habit, or something of that kind. But I shall live it down. Anyway, I’ve won, and I don’t care if it snows.’
‘Quite so. In the problems of this club, as in the problems of life, it sometimes happens that courage and character will do more than low cunning to effect a solution. And I hope that this will be a lesson to certain members who, by a series of vexatious and needless questions, have deprived me of my proper rest this evening. However, I shall shortly be taking it out of them at bridge, and they have my forgiveness.’
‘If,’ said Pusely-Smythe, ‘the chairman has finished infringing the prerogative of our padre by delivering a sermon, he will perhaps inform us what the next problem is.’
‘Certainly,’ said the chairman cheerfully. ‘I was forgetting. It is Dr Alden’s turn to take the chair next time, but complications have arisen. I’ve had a letter from the talented editor of The Pig-Keepers’ Friend, who sets our problems, and, as you will remember, was introduced to us by Lord Herngill. It appears that, in consequence of his personal knowledge of the esteemed editor, Lord Herngill would have an unfair advantage in this next competition, and is therefore with his own consent disqualified for it. But for the same reason he is specially qualified to adjudicate on the problem. I have mentioned the matter to Herngill and the Doctor, and they are both willing to exchange their turns as chairman. So that, subject to your approval, Herngill will be the chairman at our next meeting. I will put it to you, gentlemen.’
The proposal met with general approval.
‘That’s all right,’ said the chairman. ‘Then we can have the card-tables brought in. And if I can only manage to cut with the Major, I fancy that our opponents will have a pretty thin time. This is his evening.’
‘I do not wish,’ said Mr Quillian solemnly, ‘to dispute the statement, but even now we do not know what the problem for next month is to be.’
‘You’re right,’ said the chairman; ‘you’re absolutely right. It’s funny, but if I forget a thing once I nearly always forget it twice. However, as a matter of fact, I don’t yet know it myself. Here it is in its sealed envelope. We will investigate it.’
He tore open the envelope and glanced at the contents.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I really don’t know why he made so much fuss about it. You couldn’t have anything simpler. He calls it “The Pig-Keeper’s Problem.” This is all it is: “It is required to buy a copy of the current issue of The Pig-Keepers’ Friend.” I don’t see any difficulty about that, do you, Leonard?’
But Leonard declined to be drawn. ‘I should like to have notice of that question,’ he said.