'What is it you wish to see me about?' he asked, with testy curtness.
'What do you think I want to see you about?' replied Monty shrilly. 'About that dashed manuscript of Gally's that you told me to pinch, of course,' he said with a bitter laugh, and Beach, having given a single shuddering start like a harpooned whale, sat rigid in his chair; his gooseberry eyes bulging; the beer frozen, as one might say, on his lips.
Nor was Lord Tilbury unmoved. No plotter likes to have his accomplices bellowing important secrets as if they were calling coals.
'Sh!’
' Oh, nobody can hear us.'
'Nevertheless, kindly do not shout. Where is the manuscript? Have you got it?' 'Of course I've not got it.'
Lord Tilbury was feeling dismally that he might have expected this. He saw now how foolish he had been to place so delicate a commission in the hands of a popinjay. Of all classes of the community, popinjays, when it comes to carrying out delicate commissions, are the most inept. Search History's pages from end to end, reflected Lord Tilbury, and you will not find one instance of a popinjay doing anything successfully except eat, sleep, and master the new dance steps.
'It's a bit thick ...' bellowed Monty.
'Sh!'
'It's a bit thick,' repeated Monty, sinking his voice to a conspiratorial growl. 'Raising hopes only to cast them to the ground is the way I look at it. What did you want to get me all worked up for by telling me the thing was in that desk?'
'It is not?' said Lord Tilbury, staggered.
'Not a trace of it.'
'You cannot have looked properly.'
'Looked properly!'
'Sh!'
'Of course I looked properly. I left no stone unturned. I explored every avenue.' 'But I saw Threepwood put it there.' 'Says you.'
'Don't say "says you". I tell you I saw him with my own eyes place the manuscript in the top right-hand drawer of the desk.' 'Well, he must have moved it. It's not there now.' 'Then it is somewhere else.' 'I shouldn't wonder. But where?' 'You could easily have found out.' 'Oh, yeah?'
'Don't say "Oh, yeah".'
'Well, what can I say, dash it? First you keep yowling "Shush" every time I open my mouth. Then you tell me not to say, "Says you". And now you beef at my remarking "Oh, yeah". I suppose what you'd really like,' said Monty, and it was plain to the listening ear that he was deeply moved, 'would be for me to buy a flannel dressing-gown and a spade and become a ruddy Trappist monk.'
This spirited outburst led to a certain amount of rather confused debate. Lord Tilbury said that he did not propose to have young popinjays taking that tone with him; while Monty, on his side, wished to be informed who Lord Tilbury was calling a popinjay. Lord Tilbury then said that Monty was a bungler, and Monty said, Well, dash it, Lord Tilbury had told him to be a burglar, and Lord Tilbury said he had not said 'burglar', he had said 'bungler', and Monty said, What did he mean, bungler, and Lord Tilbury explained that by the expression' bungler', he had intended to signify a wretched, feckless, blundering, incompetent, imbecile. He added that an infant of six could have found the manuscript, and Monty, in a striking passage, was making a firm offer to give any bloodhound in England a shilling if it could do better than he had done, when the argument stopped as abruptly as it had started. Childish voices had begun to prattle close at hand and it was evident that one of those picnic parties from the river was approaching.
'Cor!' said Lord Tilbury, rather in the manner of the moping owl in Gray's 'Elegy' under similar provocation.
One of the childish voices spoke.
'Pa, there's someone here.'
Another followed.
' Ma, there's someone here.'
The deeper note of a male adult made itself heard.
' Emily, there's someone here.'
And then the voice of a female adult.
'Oh dear. What a shame! There's someone here.'
The conspirators appeared to be men who could take a tactful hint when they heard one. There came to Beach's ears the sound of moving bodies. And presently, from the fact that the summer-house seemed to have become occupied by a troupe of performing elephants, he gathered that the occupation had been carried through according to plan.
He sat on for some minutes; then, hurrying to the inn, asked leave of the landlord to use his telephone in order to summon Robinson and his station taxi. His mind was made up. He would not know an easy moment until he was back in his pantry, on guard. The station taxi would run into money, for Robinson, like all monopolists, drove a hard bargain; but if it would get him to the Castle before Monty it would be half a crown well spent.
'Robinson's taxi's outside now, Mr Beach,' said the landlord, tickled by the coincidence. 'A gentleman phoned for it only two minutes ago. Going up to the Castle himself he is. Maybe he'd give you a lift. You can catch him if you run.'
Beach did not run. Even if his figure had permitted such a feat, his sense of his position would have forbidden it. But he walked quite rapidly, and was enabled to leave the front door just as Monty was bidding farewell to a short, stout man in whom he recognized the Lord Tilbury who had called at the Castle on the previous day to sec Mr Galahad. So it was he who had been egging young Mr Bodkin on to bungle!
For an instant, this discovery shocked the butler so much that he could hardly speak. That Baronets like Sir Gregory Parsloe should be employing minions to steal important papers had been a severe enough blow. That Peers should stoop to the same low conduct made the foundations of his world rock. Then came a restorative thought. This Lord Tilbury, he reminded himself, was no doubt a recent creation. One cannot expect too high a standard of ethics from the uncouth (hoi polloi) who crash into Birthday Honours lists.
He found speech.
'Oh, Mr Bodkin. Pardon me, sir.'
Monty turned.
'Why, hullo, Beach.'
'Would it be a liberty, sir, if I were to request permission to share this vehicle with you?'
'Rather not. Lots of room for all. What are you doing in these parts, Beach? Slaking the old thirst, eh? Drinking-bouts in the tap-room, yes?'
'I walked down from the Castle to purchase cigarettes at the tobacconist's, sir,' replied Beach with dignity. 'And as the afternoon heat proved somewhat trying .. .'
'I know, I know,' said Monty sympathetically. 'Well, leap in, my dear old stag at eve.'
At any other moment Beach would have been offended at such a mode of address and would have shown it in his manner. But just as he was about to draw himself up with a cold stare he chanced to catch sight of Lord Tilbury, who had retreated to the shadow of the inn wall.
On his marriage to the daughter of Donaldson's Dog-biscuits, of Long Island City, N.Y., and his subsequent departure for America, the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, Lord Emsworth's younger son, who had assembled in the days of his bachelorhood what was pretty generally recognized as the finest collection of mystery thrillers in Shropshire, had bequeathed his library to Beach; and the latter in his hours of leisure had been making something of a study of the literature of Crime of late.
Lord Tilbury, brooding there with folded arms, reminded him of The Man With The Twisted Eyebrows in The Casterbridge Horror.
Shuddering strongly, Beach climbed into the cab.
When two careworn men, one of whom has just discovered that the other has criminal tendencies, take a drive together on a baking afternoon, conversation does not run trippingly. Monty was thinking out plans and schemes; and Beach, in the intervals of recoiling with horror from this desperado, was wondering why the latter had called him a stag at eve. Silence, accordingly, soon fell upon the station taxi and lasted till it drew up at the front door of the castle. Here Monty alighted, and the taxi took Beach round to the back door. As he got down and handed Robinson his fare, the butler was conscious of an unwilling respect for the fiendish cunning of the criminal mind - which, having offered you a lift in a cab, gets out first and leaves you to pay for it.
He hastened to his pantry. Reason told him that
the manuscript must still be in the drawer where he had placed it, but he did not breathe easily until he had seen it with his own eyes. He took it out and, having done so, paused irresolutely. It was stuffy in the pantry and he longed to be in the open air, in that favourite seat of his near the laurel bush outside the back door. And yet he could not relax with any satisfaction there, separated from his precious charge.
There is always a way. A few moments later he perceived that all anxiety might be obviated if he took the manuscript with him. He did so. Then, reclining in his deck-chair, he lit one of the cigarettes which it had cost him such labour to procure, and gave himself up to thought.
His moonlike face was drawn and grave. The situation, he realized, was becoming too complex for comfort.
The views of butlers who have been given important papers to guard and find that there are persons on the premises who wish to steal them are always clear-cut and definite. Broadly speaking, a butler in such a position can bear up with a reasonable amount of fortitude against the menace of one gang of would-be thieves. He may not like it, but he can set his teeth and endure. Add a second gang, however, and the thing seems to pass beyond his control.
Beach's researches in the library bequeathed to him by the Hon. Freddie Threepwood had left him extremely sensitive on the subject of Gangs. In most of the volumes in that library Gangs played an important part, and he had come to fear and dislike them. And here in Blandings Castle, groping about and liable at any moment to focus their malign attention on himself, were two Gangs - the Parsloe and the Tilbury. It made a butler think a bit.
To divert his mind, he began to read the manuscript. Being of an inquisitive nature, he had always wanted to do so, and this seemed an admirable opportunity. Opening the pages at random, therefore, and finding himself in the middle of Chapter Six (' Nightclubs of the Nineties'), he plunged into a droll anecdote about the Bishop of Bangor when an undergraduate at Oxford, and despite his cares was soon chuckling softly, like some vast kettle coming to the boil.
It was at this moment that Percy Pilbeam, who had been smoking cigarettes in the stable yard, came sauntering round the corner.
The stable yard had been a favourite haunt of Percy Pilbeam's ever since his arrival at the Castle. A keen motor-cyclist, he liked talking to Voules, the chauffeur, about valves and plugs and things. And, in addition to this, he found the place soothing because it was out of the orbit of the sisters and nephews of his host. You did not meet Lady Constance Keeble there, you did not meet Lady Julia Fish there, and you did not meet Lady Julia Fish's son Ronald there; and for Percy Pilbeam that was sufficient to make any spot Paradise enow.
He was also attracted to the stable-yard because he found it a good place to think in.
He had been thinking a great deal these last two days. A self-respecting private investigator is always loath to admit that he is baffled, but baffled was just what Pilbeam had been ever since a second visit to the small library had informed him that the manuscript which he had been commissioned to remove was no longer in its desk. Like Monty, he felt at a loss.
It was all very well, he felt sourly, for that Keeble woman to say in her impatient, duchess-talking-to-a-worm way that it must be somewhere and that she was simply amazed that he had not found it. The point was that it might be anywhere. No doubt if he had a Scotland Yard search-warrant, a troupe of African witch-doctors and unlimited time at his disposal he could find it. But he hadn't.
A well-defined dislike of Lady Constance Keeble had been germinating in Percy Pilbeam since the first moment they had met. He was brooding upon that unpleasantly supercilious manner of hers as he turned the corner now. And he had just come to the conclusion, as he always came on these occasions, that what she needed was a thoroughly good ticking off, when he was suddenly jerked out of his daydreams by the sound of a huge, reverberating, explosive laugh; and looking up with a start, espied protruding over the top of a deck-chair a few feet before him an egg-shaped head which he recognized as that of Beach, the butler.
We left Beach, it will be remembered, chuckling softly. And for a few minutes soft chuckles had contented him. But in a book of the nature of the Hon. Galahad Threepwood's Reminiscences the student is sure sooner or later to come upon some high spot, some supreme expression of the writer's art which demands a more emphatic tribute. What Beach was reading now was the story of Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe and the prawns.
'ha . . . hor . . . hoo!' he roared.
Pilbeam stood spellbound. His had not been a wide experience of butlers, and he could not recall ever before having heard a butler laugh - let alone laugh in this extraordinary fashion, casting dignity to the winds and apparently without a thought for his high blood-pressure and the stability of his waistcoat buttons. As soon as the first numbing shock had passed away, an intense curiosity seized him. He drew near, marvelling. On tiptoe he stole behind the chair, agog to see what it could be that had caused this unprecedented outburst.
The next moment he found himself gazing upon the manuscript of the Hon. Galahad's Reminiscences.
He recognized it instantly. Ever since that attempt upon it which this same butler had foiled, its shape and aspect had been graven upon his memory. And even if that straggling handwriting had not been familiar to him, the two lines which he read before uttering an involuntary cry would have told him what it was that flickered before his eyes.
'Oof!' said Pilbeam unable to check himself.
Beach gave a convulsive start, turned, and, looking up, beheld within six inches of his eyes the face of the leading executive of the sinister Parsloe Gang.
'Oof!' he exclaimed in his turn, and the deck-chair, as if in sympathy, also made an oof-like sound. Then, cracking under the strain, it spread itself out upon the ground.
Even under the most favourable conditions, the situation would have been one of embarrassment. The peculiar circumstances rendered it cataclysmic. Pilbeam, who had never seen a butler take a toss out of a deck-chair before, stood robbed of speech; while Beach, his heart palpitating dangerously, sat equally silent. He was frozen with horror. That the enemy should have succeeded in tracking him down already seemed to him to argue a cunning that transcended the human.
Rising with the manuscript clutched to the small of his back, if his back could be said to have a small, he began to retreat slowly towards the house. Continuing to recoil, he bumped into stonework, and with an infinite relief found that he was within leaping distance of the back door. With a last, lingering look, of a nature which a sensitive snake would have resented, he shot in, leaving Pilbeam staring like one in a dream.
Almost exactly at the instant when he reached the haven of his pantry, Monty Bodkin, taking a thoughtful stroll on the terrace, suddenly remembered with a start of shame and remorse that he had left Beach to pay that cab fare.
One points at Monty Bodkin with a good deal of pride. Most young men in his position would either have dismissed the matter with a careless 'What of it ?' or possibly even the still more ignoble reflection that a bit of luck had put them half a crown up; or else would have made a mental note to slip the fellow the money at some vague future date. For in the matter of Debts the young man of today wavers between straight repudiation and a moratorium.
But in a lax age Monty Bodkin had his code. To him this obligation was a blot on the Bodkin escutcheon which had to be wiped off immediately.
And so it came about that Beach, panting from his recent clash with the Parsloe Gang and in his dazed condition not having heard the door open, became suddenly aware of emotional breathing in the vicinity of his left ear and discovered that the right-hand man of the Tilbury Gang had now invaded his fastness.
It was a moment which would have tried the morale of the hero of a Secret Service novel. It made Beach feel like a rabbit with not one stoat but a whole platoon of stoats on its track. He had been sitting, relaxed. He now rose like a rocket and, snatching up the manuscript in the old familiar manner, stood holding it to his heaving chest.
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Monty, who, like Pilbeam, had reacted strongly to the wholly unforeseen discovery of the precious object in the butler's possession, was the first to recover from the shock.
'What ho!' he said. 'Afraid I startled you, what ?'
Beach continued to pant.
'I came to give you the money for that cab.'
Beach, though reluctant to take even one hand off the manuscript, was not proof against half-crowns. Cautiously extending a palm, he accepted the coin, thrust it into his pocket, and restored his grasp to the papers almost in a single movement.
' Must have given you a jump. Sorry. Ought to have blown my horn.'
There was a pause.
'I see you've got that book of Mr Galahad's there,' said Monty, with a rather overdone carelessness.
To Beach it seemed more than rather overdone. He had been manoeuvring with the open door as his objective, and he now took a shuffling step in that direction.
'Pretty good, I should imagine? Now, there's a thing,' said Monty,' that I'd very much like to read.'
Beach had now reached the door, and the thought of having a clear way to safety behind him did something to restore his composure. That trapped feeling had left him, and in its stead had come a stern, righteous wrath. He stared at Monty, breathing heavily. A sort of glaze had come over his eyes, causing them to resemble two pools of cold gravy.