The Pall Mall Magazine, August 1929
 

 

The story so far:

BLANDINGS Castle slept in the sunshine and Beach, butler to Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, its proprietor, sat in the shade. Suddenly, Mr. Hugo Carmody rose from out of a laurel bush and begged Beach to tell Miss Millicent she would find him in the rose garden at six sharp. Hugo’s furtive way was due entirely to his unpopularity with Lady Constance Keeble, his employer’s sister. Hugo had been until recently co-proprietor with Mr. Ronald Fish, Lord Emsworth’s nephew, of the Hot Spot Night Club. Lord Emsworth’s previous secretary, one Baxter, had just been dismissed for throwing flowerpots at his lordship—though certainly he was only trying to call attention to the fact that he had been locked out—so Hugo was appointed in his place.

Tea time approached and with it Clarence, ninth Earl, fresh from inspecting his prize sow, Empress of Blandings, who was expected to win for the second time the silver medal at the Shropshire Show. Lady Constance and her niece Millicent were the next arrivals, and soon came Gally, otherwise the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, the Earl’s brother. Far from showing signs of the wear and tear that should result from a misspent youth, Gally was extremely bright in looks and manner, and far also from trying to forget that misspent youth, he had lately embarked on the writing of his reminiscences. “What year was it,” he now inquired, “when young Parsloe stole Lord Burper’s false teeth and pawned them in the Edgware Road?” Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe was a near neighbour, a hated rival in pig-owning of Lord Emsworth, and a friend of Lady Constance, so this was received with mixed feelings. Gally flitted away and, changing the subject, Lady Constance made inquiry as to her niece’s intentions with regard to Ronald, stating that a most charming American girl, a Miss Schoonmaker, appeared to be quite taken with him and that Hugo was not at all a nice young man, being at the moment entangled with some impossible chorus girl.

Millicent’s interview with Hugo was of a distinctly thunderous nature, but he was able to convince her that his friend of the chorus, by name Sue Brown, was a sister to him only. Meanwhile Miss Brown was resigning her job in favour of a more struggling friend—to the utter disgust of her agent, the kind-hearted Mr. Mortimer Mason. Outside Mr. Mason’s office Ronnie and his car waited to take her to tea. Ronnie was suffering from an attack of jealousy over Hugo who, he was informed by the stage doorkeeper, had at one time taken Miss Brown out a good deal and also over one P. Frobisher Pilbeam who had just sent her a marvellous bouquet. But she dispelled the cloud when she promised not to go out with anyone at all while Ronnie was down at Blandings and stated that Mr. Pilbeam was so far a stranger to her. Ronnie decided to take his lady-love to the family home in Norfolk Street for an hour where, in the absence of his relations, the butler would provide tea. But as he drew up outside the house he saw Lady Constance Keeble descending the steps. Disaster was averted when Ronnie introduced Sue huskily as Miss Schoonmaker. Sue was warmly greeted and Ronnie was amazed at his own presence of mind until Sue asked what would happen when the real Miss Schoonmaker arrived at Blandings. They decided that a wire must be sent in Lady Constance’s name to put her off.

Down again at Blandings Ronnie was not less astonished than his uncle when Baxter turned up in a caravan in the grounds. Lady Constance had summoned him secretly in her horror at the idea of Gally’s reminiscences being published. Baxter agreed to get hold of the manuscript and destroy it.

Ronnie meanwhile was cogitating ways and means of acquiring money and his charming Sue. An attempt at borrowing money from his uncle to start a pig farm did not meet with success. During the resulting argument Gally appeared and mentioned his suspicion that Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe would stick at nothing to clear the way for the victory in the forthcoming show of his own prize pig, Pride of Matchingham. Ronnie was stunned by a bright idea. Suppose he stole the Empress, hid her for a day or two and then spectacularly restored her to his uncle Clarence. And Beach was the man to help him.

That night the deed was done.

Next day Ronnie’s troubles began. Hugo, full of zeal, advised his uncle to call in the Argus Private Inquiry Agency to locate the Empress, and himself went up to town to start the ball rolling. Millicent asked Ronnie if he too thought that Hugo had a special reason for wanting to go up to town, and if that special reason was Sue Brown. Ronnie decided he would run up to call on Sue, not that he didn’t trust her implicitly! Nevertheless. . . .

P. Frobisher Pilbeam, Manager of the Argus Agency, was inclined to scorn the idea of investigating a pig robbery, but Hugo’s silver tongue prevailed. Business done, Hugo decided a platonic evening with Sue would cheer him up and telephoned her from Pilbeam’s office to meet him at Mario’s. Pilbeam saw a chance of the long-desired introduction to Sue; he too decided to go to Mario’s.

During the evening Hugo left Sue for a minute to telephone Millicent that he was spending a quiet evening in his hotel bedroom. Pilbeam’s chance had come. He walked up and introduced himself to Sue. At that moment Ronald Overbury Fish, having tracked Sue to Mario’s, appeared in the doorway and strode across the room. “Mr. Fish, Mr. Pilbeam,” murmured Sue dazedly.

Ronnie lost his temper. Fined five pounds next day, he was borne off by Hugo to make an attempt at mending his shattered life. Hugo confessed that Sue had gone not with Pilbeam to Mario’s but with Hugo himself. Ronnie had difficulty in believing this and when Hugo turned round from paying the cabman, Ronnie had gone. Sue now appeared, also mourning a shattered life, and in the next minute Hugo’s own lay in ruins about him: Millicent telephoned him to break off their engagement. Hugo and Sue decided that Sue must go to Blandings in the guise of Miss Schoonmaker for Lady Constance’s benefit—make peace with Ronnie and thereby prove to Millicent that Hugo meant less than nothing to her.

Meanwhile Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe was receiving a call from Lord Emsworth and Mr. Galahad Threepwood, who commanded him to cough up the stolen pig, failing which Gally was prepared to tell the great story of the prawns. Sir Gregory would have coughed up anything to conceal the prawn episode, but knowing nothing about the Empress all he could do was to commission Mr. Pilbeam to steal the manuscript of the Reminiscences. Thus Lady Constance and Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe were each cherishing a plan to steal the Reminiscences, and Lord Emsworth and Gally had each a secret hope of stealing the Pride of Matchingham. A dinner party was arranged and was shortly to take place at Matchingham Hall.

Sue’s arrival at Blandings as Miss Schoonmaker preceded by only a short interval that of Mr. Pilbeam and of Mr. Mortimer Mason. Sue was kindly received and Gally and Lord Emsworth showed her the rose garden in turn. The latter began with the kind inquiry “Are you fond of pigs?” Sue had never considered this point before, but remembering that this was the man whom Ronnie had described as being wrapped up in one of these animals she smiled her bright smile and said:

“Oh, yes. Very.”

 

CHAPTER X (continued)

 

“ MINE has been stolen.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Lord Emsworth was visibly pleased at this womanly sympathy.

“But I now have strong hopes that she may be recovered. The trained mind is everything. What I always say . . .”

What it was that Lord Emsworth always said was unfortunately destined to remain unrevealed. It would probably have been something good, but the world was not to hear it; for at this moment, completely breaking his train of thought, there came from above, from the direction of the window of the small library, an odd, scrabbling sound. Something shot through the air. And the next instant there appeared in the middle of a flower-bed containing lobelias something that was so manifestly not a lobelia that he stared at it in stunned amazement, speech wiped from his lips as with a sponge.

It was the Efficient Baxter. He was on all fours, and seemed to be groping about for his spectacles, which had fallen off and got hidden in the undergrowth.

 

II

Properly considered, there is no such thing as an insoluble 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 pre-eminently 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 mould 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 these occasions when the other gaped at him open-mouthed like a surprised halibut.

“I overbalanced,” he said curtly.

“Overbalanced?”

“Slipped.”

“Slipped?”

“Yes. Slipped.”

“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 on to 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 for ever. 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 shin-bone 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.

 

III

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. I looked in the small library, thinking that you might possibly be there, but you were not.”

“No, I was out here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s why you couldn’t find me. 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 counselled. “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 has now taken a suicidal turn. Overbalanced, indeed! How the deuce could he have overbalanced? Flung himself out bodily, that’s what he did. I couldn’t think who it was he reminded me of till this moment. 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 towards 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 for ever when it was too late.

“I think you know my nephew Ronald?” he said.

“Yes.”

Lord Emsworth paused to smell a rose. He gave Sue a brief biography of it before returning to the theme.

“That boy’s an ass,” he said.

“Why?” said Sue sharply. She began to feel less amiable towards 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. “Well, heredity, probably, I should say. His father, old Miles Fish, was the biggest fool in the Brigade of Guards.” He looked at her impressively through slanting pince-nez, as if to call her attention to the fact that this was something of an achievement. “The boy throws tennis-balls at pigs,” he went on, getting down to the ghastly facts.

Sue was surprised. The words, if she had caught them correctly, seemed to present a side of Ronnie’s character of which she had been unaware.

“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 towards the men they love urged Sue to say something in Ronnie’s defence. 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. For one reason and another, Ronnie had always been a source of vague annoyance to him since boyhood. There had even been times when he had felt that he would almost have preferred the society of his younger son, Frederick.

“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 libellous.

“I don’t agree with you, Lord Emsworth.”

“But you never knew my brother Galahad as a young man,” his lordship pointed out cleverly.

“What is the name of that hill over there?” asked Sue in a cold voice, changing the unpleasant subject.

“That hill? Oh, that one?” It was the only one in sight. “It is called the Wrekin.”

“Oh?” said Sue.

“Yes,” said Lord Emsworth.

“Ah,” said Sue.

They had crossed the lawn and were on the broad terrace that looked out over the park. Sue leaned on the low stone wall that bordered it and gazed before her into the gathering dusk.

The castle had been built on a knoll of rising ground, and on this terrace one had the illusion of being perched up at a great height. From where she stood. Sue got a sweeping view of the park and of the dim, misty Vale of Blandings that dreamed beyond. In the park, rabbits were scuttling to and fro. In the shrubberies birds called sleepily. From somewhere out across the fields there came the faint tinkling of sheep-bells. The lake shone like old silver, and there was a river in the distance, dull grey, between the dull green of the trees.

It was a lovely sight, age-old, orderly and English, but it was spoiled by the sky. The sky was overcast and looked bruised. It seemed to be made of dough, and one could fancy it pressing down on the world like a heavy blanket. And it was muttering to itself. A single heavy drop of rain splashed on the stone beside Sue, and there was a low growl far away as if some powerful and unfriendly beast had spied her.

She shivered. She had been gripped by a sudden depression, a strange foreboding that chilled the spirit. That muttering seemed to say that there was no happiness anywhere and never could be any. The air was growing close and clammy. Another drop of rain fell, squashily like a toad, and spread itself over her hand.

Lord Emsworth was finding his companion unresponsive. His stream of prattle slackened and died away. He began to wonder how he was to escape from a girl who, though undeniably pleasing to the eye, was proving singularly difficult to talk to. Raking the horizon in search of aid, he perceived Beach approaching, 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. My brother Galahad will be back very shortly, I have no doubt. He will entertain you. You don’t mind?”

He bustled away, glad to go, and Sue became conscious of the salver, thrust deferentially towards her.

“For you, miss.”

“For me?”

“Yes, miss,” moaned Beach, like a winter wind wailing through dead trees.

He inclined his head sombrely, and was gone. She tore open the envelope. For one breath-taking instant she had thought it might be from Ronnie. 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 utterances 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.P.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.

The object of all good literature is to purge the soul of its petty troubles. This, she was pleased to discover, Baxter’s letter had succeeded in doing. Recalling its polished phrases, she found herself smiling appreciatively.

That muttering sky did not look so menacing now. 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. The voice, speaking close behind her, had had something of the effect of a douche of iced water down her back. For, restorative though Baxter’s letter had been, it had not left her in quite the frame of mind to enjoy anything so sudden and jumpy as an unexpected voice.

It was the Hon. Galahad, back from his interview with the gentleman, and the sight of him did nothing to calm her agitation. He was eyeing her, she thought, with a strange and sinister intentness. And though his manner, as he planted himself beside her and began to talk, seemed all that was cordial and friendly, she could not rid herself of a feeling of uneasiness. That look still lingered in her mind’s eye. With the air all heavy and woolly and the sky growling pessimistic prophecies, it had been a look to alarm the bravest girl.

Chattering amiably, the Hon. Galahad spoke of this and that: of scenery and the weather, of birds and rabbits, of friends of his who had served terms in prison, and of other friends who, one would have said on the evidence, had been lucky to escape. Then his monocle was up again, and that look was back on his face.

The air was more breathless than ever.

“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 paralysed. I suppose you mean active for a paralytic.”

The little puckers at the corners of his eyes deepened into wrinkles. The monocle gleamed like the eye of a dragon. He smiled genially.

“Confide in me, Miss Brown,” he said. “What’s the game?”

 

CHAPTER XI

 

SUE did not answer. When the solid world melts abruptly beneath the feet, one feels disinclined for speech. Avoiding the monocle, she stood looking with wide, blank eyes at a thrush which hopped fussily about the lawn. Behind her, the sky gave a low chuckle, as if this was what it had been waiting for.

“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 theatre. 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 Ronald?”

“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 God!” said the Hon. Galahad.

Suddenly Sue began to feel conscious of a slackening of the tension. Mysteriously, the conversation was seeming less difficult. In spite of the fact that Reason scoffed at the absurdity of such an idea, she felt just as if she were talking to a potential friend and ally. The thought had come to her at the moment when, looking up, she caught sight of her companion’s face. 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.

“But, however 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.”

If this chronicle has proved anything, it has proved by now that the moral outlook of the Hon. Galahad Threepwood was fundamentally unsound. A man to shake the head at. A man to view with concern. So felt his sister, Lady Constance Keeble, and she was undoubtedly right. If final evidence were needed, his next words supplied it.

“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. She had felt all along that Reason, in denying the possibility that this man could ever approve of what she had done, had been mistaken. These pessimists always are.

“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 do.”

“How can you possibly love a fellow like that?”

“That’s just what he always used to say,” said Sue softly. “And I think that’s why I love him.”

The Hon. Galahad sighed. Fifty years’ experience had taught him that it was no use arguing with women on this particular point, but he had conceived a warm affection for this girl and it shocked him to think of her madly throwing herself away.

“Don’t you go doing anything in a hurry, my dear. Think it over carefully. I’ve seen enough of you to know that you’re a very exceptional girl.”

“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 poop quarrel about?” he asked.

“He is not a poop!”

“He is. It’s astonishing to me that any one individual can be such a poop. You’d have thought it would have required a large syndicate. How long have you known him?”

“About nine months.”

“Well, I’ve known him all his life. And I say he’s a poop. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have quarrelled 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 held 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.”

The Hon. Galahad waved a hand spaciously.

“Make an opportunity! Why, I knew a girl years ago—she’s a grandmother now—who had a quarrel with the fellow she was engaged to, and a week or so later she found herself staying at the same country-house with him—Heron’s Hill it was. The Matchelows’ place in Sussex—and she got him into her room one night and locked the door and said she was going to keep him there all night and ruin both their reputations unless he handed back the ring and agreed that the engagement was on again. And she’d have done it, too. Her name was Frederica Something. Red-haired girl.”

“I suppose you have to have red hair to do a thing like that. I was thinking of a quiet meeting in the rose-garden.”

The Hon. Galahad seemed to consider this tame, but he let it pass.

“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 towards the house. As they did so, two men came out of it.

One was Lord Emsworth. The other was Percy Pilbeam.

 

II

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 Enquiry Agency was not feeling his brightest and best.

Beach, ushering him through the front door, had started the trouble. He had merely let his eye 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. Looking back over his shoulder, Pilbeam saw that the young man was still standing there, staring after him—wistfully, it seemed to him; and he was glad, as he followed his host out into the fresh air, to be beyond the range of his eye. Between it and the eye of Beach, the butler, there seemed little to choose.

Relief, however, by the time he arrived on the terrace, had not completely restored his composure. That inferiority complex was still at work, and his surroundings intimidated him. At any moment, he felt, on a terrace like this, there might suddenly appear to confront him and complete his humiliation some brilliant shattering creature indigenous to this strange and disturbing world—a Duchess, perhaps—a haughty hunting woman, it might be—the dashing daughter of a hundred Earls, possibly, who would look at him as Beach had looked at him, and, raising beautifully pencilled eyebrows in aristocratic disdain, turn away with a murmured ‘Most extraordinary!’ He was prepared for almost anything.

One of the few things he was not prepared for was Sue. And at the sight of her he leaped three clear inches and nearly broke a collar-stud.

“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 Schofield, 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. There had, he knew, been a rigid rule in the office of that bright, but frequently offensive paper that the editor’s name was never to be revealed to callers: but it now appeared only too sickeningly evident that a leakage had occurred. Underlings, he realised too late, can be bribed.

He swallowed painfully. Force of habit had come within a hair’s-breadth of making him say ‘Quite.’

“Never,” he gasped. “Certainly not. No! Never.”

“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 meagre 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?”

It seemed to Pilbeam, in his disordered state, strange that anyone should suppose that he was in a frame of mind to enjoy the Family Album, but he uttered a strangled sound which his host took for acquiescence.

“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 to read you some of my book. I think you would appreciate it. I wouldn’t read it to anybody except you. I somehow feel you’ve got the right sort of outlook. I let my sister Constance see a couple of pages once, and she was too depressing for words. An author can’t work if people depress him. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. 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.

 

III

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 put matters on a firm basis. His head ceased to swim. 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.”

“There’s no need to be so dashed unfriendly.”

“Oh?”

“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.”

“Yes.”

“Everybody except me.”

“Why should I be friendly with you? You’ve done your best to ruin my life.”

“Eh?”

“Oh, never mind,” said Sue impatiently.

There was another pause.

“Chatty!” said Pilbeam, wounded again.

He fidgeted his fingers along the wall.

“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-Enquiry-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.”

“Come back,” said Pilbeam urgently.

“I’m going.”

“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 friendly 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 hand it over to me, and there’s fifty quid for you. For doing practically nothing.”

Sue’s eyes lit up. Pilbeam had expected that they would. He could not conceive of a girl whose eyes would not light up at such an offer.

“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 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 armour 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.”

She fell into a heavy silence again, her eyes peering into the gathering gloom. Somewhere in the twilight world a cow had begun to emit long, nerve-racking bellows. The sound seemed to sum up and underline the general sadness.

“Schopenhauer says that all the suffering in the world can’t be mere chance. Must be meant. He says life’s a mixture of suffering and boredom. You’ve got to have one or the other. His stuff’s full of snappy cracks like that. You’d enjoy it. 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.”

“What a lot you seem to know about Schopenhauer.”

“I’ve been reading him up lately. Found a copy in the library. Schopenhauer says we are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses first one and then another for his prey. 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.

“You met him,” said Millicent. “Just now, in the hall. 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.

 

CHAPTER XII

 

THE firm and dignified note in which Rupert Baxter had expressed his considered opinion of the Earl of Emsworth had been written in the morning-room immediately upon the ex-secretary’s return to the house, and delivered into Beach’s charge with hands still stained with garden-mould. Only when this urgent task had been performed did he start to go upstairs in quest of the wash and brush-up which he so greatly needed. He was mounting the stairs to his bedroom and had reached the first floor when a door opened and his progress was arrested by what in a lesser woman would have been a yelp. Proceeding, as it did from the lips of Lady Constance Keeble, we must call it an exclamation of surprise.

“Mr. Baxter!”

She was standing in the doorway of her boudoir, and she eyed his dishevelled form with such open-mouthed astonishment that for an instant the ex-secretary came near to including her with the head of the family in the impromptu Commination Service which was taking shape in his mind. He was in no mood for wide-eyed looks of wonder.

“May I come in?” he said curtly. He could explain all, but he did not wish to do so on the first-floor landing of a house where almost anybody might be listening with flapping ears.

“But, Mr. Baxter!” said Lady Constance.

He paused for a moment to grit his teeth, then closed the door.

“What have you been doing, Mr. Baxter?”

“Jumping out of window.”

“Jumping out of win-dow?”

He gave a brief synopsis of the events which had led up to his spirited act. Lady Constance drew in her breath with a remorseful hiss.

“Oh, dear!” she said. “How foolish of me. I should have told you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Even though she was in the safe retirement of her boudoir. Lady Constance Keeble looked cautiously over her shoulder. In the stirring and complicated state into which life had got itself at Blandings Castle, practically everybody in the place, except Lord Emsworth, had fallen into the habit nowadays of looking cautiously over his or her shoulder before he or she spoke.

“Sir Gregory Parsloe said in his note,” she explained, “that this man Pilbeam who is coming here this evening is acting for him.”

“Acting for him?”

“Yes. Apparently Sir Gregory went to see him yesterday and has promised him a large sum of money if he will obtain possession of my brother Galahad’s manuscript. That is why he has invited us to dinner to-night, to get Galahad out of the house. So there was no need for you to have troubled.”

There was a silence.

“So there was no need,” repeated the Efficient Baxter slowly, wiping from his eye the remains of a fragment of mould which had been causing him some inconvenience, “for me to have troubled.”

“I am so sorry, Mr. Baxter.”

“Pray do not mention it, Lady Constance.”

His eye, now that the mould was out of it, was able to work again with its customary keenness. His spectacles, as he surveyed the remorseful woman before him, had a cold, steely look.

“I see,” he said. “Well, it might perhaps have spared me some little inconvenience had you informed me of this earlier, Lady Constance. I have bruised my left shin somewhat severely and, as you see, made myself rather dirty.”

“I am so sorry.”

“Furthermore, I gathered from the remark he let fall that the impression my actions have made upon Lord Emsworth is that I am insane.”

“Oh, dear!”

“He even specified the precise degree of insanity. As mad as a coot, were his words.”

He softened a little. He reminded himself that this woman before him, who was so nearly doing what is described as wringing the hands, had always been his friend, had always wished him well, had never slackened her efforts to restore him to the secretarial duties which he had once enjoyed.

“Well, it cannot be helped,” he said. “The thing now is to think of some way of recovering the lost ground.”

“You mean, if you could find the Empress?”

“Exactly.”

“Oh, Mr. Baxter, if you only could!”

“I can.”

Lady Constance stared at his dark, purposeful, efficient face in dumb admiration. To another man who had spoken those words she would have replied “How” or even “How on earth?” But, as they had proceeded from Rupert Baxter, she merely waited silently for enlightenment.

“Have you given this matter any consideration, Lady Constance?”

“Yes.”

“To what conclusions have you come?”

Lady Constance felt dull and foolish. She felt like Doctor Watson—almost like a Scotland Yard Bungler.

“I don’t think I have come to any,” she said, avoiding the spectacles guiltily. “Of course,” she added, “I think it is absurd that Sir Gregory . . .”

Baxter waved aside the notion. It was not even worth a “Tchah!”

“In any matter of this kind,” he said, “the first thing to do is to seek motive. Who is there in Blandings Castle who could have had a motive for stealing Lord Emsworth’s pig?”

Lady Constance would have given a year’s income to have been able to make some reasonably intelligent reply, but all she could do was look and listen. Baxter was not annoyed. He would not have had it otherwise. He preferred his audiences dumb and expectant.

“Carmody.”

“Mr. Carmody!”

“Precisely. He is Lord Emsworth’s secretary, and a most inefficient secretary, a secretary who stands hourly in danger of losing his position. He sees me arrive at the Castle, a man who formerly held the post he holds. He is alarmed. He suspects. He searches wildly about in his mind for means of consolidating himself in Lord Emsworth’s regard. Then he has an idea, the sort of wild, motion-picture-bred idea which would come to a man of his stamp. He thinks to himself that if he removes the pig and conceals it somewhere and then pretends to have found it and restores it to its owner, Lord Emsworth’s gratitude will be so intense that all danger of his dismissal will be at an end.”

He removed his spectacles and wiped them. Lady Constance uttered a low cry. In anybody else it would have been a squeak. Baxter replaced his spectacles.

“I have no doubt the pig is somewhere in the grounds at this moment,” he said.

“But, Mr. Baxter . . .”

The ex-secretary raised a compelling hand.

“But he would not have undertaken a thing like this single-handed. A secretary’s time is not his own, and it would be necessary to feed the pig at regular intervals. He would require an accomplice. And I think I know who that accomplice is. Beach!”

This time not even the chronicler’s desire to place Lady Constance’s utterances in the best and most attractive light can hide the truth. She bleated.

“Be-ee-ee-ee-ech!”

The spectacles raked her keenly.

“Have you observed Beach closely of late?”

She shook her head. She was not a woman who observed butlers closely.

“He has something on his mind. He is nervous. Guilty. Conscience-stricken. He jumps when you speak to him.”

“Does he?”

“Jumps,” repeated the Efficient Baxter. “Just now I gave him a—I happened to address him, and he sprang in the air.” He paused. “I have half a mind to go and question him.”

“Oh, Mr. Baxter! Would that be wise?”

Rupert Baxter’s intention of interrogating the butler had been merely a nebulous one, a sort of idle dream, but these words crystallised it into a resolve. He was not going to have people asking him if things would be wise.

“A few searching questions should force him to reveal the truth.”

“But he’ll give notice!”

This interview had been dotted with occasions on which Baxter might reasonably have said “Tchah!” but, as we have seen, until this moment he had refrained. He now said it.

“Tchah!” said the Efficient Baxter. “There are plenty of other butlers.”

And with this undeniable truth he stalked from the room. The wash and brush-up were still as necessary as they had been ten minutes before, but he was too intent on the chase to think about washes and brushes-up. He hurried down the stairs. He crossed the hall. He passed through the green-baize door that led to the quarters of the Blandings Castle staff. And he was making his way along the dim passage to the pantry where at this hour Beach might be supposed to be, when its door opened abruptly and a vast form emerged.

It was the butler. And from the fact that he was wearing a bowler hat it was plain that he was seeking the great out-doors.

Baxter stopped in mid-stride and remained on one leg, watching. Then, as his quarry disappeared in the direction of the back-entrance he followed quickly.

Out in the open it was almost as dark as it had been in the passage. That grey, threatening sky had turned black by now. It was a swollen mass of inky clouds, heavy with the thunder, lightning and rain which so often come in the course of an English summer to remind the island race that they are hardy Nordics and must not be allowed to get their fibre all sapped by eternal sunshine like the less favoured dwellers in more southerly climes. It bayed at Baxter like a bloodhound.

But it took more than dirty weather to quell the Efficient Baxter when duty called. Like the character in Tennyson’s poem who followed the gleam, he followed the butler. There was but one point about Beach which even remotely resembled a gleam, but it happened to be the only one which at this moment really mattered. He was easy to follow.

The shrubbery swallowed the butler. A few seconds later, it had swallowed the Efficient Baxter.

 

II

There are those who maintain—and make a nice income by doing so in the evening papers—that in these degenerate days the old, hardy spirit of the Briton has died out. They represent themselves as seeking vainly for evidence of the survival of those qualities of toughness and endurance which once made Englishmen what they were. To such, the spectacle of Rupert Baxter braving the elements could not have failed to bring cheer and consolation. They would have been further stimulated by the conduct of Hugo Carmody.

It had not escaped Hugo’s notice, as he left Sue on the terrace, and started out in the wake of Millicent, that the weather was hotting up for a storm. He saw the clouds. He heard the fast-approaching thunder. For neither did he give a hoot. Let it rain, was Hugo’s verdict. Let it jolly well rain as much as it dashed well wanted to. As if encouraged, the sky sent down a fat, wet drop which insinuated itself just between his neck and collar.

He hardly noticed it. The information confided to him by his friend Ronald Fish had numbed his senses so thoroughly that water down the back of the neck was merely an incident. He was feeling as he had not felt since the evening some years ago when, boxing for his University in the light-weight division, he had incautiously placed the point of his jaw in the exact spot at the moment occupied by his opponent’s right fist. When you have done this or—equally—when you have just been told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.

In all the black days through which he had been living recently, Hugo had never really lost hope. It had been dim sometimes, but it had always been there. It was his opinion that he knew women, just as it was Sue’s idea that she knew men. Like Sue, he had placed his trust in the thought that true love conquers all obstacles; that coldness melts; that sundered hearts may at long last be brought together again by a little judicious pleading and reasoning. Even the fact that Millicent stared at him, when they met, with large, scornful eyes that went through him like stilettos, unpleasant though it was, had not caused him to despair. He had looked forward to the moment when he should contrive to get her alone and do a bit of snappy talking along the right lines.

But this was final. This was the end. This put the tin hat on it. She was engaged to Ronnie. Soon she would be married to Ronnie. Like a gad-fly the hideous thought sent Hugo Carmody reeling on through the gloom.

It was so dark now that he could scarcely see before him. And, looking about him, he discovered that the reason for this was that he had made his way into a wood of sorts. The West Wood, he deduced dully, taking into consideration the fact that there was no other in this particular part of the estate. Well, he might just as well be in the West Wood as anywhere. He trudged on.

The ground beneath his feet was spongy and equipped with low-lying brambles which pricked through his thin flannels and would have caused him discomfort if he had been in the frame of mind to notice brambles. There were trees against which he bumped, and logs over which he tripped. And ahead of him, in a small clearing, there was a dilapidated-looking cottage. He noticed this because it seemed the sort of place where a man, now that a warm, gusty wind had sprung up, might shelter and light a cigarette. The need for tobacco had become imperative.

He was surprised to find that it was raining, and had apparently, from the state of his clothes, been raining for quite some time. It was also thundering. The storm had broken, and the boom of it seemed to be all round him. A flash of lightning reminded him that he was in just the kind of place, among all these trees, where blokes get struck. At dinner-time they are missed, and later on search-parties come out with lanterns. Somebody stumbles over something soft, and the rays of the lantern fall on a charred and blackened form. Here, quickly, we have found him! Where? Over here. Is that Hugo Carmody? Well, well! Pick him up, boys, and bring him along. He was a good chap once. Moody, though, of late. Some trouble about a girl, wasn’t it? She will be sorry when she hears of this. Drove him to it, you might almost say. Steady with that stretcher. Now, when I say “To me.” Right!

There was something about this picture which quite cheered Hugo up. Ajax defied the lightning. Hugo Carmody rather encouraged it than otherwise. He looked approvingly at a more than usually vivid flash that seemed to dart among the tree-tops like a snake. All the same, he was forced to reflect, he was getting dashed wet. No sense, when you came right down to it, in getting dashed wet. After all, a man could be struck by lightning just as well in that cottage sort of place over there. Ho! for the cottage, felt Hugo, and headed for it at a gallop.

He had just reached the door, when it was flung open. There was a noise rather like that made by a rising pheasant, and the next moment something white had flung itself into his arms and was weeping emotionally on his chest.

“Hugo! Hugo, darling!”

Reason told Hugo it could scarcely be Millicent who was clinging to him like this and speaking to him like this. And yet Millicent it most certainly appeared to be. She continued to speak, still in the same friendly, even chatty strain.

“Hugo! Save me!”

“Right ho!”

“I wur-wur-went in thur-thur-there to shush-shush-shelter from the rain and it’s all pitch dark.”

Hugo squeezed her fondly and with the sort of relief that comes to men who find themselves squeezing where they had not thought to squeeze. No need for that snappy bit of talking now. No need for arguments and explanations, for pleadings and entreaties. No need for anything but a good biceps.

He was bewildered. But mixed with his bewilderment had come a certain feeling of complacency. There was no denying that it was enjoyable, this exhibition of tremulous weakness in one who if she had had the shadow of a fault, had always been inclined to matter-of-factness and the display of that rather hard, bright self-sufficiency which is so characteristic of the modern girl. If this melting mood was due to the fact that Millicent, while in the cottage, had seen a ghost, Hugo wanted to meet that ghost and shake its hand. Every man likes to be in a position to say “There, there, little woman!” to the girl of his heart, particularly if for the last few days she has been treating him like a more than ordinarily unpleasant worm, and Hugo Carmody felt that he was in that position now.

“There, there!” he said, not quite feeling up to risking the “little woman.” “It’s all right.”

“But it tut-tut-tut . . .”

“It what?” said Hugo puzzled.

“It tut-tut-tut-’tisn’t. There’s a man in there!”

“A man?”

“Yes. I didn’t know there was anyone there and it was pitch dark and I heard something move and I said ‘Who’s that?’ and then he suddenly spoke to me in German.”

“In German?”

“Yes.”

Hugo released her gently. His face was determined.

“I’m going in to have a look.”

“Hugo! Stop! You’ll be killed.”

She stood there, rigid. The rain lashed about her, but she did not heed it. The lightning gleamed. She paid it no attention. For the minute that lasts an hour she waited, straining her ears for sounds of the death-struggle. Then a dim form appeared.

“I say, Millicent.”

“Hugo! Are you all right?”

“Yes. I’m all right. I say, Millicent, do you know what?”

“No, what?”

A chuckle came to her through the darkness.

“It’s the pig.”

“It’s what?”

“The pig.”

“Who’s a pig?”

“This is. Your friend in here. It’s Empress of Blandings, as large as life. Come and have a look.”

 

III

Millicent had a look. She came to the door of the cottage and peered in. Yes, just as he had said, there was the Empress. In the feeble light of the match which Hugo was holding, the noble animal’s attractive face was peering up at her—questioningly, as if wondering if she might be the bearer of the evening snack which would be so exceedingly welcome. The picture was one which would have set Lord Emsworth screaming with joy. Millicent merely gaped.

“How on earth did she get here?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out,” said Hugo. “One always knew she must be cached somewhere, of course. What is this place, anyway?”

“It used to be a gamekeeper’s cottage, I believe.”

“Well, there seems to be a room up above,” said Hugo, striking another match. “I’m going to go up there and wait. It’s quite likely that somebody will be along soon to feed the animal, and I’m going to see who it is.”

“Yes, that’s what we’ll do. How clever of you!”

“Not you. You get back home.”

“I won’t.”

There was a pause. A strong man would, no doubt, have asserted himself. But Hugo, though feeling better than he had done for days, was not feeling quite so strong as all that.

“Just as you like.” He shut the door. “Well, come on. We’d better be making a move. The fellow may be here at any moment.”

They climbed the crazy stairs and lowered themselves cautiously to a floor which smelled of mice and mildew. Below, all was in darkness, but there were holes through which it would be possible to look when the time should come for looking. Millicent could feel one near her face.

“You don’t think this floor will give way?” she asked rather nervously.

“I shouldn’t think so. Why?”

“Well, I don’t want to break my neck.”

“You don’t, don’t you! Well, I would jolly well like to break mine,” said Hugo, speaking tensely in the darkness. It had just occurred to him that now would be a good time for a heart-to-heart talk. “If you suppose I’m keen on going on living with you and Ronnie doing the Wedding Glide all over the place, you’re dashed well mistaken. I take it you’re aware that you’ve broken my bally heart, what?”

“Oh, Hugo!” said Millicent.

Silence fell. Below, the Empress rustled. Aloft, something scuttered.

“Oo!” cried Millicent. “Was that a rat?”

“I hope so.”

“What!”

“Rats gnaw you,” explained Hugo. “They cluster round and chew you to the bone and put an end to your misery.”

There was silence again. Then Millicent spoke in a small voice.

“You’re being beastly,” she said.

Remorse poured over Hugo in a flood.

“I’m frightfully sorry. Yes, I know I am, dash it. But, look here, you know . . . I mean, all this getting engaged to Ronnie. A bit thick, what? You don’t expect me to give three hearty cheers, do you? Wouldn’t want me to break into a few care-free dance-steps?”

“I can’t believe it’s really happened.”

“Well, how did it happen?”

“It sort of happened all of a sudden. I was feeling miserable and very angry with you and . . . and all that. And Ronnie took me for a stroll and we went down by the lake and started throwing little bits of stick at the swans, and suddenly Ronnie sort of grunted and said ‘I say!’ and I said ‘Hullo?’ and he said ‘Will you marry me?’ and I said ‘All right,’ and he said ‘I ought to warn you, I despise all women,’ and I said ‘And I loathe all men,’ and he said ‘Right-o, I think we shall be very happy.’ ”

“I see.”

“I only did it to score off you.”

“You succeeded.”

A trace of spirit crept into Millicent’s voice.

“You never really loved me,” she said. “You know jolly well you didn’t.”

“Is that so?”

“Well, what did you want to go sneaking off to London for then, and stuffing that beastly girl of yours with food?”

“She isn’t my girl. And she isn’t beastly.”

“She is.”

“Well, you seem to get on with her all right. I saw you chatting on the terrace together as cosily as dammit.”

“What!”

“Miss Schoonmaker.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s Miss Schoonmaker got to do with it?”

“Miss Schoonmaker isn’t Miss Schoonmaker. She’s Sue Brown.”

For a moment it seemed to Millicent that the crack in her companion’s heart had spread to his head. Futile though the action was, she stared in the direction from which his voice had proceeded. Then, suddenly, his words took on a meaning. She gasped.

“She’s followed you down here!”

“She hasn’t followed me down here. She’s followed Ronnie down here. Can’t you get it into your nut,” said Hugo with justifiable exasperation, “that you’ve been making floaters and bloomers and getting everything mixed up all along? Sue Brown has never cared a curse for me, and I’ve never thought anything about her, except that she’s a jolly girl and nice to dance with. That’s absolutely and positively the only reason I went out with her. I hadn’t had a dance for six weeks and my feet had begun to itch so that I couldn’t sleep at night. So I went to London and took her out and Ronnie found her talking to that pestilence Pilbeam and thought he had taken her out and she had told him she didn’t even know the man, which was quite true, but Ronnie cut up rough and said he was through with her and came down here and she wanted to get a word with him, so she came down here, pretending to be Miss Schoonmaker, and the moment she gets here she finds Ronnie is engaged to you. A nice surprise for the poor girl!”

Millicent’s head had begun to swim long before the conclusion of this recital.

“But what is Pilbeam doing down here?”

“Pilbeam?”

“He was on the terrace talking to her.”

A low snarl came through the darkness.

“Pilbeam here? Ah! So he came, after all, did he? He’s the fellow Lord Emsworth sent me to, about the Empress. He runs the Argus Enquiry Agency. It was Pilbeam’s minions that dogged my steps that night, at your request. So he’s here, is he? Well, let him enjoy himself while he can. Let him sniff the country air while the sniffing is good. A bitter reckoning awaits that bloke.”

From the disorder of Millicent’s mind another point emerged insistently demanding explanation.

“You said she wasn’t pretty!”

“Who?”

“Sue Brown.”

“Nor is she.”

“You don’t call her pretty? She’s fascinating.”

“Not to me,” said Hugo doggedly. “There’s only one girl in the world that I call pretty, and she’s going to marry Ronnie.” He paused. “If you haven’t realised by this time that I love you and always shall love you and have never loved anybody else and never shall love anybody else, you’re a fathead. If you brought me Sue Brown or any other girl in the world on a plate with watercress round her, I wouldn’t so much as touch her hand.”

Another rat—unless it was an exceptionally large mouse—had begun to make its presence felt in the darkness. It seemed to be enjoying an early dinner off a piece of wood. Millicent did not even notice it. She had reached out, and her hand had touched Hugo’s arm. Her fingers closed on it desperately.

“Oh, Hugo!” she said.

The arm became animated. It clutched her, drew her along the mouse-and-mildew scented floor. And time stood still.

Hugo was the first to break the silence.

“And to think that not so long ago I was wishing that a flash of lightning would strike me amidships!” he said.

The aroma of mouse and mildew had passed away. Violets seemed to be spreading their fragrance through the cottage. Violets and roses. The rat, a noisy feeder, had changed into an orchestra of harps, dulcimers and sackbuts that played soft music.

And then, jarring upon these sweet strains, there came the sound of the cottage door opening. And a moment later light shone through the holes in the floor.

Millicent gave Hugo’s arm a warning pinch. They looked down. On the floor below stood a lantern, and beside it a man of massive build who, from the golloping noises that floated upwards, appeared to be giving the Empress those calories and proteids which a pig of her dimensions requires so often and in such large quantities.

This Good Samaritan had been stooping. Now he straightened himself and looked about him with an apprehensive eye. He raised the lantern, and its light fell upon his face.

And, as she saw that face, Millicent, forgetting prudence, uttered in a high startled voice a single word.

“Beach!” cried Millicent.

Down below, the butler stood congealed. It seemed to him that the Voice of Conscience had spoken.

 

IV

Conscience, besides having a musical voice, appeared also to be equipped with feet. Beach could hear them clattering down the stairs, and the volume of noise was so great that it seemed as if Conscience must be a centipede. But he did not stir. It would have required at that moment a derrick to move him, and there was no derrick in the gamekeeper’s cottage in the West Wood. He was still standing like a statue when Hugo and Millicent arrived. Only when the identity of the newcomers impressed itself on his numbed senses did his limbs begin to twitch and show some signs of relaxing. For he looked on Hugo as a friend. Hugo, he felt, was one of the few people in his world who finding him in his present questionable position might be expected to take the broad and sympathetic view.

He nerved himself to speak.

“Good evening, sir. Good evening, miss.”

“What’s all this?” said Hugo.

Years ago, in his hot and reckless youth, Beach had once heard that question from the lips of a policeman. It had disconcerted him then. It disconcerted him now.

“Well, sir,” he replied.

Millicent was staring at the Empress, who, after one courteous look of enquiry at the intruders, had given a brief grunt of welcome and returned to the agenda.

“You stole her, Beach? You!”

The butler quivered. He had known this girl since her long hair and rompers days. She had sported in his pantry. He had cut elephants out of paper for her and taught her tricks with bits of string. The shocked note in her voice seared him like vitriol. To her, he felt, niece to the Earl of Emsworth and trained by his lordship from infancy in the best traditions of pig-worship, the theft of the Empress must seem the vilest of crimes. He burned to re-establish himself in her eyes.

There comes in the life of every conspirator a moment when loyalty to his accomplices wavers before the urge to make things right for himself. We can advance no more impressive proof of the nobility of the butler’s soul than that he did not obey this impulse. Millicent’s accusing eyes were piercing him, but he remained true to his trust. Mr. Ronald had sworn him to secrecy: and even to square himself he could not betray him.

And, as if by way of a direct reward from Providence for this sterling conduct, inspiration descended upon Beach.

“Yes, miss,” he replied.

“Oh, Beach!”

“Yes, miss. It was I who stole the animal. I did it for your sake, miss.”

Hugo eyed him sternly.

“Beach,” he said, “this is pure apple-sauce.”

“Sir?”

“Apple-sauce, I repeat. Why endeavour to swing the lead, Beach? What do you mean, you stole the pig for her sake?”

“Yes,” said Millicent. “Why for my sake?”

The butler was calm now. He had constructed his story, and he was going to stick to it.

“In order to remove the obstacles in your path, miss.”

“Obstacles?”

“Owing to the fact that you and Mr. Carmody have frequently entrusted me with your—may I say surreptitious?—correspondence, I have long been cognisant of your sentiments towards one another, miss. I am aware that it is your desire to contract a union with Mr. Carmody, and I knew that there would be objections raised on the part of certain members of the Family.”

“So far,” said Hugo critically, “this sounds to me like drivel of the purest water. But go on.”

“Thank you, sir. And then it occurred to me that, were his lordship’s pig to disappear, his lordship would, on recovering the animal, be extremely grateful to whoever restored it. It was my intention to apprise you of the animal’s whereabouts, and suggest that you should inform his lordship that you had discovered it. In his gratitude, I fancied, his lordship would consent to the union.”

There could never be complete silence in any spot where Empress of Blandings was partaking of food: but something as near silence as was possible followed this speech. In the rays of the lantern Hugo’s eyes met Millicent’s. In hers, as in his, there was a look of stunned awe. They had heard of faithful old servitors. They had read about faithful old servitors. They had seen faithful old servitors on the stage. But never had they dreamed that faithful old servitors could be as faithful as this.

“Oh, Beach!” said Millicent.

She had used the words before. But how different this “Oh, Beach!” was from that other, earlier “Oh, Beach!” On that occasion, the exclamation had been vibrant with reproach, pain, disillusionment. Now, it contained gratitude, admiration, an affection almost too deep for speech.

And the same may be said of Hugo’s “Gosh!”

“Beach,” cried Millicent, “you’re an angel!”

“Thank you, Miss.”

“A topper!” agreed Hugo.

“Thank you, sir.”

“However did you get such a corking idea?”

“It came to me, miss.”

“I’ll tell you what it is, Beach,” said Hugo earnestly. “When you hand in your dinner-pail in due course of time—and may the moment be long distant!—you’ve got to leave your brain to the nation. You’ve simply got to. Have it pickled and put in the British Museum, because it’s the outstanding brain of the century. I never heard of anything so brilliant in my puff. Of course the old boy will be all over us.”

“He’ll do anything for us,” said Millicent.

“This is not merely a scheme. It is more. It is an egg. Pray silence for your chairman. I want to think.”

Outside, the storm had passed. Birds were singing. Far away, the thunder still rumbled. It might have been the sound of Hugo’s thoughts, leaping and jostling one another.

“I’ve worked it all out,” said Hugo at length. “Some people might say, rush to the old boy now and tell him we’ve found his pig. I say, no. In my opinion we ought to hold this pig for a rising market. The longer we wait, the more grateful he will be. Give him another forty-eight hours, I suggest, and he will have reached the stage where he will deny us nothing.”

“But . . .”

“No! Act precipitately and we are undone. Don’t forget that it is not merely a question of getting your uncle’s consent to our union. We’ve got to break it to him that you aren’t going to marry Ronnie. And the family have always been pretty keen on your marrying Ronnie. To my mind, another forty-eight hours at the very least is essential.”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

“I know I’m right.”

“Then we’ll simply leave the Empress here?”

“No,” said Hugo decidedly. “This place doesn’t strike me as safe. If we found her here, anybody might. We require a new safe-deposit, and I know the very one. It’s . . .”

Beach came out of the silence. His manner betrayed agitation.

“If it is all the same to you, sir, I would much prefer not to hear it.”

“Eh?”

“It would be a great relief to me, sir, to be able to expunge the entire matter from my mind. I have been under a considerable mental strain of late, sir, and I really don’t think I could bear any more of it. Besides, supposing I were questioned, sir. It may be my imagination, but I have rather fancied from the way he has looked at me occasionally that Mr. Baxter harbours suspicions.”

“Baxter always harbours suspicions about something,” said Millicent.

“Yes, miss. But in this case they are well-grounded, and if it is all the same to you and Mr. Carmody, I would greatly prefer that he was not in a position to go on harbouring them.”

“All right, Beach,” said Hugo. “After what you have done for us, your lightest wish is law. You can be out of this, if you want to. Though I was going to suggest that, if you cared to go on feeding the animal . . .”

“No, sir . . . really . . . if you please . . .”

“Right ho, then. Come along, Millicent. We must be shifting.”

“Are you going to take her away now?”

“This very moment. I pass this handkerchief through the handy ring which you observe in the nose and . . . Ho! Allez-oop! Good-bye, Beach. It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done, I think.”

“Good-bye, Beach,” said Millicent. “I can’t tell you how grateful we are.”

“I am glad to have given satisfaction, miss. I wish you every success and happiness, sir.”

Left alone, the butler drew in his breath till he swelled like a balloon, then poured it out again in a long, sighing puff. He picked up the lantern and left the cottage. His walk was the walk of a butler from whose shoulders a great weight has rolled.

 

V

It is a fact not generally known, for a nice sense of the dignity of his position restrained him from exercising it, that Beach possessed a rather attractive singing-voice. It was a mellow baritone, in timbre not unlike that which might have proceeded from a cask of very old, dry sherry, had it had vocal chords: and we cannot advance a more striking proof of the lightness of heart which had now come upon him than by mentioning that, as he walked home through the wood, he broke his rigid rule and definitely warbled.

“There’s a light in thy bow-er”

sang Beach,

“A light in thy BOW-er . . .”

He felt more like a gay young second footman than a butler of years’ standing. He listened to the birds with an uplifted heart. Upon the rabbits that sported about his path he bestowed a series of indulgent smiles. The shadow that had darkened his life had passed away. His conscience was at rest.

So completely was this so that when, on reaching the house, he was informed by Footman James that Lord Emsworth had been enquiring for him and desired his immediate presence in the library, he did not even tremble. A brief hour ago, and what menace this announcement would have seemed to him to hold. But now it left him calm. It was with some little difficulty that as he mounted the stairs, he kept himself from resuming his song.

“Er—Beach.”

“Your lordship?”

The butler now became aware that his employer was not alone. Dripping in an unpleasant manner on the carpet, for he seemed somehow to have got himself extremely wet, stood the Efficient Baxter. Beach regarded him with a placid eye. What was Baxter to him or he to Baxter now?

“Your lordship?” he said again, for Lord Emsworth appeared to be experiencing some difficulty in continuing the conversation.

“Eh? What? What? Oh, yes.”

The ninth Earl braced himself with a visible effort.

“Er—Beach.”

“Your lordship?”

“I—er—I sent for you, Beach . . .”

“Yes, your lordship?”

At this moment Lord Emsworth’s eye fell on a volume on the desk dealing with Diseases of Pigs. He seemed to draw strength from it.

“Beach,” he said, in quite a crisp, masterful voice, “I sent for you because Mr. Baxter has made a remarkable charge against you. Most extraordinary.”

“I should be glad to be acquainted with the gravamen of the accusation, your lordship.”

“The what?” asked Lord Emsworth, starting.

“If your lordship would be kind enough to inform me of the substance of Mr. Baxter’s charge?”

“Oh, the substance? Yes. You mean the substance? Precisely. Quite so. The substance. Yes, to be sure. Quite so. Quite so. Yes. Exactly. No doubt.”

It was plain to the butler that his employer had begun to dodder. Left to himself this human cuckoo-clock would go maundering on like this indefinitely. Respectfully, but with the necessary firmness, he called him to order.

“What is it that Mr. Baxter says, your lordship?”

“Eh? Oh, tell him, Baxter. Yes, tell him, dash it.”

The Efficient Baxter moved a step closer and began to drip on another part of the carpet. His spectacles gleamed determinedly. Here was no stammering, embarrassed Peer of the Realm, but a man who knew his own mind and could speak it.

“I followed you to the gamekeeper’s cottage in the West Wood just now, Beach.”

“Sir?”

“You heard what I said.”

“Undoubtedly, sir. But I fancied I must be mistaken. I have not been to the spot you mention, sir.”

“I saw you with my own eyes.”

“I can only repeat my asseveration, sir,” said the butler with a saintly meekness.

Lord Emsworth, who had taken another look at Ailments in Pigs, became brisk again.

“He says he peeped through the window, dash it.”

Beach raised a respectful eyebrow. It was as if he had said that it was not his place to comment on the pastimes of the Castle’s guests, however childish. If Mr. Baxter wished to go out into the woods in the rain and play solitary games of Peep-Bo, that, said the eyebrow, was a matter that concerned Mr. Baxter alone.

“And you were in there,” he says, “feeding the Empress.”

“Your lordship?”

“And you were in there . . . Dash it, you heard.”

“I beg your pardon, your lordship, but I really fail to comprehend.”

“Well, if you want it in a nutshell, Mr. Baxter says it was you who stole my pig.”

There were few things in the world that the butler considered worth raising both eyebrows at. This was one of the few. He stood for a moment, exhibiting them to Lord Emsworth: then turned to Baxter, so that he could see them, too. This done, he lowered them and permitted about three-eighths of a smile to play for a moment about his lips.

“Might I speak frankly, your lordship?”

“Dash it, man, we want you to speak frankly. That’s the whole idea. That’s why I sent for you. We want a full confession and the name of your accomplice and all that sort of thing.”

“I hesitate only because what I should like to say may possibly give offence to Mr. Baxter, your lordship, which would be the last thing I should desire.”

The prospect of offending the Efficient Baxter which caused such concern to Beach appeared to disturb his lordship not at all.

“Get on. Say what you like.”

“Well, then, your lordship, I think it possible that Mr. Baxter, if he will pardon my saying so, may have been suffering from a hallucination.”

“Tchah!” said the Efficient Baxter.

“You mean he’s potty?” said Lord Emsworth, struck with the idea. In the excitement of his late secretary’s information, he had overlooked this simple explanation. Now there came surging back to him all the evidence that went to support such a theory. Those flower-pots . . . That leap from the library-window. He looked at Baxter keenly. There was a sort of wild gleam in his eyes. The old coot glitter.

“Really, Lord Emsworth!”

“Oh, I’m not saying you are, my dear fellow. Only . . .”

“It is quite obvious to me,” said Baxter stiffly, “that this man is lying. Wait!” he continued, raising a hand. “Are you prepared to come with his lordship and me to the cottage now, at this very moment, and let his lordship see for himself?”

“No, sir.”

“Ha!”

“I should first,” said Beach, “wish to go downstairs and get my hat.”

“Quite right,” agreed Lord Emsworth cordially. “Very sensible. Might catch a nasty cold in the head. Certainly get your hat, Beach, and meet us at the front door.”

“Very good, your lordship.”

A bystander, observing the little party that was gathered some five minutes later on the gravel outside the great door of Blandings Castle, would have noticed about it a touch of chill, a certain restraint. None of its three members seemed really in the mood for a ramble through the woods. Beach, though courtly, was not cordial. The face under his bowler hat was the face of a good man misjudged. Baxter was eyeing the sullen sky as though he suspected it of something. As for Lord Emsworth, he had just become conscious that he was about to accompany through dark and deserted ways one who, though on this afternoon’s evidence the trend of his tastes seemed to be towards suicide, might quite possibly become homicidal.

“One moment,” said Lord Emsworth.

He scuttled into the house again, and came out looking happier. He was carrying a stout walking-stick with an ivory knob on it.

 

CHAPTER XIII
 

I
 

BLANDINGS CASTLE basked in the afterglow of a golden summer evening. Only a memory now was the storm which, two hours since, had raged with such violence through its parks, pleasure grounds and messuages. It had passed, leaving behind it peace and bird-song and a sunset of pink and green and orange and opal and amethyst. The air was cool and sweet, and the earth sent up a healing fragrance. Little stars were peeping down from a rain-washed sky.

To Ronnie Fish, slumped in an armchair in his bedroom on the second floor, the improved weather conditions brought no spiritual uplift. He could see the sunset, but it left him cold. He could hear the thrushes calling in the shrubberies, but did not think much of them. It is, in short, in no sunny mood that we re-introduce Ronald Overbury Fish to the reader of this chronicle.

The meditations of a man who has recently proposed to and been accepted by a girl, some inches taller than himself, for whom he entertains no warmer sentiment than a casual feeling that, take her for all in all, she isn’t a bad sort of egg, must of necessity tend towards the sombre: and the surroundings in which Ronnie had spent the latter part of the afternoon had not been of a kind to encourage optimism. At the moment when the skies suddenly burst asunder and the world became a shower-bath, he had been walking along the path that skirted the wall of the kitchen-garden: and the only shelter that offered itself was a gloomy cave or dug-out that led to the heating-apparatus of the hot-houses. Into this he had dived like a homing rabbit, and here, sitting on a heap of bricks, he had remained for the space of fifty minutes with no company but one small green frog and his thoughts.

The place was a sort of Sargasso Sea into which had drifted all the flotsam and jetsam of the kitchen-garden which it adjoined. There was a wheelbarrow, lacking its wheel and lying drunkenly on its side. There were broken pots in great profusion. There was a heap of withered flowers, a punctured watering-can, a rake with large gaps in its front teeth, some potatoes unfit for human consumption and half a dead blackbird. The whole effect was extraordinarily like Hell, and Ronnie’s spirits, not high at the start, had sunk lower and lower.

Sobered by rain, wheelbarrows, watering-cans, rakes, potatoes and dead blackbirds, not to mention the steady supercilious eye of a frog which resembled that of a Bishop at the Athenæum inspecting a shy new member, Ronnie had begun definitely to repent of the impulse which had led him to ask Millicent to be his wife. And now, in the cosier environment of his bedroom, he was regretting it more than ever.

Like most people who have made a defiant and dramatic gesture and then have leisure to reflect, he was oppressed by a feeling that he had gone considerably farther than was prudent. Samson, as he heard the pillars of the temple begin to crack, must have felt the same. Gestures are all very well while the intoxication lasts. The trouble is that it lasts such a very little while.

In asking Millicent to marry him, he had gone, he now definitely realised, too far. He had overdone it. It was not that he had any objection to Millicent as a wife. He had none whatever,—provided she were somebody else’s wife. What was so unpleasant was the prospect of being married to her himself.

He groaned in spirit, and became aware that he was no longer alone. The door had opened, and his friend Hugo Carmody was in the room. He noted with a dull surprise that Hugo was in the conventional costume of the English gentleman about to dine. He had not supposed the hour so late.

“Hullo,” said Hugo. “Not dressed? The gong’s gone.”

It now became clear to Ronnie that he simply was not equal to facing his infernal family at the dinner-table. He supposed that Millicent had spread the news of their engagement by this time, and that meant discussion, wearisome congratulations, embraces from his Aunt Constance, chaff of the vintage of 1895 from his Uncle Galahad—in short, fuss and gabble. And he was in no mood for fuss and gabble. Pot-luck with a tableful of Trappist monks he might just have endured, but not a hearty feed with the family.

“I don’t want any dinner.”

“No dinner?”

“No.”

“Ill or something?”

“No.”

“But you don’t want any dinner? I see. Rummy! However, your affair, of course. It begins to look as if I should have to don the nose-bag alone. Beach tells me that Baxter also will be absent from the trough. He’s upset about something, it seems, and has asked for a snort and sandwiches in the smoking-room. And as for the pustule Pilbeam,” said Hugo grimly, “I propose to interview him at the earliest possible date. And after that he won’t want any dinner, either.”

“Where are the rest of them?”

“Didn’t you know?” said Hugo, surprised. “They’re dining over at old Parsloe’s. Your aunt, Lord Emsworth, old Galahad, and Millicent.” He coughed. A moment of some slight embarrassment impended. “I say, Ronnie, old man, while on the subject of Millicent.”

“Well?”

“You know that engagement of yours?”

“What about it?”

“It’s off.”

“Off?”

“Right off. A wash-out. She’s changed her mind.”

“What!”

“Yes. She’s going to marry me. I may tell you we have been engaged for weeks—one of those secret betrothals—but we had a row. Row now over. Complete reconciliation. So she asked me to break it to you gently that in the circs she proposes to return you to store.”

A thrill of ecstasy shot through Ronnie. He felt as men on the scaffold feel when the messenger bounds in with the reprieve.

“Well, that’s the first bit of good news I’ve had for a long time,” he said.

“You mean you didn’t want to marry Millicent?”

“Of course I didn’t.”

“Not so much of the ‘of course,’ laddie,” said Hugo, offended.

“She’s an awfully nice girl . . .”

“An angel. Shropshire’s leading seraph.”

“. . . but I’m not in love with her any more than she’s in love with me.”

“In that case,” said Hugo, with justifiable censure, “why propose to her? A goofy proceeding, it seems to me.” He clicked his tongue. “Of course! I see what happened. You grabbed Millicent to score off Sue, and she grabbed you to score off me. And now, I suppose, you’ve fixed it up with Sue again. Very sound. Couldn’t have made a wiser move. She’s obviously the girl for you.”

Ronnie winced. The words had touched a nerve. He had been trying not to think of Sue, but without success. Her picture insisted on rising before him. Not being able to exclude her from his thoughts, he had tried to think of her bitterly.

“I haven’t,” he cried.

Extraordinary how difficult it was, even now, to think bitterly of Sue. Sue was Sue. That was the fundamental fact that hampered him. Try as he might to concentrate it on the tragedy of Mario’s restaurant, his mind insisted on slipping back to earlier scenes of sunshine and happiness.

“You haven’t?” said Hugo, damped.

That Ronnie could possibly be in ignorance of Sue’s arrival at the castle never occurred to him. Long ere this, he took it for granted, they must have met. And he assumed, from the equanimity with which his friend had received the news of the loss of Millicent, that Sue and he must have had just such another heart-to-heart talk as had taken place in the room above the gamekeeper’s cottage. The dour sullenness of Ronnie’s face made his kindly heart sink.

“You mean you haven’t fixed things up?”

“No.”

Ronnie writhed. Sue in his car. Sue up the river. Sue in his arms to the music of sweet saxophones. Sue laughing. Sue smiling. Sue in the Springtime, with the little breezes ruffling her hair . . .

He forced his mind away from these weakening visions. Sue at Mario’s . . . That was better . . . Sue letting him down . . . Sue hobnobbing with the blister Pilbeam . . . That was much better.

“I think you’re being very hard on that poor little girl, Ronnie.”

“Don’t call her a poor little girl.”

“I will call her a poor little girl,” said Hugo firmly. “To me, she is a poor little girl, and I don’t care who knows it. I don’t mind telling you that my heart bleeds for her. Bleeds profusely. And I must say I should have thought . . .”

“I don’t want to talk about her.”

“. . . after her doing what she has done . . .”

“I don’t want to talk about her, I tell you.”

Hugo sighed. He gave it up. The situation was what they called an impasse. Too bad. His best friend and a dear little girl like that parted for ever. Two jolly good eggs sundered for all eternity. Oh, well, that was Life.

“If you want to talk about anything,” said Ronnie, “you had much better talk about this engagement of yours.”

“Only too glad, old man. Was afraid it might bore you, or would have touched more freely on subject.”

“I suppose you realise the Family will squash it flat?”

“Oh, no, they won’t.”

“You think my Aunt Constance is going to leap about and bang the cymbals?”

“The Keeble, I admit,” said Hugo, with a faint shiver, “may make her presence felt to some extent. But I rely on the ninth earl’s support and patronage. Before long, I shall be causing the ninth to look on me as a son.”

“How?”

For a moment Hugo almost yielded to the temptation to confide in this friend of his youth. Then he realised the unwisdom of such a course. By an odd coincidence, he was thinking exactly the same of Ronnie as Ronnie at an earlier stage of this history had thought of him. Ronnie, he considered, though a splendid chap, was not fitted to be a repository of secrets. A babbler. A sieve. The sort of fellow who would spread a secret hither and thither all over the place before nightfall.

“Never mind,” he said. “I have my methods.”

“What are they?”

“Just methods,” said Hugo, “and jolly good ones. Well, I’ll be pushing off. I’m late. Sure you won’t come down to dinner? Then I’ll be going. It is imperative that I get hold of Pilbeam with all possible speed. Don’t want the sun to go down on my wrath. All has ended happily in spite of him, but that’s no reason why he shouldn’t be massacred. I look on myself as a man with a public duty.”

For some minutes after the door had closed, Ronnie remained humped up in his chair. Then, in spite of everything, there began to creep upon him a desire for food, too strong to be resisted. Perfect health and a tealess afternoon spent in the open had given him a compelling appetite. He still shrank from the thought of the dining-room. Fond as he was of Hugo, he simply could not stand his conversation to-night. A chop at the Emsworth Arms would meet the case. He could get down there in five minutes in his two-seater.

He rose. His mind, as he moved to the door, was not entirely occupied with thoughts of food. Hugo’s parting words had turned it in the direction of Pilbeam again.

What had brought Pilbeam to the castle, he did not know. But, now that he was here, let him look out for himself! A couple of minutes alone with P. Frobisher Pilbeam was just the medicine his bruised soul required. Apparently, from what he had said, Hugo also entertained some grievance against the man. It could be nothing compared with his own.

Pilbeam! The cause of all his troubles. Pilbeam! The snake in the grass. Pilbeam! . . . Yes . . . His heart might be broken, his life a wreck, but he could still enjoy the faint consolation of dealing faithfully with Pilbeam.

He went out into the corridor. And, as he did so, Percy Pilbeam came out of the room opposite.

 

II

Pilbeam had dressed for dinner with considerable care. Owing to the fact that Lord Emsworth, in his woollen-headed way, had completely forgotten to inform him of the exodus to Matchingham Hall, he was expecting to meet a gay and glittering company at the meal and had prepared himself accordingly. Looking at the result in the mirror, he had felt a glow of contentment. This glow was still warming him as he passed into the corridor. As his eyes fell on Ronnie, it faded abruptly.

In the days of his editorship of Society Spice, that frank and fearless journal, P. Frobisher Pilbeam had once or twice had personal encounters with people having no cause to wish him well. They had not appealed to him. He was a man who found no pleasure in physical violence. And that physical violence threatened now was only too sickeningly plain. It was foreshadowed in the very manner in which this small but sturdy young man confronting him had begun to creep forward. Pilbeam, who was an F.R.Z.S., had seen leopards at the Zoo creep just like that.

Years of conducting a weekly scandal-sheet, followed by a long period of activity as a private enquiry agent, undoubtedly train a man well for the exhibition of presence-of-mind in sudden emergencies. One finds it difficult in the present instance to over-praise Percy Pilbeam’s ready resource. Had a great military strategist been present, he would have nodded approval. With the grim menace of Ronnie Fish coming closer and closer, Percy Pilbeam did exactly what Napoleon, Hannibal or the great Duke of Marlborough would have done. Reaching behind him for the handle and twisting it sharply, he slipped through the door of his bedroom, banged it, and was gone. Many an eel has disappeared into the mud with less smoothness and celerity.

If the leopard which he resembled had seen its prey vanish into the undergrowth just before dinner-time, it would probably have expressed its feelings in exactly the same kind of short, rasping cry as proceeded from Ronnie Fish, witnessing this masterly withdrawal. For an instant he was completely taken aback. Then he plunged for the door and plunged into the room.

He stood, baffled. Pilbeam had vanished. To Ronnie’s astonished eyes the apartment appeared entirely free from detectives in any shape or form whatsoever. There was the bed. There were the chairs. There was the carpet, the dressing-table and the book-shelf. But of private enquiry agents there was a complete shortage.

How long this miracle would have continued to afflict him, one cannot say. His mind was still dealing dazedly with it, when there came to his ears a sharp click, as of a key being turned in the lock. It seemed to proceed from a hanging-cupboard at the other side of the room.

Old Miles Fish, Ronnie’s father, might, as Lord Emsworth had asserted, have been the biggest fool in the Brigade of Guards, but his son could reason and deduce. Springing forward, he tugged at the handle of the cupboard door. The door stood fast.

At the same moment there filtered through it the sound of muffled breathing.

Ronnie was already looking grim. He now looked grimmer. He placed his lips to the panel.

“Come out of that!”

The breathing stopped.

“All right,” said Ronnie, with a hideous calm. “Right jolly ho! I can wait.”

For some moments there was silence. Then from the beyond a voice spoke in reply.

“Be reasonable!” said the voice.

“Reasonable?” said Ronnie thickly. “Reasonable, eh?” He choked. “Come out! I only want to pull your head off,” he added, with a note of appeal.

The voice became conciliatory.

“I know what you’re upset about,” it said.

“You do, eh?”

“Yes, I quite understand. But I can explain everything.”

“What?”

“I say I can explain everything.”

“You can, can you?”

“Quite,” said the voice.

Up till now Ronnie had been pulling. It now occurred to him that pushing might possibly produce more satisfactory results. So he pushed. Nothing, however, happened. Blandings Castle was a house which rather prided itself on its solidity. Its walls were walls and its doors doors. No jimcrack work here. The cupboard creaked, but did not yield.

“I say!”

“Well?”

“I wish you’d listen. I tell you I can explain everything. About that night at Mario’s, I mean. I know exactly how it is. You think Miss Brown is fond of me. I give you my solemn word she can’t stand the sight of me. She told me so herself.”

A pleasing thought came to Ronnie.

“You can’t stay in there all night,” he said.

“I don’t want to stay in here all night.”

“Well, come on out, then.”

The voice became plaintive.

“I tell you she had never set eyes on me before that night at Mario’s. She was dining with that fellow Carmody, and he went out and I came over and introduced myself. No harm in that, was there?”

Ronnie wondered if kicking would do any good. A tender feeling for his toes, coupled with the reflection that his uncle Clarence might have something to say if he started breaking up cupboard doors, caused him to abandon the scheme. He stood, breathing tensely.

“Just a friendly word, that’s all I came over to say. Why shouldn’t a fellow introduce himself to a girl and say a friendly word?”

“I wish I’d got there earlier.”

“I’d have been glad to see you,” said Pilbeam courteously.

“Would you?”

“Quite.”

“I shall be glad to see you,” said Ronnie, “when I can get this damned door open.”

Pilbeam began to fear asphyxiation. The air inside the cupboard was growing closer. Peril lent him the inspiration which it so often does.

“Look here,” he said, “are you Ronnie?”

Ronnie turned pinker.

“I don’t want any of your dashed cheek.”

“No, but listen. Is your name Ronnie?”

Silence without.

“Because, if it is,” said Pilbeam, “you’re the fellow she’s come here to see.”

More silence.

“She told me so. In the garden this evening. She came here calling herself Miss Shoemaker or some such name, just to see you. That ought to show you that I’m not the man she’s keen on.”

The silence was broken by a sharp exclamation.

“What’s that?”

Pilbeam repeated his remark. A growing hopefulness lent an almost finnicky clearness to his diction.

“Come out!” cried Ronnie.

“That’s all very well, but . . .”

“Come out, I want to talk to you.”

“You are talking to me.”

“I don’t want to bellow this through a door. Come on out. I swear I won’t touch you.”

It was not so much Pilbeam’s faith in the knightly word of the Fishes that caused him to obey the request as a feeling that, if he stayed cooped up in this cupboard much longer, he would get a rush of blood to the head. Already he was beginning to feel as if he were breathing a solution of dust and moth-balls. He emerged. His hair was rumpled, and he regarded his companion warily. He had the air of a man who has taken his life in his hands. But the word of the Fishes held good. As far as Ronnie was concerned, the war appeared to be over.

“What did you say? She’s here?”

“Quite.”

“What do you mean, quite?”

“Certainly. Quite. She got here just before I did. Haven’t you seen her?”

“No.”

“Well, she’s here. She’s in the room they call the Garden Room. I heard her tell that old bird Galahad so. If you go there now,” said Pilbeam insinuatingly, “you could have a quiet word with her before she goes down to dinner.”

“And she said she had come here to see me?”

“Yes. To explain about that night at Mario’s. And what I say,” proceeded Pilbeam warmly, “is, if a girl didn’t love a fellow, would she come to a place like this, calling herself Miss Shoolbred or something, simply to see him? I ask you!” said Pilbeam.

Ronnie did not answer. His feelings held him speechless. He was too deep in a morass of remorse to be able to articulate. Indeed, he was in a frame of mind so abased that he almost asked Pilbeam to kick him. The thought of how he had wronged his blameless Sue was almost too bitter to be borne. It bit like a serpent and stung like an adder.

From the surge and riot of his reflections one thought now emerged clearly, shining like a beacon on a dark night. The Garden Room!

Turning without a word, he shot out of the door as quickly as Percy Pilbeam a short while ago had shot in. And Percy Pilbeam, with a deep sigh, went to the dressing-table, took up the brush, and started to restore his hair to a state fit for the eyes of the nobility and gentry. This done, he smoothed his moustache and went downstairs to the drawing-room.

 

III

The drawing-room was empty. And to Pilbeam’s surprise it continued to be empty for quite a considerable time. He felt puzzled. He had expected to meet a reproachful host with an eye on the clock and a haughty hostess clicking her tongue. As the minutes crept by and his solitude remained unbroken, he began to grow restless.

He wandered about the room, staring at the pictures, straightening his tie and examining the photographs on the little tables. The last of these was one of Lord Emsworth, taken apparently at about the age of thirty in long whiskers and the uniform of the Shropshire Yeomanry. He was gazing at this with the fascinated horror which it induced in anyone who saw it suddenly for the first time, when the door at last opened: and with a sinking sensation of apprehension Pilbeam beheld the majestic form of Beach.

For an instant he stood eyeing the butler with that natural alarm which comes to all of us when in the presence of a man who a few short hours earlier has given us one look and made us feel like a condemned food product. Then his tension relaxed.

It has been well said that for every evil in this world Nature supplies an antidote. If butlers come, can cocktails be far behind? Beach was carrying a tray with glasses and a massive shaker on it: and Pilbeam, seeing these, found himself regarding their formidable bearer almost with equanimity.

“A cocktail, sir?”

“Thanks.”

He accepted a brimming glass. The darkness of its contents suggested a welcome strength. He drank. And instantaneously all through his system beacon-fires seemed to burst into being.

He drained the glass. His whole outlook was now magically different. Quite suddenly he had begun to feel equal to a dozen butlers, however glazed their eyes might be.

And it might have been an illusion caused by gin and vermouth, but this butler seemed to have changed considerably for the better since their last meeting. His eye, though still glassy, had lost the old basilisk quality. There appeared now, in fact, to be something so positively lighthearted about Beach’s whole demeanour that the proprietor of the Argus Enquiry Agency was emboldened to plunge into conversation.

“Nice evening.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nice after the storm.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Came down a bit, didn’t it?”

“The rain was undoubtedly extremely heavy, sir. Another cocktail?”

“Thanks.”

The re-lighting of the beacons had the effect of removing from Pilbeam the last trace of diffidence and shyness. He saw now that he had been entirely mistaken in this butler. Encountering him in the hall at the moment of his arrival, he had supposed him supercilious and hostile. He now perceived that he was a butler and a brother. More like Old King Cole, that jolly old soul, indeed, than anybody Pilbeam had met for months.

“I got caught in it,” he said affably.

“Indeed, sir?”

“Yes. Lord Emsworth had been showing me some photographs of that pig of his. . . . By the way, in strict confidence . . . what’s your name?”

“Beach, sir.”

“In strict confidence, Beach, I know something about that pig.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Yes. Well, after I had seen the photographs, I went for a walk in the park and the rain came on and I got pretty wet. In fact, I don’t mind telling you I had to get under cover and take my trousers off to dry.”

He laughed merrily.

“Another cocktail, sir?”

“Making three in all?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Pilbeam.

For some moments he sat, pensive and distrait, listening to the strains of a brass band which seemed to have started playing somewhere in the vicinity. Then his idly floating thoughts drifted back to the mystery which had been vexing him before this delightful butler’s entry.

 

(To be concluded)

 

Annotations to this novel in its book form are on this site.
The chapter and section divisions in this serial episode match those in books, beginning in the middle of section i of Chapter X.

 

The concluding episode, from the September 1929 issue of Pall Mall, has not yet been located in libraries or online sources. Contact us if you have a lead on this item.
To read the rest of the novel on this site, go to the middle of Part 10 of the American magazine serialization; for the sake of continuity, that link will take you to the last paragraph of the present episode.

 

Printer’s errors corrected above:
Magazine, p. 38b, had “How. Where?”; period changed to question mark as in books.
Magazine, p. 98c, had “Quite well?”; question mark changed to period as in all other sources.
Magazine, p. 106b, had “ ‘And I loathe all men, and he said”; closing single quotation mark inserted after ‘men,’.

 

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