Collier’s Weekly, June 22, 1929

 

 

 

Conclusion

FROM the moment when it left the door of Matchingham Hall and started on its journey back to Blandings Castle, a silence as of the tomb had reigned in the Antelope car which was bringing Lord Emsworth, his sister, Lady Constance Keeble, and his brother, the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, home from their interrupted dinner party. Not so much as a syllable proceeded from one of them.

The explanation, like all explanations, is simple. It is supplied by that one word Antelope.

 

OWING to the fact that some trifling internal ailment had removed from the active list the Hispano-Suiza in which Blandings Castle usually went out to dinner, Voules, the chauffeur, had had to fall back upon this secondary and inferior car; and anybody who has ever owned an Antelope is aware that there is no glass partition inside it, shutting off the driver from the cash customers. He is right there in their midst, ready and eager to hear everything that is said and to hand it on in due course to the Servants’ Hall.

In these circumstances, though the choice seemed one between speech and spontaneous combustion, the little company kept their thoughts to themselves. They suffered, but they did it. It would be difficult to find a better illustration of all that is implied in the fine old phrase noblesse oblige. At Lady Constance we point with particular pride. She was a woman, and silence weighed hardest on her.

There were times during the drive when even the sight of Voules’s large, red ears, all pricked up to learn the reason for this sudden and sensational return, was scarcely sufficient to restrain Lady Constance Keeble from telling her brother Clarence just what she thought of him. From boyhood up, he had not once come near to being her ideal man; but never had he sunk so low in her estimation as at the moment when she heard him giving his consent to the union of her niece Millicent with a young man, who, besides being penniless, had always afflicted her with a nervous complaint for which she could find no name, but which is known to scientists as the heeby-jeebies.

 

NOR had he reëstablished himself in any way by his outspoken remarks on the subject of the Efficient Baxter. He had said things about Baxter which no admirer of that energetic man could forgive. The adjectives mad, crazy, insane, gibbering—and, worse, potty—had played in and out of his conversation like flashes of lightning. And from the look in his eye she gathered that he was still saying them all over again to himself.

The ninth Earl of Emsworth was not a man who was easily disturbed. His was a calm which, as a rule, only his younger son Frederick could shatter. But it was not proof against the sort of thing that had been going on today. No matter how placid you may be, if you find yourself in close juxtaposition with a man who, when he is not hurling himself out of windows, is stealing pigs and trying to make you believe they were stolen by your butler, you begin to think a bit. Lord Emsworth was thoroughly upset. As the car bowled up the drive, he was saying to himself that nothing could surprise him now.

And yet something did. As the car turned the corner by the rhododendrons and wheeled into the broad strip of gravel that faced the front door, he beheld a sight which brought the first sound he had uttered since the journey began bursting from his lips.

“Good God!”

The words were spoken in a high, penetrating tenor and they made Lady Constance jump as if they had been pins running into her. This unexpected breaking of the great silence was agony to her taut nerves.

“What is the matter?”

“Matter? Look! Look at that fellow!”

Voules took it upon himself to explain.

“A man is climbing the waterspout, m’lady.”

“What! Where? I don’t see him.”

“He has just got into the balcony outside one of the bedrooms,” said the Hon. Galahad.

Lord Emsworth went straight to the heart of the matter.

“It’s that fellow Baxter!” he exclaimed.

He reasoned closely. There were, he knew, on the premises of Blandings Castle other male adults beside Rupert Baxter; but none of these would climb up waterspouts and disappear over balconies. To Baxter, on the other hand, such a pursuit would seem the normal, ordinary way of passing an evening. It would be his idea of wholesome relaxation. Soon no doubt, he would come out onto the balcony again and throw himself to the ground. That was the sort of fellow Baxter was—a man of strange pleasures.

And so, going, as we say, straight to the heart of the matter, Lord Emsworth, jerking the pince-nez off his face in his emotion, exclaimed:

“It’s that fellow Baxter!”

The car had drawn up now outside the front door. The front door was open, as always of a summer evening, and the ninth Earl, accompanied by his brother Galahad, hurried up the steps and entered the hall. And, as they did so, there came to their ears the sound of running feet. The next moment, the flying figure of Percy Pilbeam came into view, taking the stairs four at a time.

“God bless my soul!” said Lord Emsworth.

If Pilbeam heard the words or saw the speaker, he gave no sign of having done so. He was plainly in a hurry. He shot through the hall and more like a startled gazelle than a private inquiry agent, vanished down the steps. The next instant, there descended the stairs and flitted past with equal speed the form of Ronnie Fish.

 

LORD EMSWORTH got an entirely wrong conception of the affair. He had no means of knowing what had taken place in the Garden Room when Pilbeam, inspired by alcohol and flushed with the thought that now was the time to get into that apartment and possess himself of the manuscript of the Hon. Galahad’s Reminiscences, had climbed the waterspout to put the plan into operation. He knew nothing of the detective’s sharp dismay at finding himself unexpectedly confronted with the menacing form of Ronnie Fish. He was ignorant of the lively and promising mix-up which had been concluded by Pilbeam’s tempestuous dash for life. All he saw was two men fleeing madly for the open spaces, and he placed the obvious interpretation upon this phenomenon.

Baxter, he assumed, had run amuck and had done it with such uncompromising thoroughness that strong men ran panic-stricken before him.

Mild though the ninth earl was by nature, a lover of rural peace and the quiet life, he had, like all Britain’s aristocracy, the right stuff in him. It so chanced that during the years when he had held his commission in the Shropshire Yeomanry the motherland had not called to him to save her. But, had that call been made, Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, would have answered it with as prompt a “Bless my soul! Of course. Certainly!” as any of his Crusader ancestors. And in his sixtieth year the ancient fire still lingered. The Hon. Galahad, who had returned to watch the procession through the front door with a surprised monocle, turned back and found that he was alone. Lord Emsworth had disappeared. He now beheld him coming back again. On his amiable face was a look of determination. In his hand was a gun.

“Eh? What?” said the Hon. Galahad, blinking.

The head of the family did not reply. He was moving towards the stairs. In just the same silent, purposeful way had an Emsworth advanced on the foe at Agincourt.

A sound as of disturbed hens made the Hon. Galahad turn again.

“Galahad! What is all this? What is happening?”

The Hon. Galahad placed his sister in possession of the facts as known to himself.

“Clarence has just gone upstairs with a gun.”

“With a gun!”

“Yes. Looked like mine, too. I hope he takes care of it.” He perceived that Lady Constance had also been seized with the urge to climb. She was making excellent time up the broad staircase. So nimbly did she move that she was on the second landing before he came up with her.

And, as they stood there, a voice made itself heard from a room down the corridor.

“Baxter! Come out! Come out, Baxter, my dear fellow, immediately.”

 

 

IN THE race for the room from which the words had appeared to proceed, Lady Constance, getting off to a good start, beat her brother by a matter of two lengths. She was thus the first to see a sight unusual even at Blandings Castle, though strange things had happened there from time to time.

Her young guest, Miss Schoonmaker, was standing by the window, looking excited and alarmed. Her brother Clarence, pointing a gun expertly from the hip, was staring fixedly at the bed. And from under the bed, a little like a tortoise protruding from its shell, there was coming into view the spectacled head of the Efficient Baxter.

A man who has been lying under a bed for a matter of thirty minutes, and, while there, has been compelled to listen to the sort of dialogue which accompanies a lovers’ reconciliation, seldom appears at his best or feels his brightest. There was fluff in Baxter’s hair, dust on his clothes, and on Baxter’s face a scowl of concentrated hatred of all humanity.

Lord Emsworth, prepared for something pretty wild-looking, found his expectations exceeded. He tightened his grasp on the gun, and to insure a more accurate aim raised the butt of it to his shoulder, closing one eye and allowing the other to gleam along the barrel.

“I have you covered, my dear fellow,” he said mildly.

Rupert Baxter had not yet begun to stick straws in his hair, but he seemed on the verge of that final piece of self-expression.

“Don’t point that damned thing at me!”

“I shall point it at you,” replied Lord Emsworth with spirit. He was not a man to be dictated to in his own house. “And at the slightest sign of violence. . . .”

“Clarence!” It was Lady Constance who spoke. “Put that gun down.”

“Certainly not.”

“Clarence!”

“Oh, all right.”

“And now, Mr. Baxter,” said Lady Constance, proceeding to dominate the scene in her masterly way, “I am sure you can explain.”

Baxter did not speak. His silence gave Lord Emsworth the opportunity of advancing his own views.

“Explain?” He spoke petulantly, for he resented the way in which his sister had thrust him from the center of the stage. “What on earth is there to explain? The thing’s obvious.”

“Can’t say I’ve quite got to the bottom of it,” murmured the Hon. Galahad. “Fellow under bed. Why? Why under bed? Why here at all?”

Lord Emsworth hesitated. He was a kind-hearted man, and he felt that what he had to say would be better said in Baxter’s absence. However, there seemed no way out of it, so he proceeded.

“My dear Galahad, think!”

“Eh?”

“That flower-pot affair. You remember.”

“Oh!” Understanding shone in the Hon. Galahad’s monocle. “You mean . . . ?”

“Exactly.”

“Yes, yes. Of course. Subject to these attacks, you mean?”

“Precisely.”

“Clarence!” exclaimed Lady Constance.

“My dear?”

“Kindly stop talking in that offensive way.”

“You know yourself he isn’t right in the head. Didn’t he throw flower-pots at me? Didn’t he leap out of a window this very afternoon? Didn’t he try to make me think that Beach—”

 

BAXTER interrupted. There were certain matters on which he considered silence best, but this was one on which he could speak freely.

“Lord Emsworth!”

“Eh?”

“It has now come to my knowledge that Beach was not the prime mover in the theft of your pig. But I have ascertained that he was an accessory.”

“A what?”

“He helped,” said Baxter, grinding his teeth a little. “The man who committed the actual theft was your nephew, Ronald.”

Lord Emsworth turned to his sister with a triumphant gesture, like one who has been vindicated.

“There! Now perhaps you’ll say he’s not potty? It won’t do, Baxter, my dear fellow,” he went on, waggling a reproachful gun at his late employee. “The Empress was found this evening in your caravan.”

“What!”

“In your caravan. Where you put her when you stole her. And, bless my soul,” said Lord Emsworth, with a start, “I must be going and seeing that she is put back in her sty. . . .”

“In my caravan.” Baxter passed a feverish hand across his dust-stained forehead. Illumination came to him. “Then that’s what that fellow Carmody did with the animal!”

Lord Emsworth had had enough of this. Empress of Blandings was waiting for him. Counting the minutes to that holy reunion, he chafed at having to stand here listening to these wild ravings.

“First Beach, then Ronald, then Carmody! You’ll be saying I stole her next, or Galahad here, or my sister Constance. Baxter, my dear fellow, we aren’t blaming you. Please don’t think that. We quite see how it is. You will overwork yourself, and of course nature demands the penalty. I wish you would go quietly to your room, my dear fellow, and lie down. All this must be very bad for you.”

 

LADY CONSTANCE intervened. Her eye was aflame, and she spoke like Cleopatra telling an Ethiopian slave where he got off.

“Clarence, will you kindly use whatever slight intelligence you may possess? The theft of your pig is one of the most trivial and unimportant things that has ever happened in this world, and I consider the fuss that has been made about it quite revolting. But whoever stole the wretched animal . . .”

Lord Emsworth blenched. He stared as if wondering if he had heard aright.

“ . . . and wherever it has been found, it was certainly not Mr. Baxter who stole it. It is as Mr. Baxter says, much more likely to have been a young man like Mr. Carmody. There is a certain type of young man, I believe, to which Mr. Carmody belongs, which considers practical joking amusing. Do ask yourself, Clarence, and try to answer the question as reasonably as is possible for a man of your mental caliber: What earthly motive would Mr. Baxter have for coming to Blandings Castle and stealing pigs?”

It may have been the feel of the gun in his hand which awoke in Lord Emsworth old memories of dashing days with the Shropshire Yeomanry and lent him some of the hot spirit of his vanished youth. The fact remains that he did not wilt beneath his sister’s dominating eye. He met it boldly, and boldly answered back.

“And ask yourself, Constance,” he said, “what earthly motive Mr. Baxter has for anything he does.”

“Yes,” said the Hon. Galahad loyally. “What motive has our friend Baxter for coming to Blandings Castle and scaring girls stiff by hiding under beds?”

Lady Constance gulped. They had found the weak spot in her defenses. She turned to the man who, she still hoped, could deal efficiently with this attack.

“Mr. Baxter!” she said, as if she were calling on him for an after-dinner speech.

But Rupert Baxter had had no dinner. And it was perhaps this that turned the scale. Quite suddenly there descended on him a frenzied desire to be out of this, cost what it might. An hour before, half an hour before, even five minutes before, his tongue had been tied by a still lingering hope that he might yet find his way back to Blandings Castle in the capacity of private secretary to the Earl of Emsworth. Now, he felt that he would not accept that post, were it offered to him on bended knee.

His eyes flashed through their lenses. His mouth tightened.

“I will explain!”

“I knew you would have an explanation,” cried Lady Constance.

“I have. A very simple one.”

“And short, I hope?” asked Lord Emsworth, restlessly. He was aching to have done with all this talk and discussion and to be with his pig once more. To think of the Empress languishing in a beastly caravan was agony to him.

“Quite short,” said Rupert Baxter.

The only person in the room who so far had remained entirely outside this rather painful scene was Sue. She had looked on from her place by the window, an innocent bystander. She now found herself drawn abruptly into the maelstrom of the debate. Baxter’s spectacles were raking her from head to foot, and he had pointed at her with an accusing forefinger.

“I came to this room,” he said, “to try to recover a letter which I had written to this lady who calls herself Miss Schoonmaker.”

“Of course she calls herself Miss Schoonmaker,” said Lord Emsworth, reluctantly dragging his thoughts from the Empress. “It’s her name, my dear fellow. That,” he explained gently, “is why she calls herself Miss Schoonmaker. God bless my soul!” he said, unable to restrain a sudden spurt of irritability. “If a girl’s name is Schoonmaker, naturally she calls herself Miss Schoonmaker.”

“Yes, if it is. But hers is not. It is Brown.”

“Listen, my dear fellow,” said Lord Emsworth soothingly. “You go to your room and put a cool compress on your forehead and lie down and take a good rest. I will send Beach up to you with some nice bread and milk.”

“Rum and milk,” amended the Hon. Galahad. “It’s the only thing. I knew a fellow in the year ’97 who was subject to these spells—you probably remember him, Clarence. Bellamy. Barmy Bellamy we used to call him—and whenever—”

“Her name is Brown!” repeated Baxter, his voice soaring in a hysterical crescendo. “Sue Brown. She is a chorus-girl at the Regal Theater in London. And she is apparently engaged to be married to your nephew Ronald.”

 

LADY CONSTANCE uttered a cry. Lord Emsworth expressed his feelings with a couple of tuts. The Hon. Galahad alone was silent. He caught Sue’s eye, and there was concern in his gaze.

“I overheard Beach saying so in this very room. He said he had had the information from Mr. Pilbeam. I imagine it to be accurate. But in any case, I can tell you this much. Whoever she is, she is an impostor who has come here under a false name. While I was in the smoking-room some time back, a telegram came through on the telephone from Market Blandings. It was signed Myra Schoonmaker, and it had been handed in in Paris this afternoon. That is all I have to say,” concluded Baxter. “I will now leave you, and I sincerely hope I shall never set eyes on any of you again. Good evening!”

His spectacles glinting coldly, he strode from the room and in the doorway collided with Ronnie, who was entering.

“Can’t you look where you’re going?” he asked.

“Eh?” said Ronnie.

“Clumsy idiot!” said the Efficient Baxter, and was gone.

In the room he had left, Lady Constance Keeble had become a stony figure of menace. She was not at ordinary times a particularly tall woman, but she seemed now to tower like something vast and awful; and Sue quailed before her.

“Ronnie!” cried Sue weakly.

It was the cry of the female in distress, calling to her mate. Just so in prehistoric days must Sue’s cave-woman ancestress have cried to the man behind the club when suddenly cornered by the saber-toothed tiger which Lady Constance Keeble so closely resembled.

“Ronnie!”

 

“WHAT’S all this?” asked the last of the Fishes.

He was breathing rather quickly, for the going had been fast. Pilbeam, once out in the open, had shown astonishing form at the short sprint. He had shaken off Ronnie’s challenge twenty yards down the drive, and plunged into a convenient shrubbery, and Ronnie, giving up the pursuit, had come back to Sue’s room to report. It occasioned him some surprise to find that in his absence it had become the scene of some sort of public meeting.

“What’s all this?” he said, addressing that meeting.

Lady Constance wheeled round upon him.

“Ronald, who is this girl?”

“Eh?” Ronnie was conscious of a certain uneasiness, but he did his best. He did not like his aunt’s looks, but then he never had. Something was evidently up, but it might be that airy nonchalance would save the day. “You know her, don’t you? Miss Schoonmaker? Met her with me in London.”

“Is her name Brown? And is she a chorus-girl?”

“Why, yes,” admitted Ronnie. It was a bombshell, but Eton and Cambridge stood it well. “Why, yes,” he said, “as a matter of fact, that’s right.”

Words seemed to fail Lady Constance. Judging from the expression on her face this was just as well.

“I’d been meaning to tell you about that,” said Ronnie. “We’re engaged.”

Lady Constance recovered herself sufficiently to find one word:

“Clarence!”

“Eh?” said Lord Emsworth. His thoughts had been wandering.

“You heard?”

“Heard what?”

Beyond the stage of turbulent emotion, Lady Constance had become suddenly calm and icy.

“If you have not been sufficiently interested to listen,” she said, “I may inform you that Ronald has just announced his intention of marrying a chorus-girl.”

“Oh, ah?” said Lord Emsworth. Would a man of Baxter’s outstandingly unbalanced intellect, he was wondering, have remembered to feed the Empress regularly? The thought was like a spear quivering in his heart. He edged in agitation towards the door, and had reached it when he perceived that his sister had not yet finished talking to him.

“So that is all the comment you have to make, is it?”

“Eh? What about?”

“The point I have been endeavoring to make you understand,” went on Lady Constance, with laborious politeness, “is that your nephew Ronald has announced his intention of marrying into the Regal Theater chorus.”

“Who?”

“Ronald. This is Ronald. He is anxious to marry Miss Brown, a chorus-girl. This is Miss Brown.”

“How do you do?” said Lord Emsworth. He might be vague, but he had the manners of the old school.

Ronnie interposed. The time had come to play the ace of trumps.

“She isn’t an ordinary chorus-girl.”

“From the fact of her coming to Blandings Castle under a false name,” said Lady Constance, “I imagine not. It shows unusual enterprise.”

“What I mean,” continued Ronnie, “is I know what a bally snob you are, Aunt Constance—no offense, but you know what I mean—keen on birth and family and all that sort of rot. . . . Well, what I’m driving at is that Sue’s father was in the Guards.”

“A private? Or a corporal?”

“Captain. A fellow named . . .”

“Cotterleigh,” said Sue in a small voice.

“Cotterleigh,” said Ronnie.

“Cotterleigh!”

It was the Hon. Galahad who had spoken. He was staring at Sue open-mouthed.

“Cotterleigh? Not Jack Cotterleigh?”

“I don’t know whether it was Jack Cotterleigh,” said Ronnie. “The point I’m making is that it was Cotterleigh and that he was in the Irish Guards.”

The Hon. Galahad was still staring at Sue.

“My dear,” he cried, and there was an odd sharpness in his voice, “was your mother Dolly Henderson, who used to be a Serio at the old Oxford and the Tivoli?”

“Yes,” said Sue. “She was.”

The Hon. Galahad was advancing on her with outstretched hands. He looked like some father in melodrama welcoming the prodigal daughter.

“Well, I’m dashed!” he said. He repeated three times that he was in this condition. He seized Sue’s limp paws and squeezed them fondly. “I’ve been trying to think all this while who it was that you reminded me of, my dear girl. Do you know that in the years ’96, ’97 and ’98, I was madly in love with your mother myself? Do you know that if my infernal family hadn’t shipped me off to South Africa I would certainly have married her? Fact, I assure you. But they got behind me and shoved me onto the boat and when I came back I found that young Cotterleigh had cut me out. Well!”

 

IT WAS a scene which some people would have considered touching. Lady Constance Keeble was not one of them.

“Never mind about that now, Galahad,” she said. “The point is . . .”

“The point is,” retorted the Hon. Galahad warmly, “that that young Fish there wants to marry Dolly Henderson’s daughter, and I’m for it. And I hope, Clarence, that you’ll have some sense for once in your life and back them up like a sportsman.”

“Eh?” said the ninth Earl. His thoughts had once more been wandering. Even assuming that Baxter had fed the Empress, would he have given her the right sort of food and enough of it?

“You see for yourself what a splendid girl she is.”

“Who?”

“This girl.”

“Charming,” agreed Lord Emsworth courteously, and returned to his meditations.

“Clarence!” cried Lady Constance, jerking him out of them.

“Eh?”

“You are not to consent to this marriage!”

“Who says so?”

“I say so. And think what Julia will say.”

She could not have advanced a more impressive argument. In this chronicle the Lady Julia Fish, relict of the late Major-General Sir Miles Fish, C. B. O. of the Brigade of Guards, has made no appearance. We, therefore, know nothing of her compelling eye, her dominant chin, her determined mouth, and her voice, which, at certain times—as, for example, when rebuking a brother—could raise blisters on a sensitive skin. Lord Emsworth was aware of all these things. He had had experience of them from boyhood. His idea of happiness was to be where Lady Julia Fish was not. And the thought of her coming down to Blandings Castle and tackling him in his library about this business froze him to the marrow. It had been his amiable intention until this moment to do whatever the majority of those present wanted him to do. But now he hesitated.

“You think Julia wouldn’t like it?”

“Of course Julia would not like it.”

“Julia’s an ass,” said the Hon. Galahad.

Lord Emsworth considered this statement, and was inclined to agree with it. But it did not alter the main point.

“You think she would make herself unpleasant about it?”

“I do.”

“In that case . . .” Lord Emsworth paused. Then a strange, soft light came into his eyes. “Well, see you later,” he said. “I’m going down to look at my pig.”

 

HIS departure was so abrupt that it took Lady Constance momentarily by surprise, and he was out of the room and well down the corridor before she could recover herself sufficiently to act. Then she, too, hurried out. They could hear her voice diminishing down the stairs. It was calling “Clarence!”

The Hon. Galahad turned to Sue. His manner was brisk, yet soothing.

“A shame to inflict these fine old English family rows on a visitor,” he said, patting her shoulders as one who, if things had broken right and there had not been a regular service of boats to South Africa in the ’nineties, might have been her father. “Cheer up, my dear. Everything may come out all right yet.”

Sue shook her head.

“It’s no good,” she said hopelessly.

“Don’t you be too sure,” said the Hon. Galahad.

“I’ll jolly well tell you one thing,” said Ronnie. “I’m going to marry you, whatever happens. And that’s that. Good heavens! I can work, can’t I?”

“What at?” asked the Hon. Galahad.

“What at? Why—er—why, at anything.”

“The market value of any member of this family,” said the Hon. Galahad, who harbored no illusions about his nearest and dearest, “is about threepence-ha’-penny per annum. No! What we’ve got to do is get round old Clarence somehow, and that means talk and argument. But I’ve seen stickier things than this come out right in my time.”

Sue stood on the balcony, looking out into the night. She sighed. It was a night made for happiness. And she was quite sure now that happiness was not for her.

A footstep sounded behind her, and she turned eagerly.

“Ronnie?”

It was the voice of the Hon. Galahad Threepwood that answered.

“Only me, I’m afraid, my dear. May I come onto your balcony? God bless my soul, as Clarence would say, what a wonderful night!”

“Yes,” said Sue doubtfully.

“You don’t think so?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I bet you don’t. I know I didn’t, that night when my old father put his foot down and told me I was leaving for South Africa on the next boat. Just such a night as this it was, I remember.” He rested his arms on the parapet. “I never saw your mother after she was married,” he said.

“No?”

“No. She left the stage and . . . Oh, well, I was rather busy at the time—lot of heavy drinking to do, and so forth—and somehow we never met. The next thing I heard—two or three years ago—was that she was dead. You’re very like her, my dear. Can’t think why I didn’t spot the resemblance right away.”

He became silent. Sue did not speak. She slid her hand under his arm. It was all that there seemed to do. A corncrake began to call monotonously in the darkness.

“That means rain,” said the Hon. Galahad. “Or not. I forget which. Did you ever hear your mother sing that song . . . No, you wouldn’t. Before your time. About young Ronald,” he said, abruptly.

“What about him?”

“Fond of him?”

“Yes.”

“I mean really fond?”

“Yes.”

“How fond?”

 

SUE leaned out over the parapet. At the foot of the wall beneath her Percy Pilbeam, who had been peering out of a bush, popped his head back again. For the detective, possibly remembering with his subconscious mind stories heard in childhood of Bruce and the spider, had refused to admit defeat and returned by devious ways to the scene of his disaster.

Five hundred pounds is a lot of money, and Percy Pilbeam was not going to be deterred from attempting to earn it by the fact that at his last essay he had only just succeeded in escaping with his life. The influence of his potations had worn off to some extent, and he was his calm, keen self again. It was his intention to lurk in these bushes till the small hours, if need be, and then to attack the waterspout again and so to the Garden Room where the manuscript of the Hon. Galahad’s Reminiscences lay. You cannot be a good detective if you are easily discouraged.

“I can’t put it into words,” said Sue.

“Try.”

“No. Everything you say straight out about the way you feel about anybody always sounds silly. Besides, to you Ronnie isn’t the sort of man you could understand anyone raving about. You look on him just as something quite ordinary.”

“If that,” said the Hon. Galahad critically.

“Yes, if that. Whereas to me he’s something . . . rather special. In fact, if you really want to know how I feel about Ronnie, he’s the whole world to me.”

“Well, my dear, I’ve just fixed it all up.”

Sue clutched at the parapet.

“What!”

“Oh, yes,” said the Hon. Galahad. “It’s all settled. I don’t say that you can actually count on an aunt-in-law’s embrace from my sister Constance—in fact, if I were you, I wouldn’t risk it. She might bite you—but, apart from that, everything’s all right. The wedding bells will ring out. Your young man’s in the garden somewhere. You had better go and find him and tell him the news. He’ll be interested.”

“But . . . but—”

Sue was clutching his arm. A wild impulse was upon her to shout and sob. She had no doubt now as to the beauty of the night.

“But . . . how? Why? What has happened?”

“Well. . . . You’ll admit I might have married your mother?”

“Yes.”

“Which makes me a sort of honorary father to you.”

“Yes.”

“In which capacity, my dear, your interests are mine. More than mine, in fact. So what I did was to make your happiness the Price of the Papers. Ever see that play? No, before your time. It ran at the Adelphi before you were born. There was a scene where . . .”

“What do you mean?”

The Hon. Galahad hesitated a moment.

“Well, the fact of the matter is, my dear, knowing how strongly my sister Constance has always felt on the subject of those Reminiscences of mine, I went to her and put it to her squarely. ‘Clarence,’ I said to her, ‘is not the sort of man to make any objection to anyone marrying anybody, so long as he isn’t expected to attend the wedding. You’re the real obstacle,’ I said. ‘You and Julia. And if you come round, you can talk Julia over in five minutes. You know how she relies on your judgment.’ And then I said that, if she gave up acting like a barbed-wire entanglement in the path of true love—I would undertake not to publish the Reminiscences.”

Sue clung to his arm. “Oh!” she said, and again, “Oh!”

She found herself crying, and was not ashamed.

“Now, come!” said the Hon. Galahad protestingly. “Nothing so very extraordinary in that, was there? Nothing so exceedingly remarkable in one pal helping another?”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Then don’t say it,” said the Hon. Galahad, much relieved. “Why, bless you, I don’t care whether the damned things are published or not. At least . . . no, certainly I don’t. . . . Only cause a lot of unpleasantness. Besides, I’ll leave the dashed book to the Nation and have it published in a hundred years and become the Pepys of the future, what? Best thing that could have happened. Homage of Posterity and all that.”

“Oh!” said Sue.

The Hon. Galahad chuckled.

“It is a shame, though, that the world will have to wait a hundred years before it hears the story of young Gregory Parsloe and the prawns. Did you get to that when you were reading the thing this evening?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t read very much,” said Sue. “I was thinking of Ronnie rather a lot.”

“Oh? Well, I can tell you. You needn’t wait a hundred years. It was at Ascot, the year Martingale won the Gold Cup—”

 

DOWN below, Percy Pilbeam rose from his bush. He did not care now if he were seen. He was still a guest at this hole of a castle, and if a guest cannot pop in and out of bushes if he likes, where does British hospitality come in? It was his intention to shake the dust of Blandings off his feet, to pass the night at the Emsworth Arms, and on the morrow to return to London, where he was appreciated.

“Well, my dear, it was like this. Young Parsloe . . .”

Percy Pilbeam did not linger. The story of the prawns meant nothing to him. He turned away, and the summer night swallowed him. Somewhere in the darkness an owl hooted. It seemed to Pilbeam that there was derision in the sound. He frowned. His teeth came together with a little click.

If he could have found it, he would have had a word with that owl.

The End

 

---

 

Annotations to this novel in book form are on this site.

Printer’s error corrected above:
p. 32a: Magazine had “the sight of Voule’s large, red ears”; corrected to ”Voules’s“ as in US book.
p. 53a: Magazine had “He stared as wondering”; corrected to “as if” as in books.
p. 53b: Magazine had “I knew you would have an explana-
ation,” (at a hyphenated line break); extra ‘a’ deleted.

 

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