Full Moon:

  And such is the whimsicality of Fortune that he had seen her again within the first couple of minutes. True, she had come and gone like something out of a cuckoo clock, but he had seen her. And, as we say, he had marked the spot carefully and gone off to find a ladder.

  That his mind should have turned so immediately in the direction of ladders is not really surprising. Romeo's would have done the same, and so, if the Hon. Galahad's diagnosis of his temperament had been a correct one, would that of Tipton Plimsoll's Uncle Chet. Uncle Chet, like Romeo, had been a man who thought on his feet and did it now when there were girls around, and Bill was as full of ardour and impetuosity as either of them. The primary impulse of every lover, on seeing the adored object on a balcony, is to shin up and join her.

  One of the things which may be placed to the credit side of the English country house is that if you want a ladder when you are in its grounds, you can generally find one. It may take time, as it did on this occasion, but the search is seldom fruitless. Bill eventually found his propped up against a tree, where somebody seemed to have been doing a bit of pruning, and it was here that his powerful physique, which had been of such negligible value to him in the interior of Barribault's Hotel and, for the matter of that, in the Blandings Castle drawing-room, began to show returns. A ladder, even the medium-sized one which he had found, is not a light burden, but he made nothing of it. He carried it like a clouded cane. There were moments when he came near to flicking it.

  He placed it against the wall, steadied it, and began to climb. Love lent him wings. Massive though he was, he skimmed up the rungs like a featherweight. He reached the balcony. He hurried into the room. And down below Colonel Egbert Wedge, who at the conclusion of the general meeting had decided that only a brisk walk could restore a mental poise rudely shaken by his exchanges with Lord Emsworth, rounded the corner of the house and stood staring.

  The impression left on Colonel Wedge's mind by the general meeting, and particularly by his brother-in-law's share in it, had been that he had already undergone the maximum which a retired colonel of a cavalry unit could reasonably be expected to endure. If you had buttonholed him as he stalked out of the drawing-room and said to him: 'Tell me, Colonel Wedge, have you drained the bitter cup?' he would have replied: 'Yes, dash it, certainly. To the dregs.' And now, on top of all that, here was a beastly bounder of a burglar having the cool effrontery to break into the house in broad daylight.

  It was this that was causing his blood pressure to rise in a manner which would have made E. Jimpson Murgatroyd shake his head. At night, yes. He could have understood that. If this had happened in the small hours or even round about the time of the final whisky and soda, he might not actually have approved of the blasted fellow's activities, but he could have put himself to a certain extent in his place. But at a moment when the household had not yet digested its five-o'clock tea and buttered toast ...

  'Tchsh!' said Colonel Wedge, revolted, and gave the ladder a petulant jerk.

  It measured its length on the turf, and he hurried off to G.H.Q. to put in his report and make arrangements for reinforcements.

  II

  After the departure of her Uncle Galahad, Prudence had not lingered long in her room. A girl in love, remorseful for having wounded the man of her choice and pouring out her heart to him with a fountain pen, writes nearly as quickly as Lord Emsworth sending off telegrams at Paddington Station with his train puffing in the background. She had finished the letter and addressed it to W. Lister, Esq., at the Emsworth Arms and licked the gum and fastened it up long before Bill had come anywhere near his ladder.

  It was her intention to get in touch with one of the under housemaids with whom she had struck up an acquaintance, warm enough perhaps to be called a friendship, and to fee her to take it down by hand after dinner; and she set out now to find her.

  And so it came about that Bill, entering the room with beating heart, found it empty and was for an instant downcast.

  But a moment later he had perceived that though he had missed Prudence, he had found the next best thing. The letter was lying on the dressing-table, where its author had thought it wisest to leave it while she conducted her negotiations with the under housemaid. In the present unsettled conditions at Blandings Castle, to have taken it with her would have been too much like carrying despatches through the enemy's lines in war-time.

  It was with trembling fingers that Bill opened the envelope. In the course of their romantic love affair he had received in all forty-seven letters from this girl, but while the sight of her handwriting had always affected him powerfully, it had never affected him so powerfully as now. So much hung on this communication. The other forty-six had been mere variations on the theme 'I love you,' and very pleasant reading they had made! But this one – the room swam before him as the thought shot through his soul like a red-hot skewer – might quite possibly be the bird. It was the answer to his well-expressed note pleading for a reconciliation, and who knew what scornful rebuffs it might not contain?

  Through the mist which flickered before his eyes he read the words

  My own precious darling beautiful Bill

  and he felt as he had sometimes felt on stricken football fields when a number of large, well-fed members of the opposition team had risen from their seat on his stomach. Reason told him that a girl whose intention it was to rebuff and to administer the bird would scarcely have chosen this preamble.

  'Woof!' he breathed, and with swelling heart settled down to a steady perusal.

  It was a wonderful letter. Indeed, off-hand, he did not see how it could well have been improved upon. Its gist was that she loved him as of yore – in fact, even more than of yore. She made that clear in paragraph one, and clearer still in the pages which followed. She was, indeed, so complimentary about him that somebody like Lady Hermione, had she perused the eulogy, would have supposed that there was some mistake and that she must be thinking of a couple of other fellows. Even Bill, though he had read the same sort of thing forty-six times before, found a difficulty in realizing that this godlike being whose virtues provoked such enthusiasm in her was himself.

  On page four the tone of the letter changed. At first a mere outpouring of worship and affection, it now became more like some crisp despatch from the Front. For it was here that the writer began to outline for his attention the saga of the necklace. And, as he read, his heart bounded within him. So clearly had she set forth the salient points that he was able to follow the scenario step by step to its triumphant conclusion without any difficulty, and he recognized that what had happened was what Freddie would have called in the best and deepest sense a bit of all right. Rout had been turned to victory.

  The thought did strike him, as it had struck Prudence, that it was all perhaps a bit tough on Freddie, who seemed through no fault of his own to have become a sort of football of Fate; but it was not long before he was consoling himself with the philosophical reflection which had enabled the Hon. Galahad to bear up – viz., that the breaking of eggs is an inseparable adjunct to the making of omelettes and that in any case his old friend's agony would be only temporary. 'Hermione,' Gally had said, 'will have to throw in the towel,' and this was the bracing conclusion to which Bill, too, came. It would have been difficult at this moment for anything to have increased his happiness.

  But something now happened which definitely diminished it. From outside in the corridor there came the sudden sound of voices, and he leaped up and stood rigid, listening.

  Nor was his agitation without reason. One of the voices was that of Lady Hermione Wedge, and such had been his relations with her that her lightest word was enough to make him tremble.

  'Are you sure?' she was saying.

  The voice which replied was strange to Bill, for he had not yet had the privilege of meeting Colonel Wedge.

  'Quite sure, old girl. No possibility of error. He propped a beastly great ladder against the wall, and before my very eyes he shinned up it like a lamplighter. I can
show you the ladder. Here, come and look. Down there.'

  There was an interval of silence, during which the unseen speakers had apparently gone to gaze out of one of the corridor windows. Then Lady Hermione spoke.

  'Most extraordinary,' she said. 'Yes, I see the ladder.'

  'He climbed up to a bally balcony,' said Colonel Wedge, like some member of the Capulet family speaking of Romeo.

  'And he can't have climbed down.'

  'Exactly. And if he had come down the stairs, we should have met him. We arrive, then, at the irresistible conclusion that the bounder is lurking in one of these rooms, and I shall now search them one by one.'

  'Oh, Egbert, no!'

  'Eh? Why not? I've got my service revolver.'

  'No. You might get hurt. Wait till Charles and Thomas come. They ought to have been here long ago.'

  'Well, all right. After all, there's no hurry. The blighter can't get away. One can proceed at one's leisure.'

  In every difficult situation, when the spirit has been placed upon the rack and peril seems to threaten from every quarter, there inevitably comes soon or late to the interested party at the centre of the proceedings a conviction that things are getting too hot. Stags at bay have this feeling. So have Red Indians at the stake. It came now to Bill.

  Who Charles and Thomas might be, he did not know. As a matter of fact, they were respectively the Blandings Castle first and second footmen. We saw them before, it may be remembered, toiling into the drawing-room with cream and powdered sugar. They were now restoring their tissues in the Servants' Hall and listening without enthusiasm to the details of the assignment which was being sketched out for them by Beach, the butler. The delay in their arrival was owing to the slowness with which Beach was putting across the idea which he was trying to sell them; they holding, properly enough, that it was not their place to go and overpower burglars right in the middle of their meat tea.

  To Bill, as we say, their names were unfamiliar; but whoever they were, and however long they might take in reaching the front line, it seemed pretty clear to him that they might be expected eventually, and he had no desire to remain and make their acquaintance. It was not that a man of his thews and courage shrank from a turn-up with a hundred Charleses and Thomases, any more than he paled at the menace of a thousand colonels with service revolvers. What urged him to retreat was the thought of having to meet Lady Hermione again. It stimulated him to action like a cactus in the trouser seat.

  Having decided to leave, his first move was to lock the door so as to ensure himself at least a respite when the big push started. This done, he hastened out on to the balcony.

  It had been Colonel Wedge's view that there was no need for hurry, because the blighter could not get away, and Bill would have been the first to acknowledge that the loss of the ladder had struck a very serious blow at his line of communications. But that he was actually encircled he would have disputed. What the colonel had not allowed for was the extraordinary stimulus which the prospect of having to meet his wife gave to blighters' mental powers. The brain of a blighter faced with the imminent prospect of an encounter with a woman of the type of Lady Hermione Wedge works like lightning, and it was almost no time before Bill was telling himself that on the walls of houses there are generally water pipes down which a venturesome man may slide.

  A moment later he had seen one. And as his eye, sweeping the castle wall, fell upon it, his stout heart sank. It was a matter of some dozen feet away from him.

  To a performing flea, of course, a standing broad jump of a dozen feet would have been child's play. Such a flea in Bill's place would have bowed to the audience, smiled at personal friends in the front row, dusted off its antenna and made the leap with a careless 'Allay-oop!' Bill did not even contemplate its possibility. He knew his limitations. There was once a young man on the flying trapeze who flew through the air with the greatest of ease, but he had presumably had years of training. Bill was a novice.

  It was as he stood there with a silent 'What to do?' on his lips that he suddenly saw that there was still hope. Running along the wall was a narrow ledge. Furthermore, Blandings Castle having been in existence a great number of years, ivy had grown upon its surface in some profusion. And a man anxious to remove himself from a balcony here to a water pipe over there can do a great deal with the assistance of a ledge and some ivy.

  What held Bill motionless for a while, wrinkling his forehead and chewing the lower lip a little, was a growing doubt as to whether he wanted to be that man. There was a pleasantly solid look about that ivy; its strands were stout and gnarled and certainly had the appearance of being strong enough to support him; but you can never be quite sure about ivy. It puts up an impressive front and then, just when it is the time for all good ivy to come to the aid of the party, it lets you down. That was the thought which was causing Bill to hesitate. Like Freddie, he yearned for co-operation, and he wanted to be quite certain that he was going to get it.

  There was no question that failure on the part of that ivy to give one-hundred-per-cent service would mean a quick, sticky finish for the man who had put his trust in it. He would go straight down and not stop till he had hit the lawn, and it did not escape Bill's notice that that lawn had a hard, unyielding look. He could see himself bouncing – once, twice, possibly thrice – and then lying lifeless, like the man in 'Excelsior'.

  He was still weighing the pros and cons when there cut abruptly into his meditations the sound of a woman's voice, sharpened by the excitement of the chase.

  'This door is locked. He must be in here. Break down this door, Charles.'

  Worse things can happen to a man than lying lifeless on lawns. Bill scrambled over the balcony rail and set his foot on the ledge.

  Simultaneously, Tipton Plimsoll hurried past the group in the corridor and shot into his bedroom like a homing rabbit.

  III

  Tipton lowered himself into a chair with a satisfied grunt, his air that of a man glad to be at journey's end. He was breathing a little jerkily, for he had come up the stairs at a smart pace. A spectator, had one been present, would have observed that beneath his coat there was some bulky object, spoiling the set of it. It was as if he had grown a large tumour on his left side.

  At about the moment when Bill, having heard all he wanted to hear on the subject of Charleses, Thomases, and service revolvers, retreated to the balcony and started looking around for water pipes, Tipton had been leaving the Hon. Galahad's suite on the ground floor in the furtive manner of a stag which, while not yet actually at bay, is conscious of a certain embarrassment and a desire to avoid attention. He had been to fetch the flask which he had been mad enough to allow out of his possession, foolishly overlooking the fact that the time was bound to come when he would need it, and need it sorely.

  It was the presence of this flask on his person which had caused him to whizz so nimbly past the group in the corridor. He had seen that the gathering consisted of Colonel Wedge, Lady Hermione Wedge, Beach, the butler, and a brace of footmen, and at any other time – for the affair undoubtedly presented certain features of interest – he would have paused to ask questions. But with that bulge under his coat he shrank from establishing communication with his fellows, who might ask questions in their turn. The fact that this assorted mob was gathered about the door next to his own and seemed to be gazing at it with great intentness filled him not with curiosity but with thankfulness. It meant that their backs were turned, thus enabling him to pass by unseen.

  Safe in his refuge, he now produced the flask, looking at it with affection and an anticipatory gleam in his eye. His manner had ceased to betray anxiety and embarrassment. If he still resembled a stag, it was a stag at eve, about to drink its fill. His tongue stole out and passed lightly over his lips.

  In the period which had passed since he last appeared on the Blandings scene a complete change had taken place in Tipton Plimsoll's mood. He had quite got over that momentary spasm of bad temper which had led him to snatch the
necklace from Veronica's grasp and fling it scornfully to Prudence as a contribution towards the vicar's jumble sale. Five minutes in the rose garden with the girl he loved had made another man of him.

  He was now filled to the brim with a benevolence so wide in its scope that it even embraced Freddie. He had got back to his old idea of Freddie as a man and a brother, and was glad he had given him that concession for his blasted dog biscuits. He saw that he had wronged Freddie. After all, it is surely straining a regard for the proprieties absurdly to object to a male cousin giving a female cousin a trifle of five-and-ten-cent store jewellery on her birthday.

  But there were other and weightier reasons for his desire to celebrate than a mere conviction of the blamelessness of one whom he had once been reluctantly compelled to class among the rattlesnakes and black mambas. Apart from the intoxicating feeling of being betrothed to the only girl in the world, there was the realization that he had passed through the valley of the shadow and come up smiling on the other side. Even E. Jimpson Murgatroyd would now be compelled in common honesty to give him a clean bill of health.

  For mark what had happened. In order to brace himself up to tell his love he had taken a snifter. And what had ensued? He had seen a pig in a bedroom. Yes, but a real pig, a genuine pig, a pig that was equally visible to such unbiased eyes as those of Veronica and her mother. E. Jimpson Murgatroyd himself in his place would have seen precisely what he had seen. No amount of quibbling on his part could get around that.