Blushing hotly, Lord Emsworth turned and made for the gate again.
In the living-room of the white house, cool in the shade of the tree which stood outside its window, there had begun to burgeon one of those regrettable neo-Babylonian orgies which are so frequent when blondes and men who are something in the lumber business get together. Cocktails were circulating, and the blonde who had been at the wheel of the car was being the life and soul of the party with her imitation of the man outside who had been unable to get himself straightened out in the matter of dog biscuits and richly bound encyclopædias. Her “Lord Ems-worth” was a nice bit of impressionistic work, clever but not flattering.
She was giving a second encore when her performance was interrupted by a shrill yapping from without, and the blonde who had sat beside her knitted her brow in motherly concern.
“Somebody’s teasing Eisenhower,” she said.
“Probably found a cat,” said the timber wolf. “Tell me more. What sort of a character was this character?”
“Tall,” said a blonde.
“Old,” said another blonde.
“Skinny,” said a third blonde.
And a fourth blonde added that he had worn pince-nez.
A sudden gravity fell upon the timber wolf. He was remembering that on several occasions these last few days he had seen just such a man peering over his hedge in a furtive and menacing manner, like Sherlock Holmes on the trail. This very morning he had seen him. He had been standing there outside the hedge, motionless … watching … watching …
The fly in the ointment of men who throw parties for blondes when their wives are away, the thing that acts as a skeleton at the feast and induces goose pimples when the revelry is at its height, is the fact that they can never wholly dismiss the possibility that these wives, though they ought to be ashamed of themselves for entertaining unworthy suspicions, may have engaged firms of private detectives to detect them privately and report on their activities. It was this thought that now came whistling like an east wind through the mind of the timber wolf, whose name, just to keep the record straight, was not Griggs or Follansbee but Spenlow (George).
And as he quivered beneath its impact, one of his guests, who had hitherto taken no part in the conversation, spoke as follows:
“Oo, look! Eisenhower’s got him up a tree!”
And George Spenlow, following her pointing finger, saw that she was correct. There the fellow was, roosting in the branches and adjusting his pince-nez as if the better to view the scene within. He quivered like a jelly and stared at Lord Emsworth. Lord Emsworth stared at him. Their eyes met.
Much has been written of the language of the eyes, but except between lovers it is never a very satisfactory medium of communication. George Spenlow, trying to read the message in Lord Emsworth’s, completely missed the gist.
What Lord Emsworth was trying to convey with the language of the eye was an apology for behaviour which at first sight, he admitted, might seem a little odd. He had rapped on the door, he was endeavouring to explain, but, unable to attract attention to his presence, had worked his way round the house to where he heard voices, not a thought on his mind except a passionate desire to sell richly bound encyclopædias of Sport, and suddenly something had exploded like a land mine on the ground beside him and, looking down, he had perceived a Pekinese dog advancing on him with bared teeth. This had left him no option but to climb the tree to avoid its slavering jaws. “Oh, for the wings of a dove!” he had said to himself, and had got moving. He concluded his remarks by smiling a conciliatory smile.
It pierced George Spenlow like a dagger. It seemed to him that this private investigator, elated at having caught him with the goods, was gloating evilly.
He gulped.
“You girls stay here,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll go talk to this fellow.”
He climbed through the window, scooped up the Pekinese, restored it to its proprietress and addressed Lord Emsworth in a quavering voice.
“Now listen,” he said.
These men high up in the lumber business are quick thinkers. George Spenlow had seen the way.
“Now listen,” said George Spenlow.
He had taken Lord Emsworth affectionately by the arm and was walking him up and down the lawn. He was a stout, pink, globular man, so like Lord Emsworth’s pig, Empress of Blandings, in appearance that the latter felt a wave of homesickness.
“Now listen,” said George Spenlow. “I think you and I can get together.”
Lord Emsworth, to show that his heart was in the right place, smiled another conciliatory smile.
“Yes, yes, I know,” said George Spenlow, wincing. “But I think we can. I’ll put my cards on the table. I know all about it. My wife. She gets ideas into her head. She imagines things.”
Lord Emsworth, though fogged was able to understand this.
“My late wife was like that” he said.
“All women are like that” said George Spenlow. “It’s something to do with the bone structure of their heads. They let their imagination run away with them. They entertain unworthy suspicions.”
Here again Lord Emsworth was able to follow him. He said he had noticed the same thing in his sister Constance, and George Spenlow began to feel encouraged.
“Sure. Sisters, wives, late wives … they’re all the same, and it doesn’t do to let them get away with it. So here’s what. What you tell her is that you found me enjoying a quiet home afternoon with a few old college friends … Wait, wait,” said George Spenlow urgently. “Wait while I finish.”
He had observed his guest shake his head. This was because a mosquito had just bitten Lord Emsworth on the ear, but he had no means of divining this. Shakes of the head are as hard to interpret as the language of the eyes.
“Wait while I finish,” said George Spenlow. “Hear what I was going to say. You’re a man of the world. You want to take the broad, sensible outlook. You want to study the situation from every angle and find out what there is in it for you. Now then how much?”
“You mean how many?”
“Eh?”
“How many would you like?”
“How many what?”
“Richly bound encyclopædias of Sport.”
“Oh yes, yes, yes,” said George Spenlow, enlightened “Oh, sure sure, sure, sure, sure. I didn’t get you for a moment. About how many would you suggest? Fifty?”
Lord Emsworth shook his head again—petulantly, it seemed to George Spenlow. The mosquito had returned.
“Well, naturally,” proceeded George Spenlow, “when I said fifty, I meant a hundred. I think that’s a nice round number.”
“Very nice,” agreed Lord Emsworth. “Or would you care for a gross?”
“A gross might be better.”
“You can give them to you friends.”
“That’s right. On their birthdays.”
“Or at Christmas.”
“Of course. So difficult to think of a suitable Christmas present.”
“Extraordinarily difficult.”
“Shall we say five hundred dollars on account?”
“That would be capital.”
“And remember,” said George Spenlow, with all the emphasis at his disposal. “Old college friends.”
A passer-by, watching Lord Emsworth as he returned some twenty minutes later to Freddie’s dream house down the road, would have said to himself that there went an old gentleman who had found the blue bird, and he would have been right. Lord Emsworth, as he fingered the crisp roll of bills in his trouser pocket, was not actually saying “Whooppee!” but, it was a very near thing. He was feeling as if a great burden had been removed from his shoulders.
The girl was asleep when he reached the house. Gently, without disturbing her slumbers, Lord Emsworth reached for her bag and deposited the five hundred dollars in it. Then he tiptoed out and set a course for the golf club. He wanted to find his son Freddie.
“Ah,” Frederick,” he would say. “So you sell dog bi
scuits do you? Pooh! Anyone can sell dog biscuits. Give me something tougher, like richly bound encyclopædias of Sport. Now, I strolled out just now and sold a gross at the first house I visited. So don’t talk to me about dog biscuits. In fact, don’t talk to me at all, because I am sick of the sound of your voice. And STOP THAT SINGING!!”
Yes, when Freddie began singing “Buttons and Bows,” that would be the moment to strike.
CHAPTER IX
How’s That, Umpire?
THE story of Conky Biddle’s great love begins at about six-forty-five on an evening in June in the Marylebone district of London. He had spent the day at Lord’s cricket ground watching a cricket match, and driving away at close of play had been held up in a traffic jam. And held up alongside his taxi was a car with a girl at the wheel. And he had just lit a cigarette and was thinking of this and that, when he heard her say:
“Cricket is not a game. It is a mere shallow excuse for walking in your sleep.”
It was at this point that love wound its silken fetters about Conky. He leaped like a jumping bean and the cigarette fell from his nerveless fingers. If a girl who talked like that was not his dream girl, he didn’t know a dream girl when he heard one.
You couldn’t exactly say that he fell in love at first sight, for owing to the fact that in between him and her, obscuring the visibility, there was sitting a robust blighter in blue flannel with a pin stripe, he couldn’t see her. All he had to go on was her voice, but that was ample. It was a charming voice with an American intonation. She was probably, he thought, an American angel who had stepped down from Heaven for a short breather in London.
“If I see another cricket game five thousand years from now,” she said, “that’ll be soon enough.”
Her companion plainly disapproved of these cracks. He said in a stiff, sniffy sort of way that she had not seen cricket at its best that afternoon, play having been greatly interfered with by rain.
“A merciful dispensation,” said the girl. “Cricket with hardly any cricket going on is a lot better than cricket where the nuisance persists uninterrupted. In my opinion the ideal contest would be one where it rained all day and the rival teams stayed home doing their crossword puzzles.”
The traffic jam then broke up and the car shot forward like a B.29, leaving the taxi nowhere.
The reason why this girl’s words had made so deep an impression on the young Biddle was that of all things in existence, with the possible exception of slugs and his uncle Everard, Lord Plumpton, he disliked cricket most. As a boy he had been compelled to play it, and grown to man’s estate he was compelled to watch it. And if there was one spectacle that saddened him more than another in a world where the man of sensibility is always being saddened by spectacles, it was that of human beings, the heirs of the ages, waddling about in pads and shouting “How’s that, umpire?”
He had to watch cricket because Lord Plumpton told him to, and he was dependent on the other for his three squares a day. Lord Plumpton was a man who knew the batting averages of every first-class cricketer back to the days when they used to play in top hats and whiskers, and recited them to Conky after dinner. He liked to show Conky with the assistance of an apple (or, in winter, of an orange) how Bodger of Kent got the fingerspin which enabled him to make the ball dip and turn late on a sticky wicket. And frequently when Conky was walking along the street with him and working up to touching him for a tenner, he would break off the conversation at its most crucial point in order to demonstrate with his umbrella how Codger of Sussex made his late cut through the slips.
It was to the home of this outstanding louse, where he had a small bedroom on an upper floor, that Conky was now on his way. Arriving at journey’s end, he found a good deal of stir and bustle going on, with doctors coming downstairs with black bags and parlourmaids going upstairs with basins of gruel, and learned from the butler that Lord Plumpton had sprained his ankle.
“No, really?” said Conky, well pleased, for if his uncle had possessed as many ankles as a centipede he would thoroughly have approved of him spraining them all. “I suppose I had better go up and view the remains.”
He proceeded to the star bedroom and found his uncle propped up with pillows, throwing gruel at the parlourmaid. It was plain that he was in no elfin mood. He was looking like a mass murderer, though his face lacked the genial expression which you often see in mass murderers, and he glared at Conky with the sort of wild regret which sweeps over an irritable man when he sees a loved one approaching his sick bed and realizes that he has used up all the gruel.
“What ho, Uncle Everard,” said Conky. “The story going the round of the clubs is that you have bust a joint of sorts. What happened?”
Lord Plumpton scowled darkly. He looked now like a mass murderer whose stomach ulcers are paining him.
“I’ll tell you what happened. You remember I had to leave you at Lord’s to attend a committee meeting at my club. Well, as I was walking back from the club, there were some children playing cricket in the street and one of them skied the ball towards extra cover, so naturally I ran out into the road to catch it. I judged it to a nicety and had just caught it when a homicidal lunatic of a girl came blinding along at ninety miles an hour in her car and knocked me base over apex. One of these days,” said Lord Plumpton, licking his lips, “I hope to meet that girl again, preferably down a dark alley. I shall skin her very slowly with a blunt knife, dip her in boiling oil, sever her limb from limb, assemble those limbs on the pavement and dance on them.”
“And rightly,” said Conky. “These girls who bust your ankles and prevent you going to Lord’s tomorrow need a sharp lesson.”
“What do you mean, prevent me going to Lord’s to-morrow? Do you think a mere sprained ankle will stop me going to a cricket match? I shall be there, with you at my side. And now,” said Lord Plumpton, wearying of these exchanges, “go to hell!”
Conky did not go to hell, but he went downstairs and out on to the front steps to get a breath of air. He was feeling low and depressed. He had been so certain that he would be able to get to-morrow off. He had turned to go in again when he heard a noise of brakes as a car drew up behind him.
“Excuse me,” said a voice. “Could I see Lord Plumpton?”
Simple words, but their effect on Conky as he recognised that silvery voice was to make him quiver from stay-combed hair to shoe sole. He uttered a whinnying cry which, as he swivelled round and for the first time was privileged to see her face, became a gasp. The voice had been the voice of an angel. The face measured up to the voice.
Seeing him, she too gasped. This was apt to be the reaction of the other sex on first beholding Conky Biddle, for though his I.Q. was low his outer crust was rather sensational. He was, indeed, a dazzlingly good-looking young man, who out-Caryed Grant and began where Gregory Peck left off.
“I say,” he said, going to the car and placing a foot on the running-board, “Don’t look now, but did I by chance hear you expressing a wish to meet my uncle, Lord Plumpton?”
“That’s right. I recently flattened him out with my car, and I was planning to give him some flowers.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Conky. “I really wouldn’t. I say this as a friend. Time, the great healer, will have to pull up its socks and spit on its hands quite a bit before it becomes safe for you to enter the presence.”
“I see. Then I’ll take the blooms around the corner and have them delivered by a messenger boy. How’s that, umpire?”
Conky winced. It was as though he had heard this divine creature sully her lips with something out of a modern historical novel.
“Good God!” he said. “Where did you pick up that obscene expression?”
“From your uncle. He was chanting it at the top of his voice when I rammed him. A mental case, I imagine. What does it mean?”
“It’s what you say at cricket.”
“Cricket!” The girl shuddered strongly. “Shall I tell you what I think of cricket?”
“I have
already heard your views. Your car got stuck abaft my taxi in a traffic block this evening. I was here, if you follow what I mean, and you were there, a few feet to the nor’-nor’-east, so I was able to drink in what you were saying about cricket. Would you mind if I thanked you with tears in my eyes?”
“Not at all. But don’t you like cricket? I thought all Englishmen loved it.”
“Not this Englishman. It gives me the pip.”
“Me, too. I ought never to have gone near that Lord’s place. But in a moment of weakness I let myself be talked into it by my fiancé.”
Conky reeled.
“Oh, my sainted aunt! Have you got a fiancé?”
“Not now.”
Conky stopped reeling.
“Was he the bloke you were talking to in the car?”
“That’s right. Eustace Davenport-Simms. I think he plays for Essex or Sussex or somewhere. My views were too subversive for him, so after kidding back and forth for a while we decided to cancel the order for the wedding cake.”
“I thought he seemed a bit sniffy.”
“He got sniffler.”
“Very sensible of you not to marry a cricketer.”
“So I felt.”
“The upshot, then, when all the smoke has blown away, is that you are once more in circulation?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s fine,” said Conky. A sudden thought struck him. “I say, would you object if I pressed your little hand?”
“Some other time, I think.”
“Any time that suits you.”
“You see, I have to hie me back to my hotel and dress. I’m late already, and my father screams like a famished hyæna if he’s kept waiting for his rations.”