‘But . . .’
‘No! Act precipitately and we are undone. Don’t forget that it is not merely a question of getting your uncle’s consent to our union. We’ve got to break it to him that you aren’t going to marry Ronnie. And the family have always been pretty keen on your marrying Ronnie. To my mind, another forty-eight hours at the very least is essential.’
‘Perhaps you’re right.’
‘I know I’m right.’
‘Then we’ll simply leave the Empress here?’
‘No,’ said Hugo decidedly. ‘This place doesn’t strike me as safe. If we found her here, anybody might. We require a new safe-deposit, and I know the very one. It’s . . .’
Beach came out of the silence. His manner betrayed agitation.
‘If it is all the same to you, sir, I would much prefer not to hear it.’
‘Eh?’
‘It would be a great relief to me, sir, to be able to expunge the entire matter from my mind. I have been under a considerable mental strain of late, sir, and I really don’t think I could bear any more of it. Besides, supposing I were questioned, sir. It may be my imagination, but I have rather fancied from the way he has looked at me occasionally that Mr Baxter harbours suspicions.’
‘Baxter always harbours suspicions about something,’ said Millicent.
‘Yes, miss. But in this case they are well-grounded, and if it is all the same to you and Mr Carmody, I would greatly prefer that he was not in a position to go on harbouring them.’
‘All right, Beach,’ said Hugo. ‘After what you have done for us, your lightest wish is law. You can be out of this, if you want to. Though I was going to suggest that, if you cared to go on feeding the animal . . .’
‘No, sir . . . really . . . if you please . . .’
‘Right ho, then. Come along, Millicent. We must be shifting.’
Are you going to take her away now?’
‘This very moment. I pass this handkerchief through the handy ring which you observe in the nose and . . . Ho! Allez-oop! Good-bye, Beach. It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done – I think.’
‘Good-bye, Beach,’ said Millicent. ‘I can’t tell you how grateful we are.’
‘I am glad to have given satisfaction, miss. I wish you every success and happiness, sir.’
Left alone, the butler drew in his breath till he swelled like a balloon, then poured it out again in a long, sighing puff. He picked up the lantern and left the cottage. His walk was the walk of a butler from whose shoulders a great weight has rolled.
V
It is a fact not generally known, for a nice sense of the dignity of his position restrained him from exercising it, that Beach possessed a rather attractive singing-voice. It was a mellow baritone, in timbre not unlike that which might have proceeded from a cask of very old, dry sherry, had it had vocal cords; and we cannot advance a more striking proof of the lightness of heart which had now come upon him than by mentioning that, as he walked home through the wood, he broke his rigid rule and definitely warbled.
‘There’s a light in thy bow-er.’
sang Beach,
‘A light in thy BOW-er . . .’
He felt more like a gay young second footman than a butler of years’ standing. He listened to the birds with an uplifted heart. Upon the rabbits that sported about his path he bestowed a series of indulgent smiles. The shadow that had darkened his life had passed away. His conscience was at rest.
So completely was this so that when, on reaching the house, he was informed by Footman James that Lord Emsworth had been inquiring for him and desired his immediate presence in the library, he did not even tremble. A brief hour ago, and what menace this announcement would have seemed to him to hold. But now it left him calm. It was with some little difficulty that, as he mounted the stairs, he kept himself from resuming his song.
‘Er – Beach.’
‘Your lordship?’
The butler now became aware that his employer was not alone. Dripping in an unpleasant manner on the carpet, for he seemed somehow to have got himself extremely wet, stood the Efficient Baxter. Beach regarded him with a placid eye. What was Baxter to him or he to Baxter now?
‘Your lordship?’ he said again, for Lord Emsworth appeared to be experiencing some difficulty in continuing the conversation.
‘Eh? What? What? Oh, yes.’
The ninth Earl braced himself with a visible effort.
‘Er – Beach.’
‘Your lordship?’
‘I-er-I sent for you, Beach . . .’
‘Yes, your lordship?’
At this moment Lord Emsworth’s eye fell on a volume on the desk dealing with Diseases in Pigs. He seemed to draw strength from it.
‘Beach,’ he said, in quite a crisp, masterful voice, ‘I sent for you because Mr Baxter has made a remarkable charge against you. Most extraordinary.’
‘I should be glad to be acquainted with the gravamen of the accusation, your lordship.’
‘The what?’ asked Lord Emsworth, starting.
‘If your lordship would be kind enough to inform me of the substance of Mr Baxter’s charge?’
‘Oh, the substance? Yes. You mean the substance? Precisely. Quite so. The substance. Yes, to be sure. Quite so. Quite so. Yes, Exactly. No doubt.’
It was plain to the butler that his employer had begun to dodder. Left to himself this human cuckoo-clock would go maundering on like this indefinitely. Respectfully, but with the necessary firmness, he called him to order.
‘What is it that Mr Baxter says, your lordship?’
‘Eh? Oh, tell him, Baxter. Yes, tell him, dash it.’
The Efficient Baxter moved a step closer and began to drip on another part of the carpet. His spectacles gleamed determinedly. Here was no stammering, embarrassed Peer of the Realm, but a man who knew his own mind and could speak it.
‘I followed you to the gamekeeper’s cottage in the West Wood just now, Beach.’
‘Sir?’
‘You heard what I said.’
‘Undoubtedly, sir. But I fancied I must be mistaken. I have not been to the spot you mention, sir.’
‘I saw you with my own eyes.’
‘I can only repeat my asseveration, sir,’ said the butler with a saintly meekness.
Lord Emsworth, who had taken another look at Diseases in Pigs, became brisk again.
‘He says he peeped through the window, dash it.’
Beach raised a respectful eyebrow. It was as if he had said that it was not his place to comment on the pastimes of the Castle’s guests, however childish. If Mr Baxter wished to go out into the woods in the rain and play solitary games of Peep-Bo, that, said the eyebrow, that was a matter that concerned Mr Baxter alone.
‘And you were in there, he says, feeding the Empress.’
Your lordship?’
‘And you were in there . . . Dash it, you heard.’
‘I beg your pardon, your lordship, but I really fail to comprehend.’
‘Well, if you want it in a nutshell, Mr Baxter says it was you who stole my pig.’
There were few things in the world that the butler considered worth raising both eyebrows at. This was one of the few. He stood for a moment, exhibiting them to Lord Emsworth; then turned to Baxter, so that he could see them, too. This done, he lowered them and permitted about three-eighths of a smile to play for a moment about his lips.
‘Might I speak frankly, your lordship?’
‘Dash it, man, we want you to speak frankly. That’s the whole idea. That’s why I sent for you. We want a full confession and the name of your accomplice and all that sort of thing.’
‘I hesitate only because what I should like to say may possibly give offence to Mr Baxter, your lordship, which would be the last thing I should desire.’
The prospect of offending the Efficient Baxter, which caused such concern to Beach, appeared to disturb his lordship not at all.
‘Get on. Say what you like.’
&
nbsp; ‘Well, then, your lordship, I think it possible that Mr Baxter, if he will pardon my saying so, may have been suffering from a hallucination.’
‘Tchah!’ said the Efficient Baxter.
‘You mean he’s potty?’ said Lord Emsworth, struck with the idea. In the excitement of his late secretary’s information, he had overlooked this simple explanation. Now there came surging back to him all the evidence that went to support such a theory. Those flower-pots . . . . That leap from the library window. He looked at Baxter keenly. There was a sort of wild gleam in his eyes. The old coot glitter.
‘Really, Lord Emsworth!’
‘Oh, I’m not saying you are, my dear fellow. Only . . .’
‘It is quite obvious to me,’ said Baxter stiffly, ‘that this man is lying. Wait!’ he continued, raising a hand. ‘Are you prepared to come with his lordship and me to the cottage now, at this very moment, and let his lordship see for himself?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Ha!’
‘I should first,’ said Beach, ‘wish to go downstairs and get my hat.’
‘Quite right,’ agreed Lord Emsworth cordially. ‘Very sensible. Might catch a nasty cold in the head. Certainly get your hat, Beach, and meet us at the front door.’
‘Very good, your lordship.’
A bystander, observing the little party that was gathered some five minutes later on the gravel outside the great door of Bland-ings Castle, would have noticed about it a touch of chill, a certain restraint. None of its three members seemed really in the mood for a ramble through the woods. Beach, though courtly, was not cordial. The face under his bowler hat was the face of a good man misjudged. Baxter was eyeing the sullen sky as though he suspected it of something. As for Lord Emsworth, he had just become conscious that he was about to accompany through dark and deserted ways one who, though on this afternoon’s evidence the trend of his tastes seemed to be towards suicide, might quite possibly become homicidal.
‘One moment,’ said Lord Emsworth.
He scuttled into the house again, and came out looking happier. He was carrying a stout walking-stick with an ivory knob on it.
13 COCKTAILS BEFORE DINNER
I
Blandings Castle basked in the afterglow of a golden summer evening. Only a memory now was the storm which, two hours since, had raged with such violence through its parks, pleasure grounds and messuages. It had passed, leaving behind it peace and bird-song and a sunset of pink and green and orange and opal and amethyst. The air was cool and sweet, and the earth sent up a healing fragrance. Little stars were peeping down from a rain-washed sky.
To Ronnie Fish, slumped in an armchair in his bedroom on the second floor, the improved weather conditions brought no spiritual uplift. He could see the sunset, but it left him cold. He could hear the thrushes calling in the shrubberies, but did not think much of them. It is, in short, in no sunny mood that we re-introduce Ronald Overbury Fish to the reader of this chronicle.
The meditations of a man who has recently proposed to and been accepted by a girl, some inches taller than himself, for whom he entertains no warmer sentiment than a casual feeling that, take her for all in all, she isn’t a bad sort of egg, must of necessity tend towards the sombre: and the surroundings in which Ronnie had spent the latter part of the afternoon had not been of a kind to encourage optimism. At the moment when the skies suddenly burst asunder and the world became a shower-bath, he had been walking along the path that skirted the wall of the kitchen-garden: and the only shelter that offered itself was a gloomy cave or dug-out that led to the heating apparatus of the hothouses. Into this he had dived like a homing rabbit, and here, sitting on a heap of bricks, he had remained for the space of fifty minutes with no company but one small green frog and his thoughts.
The place was a sort of Sargasso Sea into which had drifted all the flotsam and jetsam of the kitchen-garden which it adjoined. There was a wheelbarrow, lacking its wheel and lying drunkenly on its side. There were broken pots in great profusion. There was a heap of withered flowers, a punctured watering-can, a rake with large gaps in its front teeth, some potatoes unfit for human consumption and half a dead blackbird. The whole effect was extraordinarily like Hell, and Ronnie’s spirits, not high at the start, had sunk lower and lower.
Sobered by rain, wheelbarrows, watering-cans, rakes, potatoes, and dead blackbirds, not to mention the steady, supercilious eye of a frog which resembled that of a Bishop at the Athenaeum inspecting a shy new member, Ronnie had begun definitely to repent of the impulse which had led him to ask Millicent to be his wife. And now, in the cosier environment of his bedroom, he was regretting it more than ever.
Like most people who have made a defiant and dramatic gesture and then have leisure to reflect, he was oppressed by a feeling that he had gone considerably farther than was prudent. Samson, as he heard the pillars of the temple begin to crack, must have felt the same. Gestures are all very well while the intoxication lasts. The trouble is that it lasts such a very little while.
In asking Millicent to marry him, he had gone, he now definitely realized, too far. He had overdone it. It was not that he had any objection to Millicent as a wife. He had none whatever – provided she were somebody else’s wife. What was so unpleasant was the prospect of being married to her himself.
He groaned in spirit, and became aware that he was no longer alone. The door had opened, and his friend Hugo Carmody was in the room. He noted with a dull surprise that Hugo was in the conventional costume of the English gentleman about to dine. He had not supposed the hour so late.
‘Hullo,’ said Hugo. ‘Not dressed? The gong’s gone.’
It nowbecame clear to Ronnie that he simply was not equal to facing his infernal family at the dinner-table. He supposed that Millicent had spread the news of their engagement by this time, and that meant discussion, wearisome congratulations, embraces from his Aunt Constance, chaff of the vintage of 1895 from his Uncle Galahad – in short, fuss and gabble. And he was in no mood for fuss and gabble. Pot-luck with a tableful of Trappist monks he might just have endured, but not a hearty feed with the family.
‘I don’t want any dinner.’
‘No dinner?’
‘No.’
‘Ill or something?’
‘No.’
‘But you don’t want any dinner? I see. Rummy! However, your affair, of course. It begins to look as if I should have to don the nose-bag alone. Beach tells me that Baxter also will be absent from the trough. He’s upset about something, it seems, and has asked for a snort and sandwiches in the smoking-room. And as for the pustule Pilbeam,’ said Hugo grimly, ‘I propose to interview him at the earliest possible date. And after that he won’t want any dinner, either.’
‘Where are the rest of them?’
‘Didn’t you know?’ said Hugo, surprised. ‘They’re dining over at old Parsloe’s. Your aunt, Lord Emsworth, old Galahad, and Millicent.’ He coughed. A moment of some slight embarrassment impended. ‘I say, Ronnie, old man, while on the subject of Millicent.’
‘Well?’
You know that engagement of yours?’
‘What about it?’
‘It’s off.’
‘Off?’
‘Right off. A wash-out. She’s changed her mind.’
‘What!’
Yes. She’s going to marry me. I may tell you we have been engaged for weeks – one of those secret betrothals – but we had a row. Row now over. Complete reconciliation. So she asked me to break it to you gently that in the circs, she proposes to return you to store.’
A thrill of ecstasy shot through Ronnie. He felt as men on the scaffold feel when the messenger bounds in with the reprieve.
‘Well, that’s the first bit of good news I’ve had for a long time,’ he said.
You mean you didn’t want to marry Millicent?’
‘Of course I didn’t.’
‘Not so much of the “of course”, laddie,’ said Hugo, offended.
‘She’s an awfully
nice girl . . .’
An angel. Shropshire’s leading seraph.’
‘. . . but I’m not in love with her any more than she’s in love with me.’
‘In that case,’ said Hugo, with justifiable censure, ‘why propose to her? A goofy proceeding, it seems to me.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘Of course! I see what happened. You grabbed Millicent to score off Sue, and she grabbed you to score off me. And now, I suppose, you’ve fixed it up with Sue again. Very sound. Couldn’t have made a wiser move. She’s obviously the girl for you.’
Ronnie winced. The words had touched a nerve. He had been trying not to think of Sue, but without success. Her picture insisted on rising before him. Not being able to exclude her from his thoughts, he had tried to think of her bitterly.
‘I haven’t,’ he cried.
Extraordinary how difficult it was, even now, to think bitterly of Sue. Sue was Sue. That was the fundamental fact that hampered him. Try as he might to concentrate it on the tragedy of Mario’s restaurant, his mind insisted on slipping back to earlier scenes of sunshine and happiness.
‘You haven’t?’ said Hugo, damped.
That Ronnie could possibly be in ignorance of Sue’s arrival at the castle never occurred to him. Long ere this, he took it for granted, they must have met. And he assumed, from the equanimity with which his friend had received the news of the loss of Millicent, that Sue and he must have had just such another heart-to-heart talk as had taken place in the room above the gamekeeper’s cottage. The dour sullenness of Ronnie’s face made his kindly heart sink.
‘You mean you haven’t fixed things up?’
‘No.’
Ronnie writhed. Sue in his car. Sue up the river. Sue in his arms to the music of sweet saxophones. Sue laughing. Sue smiling. Sue in the springtime, with the little breezes ruffling her hair . . .
He forced his mind away from these weakening visions. Sue at Mario’s . . . That was better . . . Sue letting him down . . . . Sue hobnobbing with the blister Pilbeam . . . That was much better.
‘I think you’re being very hard on that poor little girl, Ronnie.’