Vanessa flung her arms out in a despairing gesture. Wilbur had always been a story-teller who got his stories muddled up, but with his present conte he was excelling himself.
'I don't get it,' she said. 'I just don't get it. Maybe you'll make it clearer as you proceed, so go on from when you bought the picture. In words of one syllable, if you can manage it.'
Wilbur fortified himself with gin and tonic. From now on every word he uttered was going to be a knife in his bosom.
'I didn't buy it. That's the whole point. It was past one o'clock, and like a sap I thought I might as well have lunch first, so I went to a club where I've a guest card and was having a drink at the bar before going into the dining-room, when this duke came along and sat down next to me and started telling me what was wrong with the Government. We hit it off pretty well and I had some more drinks, and before I knew what was happening I was telling him about Genevieve and this picture in the art gallery.'
'And while you were having your lunch he popped around the corner and bought the picture, and now he's got you here to sell it to you at a large profit.'
Amazement held Wilbur speechless for a long moment. He stared blankly at the clairvoyant girl.
'How did you guess?' he gasped.
'It wasn't difficult, knowing the Duke. It must be the picture that's in the castle portrait gallery now. And I'll bet he didn't buy it from any love of art. He's in this for what he can get.'
With another of his sombre sighs Wilbur endorsed this theory.
'And he's invited me here so that I can keep on seeing the thing. He knows I won't be able to stop myself buying it, no matter what he asks. And that,' said Wilbur moodily, 'will be about double what he paid for it. I'm in a spot.'
'Then say "Out, damned spot."'
A long train journey and several gin and tonics had left Wilbur's brain on the sluggish side. There was, he presumed, some significance in her words, but what it was eluded him. Pure baloney, he would have said if asked to criticize them.
'How do you mean?'
'You say you're in a spot. Why are you in a spot? Ask me, you're sitting pretty. You're here, the picture's here, and all you've got to do is swipe it.'
Wilbur's eyes widened. He uttered a low bronchial sound like the croak of a bull frog. It is never easy for a man of slow mind to assimilate a novel idea.
'Swipe it?' he said. 'Do you mean swipe it?'
'Sure. Why not? He as good as swiped it from you. You can find out from the art gallery what he paid for it and reimburse him, if that's the word.'
A gleam came into Wilbur's eyes, but it was only momentary. He was able to recognize the suggestion as a good one, but he knew that he was not the man to carry it out.
'I couldn't,' he said with something of the emphasis which Lord Emsworth had employed while saying the same thing a little earlier in the afternoon, and Vanessa reacted as she had done on that occasion.
'Then I will,' she said, and Wilbur, like Lord Emsworth, stared for a moment unbelievingly. In the days of their brief engagement he had come to know Vanessa as a girl of unconventional trend of thought, but she had never given him a surprise of this magnitude.
'You really think you could do it?'
'Of course I can do it. It only wants thinking over. As a matter of fact, I've got a glimmering of an idea already. I'm only hesitating because it means bringing Chesney into it.'
'Who's Chesney?'
'Man who's staying at the castle. I'm pretty sure he's a crook, but I'll have to be certain before I start anything. You don't want to take chances with a thing of this kind.'
'You bet not.'
'I'll be able to tell when I've studied him a bit longer. I hope he'll turn out to be what I think he is, for if there's one thing that sticks out of this situation like a sore thumb, it is that His Grace the Duke must not be allowed to pull quick ones on the young and innocent and get away with it. And now,' said Vanessa, 'let's dig that chauffeur out of the bar and be getting along to the castle.'
CHAPTER SIX
Night had fallen when John got back to London. He found Paddington still its refined and unruffled self, and his forlorn aspect struck as discordant a note there as it had done at the Emsworth Arms. Paddington porters like to see smiling faces about them. They may feel pity for young men with drawn brows and haggard eyes, but they prefer not to have to associate with them, and this applies equally to guards, engine drivers and the staff of the refreshment room. The whole personnel of the station felt a sense of relief when he had removed himself in a taxi and was on his way to Halsey Court in the W.I. postal division, his London address.
His interview with Gally had deepened the despondency with which he had set out on his journey to Shropshire. He had been so certain that he would have received an invitation to Blandings Castle, that essential preliminary to a reconciliation with the girl whose gentle heart he had bruised with all those 'Would it be fair to say's' and 'I suggest's' when battling under the banner of G. G. Clutterbuck. Once at the castle he would have been in a position to start pleading, and by pleading he meant really pleading—omitting no word or act that would lead to a peaceful settlement. Let him once get Linda to the negotiating table, he had told himself, let her once hear the tremolo in his voice and see the melting look in his eyes, and all would have been well.
Gally's refusal to co-operate had come as a stunning blow, dislocating his whole plan of campaign. Nor had Gally's parting words done anything to raise his spirits. He had spoken of playing on Linda as on a stringed instrument with the confidence of a man who had been playing on girls as on stringed instruments since early boyhood, but there was little solace to be drawn from that. A third party can never accomplish anything solid on these occasions. Delicate negotiations between two sundered hearts cannot be conducted through an agent; one needs the personal touch.
Halsey Court, when he reached it, set the seal on his depression. It was a gloomy cul-de-sac full of prowling cats and fluttering newspapers, almost its only merit being that living there was cheap. Halsey Chambers, where he had had a flat for the last two years, was a ramshackle building occupied for the most part by young men trying to get along— journalists like Jerry Shoesmith, at one time editor of that seedy weekly paper Society Spice, and writers of novels of suspense like Jeff Miller, the Rugger international. John had inherited the latter's apartment when Jeff had married and gone to live in New York, and with it Ma Balsam, the stout motherly soul who had looked after him. She emerged from the kitchen as he opened the front door, and he greeted her with a 'Hullo, Ma' which he hoped did not sound too much like a death rattle.
'Good evening, sir,' she said. 'So you're back. Did you have a nice time in the country?'
John tightened his lips and held his breath and was thus enabled to prevent the escape of the hollow laugh which had tried to get out in response to this query. He had no wish to reveal to this good woman that she was conversing with a tortured soul, for let her find that this was the case and he would be overwhelmed by a tidal wave of sympathy with which at the moment he was incapable of coping. Ma Balsam when in sympathetic vein could be stupefying.
'Very nice,' he said, having counted ten.
'Where was it you went?'
'Shropshire.'
'That's a long way.'
'Yes.'
'A good thing the weather kept up.'
'Yes.'
'So nasty if it comes on to rain when you're having a pleasure trip in the country.'
'Yes.'
'Well,' said Ma Balsam, seeming to feel that what might be called the pourparlers could now be considered completed, 'it's a pity you weren't here, because that friend of yours, that Mr. Ferguson, was trying to get you on the telephone all day.'
'I don't know any Ferguson.'
'Might have been Bostock. He's been to dinner here often. Artistic-looking. High voice. Tortoiseshell-rimmed specs.'
'You don't mean Joe Bender?'
'That's the name. He's an artist or someth
ing.'
'He runs a picture gallery in Bond Street.'
'Well, he can't have been running it much today, because he was on the buzzer all the time, asking for you. Very impatient he was. Kept saying "For G's sake isn't he back yet?", and I had to speak to him for using the expression "Oh, aitch!" when I told him you wasn't. Last time he phoned, which wasn't more than twenty minutes ago, he told me to get him the minute you showed up. Like me to do it now?'
John weighed the question. His impulse was to answer it in the negative. He was fond of Joe Bender and in normal circumstances always enjoyed his company, but a man reeling from a blow of the kind he had so recently received shrinks from the society of even the closest of friends. Harrowing though his thoughts were, tonight he wanted to be alone with them.
Then his natural goodness of heart prevailed. Joe, he reflected, would not have been telephoning so urgently unless he were in some sort of trouble, and this being so he would have to do the decent thing and let him come and cry on his shoulder.
'Yes, do, Ma,' he said. 'I'm going to have a shower. If he comes before I'm dressed, tell him to wait.'
When John reappeared, a good deal restored by his bath, Joe Bender had arrived and was in conversation with Ma Balsam, though conversation is not perhaps the right word for what had been a monologue on her part, a series of grunts on his. Like a good hostess, she drew John into their little circle.
'I've been telling Mister Who-is-it he doesn't look well,' she said. 'Noticed it the minute he came in.'
Her eye had not deceived her. Joe Bender was looking terrible. A man, to use an old-fashioned phrase, of some twenty-eight summers, he gave the impression at the moment of having experienced at least that number of very hard winters. He was even more haggard than John, so much so that the latter, forgetting his own troubles, uttered a cry of concern.
'Good heavens, Joe! What's the matter?'
'Just what I was wondering,' said Ma Balsam. 'If you ask me, he's coming down with something. He's got the same pasty look Balsam had before he was stricken with whatever it was and passed beyond the veil. Lost the use of his legs to begin with,' she said as Joe Bender collapsed into a chair, 'and it wasn't long after that that he came out in spots. We ought to send for a doctor, Mister Who-is-it.'
'I don't want a doctor.'
'Then I'll go and heat you up a nice glass of hot milk,' said Ma Balsam. She belonged to the school of thought which holds that a nice glass of hot milk, while not baffling the death angel altogether, can at least postpone the inevitable.
As the kitchen door closed behind her, Joe Bender heaved a sigh of relief.
'I thought that woman would never go. Tell her I don't want any damned milk.'
'Have a whisky and soda.'
'Yes, I'll do that. In fact, I shall need several.'
John went to the kitchen and came back successful, though not without argument, in having countermanded the Ma Balsam specific. 'He's liable to expire all over the floor,' she warned, 'but have it your own way.'
'Now then,' he said. 'What's all this about?'
It is possible that had this meeting taken place earlier, Joe Bender would have been in a frame of mind to break gently the news he had come to impart, for he was a man of sensibility who if compelled to give people shocks liked to do his best to soften them. But a whole long day of ever-growing agitation had sapped his morale. For an eternity, it seemed to him, he had kept pent in what Shakespeare would have called his stuffed bosom a secret calculated to stagger humanity or at least that portion of humanity with the interests of the Bender gallery at heart, and it came out with the abruptness of a cork leaving a champagne bottle.
'That picture, John! It's a fake!'
It is also possible that if John had been less preoccupied with his own tragedy, he would have grasped the import of these words more readily. As it was, he merely stared.
'Picture? What picture?'
Joe Bender, too, stared. The eyes behind their tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles widened to their fullest capacity.
'What picture?' he echoed. He found it incredible that John of all people should find it necessary to ask such a question. There was only one picture in the world. 'The Robichaux. The one we sold to the Duke. Don't you understand, dammit? It's a fake. It's a forgery.'
He had no need to explain the situation further. John had grasped it now, and it was as if Ma Balsam, not that she was capable of such a thing, had crept up behind him and poured a brimming beaker of ice water down his back. He would not have thought such a thing possible, but he actually stopped thinking of Linda Gilpin. It was an appreciable time before he found speech, and when he did it was only to ask a fatuous question.
'Are you sure?'
'Of course I'm sure. The real one had been vetted by Mortimer Bayliss, who's about the best art critic in the world. He said it was genuine, and when he says a picture's genuine, that settles it.'
John was still far from understanding. He was clear as to there being in circulation not one reclining nude from the brush of the late Claude Robichaux, but two reclining nudes. Beyond that he found himself in a fog, and he fell insensibly into his professional manner when cross-examining a witness.
'Explain it from the beginning,' he said, only just refraining from a 'Then will you kindly tell the jury'. 'Where did the one you sold the Duke come from?'
'I bought it in Paris, from a couple of Rumanians who have a small place near the Madeleine. I might have known,' said Joe Bender bitterly. 'I ought to have asked myself "Bender, if you were a forgery, where would you go?", and the answer would have been "To a Rumanian art gallery".'
'And this other one, the genuine one?'
'My father had it before I took over the business. That's what hurts so. It had been there all the time. I suppose Father had been holding on to it, waiting for a rise in the market.'
'Then why—?'
'Because it had been sent to be cleaned. That's why I knew nothing about it. It came back this morning. What on earth are we going to do, John?'
'Explain to the Duke and give him the genuine one, I suppose.'
'And have him spread the story everywhere that you can't rely on anything you buy at the Bender Gallery because every second thing they sell you is bound to be a forgery. We should be ruined in a month, if not sooner. There's nothing so vulnerable as a picture gallery. It lives on its reputation. That's the last thing we must do. Fatal, absolutely fatal.'
'But we can't take his money under false pretences.'
'Of course not.'
'Then what?'
'We'll have to buy it back from him, probably for about double what he paid us.'
'That's not a pleasant thought.'
'I don't like it myself.'
'And how do we explain our sudden switch from seller to buyer?'
'I don't know.'
'He's bound to suspect a trap and put the price up even higher than you said. I've been hearing a lot about the Duke of Dunstable from my godfather, who has known him for years, and one of the things I heard was that he always likes to get all the money that's coming to him. We shan't have a penny left after he's done with us. What we ought to do is smuggle the forgery away and put the real picture in its place.'
'Yes?'
'Then everybody would be happy.'
'So they would. Smuggle the forgery away and put the real picture in its place. Mind if I ask you something?'
'Go ahead.'
'How?'
John agreed that this was a good question, and there was a silence of some duration. Joe Bender helped himself to another whisky.
'Yes,' he said, 'that's what we must do, smuggle the forgery away and put the real picture in its place. And we don't even know where it is.'
'The Duke's got it.'
'And where's the Duke?'
'At Blandings Castle.'
'I hope he's having a wonderful time.'
'He's bound to have the picture with him.'
'And nothing simpler than
to grab it. All we need is an invitation to Blandings Castle.'
'My God!' cried John, so loudly that his voice penetrated to Ma Balsamin the kitchen, causing her to shake her head sadly. She felt that association with that Mister Who-is-it was corrupting her employer.
Joe Bender was endeavouring to dry his trousers, on to which the major portion of his whisky had fallen. That clarion cry had startled him.
'Gally!' John shouted, and Ma Balsam shook her head again. The expletive was new to her, but it sounded worse than G or Aitch. 'Gally's at Blandings, too.'
'He is?' said Joe Bender. He had heard tales of Gally from John, and the first time a faint light of hope flickered behind his tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles. 'You mean—?'
'We can place the whole conduct of the thing in his hands with the utmost confidence. It's the sort of job that's right up his street. I'll go to Market Blandings first thing tomorrow and give him full particulars.'
2
It was not, however, till the following afternoon that John was at liberty to leave for Market Blandings. He had forgotten that he had been briefed to appear in court in the morning on behalf of Onapoulos and Onapoulos in their suit against the Lincolnshire and Eastern Counties Glass Bottling Company, and the sunlight was blotted still further from his life, when he did so appear, by the fact that he lost his case, was rebuked by the judge and harshly spoken to by both Onapouloses, who held the view that it was only the incompetence of their advocate that had prevented them winning by a wide margin. When he caught the 2.33 train at Paddington, everybody there winced at the sight of his haggard face. They thought he looked even worse than when they had seen him last.
The parting with Ma Balsam had done nothing to induce equanimity. When a motherly woman of strong inquisitive trend sees a young man, to whom she has attached herself as a guide, philosopher and friend, making preparations for a journey the day after he has returned from one, she is naturally curious. And when the Ma Balsams of this world are curious, they do not hesitate to ask questions. The following dialogue took place as John packed his suitcase.