Ah yes. He had it now. His bedroom ... Egbert bursting in ... himself jotting down that memorandum in his pig book.
'Freddie, yes,' he went on. 'Of course, yes, Freddie. I knew there was something I wanted to tell you about him. He and Veronica were once engaged to be married.'
'What!'
'Yes. It was broken off- why, I cannot at the moment recall – possibly it was because Freddie married somebody else – but they are still devoted to each other. They always were, even as children. My wife, I recollect, used to speak of Veronica as Freddie's little sweetheart. My wife was alive at that time,' explained Lord Emsworth, careful to make it clear this was no question of a voice from the tomb.
Although any possible misunderstanding had thus been avoided, Tipton's brow remained drawn and furrowed. Spiritually, he was gasping for air. At a boisterous reunion in a speakeasy someone had once hit him on the bridge of the nose with an order of planked steak. As he had felt then, so did he feel now. The same sensation of standing insecurely in a tottering and disintegrating universe.
Many lovers in his position might have consoled themselves with the reflection that Freddie, being now a married man, was presumably out of the race for Veronica Wedge's hand and heart. But Tipton had had the wrong sort of upbringing to permit of his drawing comfort from any thought like that. The son of parents who after marrying each other had almost immediately started marrying other people with a perseverance worthy of a better cause, his had been one of those childhoods where the faintly bewildered offspring finds himself passed from hand to hand like a medicine ball. And, grown to riper years, he had seen among his friends and acquaintances far too much of that Ex-Wife's Heart Balm Society Love Tangle stuff to be a believer in the durability of the married state.
That very Doris Jimpson, of whom he had once supposed himself enamoured, had become Doris Boole, Doris Busbridge, and Doris Applejohn in such rapid succession that the quickness of the hand almost deceived the eye.
So the fact that Veronica's little sweetheart was now a married man by no means seemed to Tipton to render him automatically a non-starter. Freddie, he assumed, having wearied of Mrs Freddie, had sent her off to Paris to secure one of the divorces which that city supplies with such a lavish hand; and now, giving himself a preliminary shake preparatory to starting all over again, he was about to make a pass at his old love. That low-voiced remark of his at dinner, which had caused the girl to slap his wrist and tell him not to be silly, had, of course, been something in the nature of a sighting shot.
That was how Tipton summed up the situation, and while the moon did not actually go out with a pop, like a stage moon when some hitch occurs in the lighting effects, it seemed to him to have done so.
'I guess I'll be turning in,' he said hollowly. 'Getting kind of late.'
As he made his way back to the drawing-room, one coherent thought held sway in his seething mind; and that was that, faces or no faces, he had got to have a bracer. He was convinced that even E. J. Murgatroyd, had the facts been placed before him, would have patted him on the shoulder and bidden him go to it. He would never, Murgatroyd would reason, were he standing beside him now, need a drop of the right stuff more than at this shattering moment; and, after all, the clear-thinking medico would go on to point out, since two o'clock that afternoon he had been leading a quiet regular life, thus reducing risk to a minimum.
The decanter was still on the drawing-room table, fully half of its precious contents intact. To seize it and take a long, invigorating snort was with Tipton the work of an instant. Then, as a prudent man's will, his thoughts turned to the future. Owing to those insane instructions which he had given Freddie, that only non-alcoholic beverages should be served to him while at the castle, this, unless he took steps, was the last life-saver he would get till he returned to civilization. A prospect at which imagination boggled.
Swift action was required, and he acted swiftly. Hastening to his room, he found the large flask without which he never travelled, and which he had brought along this time partly from habit and partly out of sentiment. He took it down to the drawing-room and filled it. Then, feeling that he had done all that man could do to make the future safe, he returned to his bedchamber.
Probably owing to his prompt measures, the moon had now begun to shine again, and Tipton, leaning on the window sill looking down over the meadows and spinneys which it illuminated so tastefully, was sufficiently himself once more to regard its activities with approval. The fact that he was sharing the same planet with Freddie still aggrieved him, but he no longer feared the other as a rival. That gargle from the decanter had made him feel capable of cutting out a dozen Freddies, and it now occurred to him that a gargle from the flask might help the good work along still further.
He took one, accordingly, and was about to take another, when he suddenly checked the progress of hand towards his lips and leaned forward, peering. A moving something on the lawn below had caught his eye.
It seemed to be a human figure.
It was a human figure – that of Bill Lister, who had carried out his intention of walking to the castle and gazing up at Prudence's window. The fact that he had no means of knowing which of these many windows was hers in no way deterred him. He was planning to gaze up at them all and so make sure. And, as a matter of fact, he had made an extraordinarily accurate shot. Her room was next door to Tipton's, the one with the balcony.
He had been gazing up at it a moment before, and he now moved along and gazed up at Tipton's. And as the moonlight fell full on his face, Tipton shot backwards into the room, groped for the bed, and sank bonelessly upon it.
It was some minutes before he could nerve himself to return to the window and take another look. When he did so, the face was no longer there. Having appeared and leered, it had vanished. This, he now realized, was its set routine. He went back to the bed and sat down again, his chin on his hand, motionless. He looked like Rodin's Penseur.
Some little while later, Lord Emsworth, pottering upstairs to his bedroom, was aware of a long, thin form confronting him on the landing. A ghost, was his first impression, though he would have expected a White Lady or a man in armour with his head under his arm rather than a stringbean-like young man wearing horn-rimmed spectacles. Then, as had happened before, a little intensive blinking enabled him to identify the agreeable young fellow who had been so interested in pigs, his guest Mr Er or Mr Ah or possibly Mr Umph.
'Say,' said the apparition, speaking in a low, emotional voice, 'would you do me a favour?'
'You would like to listen to my pig again? It is a little late, but if you really—'
'Look,' said Tipton. 'Will you take this flask and put it away somewhere?'
'Flask? Flask? Flask? Eh? What? Put it away somewhere? Certainly, my dear fellow, certainly, certainly, certainly,' said Lord Emsworth, for such a task was well within his scope.
'Thanks,' said Tipton. 'Good night.'
'Eh? Oh, good night? Yes indeed,' said Lord Emsworth. 'Oh, quite, quite, quite.'
CHAPTER 5
The Emsworth Arms, that old-world hostelry at which Bill Lister had established himself with his paints, brushes, canvas, easel, palette knives, and what not, stands in the picturesque High Street of the little town of Market Blandings; and towards the quiet evenfall of the third day after his arrival there a solitary two-seater might have been observed dashing up to its front entrance. The brakes squealed, a cat saved its life by a split second, the car stopped, and Freddie Threepwood alighted. Having given a couple of nights to the Cheshire Brackenburys, he was on his way to stay with the equally deserving Worcestershire Fanshawe-Chadwicks.
His visit to Cogwych Hall, Cogwych-in-the-Marsh, Cheshire, the seat of Sir Rupert Brackenbury, M.F.H., had left Freddie in a mood of effervescent elation. He had gone there with the intention of talking Sir Rupert into playing ball, and he had done so. His subtle sales talks had made this M.F.H. a devout convert to Donaldson's Dog-Joy. And when you bore in mind the fact that the ini
tials M.F.H. stand for Master of Fox Hounds, you could see what that meant.
Chaps from neighbouring counties would come to hunt with the Cogwych pack and be stunned by the glowing health of its personnel. 'Egad, Sir Rupert,' they would say, 'those hounds of yours look dashed fit.' To which Sir Rupert would reply, 'And no wonder, considering that they are tucking into Donaldson's Dog-Joy all the time, a bone-forming product peculiarly rich in Vitamins A, B, and C.' 'Donaldson's Dog-Joy, eh?' the chaps would say, and they would make a note to lay in a stock for their own four-leggers. And in due season other chaps would call on these chaps and say, 'Egad ...' Well, you could see how the thing would spread. Like a forest fire.
As he passed through the portal of the Emsworth Arms, he was whistling cheerily. Not the slightest presentiment came to him that he would find the affairs of Bill Lister in anything but apple-pie order. By this time the foundations of a beautiful friendship between Blister and the guv'nor should have been securely laid. 'Call me Uncle Clarence,' he could hear the guv'nor saying.
It was accordingly with a crushing bolt-from-the-blueness that the information which he received at the reception desk descended upon him. He had to clutch at a passing knives-and-boots boy to support himself.
'Leaving?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Leaving?' repeated Freddie incredulously. 'But, dash it, he's only just come. He was supposed to be here for weeks. Are you sure?'
'Oh, yes, sir. The gentleman has paid his bill, and the cab is ordered for the six-o'clock train for London.'
'Is he in his room?'
'No, sir. The gentleman went for a walk.'
Freddie released the knives-and-boots boy, who thanked him and passed on. With pursed lips and drawn brows he returned to the two-seater. He was deeply concerned. Unless all the signs deceived him, something had gone seriously wrong with the works, and it was imperative, he felt, that he look into the matter without delay.
A promising line of enquiry occurred to him almost immediately, for the young men of Donaldson's Inc. are trained to think like lightning and it is seldom that they are baffled for more than about a minute and a quarter. If anyone could cast a light on this mystery, it would be his cousin Prudence. She surely must be an authoritative source. A man who has sweated four hours by train to a one-horse town in the country simply in order to be near the girl he loves does not, he reasoned, suddenly leg it back to where he started without a word of explanation to her.
A few moments later he was speeding on his way to the castle. No one could have been more acutely alive than he to the fact that this was going to be a nasty jar for the Worcestershire Fanshawe-Chadwicks, who would not get him quite so soon as they had expected, but that could not be helped. Into each life some rain must fall, and the Fanshawe-Chadwicks would have to stiffen the upper lip and stick it like men. As Bill's patron and backer, duty called him to proceed to the fountain-head and obtain the low-down from the horse's mouth.
The two-seater was a car which could do seventy-five at the height of its fever, and he reached the castle gates in record time. But turning through them into the drive he slackened his speed. He had observed ahead of him a familiar figure.
He put a finger on the tooter and tooted a toot or two.
'What ho, Tippy!' he called. He was in a hurry, but one cannot pass an old buddy by with a mere wave of the hand after being away from him for two days.
Tipton Plimsoll stopped, looked over his shoulder, and, seeing who it was that had spoken, frowned darkly. For some little while he had been pacing the drive, deep in his thoughts. And among the thoughts he had been deep in had been several particularly hard ones relating to this tooting ex-friend.
Ex, one says, for where he had once beheld in Frederick Threepwood a congenial crony and a side-kick with whom it had been a pleasure to flit from high spot to high spot, he now saw only a rival in love, and a sinister, crafty, horn-swoggling rival at that, one who could be classified without hesitation as a snake. At least, if you couldn't pigeon-hole among the snakes bimbos who went about the place making passes at innocent girls after discarding their wives like old tubes of toothpaste, Tipton was at a loss to know into what category they did fall.
'Guk,' he said reservedly. A man has to answer snakes when they speak to him, but he is under no obligation to be sunny.
His gloom did not pass unnoticed. It could scarcely have done so except at a funeral. But Freddie, placing an erroneous interpretation upon it, was pleased rather than wounded. In a man who suddenly abstains from the alcoholic beverages which were once his principal form of nourishment a certain moodiness is to be expected, and all that this Hamlet-like despondency suggested to him was that his former playmate was still on the wagon, and he honoured him for it. His only comment on the other's bleakness of front was to lower his voice sympathetically, as he would have done at some stricken bedside.
'Seen Prue anywhere?' he asked, in a hushed whisper.
Tipton frowned.
'You got a sore throat?' he enquired with some asperity.
'Eh? No, Tippy, no sore throat.'
'Then why the hell are you talking like a suffocating mosquito? What did you say?'
'I asked if you had seen Prue anywhere.'
'Prue?' Tipton's frown deepened. 'Oh, you mean the squirt?'
'I don't know that I would call her a squirt, Tippy.'
'She looks like a squirt to me,' said Tipton firmly. 'Ruddy little midget.'
'She isn't a tall girl,' Freddie conceded pacifically. 'Never has been. Some girls are, of course, and some aren't. You've got to face it. Still, putting all that on one side for the nonce, do you know where I can find her?'
'You can't find her. She's gone with your aunt to call on some people named Brimble.'
Freddie clicked his tongue. He knew what these afternoon calls in the country were. By the time you had had tea and been shown round the garden and told how wonderful it had looked a month ago and come back to the house and glanced through the photograph album, it was getting on for the dinner hour. Useless, therefore, to wait for Prudence. Apart from anything else, there is a limit to the agony of suspense which you can inflict on Worcestershire Fanshawe-Chadwicks. You don't want to get the poor devils feeling like Mariana at the moated grange.
He performed complicated backing and filling manœuvres with the car. As he got its nose pointed down the drive, the idea struck him that Prudence might have confided in her cousin Veronica.
'Where's Vee?' he asked.
A quick tremor passed through Tipton Plimsoll. He had been expecting this. All that eyewash about wanting to see the squirt Prudence had not deceived him for an instant. The coldness of his manner became intensified.
'She went too. Why?'
'I just wanted a word with her.'
'What about?'
'Nothing important.'
'I could give her a message.'
'Oh, no, that's all right.'
There followed a silence, and it was unfortunate that during it Freddie should suddenly have recalled the powerful harangue which his aunt Hermione had delivered in the drawing-room after dinner on the night of his arrival. He saw now that he had come near to missing an opportunity of speaking the word in season.
In disembowelling her nephew on the occasion referred to, Lady Hermione Wedge had made it abundantly clear to him that the idea of a union between Tipton Plimsoll and her daughter was one that was very near her heart. And Freddie, considering the thing, had also been decidedly in favour of it. It would, he had perceived, fit in admirably with his plans if the man who owned the controlling interest in Tipton's Stores should marry a wife who could be relied on to use her influence to promote the interests of Donaldson's dog biscuits. And he knew that good old Vee, who had practically written the words and music of Auld Lang Syne, could be trusted to do her bit. Wondering how he could have been so remiss as not to have strained every nerve to push this good thing along earlier, he now addressed himself to repairing his negligence, beginning
by observing that Veronica, in his opinion, was a ripper and a corker and a topper and didn't Tipton agree with him?
To this, looking like Othello and speaking like a trapped wolf, Tipton replied: 'Yup.'
'Dashed attractive, what?'
'Yup.'
'Her profile. Lovely, don't you think?'
'Yup.'
'And her eyes. Super-colossal. And such a sweet girl, too. I mean as regards character and disposition and soul and all that sort of thing.'
A man trained over a considerable period of time to become lyrical about dog biscuits at the drop of the hat never finds any difficulty in reaching heights of eloquence on the subject of a beautiful girl. For some minutes Freddie continued to speak with an enthusiasm and choice of phrase which would have excited the envy of a court poet. There was deep feeling behind his every word, and it was not long before Tipton was writhing like an Ouled Nail stomach dancer. He had known, of course, that this human snake was that way about the girl he worshipped, but he had not suspected that the thing had gone so far.
'Well,' said Freddie, pausing at length, 'I must be getting along. I shall be back in a few days.'
'Oh?' said Tipton.
'Yes,' Freddie assured him. 'Not more than two or three at the outside.'
And having delivered these words of cheer, he trod on the self-starter and put the two-seater into first. It seemed to him, as he did so, that the gears were a bit noisy. But it was only Tipton Plimsoll grinding his teeth.
II
Better news awaited Freddie on his return to the Emsworth Arms. Bill Lister had come in from his walk and was up in his room, packing. Taking the stairs three at a time, he burst in without formality.
Although at the moment of his entry all that was visible of his friend was the seat of his trousers as he bent over a suitcase, Freddie, though not a particularly close observer, had no difficulty in discerning that he stood in the presence of a man into whose life tragedy has stalked. The face which now looked up into his was one which harmonized perfectly with the trouser seat. It was the face, as the trouser seat had been the trouser seat, of a tortured soul.