‘I’ve been reading him up lately. Found a copy in the library. Schopenhauer says we are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses first one and then another for his prey. Sure you won’t come for a walk?’
‘No thanks, really. I think I’ll go in.’
‘Just as you like,’ said Millicent. ‘Liberty Hall.’
She moved off a few steps, then returned.
‘Sorry if I seem loopy,’ she said. ‘Something on my mind. Been giving it a spot of thought. The fact is, I’ve just got engaged to be married to my cousin Ronnie.’
The trees that stood out against the banking clouds seemed to swim before Sue’s eyes. An unseen hand had clutched her by the throat and was crushing the life out of her.
‘Ronnie!’
‘Yes,’ said Millicent, rather in the tone of voice which Schopenhauer would have used when announcing the discovery of a caterpillar in his salad. ‘We fixed it up just now.’
She wandered away, and Sue clung to the terrace wall. That at least was solid in a world that rocked and crashed.
‘I say!’
It was Hugo. She was looking at him through a mist, but there was never any mistaking Hugo Carmody.
‘I say! Did she tell you?’
Sue nodded.
‘She’s engaged.’
Sue nodded.
‘She’s going to marry Ronnie.’
Sue nodded.
‘Death, where is thy sting?’ said Hugo, and vanished in the direction taken by Millicent.
12 ACTIVITIES OF BEACH THE BUTLER
I
The firm and dignified note in which Rupert Baxter had expressed his considered opinion of the Earl of Emsworth had been written in the morning-room immediately upon the ex-secretary’s return to the house and delivered into Beach’s charge with hands still stained with garden-mould. Only when this urgent task had been performed did he start to go upstairs in quest of the wash and brush-up which he so greatly needed. He was mounting the stairs to his bedroom and had reached the first floor when a door opened and his progress was arrested by what in a lesser woman would have been a yelp. Proceeding, as it did, from the lips of Lady Constance Keeble, we must call it an exclamation of surprise.
‘Mr Baxter!’
She was standing in the doorway of her boudoir, and she eyed his dishevelled form with such open-mouthed astonishment that for an instant the ex-secretary came near to including her with the head of the family in the impromptu Commination Service which was taking shape in his mind. He was in no mood for wide-eyed looks of wonder.
‘May I come in?’ he said curtly. He could explain all, but he did not wish to do so on the first floor landing of a house where almost anybody might be listening with flapping ears.
‘But, Mr Baxter!’ said Lady Constance.
He paused for a moment to grit his teeth, then closed the door.
‘What
have
you been doing, Mr Baxter?’
‘Jumping out of window.’
‘Jumping out of
win
-dow?’
He gave a brief synopsis of the events which had led up to his spirited act. Lady Constance drew in her breath with a remorseful hiss.
‘Oh, dear!’ she said. ‘How foolish of me. I should have told you.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Even though she was in the safe retirement of her boudoir Lady Constance Keeble looked cautiously over her shoulder. In the stirring and complicated state into which life had got itself at Blandings Castle, practically everybody in the place, except Lord Emsworth, had fallen into the habit nowadays of looking cautiously over his or her shoulder before he or she spoke.
‘Sir Gregory Parsloe said in his note,’ she explained, ‘that this man Pilbeam who is coming here this evening is acting for him.’
‘Acting for him?’
‘Yes. Apparently Sir Gregory went to see him yesterday and has promised him a large sum of money if he will obtain possession of my brother Galahad’s manuscript. That is why he has invited us to dinner to-night, to get Galahad out of the house. So there was no need for you to have troubled.’
There was a silence.
‘So there was no need,’ repeated the Efficient Baxter slowly, wiping from his eye the remains of a fragment of mould which had been causing him some inconvenience, ‘for me to have troubled.’
‘I am so sorry, Mr Baxter.’
‘Pray do not mention it, Lady Constance.’
His eye, now that the mould was out of it, was able to work again with its customary keenness. His spectacles, as he surveyed the remorseful woman before him, had a cold, steely look.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, it might perhaps have spared me some little inconvenience had you informed me of this earlier, Lady Constance. I have bruised my left shin somewhat severely and, as you see, made myself rather dirty.’
‘I am so sorry.’
‘Furthermore, I gathered from the remark he let fall that the impression my actions have made upon Lord Emsworth is that I am insane.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘He even specified the precise degree of insanity. As mad as a coot, were his words.’
He softened a little. He reminded himself that this woman before him, who was so nearly doing what is described as wringing her hands, had always been his friend, had always wished him well, had never slackened her efforts to restore him to the secretarial duties which he had once enjoyed.
‘Well, it cannot be helped,’ he said. ‘The thing now is to think of some way of recovering the lost ground.’
‘You mean, if you could find the Empress?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Oh, Mr Baxter, if you only could!’
‘I can.’
Lady Constance stared at his dark, purposeful, efficient face in dumb admiration. To another man who had spoken those words she would have replied ‘How?’ or even ‘How on earth?’ But, as they had proceeded from Rupert Baxter, she merely waited silently for enlightenment.
‘Have you given this matter any consideration, Lady Constance?’
‘Yes.’
‘To what conclusions have you come?’
Lady Constance felt dull and foolish. She felt like Doctor Watson – almost like a Scotland Yard Bungler.
‘I don’t think I have come to any,’ she said, avoiding the spectacles guiltily. ‘Of course,’
she added, ‘I think it is absurd to suppose that Sir Gregory . . .’
Baxter waved aside the notion. Itwas not even worth a’Tchah!’
‘In any matter of this kind,’ he said, ‘the first thing to do is to seek motive. Who is there in Blandings Castle who could have had a motive for stealing Lord Emsworth’s pig?’
Lady Constance would have given a year’s income to have been able to make some reasonably intelligent reply, but all she could do was look and listen. Baxter was not annoyed. He would not have had it otherwise. He preferred his audiences dumb and expectant.
‘Carmody.’
‘Mr Carmody?’
‘Precisely. He is Lord Emsworth’s secretary, and a most inefficient secretary, a secretary who stands hourly in danger of losing his position. He sees me arrive at the castle, a man who formerly held the post he holds. He is alarmed. He suspects. He searches wildly about in his mind for means of consolidating himself in Lord Emsworth’s regard. Then he has an idea, the sort of wild, motion-picture-bred idea which would come to a man of his stamp. He thinks to himself that if he removes the pig and conceals it somewhere and then pretends to have found it and restores it to its owner, Lord Emsworth’s gratitude will be so intense that all danger of his dismissal will be at an end.’
He removed his spectacles and wiped them. Lady Constance uttered a low cry. In anybody else it would have been a squeak. Baxter replaced his spectacles.
‘I have no doubt the pig is somewhere in the grounds at this moment,’ he said.
‘But, Mr Baxter . . .!’
The ex-secretary raised a compelling hand.
‘But he would not have undertaken a thing like this single-handed. A secretary’s time is not his own, and it would be necessary to feed the pig at regular intervals. He would require an accomplice. And I think I know who that accomplice is. Beach!’
This time not even the chronicler’s desire to place Lady Constance’s utterances in the best and most attractive light can hide the truth. She bleated.
‘Be-ee-ee-ee-ach!’
The spectacles raked her keenly.
‘Have you observed Beach closely of late?’
She shook her head. She was not a woman who observed butlers closely.
‘He has something on his mind. He is nervous. Guilty. Conscience-stricken. He jumps when you speak to him.’
‘Does he?’
‘Jumps,’ repeated the Efficient Baxter. ‘Just now I gave him a – I happened to address him, and he sprang in the air.’ He paused. ‘I have half a mind to go and question him.’
‘Oh, Mr Baxter! Would that be wise?’
Rupert Baxter’s intention of interrogating the butler had been merely a nebulous one, a sort of idle dream, but these words crystallized it into a resolve. He was not going to have people asking him if things would be wise.
‘A few searching questions should force him to reveal the truth.’
‘But he’ll give notice!’
This interview had been dotted with occasions on which Baxter might reasonably have said ‘Tchah!’ but, as we have seen, until this moment he had refrained. He now said it.
‘Tchah!’ said the Efficient Baxter. ‘There are plenty of other butlers.’
And with this undeniable truth he stalked from the room. The wash and brush-up were still as necessary as they had been ten minutes before, but he was too intent on the chase to think about washes and brushes-up. He hurried down the stairs. He crossed the hall. He passed through the green-baize door that led to the quarters of the Blandings Castle staff.
And he was making his way along the dim passage to the pantry where at this hour Beach might be supposed to be, when its door opened abruptly and a vast form emerged.
It was the butler. And from the fact that he was wearing a bowler hat it was plain that he was seeking the great outdoors.
Baxter stopped in mid-stride and remained on one leg, watching. Then, as his quarry disappeared in the direction of the back entrance he followed quickly.
Out in the open it was almost as dark as it had been in the passage. That grey, threatening sky had turned black by now. It was a swollen mass of inky clouds, heavy with the thunder, lightning and rain which so often come in the course of an English summer to remind the island race that they are hardy Nordics and must not be allowed to get their fibre all sapped by eternal sunshine like the less favoured dwellers in more southerly climes. It bayed at Baxter like a bloodhound.
But it took more than dirty weather to quell the Efficient Baxter when duty called. Like the character in Tennyson’s poem who followed the gleam, he followed the butler. There was but one point about Beach which even remotely resembled a gleam, but it happened to be the only one which at this moment really mattered. He was easy to follow.
The shrubbery swallowed the butler. A few seconds later, it had swallowed the Efficient Baxter.
II
There are those who maintain – and make a nice income by doing so in the evening papers – that in these degenerate days the old, hardy spirit of the Briton has died out.
They represent themselves as seeking vainly for evidence of the survival of those qualities of toughness and endurance which once made Englishmen what they were. To such, the spectacle of Rupert Baxter braving the elements could not have failed to bring cheer and consolation. They would have been further stimulated by the conduct of Hugo Carmody.
It had not escaped Hugo’s notice, as he left Sue on the terrace and started out in the wake of Millicent, that the weather was hotting up for a storm. He saw the clouds. He heard the fast-approaching thunder. For neither did he give a hoot. Let it rain, was Hugo’s verdict.
Let it jolly well rain as much as it dashed well wanted to. As if encouraged, the sky sent down a fat, wet drop which insinuated itself just between his neck and collar.
He hardly noticed it. The information confided to him by his friend Ronald Fish had numbed his senses so thoroughly that water down the back of the neck was merely an incident. He was feeling as he had not felt since the evening some years ago when, boxing for his University in the light-weight division, he had incautiously placed the point of his jaw in the exact spot at the moment occupied by his opponent’s right fist.
When you have done this or – equally-when you have just been told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.
In all the black days through which he had been living recently, Hugo had never really lost hope. It had been dim sometimes, but it had always been there. It was his opinion that he knew women, just as it was Sue’s idea that she knew men. Like Sue, he had placed his trust in the thought that true love conquers all obstacles; that coldness melts; that sundered hearts may at long last be brought together again by a little judicious pleading and reasoning. Even the fact that Millicent stared at him, when they met, with large, scornful eyes that went through him like stilettos, unpleasant though it was, had not caused him to despair. He had looked forward to the moment when he should contrive to get her alone and do a bit of snappy talking along the right lines.
But this was final. This was the end. This put the tin hat on it. She was engaged to Ronnie. Soon she would be married to Ronnie. Like a gadfly the hideous thought sent Hugo Carmody reeling on through the gloom.
It was so dark now that he could scarcely see before him. And, looking about him, he discovered that the reason for this was that he had made his way into a wood of sorts. The West Wood, he deduced dully, taking into consideration the fact that there was no other in this particular part of the estate. Well, he might just as well be in the West Wood as anywhere. He trudged on.
The ground beneath his feet was spongy, and equipped with low-lying brambles which pricked through his thin flannels and would have caused him discomfort if he had been in the frame of mind to notice brambles. There were trees against which he bumped, and logs over which he tripped. And ahead of him, in a small clearing, there was a dilapidated-looking cottage. He noticed this because it seemed the sort of place where a man, now that a warm, gusty wind had sprung up, might shelter and light a cigarette. The need for tobacco had become imperative.