A gentleman to see me?’ asked Percy Pilbeam.
A baronet to see you, sir,’ corrected the office-boy. ‘Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, Matchingham Hall, Salop.’
‘Show him in immediately,’ said Pilbeam with enthusiasm.
He rose and pulled down the lapels of his coat. Things, he felt, were looking up. He remembered Sir Gregory Parsloe. One of his first cases. He had been able to recover for him some letters which had fallen into the wrong hands. He wondered, as he heard the footsteps outside, if his client had been indulging in correspondence again.
From the baronet’s sandbagged expression, as he entered, such might well have been the case. It is the fate of Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe to come into this chronicle puffing and looking purple. He puffed and looked purple now.
‘I have called to see you, Mr Pilbeam,’ he said, after the preliminary civilities had been exchanged and he had lowered his impressive bulk into a chair, ‘because I am in a position of serious difficulty.’
‘I am sorry to hear that, Sir Gregory.’
‘And because I remember with what discretion and resource you once acted on my behalf.’
Pilbeam glanced at the door. It was closed. He was now convinced that his visitor’s little trouble was the same as on the previous occasion, and he looked at the indefatigable man with frank astonishment.
Didn’t these old bucks, he was asking himself, ever stop writing compromising letters? You would have thought they would have got writer’s cramp.
‘If there is any way in which I can assist you, Sir Gregory . . . Perhaps you will tell me the facts from the beginning?’
‘The beginning?’ Sir Gregory pondered. ‘Well, let me put it this way. At one time, Mr Pilbeam, I was younger than I am to-day.’
‘Quite.’
‘Poorer.’
‘No doubt.’
‘And less respectable. And during that period of my life I unfortunately went about a good deal with a man named Threepwood.’
‘Galahad Threepwood?’
‘You know him?’ said Sir Gregory, surprised.
Pilbeam chuckled reminiscently.
‘I know his name. I wrote an article about him once, when I was editing a paper called Society Spice. Number One of the Thriftless Aristocrats series. The snappiest thing I ever did in my life. They tell me he called twice at the office with a horsewhip, wanting to see me.’
Sir Gregory exhibited concern.
You have met him, then?’
‘I have not. You are probably not familiar with the inner workings of a paper like Society Spice, Sir Gregory, but I may tell you that it is foreign to the editorial policy ever to meet visitors who call with horsewhips.’
‘Would he have heard your name?’
‘No. There was a very strict rule in the Spice office that the names of the editorial staff were not to be divulged.’
‘Ah!’ said Sir Gregory, relieved.
His relief gave place to indignation. There was an inconsistency about the Hon. Galahad’s behaviour which revolted him.
‘He cut up rough, did he, because you wrote things about him in your paper? And yet he doesn’t seem to mind writing things himself about other people, damn him. That’s quite another matter. A different thing altogether. Oh yes!’
‘Does he write? I didn’t know.’
‘He’s writing his Reminiscences at this very moment. He’s down at Blandings Castle, finishing them now. And the book’s going to be full of stories about me. That’s why I’ve come to see you. Dashed, infernal, damaging stories, which’ll ruin my reputation in the county. There’s one about some prawns . . .’
Words failed Sir Gregory. He sat puffing. Pilbeam nodded gravely. He understood the position now. As to what his client expected him to do about it, however, he remained hazy.
‘But if these stories you speak of are libellous . . .’
‘What has that got to do with it? They’re true.’
‘The greater the truth, the greater the . . .’
‘Oh, I know all about that,’ interrupted Sir Gregory impatiently. And a lot of help it’s going to be to me. A jury could give me the heaviest damages on record and it wouldn’t do me a bit of good. What about my reputation in the county? What about knowing that every damned fool I met was laughing at me behind my back? What about the Unionist Committee? I may tell you, Mr Pilbeam, apart from any other consideration, that I am on the point of being accepted by our local Unionist Committee as their candidate at the next election. And if that old pest’s book is published, they will drop me like a hot coal. Now do you understand?’
Pilbeam picked up a pen, and with it scratched his chin thoughtfully. He liked to take an optimistic view with regard to his clients’ affairs, but he could not conceal from himself that Sir Gregory appeared to be out of luck.
‘He is determined to publish this book?’
‘It’s the only object he’s got in life, the miserable old fossil.’
‘And he is resolved to include the stories?’
‘He called on me this morning expressly to tell me so. And I caught the next train to London to put the matter in your hands.’
Pilbeam scratched his left cheekbone.
‘H’m!’ he said. ‘Well, in the circumstances, I really don’t see what is to be done except . . .’
‘. . . get hold of the manuscript and destroy it, you were about to say? Exactly. That’s precisely what I’ve come to ask you to do for me.’
Pilbeam opened his mouth, startled. He had not been about to say anything of the kind. What he had been intending to remarkwas that, the situation being as described, there appeared no course to pursue but to fold the hands, set the teeth, and await the inevitable disaster like a man and a Briton. He gazed blankly at this lawless Bart. Baronets are proverbially bad, but surely, felt Percy Pilbeam, there was no excuse for them to be as bad as all that.
‘Steal the manuscript?’
‘Only possible way.’
‘But that’s rather a tall order, isn’t it, Sir Gregory?’
‘Not,’ replied the baronet ingratiatingly, ‘for a clever young fellow like you.’
The flattery left Pilbeam cold. His distant, unenthusiastic manner underwent no change. However clever a man is, he was thinking, he cannot very well abstract the manuscript of a book of Reminiscences from a house unless he is first able to enter that house.
‘How could I get into the place?’
‘I should have thought you would have found a dozen ways.’
‘Not even one,’ Pilbeam assured him.
‘Look how you recovered those letters of mine.’
‘That was easy.’
‘You told them you had come to inspect the gas meter.’
‘I could scarcely go to Blandings Castle and say I had come to inspect the gas meter and hope to be invited to make a long visit on the strength of it. You do not appear to realize, Sir Gregory, that the undertaking you suggest would not be a matter of a few minutes. I might have to remain in the house for quite a considerable time.’
Sir Gregory found his companion’s attitude damping. He was a man who, since his accession to the baronetcy and its accompanying wealth, had grown accustomed to seeing people jump smartly to it when he issued instructions. He became peevish.
‘Why couldn’t you go there as a butler or something?’
Percy Pilbeam’s only reply to this was a tolerant smile. He raised the pen and scratched his head with it.
‘Scarcely feasible,’ he said. And again that rather pitying smile flitted across his face.
The sight of it brought Sir Gregory to the boil. He felt an irresistible desire to say something to wipe it away. It reminded him of the smiles he had seen on the faces of bookmakers in his younger days when he had suggested backing horses with them on credit and in a spirit of mutual trust.
‘Well, have it your own way,’ he snapped. ‘But it may interest you to know that to get that manuscript into my possession I am willing to pay a thous
and pounds.’
It did, as he had foreseen, interest Pilbeam extremely. So much so that in his emotion he jerked the pen wildly, inflicting a nasty scalp wound.
‘A thuth?’he stammered.
Sir Gregory, a prudent man in money matters, perceived that he had allowed his sense of the dramatic to carry him away.
‘Well, five hundred,’ he said, rather quickly. ‘And five hundred pounds is a lot of money, Mr Pilbeam.’
The point was one which he had no need to stress. Percy Pilbeam had grasped it without assistance, and his face grew wan with thought. The day might come when the proprietor of the Argus Enquiry Agency would remain unmoved by the prospect of adding five hundred pounds to his bank balance, but it had not come yet.
A cheque for five hundred the moment that old weasel’s manuscript is in my hands,’ said Sir Gregory, insinuatingly.
Nature had so arranged it that in no circumstances could Percy Pilbeam’s face ever become really beautiful; but at this moment there stole into it an expression which did do something to relieve, to a certain extent, its normal unpleasantness. It was an expression of rapture, of joy, of almost beatific happiness – the look, in short, of a man who sees his way clear to laying his hands on five hundred pounds.
There is about the mention of any substantial sum of money something that seems to exercise a quickening effect on the human intelligence. A moment before, Pilbeam’s mind had been an inert mass. Now, abruptly, it began to function like a dynamo.
Get into Blandings Castle? Why, of course he could get into Blandings Castle. And not sneak in, either, with a trouser-seat itching in apprehension of the kick that should send him out again, but bowl proudly up to the front door in his two-seater and hand his suit-case to the butler and be welcomed as the honoured guest. Until now he had forgotten, for he had deliberately set himself to forget, the outrageous suggestion of that young idiot whose name escaped him that he should come to Blandings and hunt about for lost pigs. It had wounded his self-respect so deeply at the time that he had driven it from his thoughts. When he found himself thinking about Hugo, he had immediately pulled himself together and started thinking about something else. Now it all came back to him. And Hugo’s parting words, he recalled, had been that if ever he changed his mind the commission would still be open.
‘I will take this case, Sir Gregory’ he said.
‘Woof?’
‘You may rely on my being at Blandings Castle by to-morrow evening at the latest. I have thought of a way of getting there.’
He rose from his desk, and paced the room with knitted brows. That agile brain had begun to work under its own steam. He paused once to look in a distrait manner out of the window; and when Sir Gregory cleared his throat to speak, jerked an impatient shoulder at him. He could not have baronets, even with hyphens in their names, interrupting him at a moment like this.
‘Sir Gregory,’ he said at length. ‘The great thing in matters like this is to be prepared with a plan. I have a plan.’
‘Woof!’ said Sir Gregory.
This time he meant that he had thought all along that his companion would get one after pacing like that.
‘When you arrive home, I want you to invite Mr Galahad Threepwood to dinner to-morrow night.’
The baronet shook like a jelly. Wrath and amazement fought within him. Ask the man to dinner? After what had occurred?
As many others of the Blandings Castle party as you think fit, of course, but Mr Threepwood without fail. Once he is out of the house, my path will be clear.’
Wrath and amazement died away. The baronet had grasped the idea. The beauty and simplicity of the stratagem stirred his admiration. But was it not, he felt, a simpler matter to issue such an invitation than to get it accepted? A vivid picture rose before his eyes of the Hon. Galahad as he had last seen him.
Then there came to him the blessed, healing thought of Lady Constance Keeble. He would send the invitation to her and – yes, dash it! – he would tell her the full facts, put his cards on the table and trust to her sympathy and proper feeling to enlist her in the cause. He had been long aware that her attitude towards the Reminiscences resembled his own. He could rely on her to help him. He could also rely on her somehow – by what strange feminine modes of coercion he, being a bachelor, could only guess at – to deliver the Hon. Galahad Threepwood at Matchingham Hall in time for dinner. Women, he knew, had this strange power over their near relations.
‘Splendid!’ he said. ‘Excellent! Capital. Woof! I’ll see it’s done.’
‘Then you can leave the rest to me.’
‘You think, if I can get him out of the house, you will be able to secure the manuscript?’
‘Certainly.’
Sir Gregory rose and extended a trembling hand.
‘Mr Pilbeam,’ he said, with deep feeling, ‘coming to see you was the wisest thing I ever did in my life.’
‘Quite,’ said Percy Pilbeam.
8 THE STORM CLOUDS HOVER OVER BLANDINGS
Having re-read the half-dozen pages which he had written since luncheon, the Hon. Galahad Threepwood attached them with a brass paper-fastener to the main body of his monumental work and placed the manuscript in its drawer – lovingly, like a young mother putting her first-born to bed. The day’s work was done. Rising from the desk, he yawned and stretched himself.
He was ink-stained but cheerful. Happiness, as solid thinkers have often pointed out, comes from giving pleasure to others; and the little anecdote which he had just committed to paper would, he knew, give great pleasure to a considerable number of his fellow-men. All over England they would be rolling out of their seats when they read it. True, their enjoyment might possibly not be shared to its fullest extent by Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, of Matchingham Hall, for what the Hon. Galahad had just written was the story of the prawns: but the first lesson an author has to learn is that he cannot please everybody.
He left the small library which he had commandeered as a private study and, descending the broad staircase, observed Beach in the hall below. The butler was standing mountainously beside the tea-table, staring in a sort of trance at a plateful of anchovy sandwiches: and it struck the Hon. Galahad, not for the first time in the last few days, that he appeared to have something on his mind. A strained, haunted look he seemed to have, as if he had done a murder and was afraid somebody was going to find the body. A more practised physiognomist would have been able to interpret that look. It was the one that butlers always wear when they have allowed themselves to be persuaded against their better judgement into becoming accessories before the fact in the theft of their employers’ pigs.
‘Beach,’ he said, speaking over the banisters, for he had just remembered there was a question he wanted to ask the man about the somewhat eccentric Major-General Magnus in whose employment he had once been.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ he added with some irritation. For the butler, jerked from his reverie, had jumped a couple of inches and shaken all over in a manner that was most trying to watch. A butler, felt the Hon. Galahad, is a butler, and a startled fawn is a startled fawn. He disliked the blend of the two in a single body.
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’
‘Why on earth do you spring like that when anyone speaks to you? I’ve noticed it before. He leaps,’ he said complainingly to his niece Millicent, who now came down the stairs with slow, listless steps. ‘When addressed, he quivers like a harpooned whale.’
‘Oh?’ said Millicent dully. She had dropped into a chair and picked up a book. She looked like something that might have occurred to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.
‘I am extremely sorry, Mr Galahad.’
‘No use being sorry. Thing is not to do it. If you are practising the Shimmy for the Servants’ Ball, be advised by an old friend and give it up. You haven’t the build.’
‘I think I may have caught a chill, sir.’
‘Take a stiff whisky toddy. Put you right in no time. What’s the car doing
out there?’
‘Her ladyship ordered it, sir. I understand that she and Mr Baxter are going to Market Blandings to meet the train arriving at four-forty.’
‘Somebody expected?’
‘The American young lady, sir. Miss Schoonmaker.’
‘Of course, yes. I remember. She arrives to-day, does she?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The Hon. Galahad mused.
‘Schoonmaker. I used to know old Johnny Schoonmaker well. A great fellow. Mixed the finest mint-juleps in America. Have you ever tasted a mint-julep, Beach?’
‘Not to my recollection, sir.’
‘Oh, you’d remember all right if you had. Insidious things. They creep up to you like a baby sister and slide their little hands into yours and the next thing you know the Judge is telling you to pay the clerk of the court fifty dollars. Seen Lord Emsworth anywhere?’
‘His lordship is at the telephone, sir.’
‘Don’t do it, I tell you!’ said the Hon. Galahad petulantly. For once again the butler had been affected by what appeared to be a kind of palsy.
‘I beg your pardon, Mr Galahad. It was something I was suddenly reminded of. There was a gentleman just after luncheon who desired to communicate with you on the telephone. I understood him to say that he was speaking from Oxford, being on his way from London to Blackpool in his automobile. Knowing that you were occupied with your literary work, I refrained from disturbing you. And till I mentioned the word “telephone”, the matter slipped my mind.’
‘Who was he?’
‘I did not get the gentleman’s name, sir. The wire was faulty. But he desired me to inform you that his business had to do with a dramatic entertainment.’
‘A play?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Beach, plainly impressed by this happy way of putting it. ‘I took the liberty of advising him that you might be able to see him later in the afternoon. He said that he would call after tea.’
The butler passed from the hall with heavy, haunted steps, and the Hon. Galahad turned to his niece.