Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsCollier’s Weekly, April 6, 1929
BLANDINGS CASTLE slept in the sunshine. Dancing little ripples of heat-mist played across its smooth lawns and stone-flagged terraces. It was that gracious hour of a summer afternoon, midway between luncheon and tea, when Nature seems to unbutton its waistcoat and put its feet up.
In the shade of a laurel bush outside the back premises of this stately home of England, Beach, butler to Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, its proprietor, sat sipping the contents of a long glass and reading a weekly paper devoted to the doings of Society and the Stage. His attention had just been arrested by a photograph in an oval border on one of the inner pages, and for perhaps a minute he scrutinized this in a slow, thorough, popeyed way, absorbing its every detail. Then, with a chuckle, he took a penknife from his pocket, cut out the photograph, and placed it in the recesses of his costume.
At this moment the laurel bush, which had hitherto not spoken, said “Psst!”
The butler started violently. A spasm ran through his ample frame.
“Beach!” said the bush.
SOMETHING was now peering out of it. This might have been a wood-nymph, but the butler rather thought not, and he was right. It was a tall young man with light hair. He recognized his employer’s secretary, Mr. Hugo Carmody, and rose with pained reproach. His heart was still jumping, and he had bitten his tongue.
“Startle you, Beach?”
“Extremely, sir.”
“I’m sorry. Excellent for the liver, though. Beach, do you want to earn a quid?”
The butler’s austerity softened. The hard look died out of his eyes.
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you get hold of Miss Millicent alone?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Then give her this note, and don’t let anyone see you do it. Especially—and this is where I want you to follow me very closely, Beach—Lady Constance Keeble.”
“I will attend to the matter immediately, sir.”
He smiled a paternal smile. Hugo smiled back. A perfect understanding prevailed between these two. Beach understood that he ought not to be giving his employer’s niece surreptitious notes and Hugo understood that he ought not to be urging a good man to place such a weight upon his conscience.
“Perhaps you are not aware, sir,” said the butler, having trousered the wages of sin, “that her ladyship went up to London on the 3:30 train?”
Hugo uttered an exclamation of chagrin.
“You mean that all this Red Indian stuff—creeping from bush to bush and not letting a single twig snap beneath my feet—has simply been a waste of time?” He emerged, dusting his clothes. “I wish I’d known that before,” he said. “I’ve severely injured a good suit, and it’s a very moot question whether I haven’t got some kind of a beetle down my back. However, nobody ever took a toss through being careful.”
“Very true, sir.”
Relieved by the information that the X-ray eye of the aunt of the girl he loved was operating elsewhere, Mr. Carmody became conversational.
“Nice day, Beach.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know, Beach, life’s rummy. I mean to say, you can never tell what the future holds in store. Here I am at Blandings Castle, loving it. Sing of joy, sing of bliss, home was never like this. And yet, when the project of my coming here was first placed on the agenda, I don’t mind telling you the heart was rather bowed down with weight of woe.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Yes. Noticeably bowed down. If you knew the circumstances, you would understand why.”
Beach did know the circumstances. There were few facts concerning the dwellers in Blandings Castle of which he remained in ignorance for long. He was aware that young Mr. Carmody had been until a few weeks back co-proprietor with Mr. Ronald Fish, Lord Emsworth’s nephew, of a night-club called the Hot Spot, situated just off Bond Street in the heart of London’s pleasure-seeking area; that, despite this favored position, it had proved a financial failure; that Mr. Ronald had gone off with his mother, Lady Julia Fish, to recuperate at Biarritz and that Hugo, on the insistence of Ronnie that unless some niche was found for his boyhood friend he would not stir a step toward Biarritz or any other blighted place, had come to Blandings in the capacity of Lord Emsworth’s private secretary.
“NO DOUBT you were reluctant to leave London, sir?”
“Exactly. But now, Beach, believe me or believe me not, as far as I am concerned, anyone who likes can have London. Mark you, I’m not saying that just one brief night in the Piccadilly neighborhood would come amiss. But to dwell in, give me Blandings Castle. What a spot, Beach!”
“Yes, sir.”
“A garden of Eden, shall I call it, Beach?”
“Certainly, sir, if you wish.”
“And now that old Ronnie’s coming here, joy, as you might say, will be unconfined.”
“Is Mr. Ronald expected, sir?”
“Coming either tomorrow or the day after. I had a letter from him this morning. Which reminds me. He sends his regards to you and asks me to tell you to put your shirt on Baby Bones for the Medbury Selling Plate.”
The butler pursed his lips dubiously.
“A long shot, sir. Not generally fancied.”
“Rank outsider. Leave it alone is my verdict.”
“And yet Mr. Ronald is usually very reliable. It is many years now since he first began to advise me in these matters, and I have done remarkably well by following him. Even as a lad at Eton he was always singularly fortunate in his information concerning these affairs.”
“Well, suit yourself,” said Hugo, indifferently. “What was that thing you were cutting out of the paper just now?”
“A photograph of Mr. Galahad, sir. I keep an album in which I paste items of interest relating to the members of the family.”
“What that album needs is an eyewitness’s description of Lady Constance Keeble falling out of a window and breaking her neck,” observed young Mr. Hugo Carmody.
A nice sense of the proprieties prevented Beach from endorsing this view verbally, but he sighed a little wistfully. He had frequently felt much the same about the chatelaine of Blandings.
“If you would care to see the clipping, sir? There is a reference to Mr. Galahad’s literary work.”
Most of the photographs in the weekly paper over which Beach had been relaxing were of peeresses trying to look like chorus-girls and chorus-girls trying to look like peeresses; but this one showed the perky features of a dapper little gentleman in the late fifties.
Beneath it, in large letters, was the single word:
“GALLY”
Under this ran a caption in smaller print:
The Hon. Galahad Threepwood, brother of the Earl of Emsworth.
A little bird tells us that “Gally” is at Blandings Castle, Shropshire, the ancestral seat of the family, busily engaged in writing his Reminiscences. As every member of the Old Brigade will testify, they ought to be as warm as the weather, if not warmer.
Hugo scanned the exhibit thoughtfully and handed it back.
“Yes,” he observed, “I should say that about summed it up. That old bird must have been pretty hot stuff, I imagine, back in the days of Edward the Confessor.”
“Mr. Galahad was somewhat wild as a young man,” agreed the butler with a sort of feudal pride in his voice. It was his opinion that the Hon. Galahad shed luster on Blandings Castle.
“Has it ever occurred to you, Beach, that that book of his is going to make no small stir when it comes out?”
“Frequently, sir.”
“Well, I’m saving up for my copy. By the way, I knew there was something I wanted to ask you. Can you give me any information on the subject of a bloke named Baxter?”
“Mr. Baxter, sir? He used to be private secretary to his lordship.”
“Yes, so I gathered. Lady Constance was speaking to me about him this morning. She happened upon me as I was taking the air in riding kit and didn’t seem overpleased. ‘You appear to enjoy a great deal of leisure, Mr. Carmody,’ she said. ‘Mr. Baxter,’ she continued, giving me the meaning eye, ‘never seemed to find time to go riding when he was Lord Emsworth’s secretary. Mr. Baxter was always so hard at work. But, then, Mr. Baxter,’ she added, the old lamp becoming more meaning than ever, ‘loved his work. Mr. Baxter took a real interest in his duties.’ Or words to that effect. I may be wrong, but I classed it as a dirty dig. And what I want to know is, if Baxter was such a world-beater, why did they ever let him go?”
The butler gazed about cautiously.
“I fancy, sir, there was some trouble.”
“Pinched the spoons, eh? Always the way with these zealous workers.”
“I never succeeded in learning the full details, sir, but there was something about some flower-pots.”
“He pinched the flower-pots?”
“Threw them at his lordship, I was given to understand.”
Hugo looked injured. He was a high-spirited young man who chafed at injustice.
“Well, I’m dashed if I see then,” he said, “where this Baxter can claim to rank so jolly high above me as a secretary. I may be leisurely, I may forget to answer letters, I may occasionally on warm afternoons go in to some extent for the folding of the hands in sleep, but at least I don’t throw flower-pots at people. Not so much as a pen-wiper have I ever bunged at Lord Emsworth. Well, I must be getting about my duties. That ride this morning and a slight slumber after lunch have set the schedule back a bit. You won’t forget that note, will you?”
“No, sir.”
Hugo reflected.
“On second thoughts,” he said, “perhaps you’d better hand it back to me. Safer not to have too much written matter circulating about the place. Just tell Miss Millicent that she will find me in the rose garden at six sharp.”
“Very good, sir. I will see that she receives the information.”
FOR two hours after this absolutely nothing happened in the grounds of Blandings Castle. At the end of that period there sounded through the mellow, drowsy stillness a drowsy, mellow chiming. It was the clock over the stables striking five. Simultaneously, a small but noteworthy procession filed out of the house and made its way across the sun-bathed lawn to where the big cedar cast a grateful shade. It was headed by James, a footman, bearing a laden tray. Following him came Thomas, another footman, with a gate-leg table. The rear was brought up by Beach, who carried nothing but merely lent a tone.
The instinct which warns all good Englishmen when tea is ready immediately began to perform its silent duty. Even as Thomas set the gate-leg table to earth there appeared, as if answering a cue, an elderly gentleman in stained tweeds and a hat he should have been ashamed of. Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, in person. He was a long, lean, stringy man of about sixty, slightly speckled at the moment with mud, for he had spent most of the afternoon pottering round pig-stys. He surveyed the preparations for the meal with vague amiability through rimless pince-nez.
“Tea?”
“Yes, your lordship.”
“Oh?” said Lord Emsworth. “Ah? Tea, eh? Tea? Yes. Tea. Quite so. To be sure, tea. Capital.”
One gathered from his remarks that he realized that the tea-hour had arrived and was glad of it. He proceeded to impart his discovery to his niece, Millicent, who, lured by that same silent call, had just appeared at his side.
“Tea, Millicent.”
“Yes.”
“Er—tea,” said Lord Emsworth, driving home his point.
Millicent sat down, and busied herself with the pot. She was a tall, fair girl with soft blue eyes and a face like the Soul’s Awakening. Her whole appearance radiated wholesome innocence. Not even an expert could have told that she had just received a whispered message from a bribed butler and was proposing at six sharp to go and meet a quite ineligible young man among the rose bushes.
“Been down seeing the Empress, Uncle Clarence?”
“Eh? Oh, yes. Yes, my dear. I have been with her all the afternoon.”
Lord Emsworth’s mild eyes beamed. They always did when that noble animal, Empress of Blandings, was mentioned.
THE ninth Earl was a man of few and quite simple ambitions. He had never desired to mold the destinies of the state, to frame its laws and make speeches in the House of Lords that would bring all the peers and bishops to their feet, whooping and waving their hats. All he yearned to do, by way of insuring admittance to England’s Hall of Fame, was to tend his prize sow, Empress of Blandings, so sedulously that for the second time in two consecutive years she would win the silver medal in the Fat Pigs class at the Shropshire Agricultural Show. And every day, it seemed to him, the glittering prize was coming more and more within his grasp.
Earlier in the summer, there had been one breathless, sickening moment of suspense, and disaster had seemed to loom. This was when his neighbor, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe of Matchingham Hall, had basely lured away his pig-man, the superbly gifted George Cyril Wellbeloved, by the promise of higher wages.
FOR a while Lord Emsworth had feared lest the Empress, mourning for her old friend and valet, might refuse food and fall from her high standard of obesity. But his apprehensions had proved groundless. The Empress had taken to Pirbright, George Cyril’s successor, from the first, and was tucking away her meals with all the old abandon. The Right triumphs in this world far more often than we realize.
“What do you do to her?” asked Millicent, curiously. “Read her bedtime stories?”
Lord Emsworth pursed his lips. He had a reverent mind, and disliked jesting on serious subjects.
“Whatever I do, my dear, it seems to effect its purpose. She is in wonderful shape.”
“I didn’t know she had a shape. She hadn’t when I last saw her.”
This time Lord Emsworth smiled indulgently. Gibes at the Empress’s rotundity had no sting for him. He did not desire for her that school-girl slimness which is so fashionable nowadays.
“She has never fed more heartily,” he said. “It is a treat to watch her.”
“I’m so glad. Mr. Carmody,” said Millicent, stooping to tickle a spaniel which had wandered up to take pot-luck, “told me he had never seen a finer animal in his life.”
“I LIKE that young man,” said Lord Emsworth emphatically. “He is sound on pigs. He has his head screwed on the right way.”
“Yes, he’s an improvement on Baxter, isn’t he?”
“Baxter!” His lordship choked over his cup.
“You didn’t like Baxter much, did you, Uncle Clarence?”
“Hadn’t a peaceful moment while he was in the place. Dreadful feller! Always fussing. Always wanting me to do things. Always coming round corners with his infernal spectacles gleaming and making me sign papers when I wanted to be out in the garden. Besides, he was off his head. Thank goodness I’ve seen the last of Baxter.”
“But have you?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you ask me,” said Millicent, “Aunt Constance hasn’t given up the idea of getting him back.”
Lord Emsworth started with such violence that his pince-nez fell off. She had touched on his favorite nightmare. Sometimes he would wake trembling in the night, fancying that his late secretary had returned to the castle. And though on these occasions he always dropped off to sleep again with a happy smile of relief, he had never ceased to be haunted by the fear that his sister Constance, in her infernal managing way, was scheming to restore the fellow to office.
“Good Lord! Has she said anything to you?”
“No. But I have a feeling. I know she doesn’t like Mr. Carmody.”
Lord Emsworth exploded.
“Perfect nonsense! Utter, absolute, dashed nonsense. What on earth does she find to object to in young Carmody? Most capable, intelligent boy. Leaves me alone. Doesn’t fuss me. I wish to heaven she would . . .”
He broke off, and stared blankly at a handsome woman of middle age who had come out of the house and was crossing the lawn.
“Why, here she is!” said Millicent, equally and just as disagreeably surprised. “I thought you had gone up to London, Aunt Constance.”
Lady Constance Keeble had arrived at the table. Declining with a distrait shake of the head her niece’s offer of the seat of honor by the teapot, she sank into a chair. She was a woman of still remarkable beauty, with features cast in a commanding mold and fine eyes. These eyes were at the moment dull and brooding.
“I missed my train,” she explained. “However, I can do all I have to do in London tomorrow. I shall go up by the eleven-fifteen. In a way, it will be more convenient, for Ronald will be able to motor me back. I will look in at Norfolk Street and pick him up there before he starts.”
“What made you miss your train?”
“Yes,” said Lord Emsworth, complainingly. “You started in good time.”
THE brooding look in his sister’s eyes deepened.
“I met Sir Gregory Parsloe.” Lord Emsworth stiffened at the name. “He kept me talking. He is extremely worried.” Lord Emsworth looked pleased. “He tells me he used to know Galahad very well a number of years ago, and he is very much alarmed about this book of his.”
“And I bet he isn’t the only one,” murmured Millicent.
She was right. Once a man of the Hon. Galahad Threepwood’s antecedents starts taking pen in hand and being reminded of amusing incidents that happened to my dear old friend So-and-So, you never know where he will stop; and all over England, among the more elderly of the nobility and gentry, something like a panic had been raging ever since the news of his literary activities had got about. From Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe of Matchingham Hall to gray-headed pillars of Society in distant Cumberland and Kent, whole droves of respectable men who in their younger days had been rash enough to chum with the Hon. Galahad were recalling past follies committed in his company and speculating agitatedly as to how good the old pest’s memory was.
For Galahad in his day had been a notable lad about town. Bookmakers had called him by his pet name, barmaids had simpered beneath his gallant chaff. He had heard the chimes at midnight. And when he looked in at the old Gardenia, commissionaires had fought for the privilege of throwing him out. A man, in a word, who should never have been taught to write and who, if unhappily gifted with that ability, should have been restrained by Act of Parliament from writing Reminiscences.
So thought Lady Constance, his sister. So thought Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, his neighbor. And so thought the pillars of Society in distant Cumberland and Kent. Widely as they differed on many points, they were unanimous on this.
“He wanted me to try to find out if Galahad was putting anything about him into it.”
“Better ask him now,” said Millicent. “He’s just come out of the house and seems to be heading in this direction.”
The author, ambling briskly across the lawn, joined the little group at the tea-table. He was a short, trim, dapper little man of the type one associates automatically in one’s mind with checked suits, tight trousers, white bowler hats, pink carnations and race glasses bumping against the left hip. Though bareheaded at the moment and in his shirt-sleeves and displaying on the tip of his nose the ink-spot of the literary life, he still seemed out of place away from a paddock or an American bar. His bright eyes, puckered at the corners, peered before him as though watching horses rounding into the straight. His neatly-shod foot had about it a suggestion of pawing in search of a brass rail. A jaunty little gentleman, and, as Millicent had said, quite astonishingly fit and rosy.
Arrived at the tea-table, he produced a black-rimmed monocle, and, screwing it into his eye, surveyed the group with a frown of distaste.
“Tea?”
Millicent reached for a cup.
“You know I never drink tea. Too much respect for my inside. Don’t tell me you are ruining your inside with that poison.”
“Sorry, Uncle Gally. I like it.”
“You be careful,” urged the Hon. Galahad, who was fond of his niece and did not like to see her falling into bad habits. “You be very careful how you fool about with that stuff. Did I ever tell you about poor Buffy Struggles back in ninety-three? Some misguided person lured poor old Buffy into one of those temperance lectures illustrated with colored slides, and he called on me next day ashen, poor old chap—ashen. ‘Gally,’ he said, ‘what would you say the procedure was when a fellow wants to buy tea? How would a fellow set about it?’ ‘Tea?’ I said. ‘What do you want tea for?’ ‘To drink,’ said Buffy. ‘Pull yourself together, dear boy,’ I said. ‘You’re talking wildly. You can’t drink tea. Have a brandy and soda.’ ‘No more alcohol for me,’ said Buffy. ‘Look what it does to the common earthworm.’ ‘But you’re not a common earthworm,’ I said, putting my finger on the flaw in his argument right away. ‘I dashed soon shall be if I go on drinking alcohol,’ said Buffy. Well, I begged him with tears in my eyes not to do anything rash, but I couldn’t move him. He ordered in ten pounds of the muck and was dead inside the year.”
“Good heavens! Really?”
The Hon. Galahad nodded impressively.
“Dead as a doornail. Got run over by a hansom cab, poor dear old chap, as he was crossing Piccadilly. You’ll find the story in my book.”
“How’s the book coming along?”
“Magnificently, my dear. Splendidly. I had no notion writing was so easy. The stuff just pours out. Clarence, I wanted to ask you about a date. What year was it there was that terrible row between young Gregory Parsloe and Lord Burper, when Parsloe stole the old chap’s false teeth and pawned them at a shop in the Edgware Road? ’96? I should have said later than that—’97 or ’98. Perhaps you’re right, though. I’ll pencil in ’96 tentatively.”
LADY CONSTANCE uttered a sharp cry. The sunlight had now gone quite definitely out of her life. She felt as if foxes were gnawing her vitals.
“Galahad! You are not proposing to print libelous stories like that about our nearest neighbor?”
“Certainly I am.” The Hon. Galahad snorted militantly. “And, as for libel, let him bring an action if he wants to. I’ll fight him to the House of Lords. It’s the best documented story in my book,”—and, leaping lightly over the spaniel, he flitted away across the lawn.
Lady Constance sat rigid in her chair.
“Clarence!”
“My dear?”
“What are you going to do about this?”
“Do?”
“Can’t you see that something must be done? Do you realize that if this awful book of Galahad’s is published it will alienate half our friends? They will think we are to blame. They will say we ought to have stopped him somehow. Imagine Sir Gregory’s feelings when he reads that appalling story!”
Lord Emsworth’s amiable face darkened.
“I am not worrying about Parsloe’s feelings. Besides, he did steal Burper’s false teeth. I remember him showing them to me. He had them packed up in cotton-wool in a small cigar-box.”
The gesture known as wringing the hands is one that is seldom seen in real life, but Lady Constance Keeble at this point did something with hers which might by a liberal interpretation have been described as wringing.
“Oh, if Mr. Baxter were only here!” she moaned.
Lord Emsworth started with such violence that his pince-nez fell off.
“What on earth do you want that awful feller here for?”
“He would find a way out of this dreadful business. He was always so efficient.”
“Baxter’s off his head.”
Lady Constance uttered a sharp exclamation.
“Clarence, you really can be the most irritating person in the world. Mr. Baxter was the most wonderfully capable man I ever met.”
“Yes, capable of anything,” retorted Lord Emsworth with spirit. “Threw flower-pots at me in the middle of the night. I woke up in the small hours and found flower-pots streaming in at my bedroom window and looked out and there was this feller Baxter standing on the terrace in lemon-colored pajamas, hurling the dashed things as if he thought he was a machine-gun or something. I suppose he’s in an asylum by this time.”
Lady Constance had turned a bright scarlet.
“You know perfectly well that there was a quite simple explanation. My diamond necklace had been stolen, and Mr. Baxter thought the thief had hidden it in one of the flower-pots. He went to look for it and got locked out and tried to attract attention by . . .”
“Well, I prefer to think the man was crazy, and that’s the line that Galahad takes in his book.”
“His . . . ! Galahad is not putting that story in his book?”
“Of course he’s putting it in his book. Do you think he’s going to waste excellent material like that? And, as I say, the line Galahad takes—and he’s a clear-thinking, level-headed man—is that Baxter was a raving, roaring lunatic. Well, I’m going to have another look at the Empress.”
He pottered off pigwards.
FOR some moments after he had gone, there was silence at the tea-table. Millicent lay back in her chair, Lady Constance sat stiffly upright in hers. A little breeze that brought with it a scent of wall-flowers began whispering the first tidings that the cool of evening was on its way.
“Why are you so anxious to get Mr. Baxter back, Aunt Constance?” asked Millicent.
Lady Constance’s rigidity had relaxed. She was looking her calm, masterful self again. She had the air of a woman who has just solved a difficult problem.
“I think his presence here essential,” she said.
“Uncle Clarence doesn’t seem to agree with you.”
“Your Uncle Clarence has always been completely blind to his best interests. He ought never to have dismissed the only secretary he has ever had who was capable of looking after his affairs.”
“Isn’t Mr. Carmody any good?”
“No. He is not. And I shall never feel easy in my mind until Mr. Baxter is back in his old place.”
“What’s wrong with Mr. Carmody?”
“He is grossly inefficient. And,” said Lady Constance, unmasking her batteries, “I consider that he spends far too much of his time mooning around you, my dear. He appears to imagine that he is at Blandings Castle simply to dance attendance on you.”
THE charge struck Millicent as unjust. She thought of pointing out that she and Hugo only met occasionally and then on the sly, but it occurred to her that the plea might be injudicious. She bent over the spaniel. A keen observer might have noted a defensiveness in her manner. She looked like a girl preparing to cope with an aunt.
“Do you find him an entertaining companion?”
Millicent yawned.
“Mr. Carmody? No, not particularly.”
“A dull young man, I should have thought.”
“Deadly.”
“Vapid.”
“Vap to a degree.”
“And yet you went riding with him last Tuesday.”
“Anything’s better than riding alone.”
“You play tennis with him, too.”
“Well, tennis is a game I defy you to play by yourself.”
Lady Constance’s lips tightened.
“I wish Ronald had never persuaded your uncle to employ him. Clarence should have seen by the mere look of him that he was impossible.” She paused. “It will be nice having Ronald here,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You must try to see something of him. If,” said Lady Constance, in the manner which her intimates found rather less pleasant than some of her other manners, “Mr. Carmody can spare you for a moment from time to time.”
She eyed her niece narrowly. But Millicent was a match for any number of narrow glances, and had been from her sixteenth birthday. She was also a girl who believed that the best form of defense is attack.
“Do you think I’m in love with Mr. Carmody, Aunt Constance?”
Lady Constance was not a woman who relished the direct methods of the younger generation. She colored.
“Such a thought never entered my head.”
“That’s fine. I was afraid it had.”
“A sensible girl like you would naturally see the utter impossibility of marriage with a man in his position. He has no money and very little prospects. And, of course, your uncle holds your own money in trust for you and would never dream of releasing it if you wished to make an unsuitable marriage.”
“So, it does seem lucky I’m not in love with him, doesn’t it?”
“Extremely fortunate.”
Lady Constance paused for a moment, then introduced a topic on which she had frequently touched before. Millicent had seen it coming by the look in her eyes.
“Why you won’t marry Ronald, I can’t think. It would be so suitable in every way. You have been fond of one another since you were children.”
“Oh, I like old Ronnie a lot.”
“It has been a great disappointment to your Aunt Julia.”
“She must cheer up. She’ll get him off all right, if she sticks at it.”
Lady Constance bridled.
“It is not a question of . . . If you will forgive my saying so, my dear, I think you have allowed yourself to fall into a way of taking Ronald far too much for granted. I am afraid you have the impression that he will always be there, ready and waiting for you when you at last decide to make up your mind. I don’t think you realize what a very attractive young man he is.”
“The longer I wait, the more fascinating it will give him time to become.”
At a moment less tense Lady Constance would have taken time off to rebuke this flippancy, but she felt it would be unwise to depart from her main theme.
“He is just the sort of young man that girls are drawn to. In fact, I have been meaning to tell you. I had a letter from your Aunt Julia, saying that during their stay at Biarritz they met a most charming American girl, a Miss Schoonmaker, whose father, it seems, used to be a friend of your Uncle Galahad. She appeared to be quite taken with Ronald, and he with her. He traveled back to Paris with her and left her there.”
“How fickle men are!” sighed Millicent.
“She had some shopping to do,” said Lady Constance sharply. “By this time she is probably in London. Julia invited her to stay at Blandings, and she accepted. She may be here any day now. And I do think, my dear,” proceeded Lady Constance earnestly, “that, before she arrives, you ought to consider very carefully what your feelings toward Ronald really are.”
“You mean, if I don’t watch my step, this Miss Doopenhacker may steal my Ronnie away from me?”
It was not quite as Lady Constance would have put it herself, but it conveyed her meaning.
“Exactly.”
Millicent laughed. It was plain that her flesh declined to creep at the prospect.
“Good luck to her,” she said. “She can count on a fish-slice from me, and I’ll be a bridesmaid, too, if wanted. Can’t you understand, Aunt Constance, that I haven’t the slightest desire to marry Ronnie. We’re great pals, and all that, but he’s not my style. Too short, for one thing.”
“Short?”
“I’m inches taller than he is. When we went up the aisle, I should look like someone taking her little brother for a walk.”
LADY CONSTANCE would undoubtedly have commented on this remark, but before she could do so the procession reappeared, playing an unexpected return date. Footman James bore a dish of fruit, Footman Thomas a salver with a cream-jug on it. Beach, as before, confined himself to a straight ornamental rôle.
“Oo!” said Millicent welcomingly. And the spaniel, who liked anything involving cream, gave a silent nod of approval.
“Well,” said Lady Constance, as the procession withdrew, giving up the lost cause, “if you won’t marry Ronald, I suppose you won’t.”
“That’s about it,” agreed Millicent, pouring cream.
“At any rate, I am relieved to hear that there is no nonsense going on between you and this Mr. Carmody. That I could not have endured.”
“He’s only moderately popular with you, isn’t he?”
“I dislike him extremely.”
“I wonder why. I should have thought he was fairly all right, as young men go. Uncle Clarence likes him. So does Uncle Gally.”
Lady Constance had a high, arched nose, admirably adapted for sniffing. She used it now to the limits of its power.
“Mr. Carmody,” she said, “is just the sort of young man your Uncle Galahad would like. No doubt he reminds him of the horrible men he used to go about London with in his young days.”
“Mr. Carmody isn’t a bit like that.”
“Indeed?” Lady Constance sniffed again. “Well, I dislike mentioning it to you, Millicent, for I am old-fashioned enough to think that young girls should be shielded from a knowledge of the world, but I happen to know that Mr. Carmody is not at all a nice young man. I have it on the most excellent authority that he is entangled with some impossible chorus girl.”
IT IS not easy to sit suddenly bolt-upright in a deep garden-chair, but Millicent managed the feat.
“What!”
“Lady Allardyce told me so.”
“And how does she know?”
“Her son Vernon told her. A girl of the name of Brown. Vernon Allardyce says that he used to see her repeatedly, lunching and dining and dancing with Mr. Carmody.”
There was a long silence.
“Nice boy, Vernon,” said Millicent.
“He tells his mother everything.”
“That’s what I meant. I think it’s so sweet of him.” Millicent rose. “Well, I’m going to take a short stroll.”
She wandered off toward the rose garden.
A young man who has arranged to meet the girl he loves in the rose garden at six sharp naturally goes there at five-twenty-five, so as not to be late. Hugo Carmody had done this, with the result that by three minutes to six he was feeling as if he had been marooned among roses since early summer.
If anybody had told Hugo Carmody six months before that halfway through the following July he would be lurking in trysting-places like this, his whole being alert for the coming of a girl, he would have scoffed at the idea. He would have laughed lightly. Not that he had not been fond of girls. He had always liked girls. But they had been, as it were, the mere playthings, so to speak, of a financial giant’s idle hour. Six months ago he had been the keen, iron-souled man of business, all his energies and thoughts devoted to the management of the Hot Spot.
But now he stood shuffling his feet and starting hopefully at every sound, while the leaden moments passed sluggishly on their way. Then his vigil was enlivened by a wasp, which stung him on the back of the hand. He was leaping to and fro, licking his wounds, when he perceived the girl of his dreams coming down the path.
“Ah!” cried Hugo.
He ceased to leap and, rushing forward, would have clasped her in a fond embrace. Many people advocate the old-fashioned blue-bag for wasp-stings, but Hugo preferred this treatment.
To his astonishment she drew back. And she was not a girl who usually drew back on these occasions.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, pained. It seemed to him that a spanner had been plunged into a holy moment.
“Nothing.”
Hugo was concerned. He did not like the way she was looking at him. Her soft blue eyes appeared to have been turned into stone.
“I say,” he said, “I’ve just been stung by a beastly great wasp.”
“Good!” said Millicent. The way she was talking seemed to him worse than the way she was looking.
Hugo’s concern increased.
“I say, what’s up?”
The granite eyes took on an added hardness.
“You want to know what’s up?”
“Yes—what’s up?”
“I’ll tell you what’s up.”
“Well, what’s up?” asked Hugo.
He waited for enlightenment, but she had fallen into a chilling silence.
“You know,” said Hugo, breaking it, “I’m getting pretty well fed up with all this secrecy and general snakiness. Seeing you for an occasional odd five minutes a day and having to put on false whiskers and hide in bushes to manage that. I know the Keeble looks on me as a sort of cross between a leper and a nosegay of deadly nightshade, but I’m strong with the old boy. I talk pig to him. You might almost say I play on him as on a stringed instrument. So what’s wrong with going to him and telling him in a frank and manly way that we love each other and are going to get married?”
THE marble of Millicent’s face was disturbed by one of those quick, sharp, short, bitter smiles that do nobody any good.
“Why should we lie to Uncle Clarence?”
“Eh?”
“I say why should we tell him something that isn’t true?”
“I don’t get your drift.”
“I will continue snowing,” said Millicent coldly. “I am not quite sure if I am ever going to speak to you again in this world or the next. Much will depend on how good you are as an explainer. I have it on the most excellent authority that you are entangled with a chorus girl. How about it?”
Hugo reeled. But then St. Anthony himself would have reeled if a charge like that had suddenly been hurled at him. The best of men require time to overhaul their consciences on such occasions. A moment, and he was himself again.
“It’s a lie!”
“Name of Brown.”
“Not a word of truth in it. I haven’t set eyes on Sue Brown since I first met you.”
“No. You’ve been down here all the time.”
“And when I was setting eyes on her—why, dash it, my attitude from start to finish was one of blameless, innocent, one-hundred-per-cent brotherliness. A wholesome friendship. Brotherly. Nothing more. I liked dancing and she liked dancing and our steps fitted. So occasionally we would go out together and tread the measure. That’s all there was to it. Pure brotherliness, nothing more. I looked on myself as a sort of brother.”
“Brother, eh?”
“Absolutely a brother. Don’t,” urged Hugo earnestly, “go running away, my dear old prune, with any sort of silly notion that Sue Brown was something in the nature of a vamp. She’s one of the nicest girls you would ever want to meet.”
“Nice, is she?”
“A sweet girl. A girl in a million. A real good sort. A sound egg.”
“Pretty, I suppose?”
The native good sense of the Carmodys asserted itself at the eleventh hour.
“Not pretty,” said Hugo decidedly. “Not pretty, no. Not at all pretty. Far from pretty. Totally lacking in sex-appeal, poor girl. But nice. A good sort. No nonsense about her. Sisterly.”
Millicent pondered.
“H’m,” she said.
Nature paused, listening. Birds checked their song, insects their droning. It was as if it had got about that this young man’s fate hung in the balance and the returns would be in shortly.
“Well, all right,” she said at length. “I suppose I’ll have to believe you.”
“ ’At’s the way to talk!”
“But you bear this in mind, my lad. Any funny business from now on . . .”
“As if . . . !”
“One more attack of that brotherly urge . . .”
“As though . . . !”
“All right, then.”
Hugo inhaled vigorously. He felt like a man who has just dodged a wounded tigress.
“Banzai!” he said. “Sweethearts still!”
BLANDINGS CASTLE dozed in the twilight. Its various inmates were variously occupied. Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, after many a longing, lingering look behind, had dragged himself away from the Empress’s boudoir and was reading his well-thumbed copy of British Pigs. The Hon. Galahad, having fixed up the Parsloe-Burper passage, was skimming through his day’s output with an artist’s complacent feeling that this was the stuff to give ’em. Butler Beach was pasting the Hon. Galahad’s photograph into his album. Millicent, in her bedroom, was looking a little thoughtfully into her mirror. Hugo, in the billiard-room, was practicing pensive caroms and thinking loving thoughts of his lady, coupled with an occasional reflection that a short, swift binge in London would be a great wheeze if he could wangle it.
And in her boudoir on the second floor, Lady Constance Keeble had taken pen in hand and was poising it over a sheet of notepaper.
“Dear Mr. Baxter,” she wrote.
Annotations to this novel in book form are on this site.
Printer’s errors corrected above:
Magazine, p. 59b, had “ ‘No more alcohol for me.’ said Buffy.”; corrected to comma after ‘me’.
Magazine, p. 62b, had “Sue Brown was something the nature of a vamp.”; ‘in’ added as in all other versions.