Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsCollier’s Weekly, May 25, 1929
The Story Thus Far:
IN BLANDINGS CASTLE, England, lives Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, whose chief interest is the Empress of Blandings, his prize pig. With him live his sister, Lady Constance Keeble; his niece, Millicent; his brother, the Honorable Galahad Threepwood, now writing his Reminiscences; his secretary, Hugo Carmody, secretly engaged to Millicent; and his nephew, Ronald Fish, secretly engaged to Sue Brown, a chorus girl. When Ronnie and Sue meet Lady Constance in London, Ronnie introduces Sue as Miss Schoonmaker, a wealthy American girl his mother has invited to Blandings.
Ronnie, with the butler’s aid, steals the Empress and hides her in a disused cottage, planning to “find” her later, thus gaining his trustee’s gratitude and a share of his own capital. Hugo is sent to London to get a detective, P. Frobisher Pilbeam.
At Mario’s that night Sue and Hugo are dancing when Pilbeam appears and finds a long-sought opportunity to approach Sue. Ronnie finds her with Pilbeam and breaks their engagement. Next day Millicent breaks with Hugo. Sue goes to Blandings as Miss Schoonmaker to see Ronnie and explain.
Galahad accuses Parsloe, owner of the rival pig. of stealing the Empress and puts in his Reminiscences a ruinous story. Parsloe offers Pilbeam £500 to steal the manuscript. Lady Constance has already invited to Blandings the Efficient Baxter for the same purpose.
While Galahad is introducing Lord Emsworth to Sue in the garden Baxter hurtles through the air and lands in a flower bed.
VIII
PROPERLY considered there is no such thing as an unsolvable mystery. It may seem puzzling at first sight when ex-secretaries start falling as the gentle rain from heaven upon the lobelias beneath, but there is always a reason for it. That Baxter did not immediately give the reason was due to the fact that he had private and personal motives for not doing so.
We have called Rupert Baxter efficient, and efficient he was. The word, as we interpret it, implies not only a capacity for performing the ordinary tasks of life with a smooth firmness of touch but in addition a certain alertness of mind, a genius for opportunism, a gift for seeing clearly, thinking swiftly, and Doing It Now. With these qualities Rupert Baxter was preëminently equipped, and it had been with him the work of a moment to perceive, directly the Hon. Galahad had left the house with Sue, that here was his chance of popping upstairs, nipping into the small library, and abstracting the manuscript of the Reminiscences. Having popped and nipped, as planned, he was in the very act of searching the desk when the sound of a footstep outside froze him from his spectacles to the soles of his feet. The next moment, fingers began to turn the door-handle.
You may freeze a Baxter’s body, but you cannot numb his active brain. With one masterful, lightning-like flash of clear thinking he took in the situation and saw the only possible way out. To reach the door leading to the large library, he would have had to circumnavigate the desk. The window, on the other hand, was at his elbow. So he jumped out of it.
All these things Baxter could have explained in a few words. Refraining from doing so, he rose to his feet and began to brush the mold from his knees.
“Baxter! What on earth?”
The ex-secretary found the gaze of his late employer trying to nerves which had been considerably shaken by his fall. The occasions on which he disliked Lord Emsworth most intensely were just those occasions when the other gaped at him open-mouthed like a surprised halibut.
“I overbalanced,” he said curtly.
“How? Where?”
It now occurred to Baxter that by a most fortunate chance the window of the small library was not the only one that looked out onto this arena into which he had precipitated himself. He might equally well have descended from the larger library which adjoined it.
“I WAS leaning out of the library window . . .”
“Why?”
“Inhaling the air . . .”
“What for?”
“And I lost my balance.”
“Lost your balance?”
“I slipped.”
“Slipped?”
Baxter had the feeling—it was one which he had often had in the old days when conversing with Lord Emsworth—that an exchange of remarks had begun which might go on forever. A keen desire swept over him to be—and that right speedily—in some other place. He did not care where it was. So long as Lord Emsworth was not there, it would be Paradise enow.
“I think I will go indoors and wash my hands,” he said.
“And face,” suggested the Hon. Galahad.
“My face, also,” said Rupert Baxter coldly.
He started to move round the angle of the house, but long before he had got out of hearing, Lord Emsworth’s high and penetrating tenor was dealing with the situation. His lordship, as so often happened on these occasions, was under the impression that he spoke in a hushed whisper.
“Mad as a coot!” he said. And the words rang out through the still summer air like a public oration.
They cut Baxter to the quick. They were not the sort of words to which a man with an inch and a quarter of skin off his left shinbone ought ever to have been called upon to listen. With flushed ears and glowing spectacles, the Efficient Baxter passed on his way. Statistics relating to madness among coots are not to hand, but we may safely doubt whether even in the ranks of these notoriously unbalanced birds there could have been found at this moment one who was feeling half as mad as he did.
Lord Emsworth continued to gaze at the spot where his late secretary had passed from sight.
“Mad as a coot,” he repeated.
In his brother Galahad he found a ready supporter.
“Madder,” said the Hon. Galahad.
“Upon my word, I think he’s actually worse than he was two years ago. Then, at least, he never fell out of windows.”
“Why on earth do you have the fellow here?”
Lord Emsworth sighed.
“It’s Constance, my dear Galahad. You know what she is. She insisted on inviting him.”
“Well, if you take my advice, you’ll hide the flower-pots. One of the things this fellow does when he gets these attacks,” explained the Hon. Galahad, taking Sue into the family confidence, “is to go about hurling flower-pots at people.”
“Really?” said Sue.
“I assure you. Looking for me, Beach?”
The careworn figure of the butler had appeared, walking as one pacing behind the coffin of an old friend.
“Yes, sir. The gentleman has arrived, Mr. Galahad.”
“Show him up to the small library, Beach, and tell him I’ll be with him in a moment.”
“Very good, sir.”
THE Hon. Galahad’s temporary delay in going to see his visitor was due to his desire to linger long enough to tell Sue, to whom he had taken a warm fancy and whom he wished to shield as far as it was in his power from the perils of life, what every girl ought to know about the Efficient Baxter.
“Never let yourself be alone with that fellow in a deserted spot, my dear,” he counseled. “If he suggests a walk in the woods, call for help. Been off his head for years. Ask Clarence.”
Lord Emsworth nodded solemnly.
“And it looks to me,” went on the Hon. Galahad, “as if his mania had now taken a suicidal turn. He’s the living image of a man I used to know in the nineties.
“The first intimation any of us had that this chap had anything wrong with him was when he turned up to supper at the house of a friend of mine—George Pallant. You remember George, Clarence—with a couple of days’ beard on him. And when Mrs. George, who had known him all her life, asked him why he hadn’t shaved, ‘Shaved?’ says this fellow, surprised. Packleby, his name was. One of the Leicestershire Packlebys. ‘Shaved, dear lady?’ he says. ‘Well, considering that they even hide the butter-knife when I come down to breakfast for fear I’ll try to cut my throat with it, is it reasonable to suppose they’d trust me with a razor?’ Quite stuffy about it, he was, and it spoiled the party. Look after Miss Schoonmaker, Clarence. I shan’t be long.”
Lord Emsworth had little experience in the art of providing diversion for young girls. Left thus to his native inspiration, he pondered awhile. If the Empress had not been stolen, his task would, of course, have been simple. He could have given this Miss Schoonmaker a half-hour of sheer entertainment by taking her down to the piggeries to watch that superb animal feed. As it was, he was at something of a loss.
“Perhaps you would care to see the rose garden?” he hazarded.
“I should love it,” said Sue.
“Are you fond of roses?”
“Tremendously.”
Lord Emsworth found himself warming to this girl. Her personality pleased him. He seemed dimly to recall something his sister Constance had said about her—something about wishing that her nephew Ronald would settle down with some nice girl with money like that Miss Schoonmaker whom Julia had met at Biarritz. Feeling so kindly toward her, it occurred to him that a word in season, opening her eyes to his nephew’s true character, might prevent the girl making a mistake which she would regret forever when it was too late.
“I think you know my nephew Ronald?” he said.
“Yes.”
“That boy’s an ass.”
“Why?” said Sue sharply. She began to feel less amiable toward this stringy old man. A moment before, she had been thinking that it was rather charming, that funny, vague manner of his. Now she saw him clearly for what he was—a dodderer, and a Class A dodderer at that.
“Why?” His lordship considered the point. “He throws tennis-balls at pigs,” he went on, getting down to the ghastly facts.
“Does what?”
“I saw him with my own eyes. He threw a tennis-ball at Empress of Blandings. And not once but repeatedly.”
THE motherly instinct which all girls feel toward the men they love urged Sue to say something in Ronnie’s defense. But, apart from suggesting that the pig had probably started it, she could not think of anything. They left the rose garden and began to walk back to the lawn, Lord Emsworth still exercised by the thought of his nephew’s shortcomings.
“Aggravating boy,” he said. “Most aggravating. Always up to something or other. Started a night-club the other day. Lost a lot of money over it. Just the sort of thing he would do. My brother Galahad started some kind of a club many years ago. It cost my old father nearly a thousand pounds, I recollect. There is something about Ronald that reminds me very much of Galahad at the same age.”
Although Sue had found much in the author of the Reminiscences to attract her, she was able to form a very fair estimate of the sort of young man he must have been in the middle twenties. This charge, accordingly, struck her as positively libelous.
“I don’t agree with you, Lord Emsworth.”
“But you never knew my brother Galahad as a young man,” his lordship pointed out cleverly.
At this moment Beach came in sight, a silver salver in his hand. The salver had a card on it, and an envelope.
“For me, Beach?”
“The card, your lordship. The gentleman is in the hall.”
Lord Emsworth breathed a sigh of relief. “You will excuse me, my dear? It is most important that I should see this fellow immediately.”
He bustled away, glad to go, and Sue became conscious of the salver, thrust deferentially toward her.
“For you, miss.”
“For me?”
“Yes, miss,” moaned Beach, like a winter wind wailing through dead trees. He inclined his head somberly, and was gone. She tore open the envelope. For one breath-taking instant she had thought Ronnie might have seen her. But the writing was not Ronnie’s familiar scrawl. It was bold, clear, decisive writing, the writing of an efficient man.
She looked at the last page: Yours sincerely, R. J. Baxter.
SUE’S heart was beating faster as she turned back to the beginning. When a girl in the position in which she had placed herself has been stared at through steel-rimmed spectacles in the way this R. J. Baxter had stared at her through his spectacles, her initial reaction to mysterious notes from the man behind the lenses cannot but be a panic fear that all has been discovered.
The opening sentence dispelled her alarm. Purely personal motives, it appeared, had caused Rupert Baxter to write these few lines. The mere fact that the letter began with the words Dear Miss Schoonmaker was enough in itself to bring comfort.
At the risk of annoying you by the intrusion of my private affairs, [wrote the Efficient Baxter, rather in the manner of one beginning an after-dinner speech] I feel that I must give you an explanation of the incident which occurred in the garden in your presence this afternoon. From the observation—in the grossest taste—which Lord Emsworth let fall in my hearing, I fear you may have placed a wrong construction on what took place. (I allude to the expression “Mad as a coot,” which I distinctly heard Lord Emsworth utter as I moved away.)
The facts were precisely as I stated. I was leaning out of the library window, and, chancing to lean too far, I lost my balance and fell. That I might have received serious injuries and was entitled to expect sympathy, I overlook. But the words “Mad as a coot” I resent extremely.
Had this incident not occurred, I would not have dreamed of saying anything to prejudice you against your host. As it is, I feel that in justice to myself I must tell you that Lord Emsworth is a man to whose utterance no attention should be paid. He is to all intents and purposes half-witted. Life in the country, with its lack of intellectual stimulus, has caused his natural feebleness of mind to reach a stage which borders closely on insanity. His relatives look on him as virtually an imbecile and have, in my opinion, every cause to do so.
In these circumstances, I think I may rely on you to attach no importance to his remarks this afternoon.
Yours sincerely,
R. J. Baxter
P. S. You will, of course, treat this as entirely confidential.
P. P. S. If you are fond of chess and would care for a game after dinner, I am a good player.
P. P. S. S. Or bezique.
Sue thought it a good letter, neat and well-expressed. Why it had been written, she could not imagine. It had not occurred to her that love—or, at any rate, a human desire to marry a wealthy heiress—had begun to burgeon in R. J. Baxter’s bosom. With no particular emotions, other than the feeling that if he was counting on playing bezique with her after dinner he was due for a disappointment, she put the letter in her pocket, and looked out over the park again.
Everything, she told herself, was going to be all right. After all, she did not ask much from Fate—just an uninterrupted five minutes with Ronnie. And if Fate so far had denied her this very moderate demand . . .
“All alone?”
Sue turned, her heart beating quickly. There stood the Hon. Galahad, back from his interview with the gentleman. He was eyeing her, she thought, with a strange and sinister intentness.
“You know,” said the Hon. Galahad, “it’s been a great treat to me, meeting you, my dear. I haven’t seen any of your people for a number of years, but your father and I correspond pretty regularly. He tells me all the news. Did you leave your family well?”
“Quite well.”
“How was your Aunt Edna?”
“Fine,” said Sue feebly.
“Ah,” said the Hon. Galahad. “Then your father must have been mistaken when he told me she was dead. But perhaps you thought I meant your Aunt Edith?”
“Yes,” said Sue gratefully.
“She’s all right, I hope?”
“Oh, yes.”
“What a lovely woman!”
“Yes.”
“You mean she still is?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Remarkable! She must be well over seventy by now. No doubt you mean beautiful, considering she is over seventy?”
“Yes.”
“Pretty active?”
“Oh, yes.”
“When did you see her last?”
“Oh—just before I sailed.”
“And you say she’s active? Curious! I heard two years ago that she was paralyzed. I suppose you mean active for a paralytic.”
The little puckers at the corners of his eyes deepened into wrinkles. His monocle gleamed like the eye of a dragon. He smiled genially.
“Confide in me, Miss Brown,” he said. “What’s the game?”
Sue did not answer. When the solid world melts abruptly beneath the feet, one feels disinclined to speech. Avoiding the monocle, she stood looking with wide, blank eyes at a thrush which hopped fussily about the lawn.
“UP THERE,” proceeded the Hon. Galahad, pointing to the small library, “is the room where I work. And sometimes, when I’m not working, I look out of the window. I was looking out a short while back when you were down here talking to my brother Clarence. There was a fellow with me. He looked out, too.” His voice sounded blurred and far-away. “A theatrical manager fellow whom I used to know very well in the old days. A man named Mason.”
The thrush had flown away. Sue continued to gaze at the spot where it had been. Across the years, for the mind works oddly in times of stress, there had come to her a vivid recollection of herself at the age of ten, taken by her mother to the Isle of Man on her first steamer trip and just beginning to feel the motion of the vessel. There had been a moment then, just before the supreme catastrophe, when she had felt exactly as she was feeling now.
“We saw you, and he said, ‘Why, there’s Sue!’—I said ‘Sue? Sue who?’ ‘Sue Brown,’ said this fellow Mason. He said you were one of the girls at his theater. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to see you here. He said he took it that everything had been fixed up all right and he was glad, because you were one of the best. He wanted to come and have a chat with you, but I headed him off. I thought you might prefer to talk over this little matter of your being Miss Sue Brown alone with me. Which brings me back to my original question: What, Miss Brown, is the game?”
Sue felt dizzy, helpless, hopeless.
“I can’t explain,” she said.
The Hon. Galahad tut-tutted protestingly.
“You don’t mean to say you propose to leave the thing as just another of those historic mysteries? Don’t you want me ever to get a good night’s sleep again?”
“Oh, it’s so long.”
“WE HAVE the evening before us. Take it bit by bit, a little at a time. To begin with, what did Mason mean by saying that everything was all right?”
“I had told him about Ronnie.”
“Ronnie? My nephew Ronnie?”
“Yes. And, seeing me here, he naturally took it for granted that Lord Emsworth and the rest of you had consented to the engagement and invited me to the castle.”
“Engagement?”
“I used to be engaged to Ronnie.”
“What! That young Fish?”
“Yes.”
“Good Lord!” said the Hon. Galahad.
Suddenly Sue began to feel conscious of a slackening of the tension. It is an unpleasant thing to say of any man, but there is no denying that the Hon. Galahad’s face, when he was listening to the confessions of those who had behaved as they ought not to have behaved, very frequently lacked the austerity and disapproval which one likes to see in faces on such occasions. It lacked them now.
“But how ever did Pa Mason come to be here?” asked Sue.
“He came to discuss some business in connection with. . . . Never mind about that,” said the Hon. Galahad, calling the meeting to order. “Kindly refrain from wandering from the point. I’m beginning to see daylight. You are engaged to Ronald, you say?”
“I was.”
“But you broke it off?”
“He broke it off.”
“He did?”
“Yes. That’s why I came here. You see, Ronnie was here and I was in London and you can’t put things properly in letters, so I thought that if I could get down to Blandings I could see him and explain and put everything right . . . and I’d met Lady Constance in London one day when I was with Ronnie and he had introduced me as Miss Schoonmaker, so that part of it was all right . . . so . . . Well, so I came.”
“I never heard,” said the Hon. Galahad, beaming like one listening to a tale of virtue triumphant, “anything so dashed sporting in my life.”
Sue’s heart leaped.
“You mean,” she cried, “you won’t give me away?”
“Me?” said the Hon. Galahad, aghast at the idea. “Of course I won’t. What do you take me for?”
“I think you’re an angel.”
The Hon. Galahad seemed pleased at the compliment, but it was plain that there was something that worried him. He frowned a little.
“What I can’t make out,” he said, “is why you want to marry my nephew Ronald.”
“I love him, bless his heart.”
“No, seriously!” protested the Hon. Galahad. “Do you know that he once put tin-tacks on my chair?”
“And he throws tennis-balls at pigs. All the same, I love him.”
“You can’t!”
“I don’t believe you like Ronnie.”
“I don’t dislike him. He’s improved since he was a boy. I’ll admit that. But he isn’t worthy of you.”
“Why not?”
“Well, he isn’t.”
She laughed.
“It’s funny that you of all people should say that. Lord Emsworth was telling me just now that Ronnie is exactly like what you used to be at his age.”
“What!”
“That’s what he said.”
The Hon. Galahad stared incredulously.
“That boy like me?” He spoke with indignation, for his pride had been sorely touched. “Ronald like me? Why, I was twice the man he is. How many policemen do you think it used to take to shift me from the Alhambra to Vine Street when I was in my prime? Two! Sometimes three. And one walking behind carrying my hat. Clarence ought to be more careful what he says, dash it. It’s just this kind of loose talk that makes trouble. The fact of the matter is, he’s gone and got his brain so addled with pigs, he doesn’t know what he is saying half the time.”
He pulled himself together with a strong effort. He became calmer.
“What did you and that young nincompoop quarrel about?” he asked.
“He is not a nincompoop!”
“He is. How long have you known him?”
“About nine months.”
“WELL, I’ve known him all his life. And I say he’s a nincompoop. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have quarreled with you. However, we won’t split straws. What did you quarrel about?”
“He found me dancing.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I had promised him I wouldn’t.”
“And is that all the trouble?”
“It’s quite enough for me.”
The Hon. Galahad made light of the tragedy.
“I don’t see what you’re worrying about. If you can’t smooth a little thing like that over, you’re not the girl I take you for.”
“I thought I might be able to.”
“Of course you’ll be able to. Girls were always doing that sort of thing to me in my young days, and I never could hold out for five minutes, once the crying started. Go and sob on the boy’s waistcoat. How are you as a sobber?”
“Not very good, I’m afraid.”
“Well, there are all sorts of other tricks you can try. Every girl knows a dozen. Falling on your knees, fainting, laughing hysterically, going rigid all over . . . scores of them.”
“I think it will be all right if I can just talk to him. The difficulty is to get an opportunity.”
“Well, whatever you do, you’ll have to be quick about it, my dear. Suppose old Johnny Schoonmaker’s girl really turns up? She said she was going to.”
“Yes, but I made Ronnie send her a telegram, signed with Lady Constance’s name, saying that there was scarlet fever at the castle and she wasn’t to come.”
One dislikes the necessity of perpetually piling up the evidence against the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, to show ever more and more clearly how warped was his moral outlook. Nevertheless, the fact must be stated that at these words he threw his head up and uttered a high, piercing laugh that sent the thrush, which had just returned to the lawn, starting back as if a bullet had hit it. It was a laugh which, when it had rung out in days of yore in London’s more lively night-resorts, had caused commissionaires to leap like war-horses at the note of the bugle, to spit on their hands, feel their muscles and prepare for action.
“It’s the finest thing I ever heard!” cried the Hon. Galahad. “It restores my faith in the younger generation. And a girl like you seriously contemplates marrying a boy like . . . Oh, well!” he said resignedly, seeming to brace himself to make the best of a distasteful state of affairs. “It’s your business, I suppose. You know your own mind best. After all, the great thing is to get you into the family. A girl like you is what this family has been needing for years.”
He patted her kindly on the shoulder, and they started to walk toward the house. As they did so, two men came out of it.
One was Lord Emsworth. The other was Percy Pilbeam.
There is about a place like Blandings Castle something which, if you are not in the habit of visiting country-houses planned on the grand scale, tends to sap the morale. At the moment when Sue caught sight of him, the proprietor of the Argus Inquiry Agency was not feeling his brightest and best.
Beach, ushering him through the front door, had started the trouble. He had merely let his eyes rest upon Pilbeam, but it had been enough. The butler’s eye, through years of insufficient exercise and too hearty feeding, had acquired in the process of time a sort of glaze which many people found trying when they saw it. In Pilbeam it created an inferiority complex of the severest kind.
He could not know that to this godlike man he was merely a blur. To Beach, tortured by the pangs of a guilty conscience, almost everything nowadays was merely a blur. Misinterpreting his gaze, Pilbeam had read into it a shocked contempt, a kind of wincing agony at the thought that things like himself should be creeping into Blandings Castle. He felt as if he had crawled out from under a flat stone.
AND it was at this moment that somebody in the dimness of the hall had stepped forward and revealed himself as the young man, name unknown, who had showed such a lively disposition to murder him on the dancing-floor of Mario’s restaurant. And from the violent start which he gave, it was plain that the young man’s memory was as good as his own.
So far, things had not broken well for Percy Pilbeam. But now his luck turned. There had appeared in the nick of time an angel from heaven, effectively disguised in a shabby shooting-coat and an old hat. He had introduced himself as Lord Emsworth, and he had taken Pilbeam off with him into the garden.
Relief, however, by the time he arrived on the terrace, had not completely restored his composure. And then he saw Sue!
“Gaw!” he said.
“I beg your pardon?” said Lord Emsworth. He had not caught his companion’s remark and hoped he would repeat it. The lightest utterance of a detective with the trained mind is something not to be missed. “What did you say, my dear fellow?”
He, too, perceived Sue; and with a prodigious effort of the memory, working by swift stages through Scofield, Maybury, Coolidge and Spooner, recalled her name.
“Mr. Pilbeam, Miss Schoonmaker,” he said. “Galahad, this is Mr. Pilbeam. Of the Argus, you remember.”
“Pilbeam?”
“How do you do?”
“Pilbeam?”
“My brother,” said Lord Emsworth, exerting himself to complete the introduction. “This is my brother Galahad.”
“PILBEAM?” said the Hon. Galahad, looking intently at the proprietor of the Argus. “Were you ever connected with a paper called Society Spice, Mr. Pilbeam?”
The gardens of Blandings Castle seemed to the detective to rock gently.
“Never,” he gasped. “Certainly not. No! I never have been connected with any paper called Society Spice.”
“A fellow of your name used to edit it. Uncommon name, too.”
“Relation, perhaps. Distant.”
“Well, I’m sorry you’re not the man,” said the Hon. Galahad regretfully. “I’ve been wanting to meet him. He wrote a very offensive thing about me once. Most offensive thing.”
Lord Emsworth, who had been according the conversation the rather meager interest which he gave to all conversations that did not deal with pigs, created a diversion.
“I wonder,” he said, “if you would like to see some photographs? Of the Empress, I mean, of course. They will give you some idea of what a magnificent animal she is. They will . . .” He sought for the mot juste. “. . . stimulate you. I’ll go to the library and get them out.”
The Hon. Galahad was now his old, affable self again.
“You doing anything after dinner?” he asked Sue.
“There was some talk,” said Sue, “of a game of bezique with Mr. Baxter.”
“Don’t dream of it,” said the Hon. Galahad vehemently. “The fellow would probably try to brain you with the mallet. I was thinking that if I hadn’t got to go out to dinner I’d like you to see my book. I’ll give you the thing to read. Which is your room?”
“The Garden Room, I think it’s called.”
“Oh, yes. Well, I’ll bring the manuscript to you before I leave.”
He sauntered off. There was a moment’s pause. Then Sue turned to Pilbeam. Her chin was tilted. There was defiance in her eye.
“Well?” she said.
Percy Pilbeam breathed a sigh of relief. At the first moment of their meeting, all that he had ever read about doubles had raced through his mind. This question clarified the situation. It was Sue Brown and no other who stood before him.
“What on earth are you doing here?” he asked.
“Never mind.”
“What’s the game?”
“Never mind.”
“If you won’t tell me, you won’t, I suppose.”
There was a pause.
“WHAT was that name the old boy called you?”
“Schoonmaker.”
“Why did he call you that?”
“Because that’s who he thinks I am.”
“What on earth made you choose a name like that?”
“Oh, don’t keep asking questions.”
“I don’t believe there is such a name. And when it comes to asking questions,” said Pilbeam warmly, “what do you expect me to do? I never got such a shock in my life as when I met you just now. I thought I was seeing things. Do you mean to say you’re here under a false name, pretending to be somebody else?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m hanged! And as friendly as you please with everybody. The Galahad fellow seems to look on you as a daughter or something.”
“We are great friends.”
“So I see. And he’s going to give you his book to read.”
“Yes.”
A keen, purposeful, Argus-Inquiry-Agency sort of look shot into Pilbeam’s face.
“Well, this is where you and I get together,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you what I mean. Do you want to make some money?”
“No,” said Sue.
“What! Of course you do. Everybody does. Now, listen. Do you know why I’m here?”
“I’ve stopped wondering why you’re anywhere. You just seem to pop up.”
SHE started to move away. A sudden, disturbing thought had come to her. At any moment Ronnie might appear on the terrace. If he found her here, closeted, so to speak, with the abominable Pilbeam, what would he think? What, rather, would he not think?
“Where are you going?”
“Into the house.”
“But I’ve got something important to say.”
“Well?”
She stopped.
“That’s right,” said Pilbeam approvingly. “Now, listen. You’ll admit that, if I liked, I could give you away and spoil whatever game it is that you’re up to in this place?”
“Well?”
“But I’m not going to do it. If you’ll be sensible.”
“Sensible?”
Pilbeam looked cautiously up and down the terrace.
“Now, listen,” he said. “I want your help. I’ll tell you why I’m here. The old boy thinks I’ve come down to find his pig, but I haven’t. I’ve come to get that book your friend Galahad is writing.”
“What!”
“I thought you’d be surprised. Yes, that’s what I’m after. There’s a man living near here who’s scared stiff that there’s going to be a lot of stories about him in that book, and he came to see me at my office yesterday and offered me . . .” He hesitated a moment. “. . . Offered me,” he went on, “a hundred pounds if I’d get into the house somehow and snitch the manuscript. And you being on friendly terms with the old buster has made everything simple.”
“You think so?”
“Easy,” he assured her. “Especially now he’s going to give you the thing to read. All you have to do is to hand the manuscript over to me, and there’s fifty quid for you. For doing practically nothing.”
“Oh?” said Sue.
“Fifty quid,” said Pilbeam. “I’m going halves with you.”
“And if I don’t do what you want I suppose you will tell them who I really am?”
“That’s it,” said Pilbeam, pleased at her ready intelligence.
“Well, I’m not going to do anything of the kind.”
“What!”
“And if,” said Sue, “you want to tell these people who I am, go ahead and tell them.”
“I will.”
“Do. But just bear in mind that the moment you do tell them I shall tell Mr. Threepwood that it was you who wrote that thing about him in Society Spice.”
Percy Pilbeam swayed like a sapling in the breeze. The blow had unmanned him. He found no words with which to reply.
“I will,” said Sue.
Pilbeam continued speechless. He was still trying to recover from this deadly thrust through an unexpected chink in his armor when the opportunity for speech passed. Millicent had appeared, and was walking along the terrace towards them. She wore her customary air of settled gloom. On reaching them, she paused.
“Hullo,” said Millicent, from the depths.
“Hullo,” said Sue.
The library window framed the head and shoulders of Lord Emsworth.
“Pilbeam, my dear fellow, will you come up to the library. I have found the photographs.”
Millicent eyed the detective’s retreating back with a mournful curiosity.
“Who’s he?”
“A man named Pilbeam.”
“Pill, I should say, is right. What makes him waddle like that?”
Sue was unable to supply a solution to this problem. Millicent came and stood beside her, and, leaning on the stone parapet, gazed disparagingly at the park. She gave the impression of disliking all parks, but this one particularly.
“Ever read Schopenhauer?” she asked, after a silence.
“No.”
“You should. Great stuff. Well, I’m going for a walk. You coming?”
“I don’t think I will, thanks.”
“Just as you like. Schopenhauer says suicide’s absolutely O. K. He says Hindoos do it instead of going to church. They bung themselves into the Ganges and get eaten by crocodiles and call it a well-spent day. Sure you won’t come for a walk?”
“No, thanks, really. I think I’ll go in.”
“Just as you like,” said Millicent. “Liberty Hall.”
She moved off a few steps, then returned.
“Sorry if I seem loopy,” she said. “Something on my mind. Been giving it a spot of thought. The fact is, I’ve just got engaged to be married to my cousin Ronnie.”
The trees that stood out against the banking clouds seemed to swim before Sue’s eyes. An unseen hand had clutched her by the throat and was crushing the life out of her.
“Didn’t you meet Ronnie when you arrived?” asked Millicent. “Pink-faced bird. Oh, but of course you knew him before, didn’t you? Well, that’s who it is,” she went on, rather in the tone of voice which Schopenhauer would have used when announcing the discovery of a caterpillar in his salad. “We fixed it up just now.”
SHE wandered away, and Sue clung to the terrace wall. That at least was solid in a world that rocked and crashed.
“I say!”
It was Hugo. She was looking at him through a mist, but there was never any mistaking Hugo Carmody.
“I say! Did she tell you?”
Sue nodded.
“She’s engaged.”
Sue nodded.
“She’s going to marry Ronnie.”
Sue nodded.
“Death, where is thy sting?” said Hugo, and vanished in the direction taken by Millicent.
Annotations to this novel in book form are on this site.
Printer’s errors corrected above:
p. 56b: Magazine had “What! That young fish?”; corrected to “Fish” as in both US and UK books.
p. 58a: Magazine had “There had apeared in the nick of time”; corrected to “appeared”.
p. 61a: Magazine had “A keen, purposeful, Argus-Inquiry Agency sort of look”; hyphen added. UK magazine has “Argus-Enquiry-Agency”; both US and UK books have “Argus-Enquiry-Agent” here.
p. 61a: Magazine had “I’ve stopped wondering why you’re anywhere,” said Pilbeam. “You just seem to pop up.” Since this is actually said by Sue, corrected to one unattributed speech of two sentences, as in both books.