Sue caught at the smile.
‘Ronnie! He’s all right. I believe he’s a friend.’
‘Of course he’s a friend! Old Beach. One of my earliest and stoutest pals.’
‘I mean, he isn’t going to give us away.’
‘Me, miss?’ said Beach, shocked. ‘Certainly not.’
‘Splendid fellow, Beach!’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Beach,’ said Ronnie, ‘the time has come to act. No more delay. I’ve got to make myself solid with Uncle Clarence at once. Directly he gets back to-night, I shall go to him and tell him that Empress of Blandings is in the gamekeeper’s cottage in the West Wood, and then, while he’s still weak, I shall spring on him the announcement of my engagement.’
‘Unfortunately, Mr Ronald, the animal is no longer in the cottage.’
‘You’ve moved it?’
‘Not I, sir. Mr Carmody. By a most regrettable chance Mr Carmody found me feeding it this afternoon. He took it away and deposited it in some place of which I am not cognizant, sir.’
‘But, good heavens, he’ll dish the whole scheme. Where is he?’
‘You wish me to find him, sir?’
‘Of course I wish you to find him. Go at once and ask him where that pig is. Tell him it’s vital.’
‘Very good, sir.’
Sue had listened with bewilderment to this talk of pigs.
‘I don’t understand, Ronnie.’
Ronnie was pacing the room in agitation. Once he came so close to where Baxter lay in his snug harbour that the ex-secretary had a flashing glimpse of a sock with a lavender clock. It was the first object of beauty that he had seen for a long time, and he should have appreciated it more than he did.
‘I can’t explain now,’ said Ronnie. ‘It’s too long. But I can tell you this. If we don’t get that pig back, we’re in the soup.’
‘Ronnie!’
Ronnie had ceased to pace the room. He was standing in a listening attitude.
‘What’s that?’
He sprang quickly to the balcony, looked over the parapet and came softly back.
‘Sue!’
‘What!’
‘It’s that blighter Pilbeam,’ said Ronnie in a guarded undertone. ‘He’s climbing up the waterspout!’
17 SPIRITED CONDUCT OF LORD EMSWORTH
From the moment when it left the door of Matchingham Hall and started on its journey back to Blandings Castle, a silence as of the tomb had reigned in the Antelope car which was bringing Lord Emsworth, his sister Lady Constance Keeble, and his brother, the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, home from their interrupted dinner-party. Not so much as a syllable proceeded from one of them.
In the light of what Millicent, an eyewitness at the Front, had told Hugo over the telephone of the family battle which had been raging at Sir Gregory Parsloe’s table, this will appear strange. If ever three people with plenty to say to one another were assembled together in a small space, these three, one would have thought, were those three. Lady Constance alone might have been expected to provide enough conversation to keep the historian busy for hours.
The explanation, like all explanations, is simple. It is supplied by that one word Antelope.
Owing to the fact that some trifling internal ailment had removed from the active list the Hispano-Suiza in which Blandings Castle usually went out to dinner, Voules, the chauffeur, had had to fall back upon this secondary and inferior car; and anybody who has ever owned an Antelope is aware that there is no glass partition inside it shutting off the driver from the cash customers. He is right there in their midst, ready and eager to hear everything that is said and to hand it on in due course to the Servants’ Hall.
In these circumstances, though the choice seemed one between speech and spontaneous combustion, the little company kept their thoughts to themselves. They suffered, but they did it. It would be difficult to find a better illustration of all that is implied in the fine old phrase
Noblesse oblige.
At Lady Constance we point with particular pride. She was a woman, and silence weighed hardest on her.
There were times during the drive when even the sight of Voules’ large, red ears, all pricked up to learn the reason for this sudden and sensational return, was scarcely sufficient to restrain Lady Constance Keeble from telling her brother Clarence just what she thought of him. From boyhood up, he had not once come near to being her ideal man; but never had he sunk so low in her estimation as at the moment when she heard him giving his consent to the union of her niece Millicent with a young man who, besides being penniless, had always afflicted her with a nervous complaint for which she could find no name, but which is known to Scientists as the heeby-jeebies.
Nor had he re-established himself in any way by his outspoken remarks on the subject of the Efficient Baxter. He had said things about Baxter which no admirer of that energetic man could forgive. The adjectives mad, crazy, insane, gibbering – and, worse, potty – had played in and out of his conversation like flashes of lightning. And from the look in his eye she gathered that he was still saying them all over again to himself.
Her surmise was correct. To Lord Emsworth the events of this day had come as a stunning revelation. On the strength of that flower-pot incident two years ago, he had always looked on Baxter as mentally unbalanced; but, being a fair-minded man, he had recognized the possibility that a quiet, regular life and freedom from worries might, in the interval which had elapsed since his late secretary’s departure from the castle, have effected a cure. Certainly the man had appeared quite normal on the day of his arrival.
And now into the space of a few hours he had crammed enough variegated lunacy to equip all the March Hares in England and leave some over for the Mad Hatters.
The ninth Earl of Emsworth was not a man who was easily disturbed. His was a calm which, as a rule, only his younger son Frederick could shatter. But it was not proof against the sort of thing that had being going on to-day. No matter how placid you may be, if you find yourself in close juxtaposition with a man who, when he is not hurling himself out of windows, is stealing pigs and trying to make you believe they were stolen by your butler, you begin to think a bit. Lord Emsworth was thoroughly upset. As the car bowled up the drive, he was saying to himself that nothing could surprise him now.
And yet something did. As the car turned the corner by the rhododendrons and wheeled into the broad strip of gravel that faced the front door, he beheld a sight which brought the first sound he had uttered since the journey began bursting from his lips.
‘Good God!’
The words were spoken in a high, penetrating tenor, and they made Lady Constance jump as if they had been pins running into her. This unexpected breaking of the great silence was agony to her taut nerves.
‘What
is
the matter?’
‘Matter? Look! Look at that fellow!’
Voules took it upon himself to explain. Never having met Lady Constance socially, as it were, he ought perhaps not to have spoken. He considered, however, that the importance of the occasion justified the solecism.
‘A man is climbing the waterspout, m’lady.’
‘What! Where? I don’t see him.’
‘He has just got into the balcony outside one of the bedrooms,’ said the Hon. Galahad.
Lord Emsworth went straight to the heart of the matter.
‘It’s that fellow Baxter!’ he exclaimed.
The summer day, for all the artificial aid lent by daylight saving, was now definitely over, and gathering night had spread its mantle of dusk over the world. The visibility, therefore, was not good: and the figure which had just vanished over the parapet of the balcony of the Garden Room had been unrecognizable except to the eye of intuition.
This, however, was precisely the sort of eye that Lord Emsworth possessed.
He reasoned closely. There were, he knew, on the premises of Blandings Castle other male adults besides Rupert Baxter: but none of these would climb up waterspouts and disappear over balconies. To Baxter, on the other hand, such a pursuit would seem the normal, ordinary way of passing an evening. Itwouldbe his idea of wholesome relaxation.
Soon, no doubt, he would come out on to the balcony again and throw himself to the ground. That was the sort of fellow Baxter was – a man of strange pleasures.
And so, going as we say, straight to the heart of the matter, Lord Emsworth, jerking the pince-nez off his face in his emotion, exclaimed:
‘It’s that fellow Baxter!’
Not since a certain day in their mutual nursery many years ago had Lady Constance gone to the length of actually hauling off and smiting her elder brother on the head with the flat of an outraged hand: but she came very near to doing it now. Perhaps it was the presence of Voules that caused her to confine herself to words.
‘Clarence, you’re an idiot!’
Even Voules could not prevent her saying that. After all, she was revealing no secrets.
The chauffeur had been in service at the castle quite long enough to have formed the same impression for himself.
Lord Emsworth did not argue the point. The car had drawn up now outside the front door.
The front door was open, as always of a summer evening, and the ninth Earl, accompanied by his brother Galahad, hurried up the steps and entered the hall. And, as they did so, there came to their ears the sound of running feet. The next moment, the flying figure of Percy Pilbeam came into view, taking the stairs four at a time.
‘God bless my soul!’ said Lord Emsworth.
If Pilbeam heard the words or saw the speaker, he gave no sign of having done so. He was plainly in a hurry. He shot through the hall and, more like a startled gazelle than a private enquiry agent, vanished down the steps. His shirt-front was dark with dirt-stains, his collar had burst from its stud, and it seemed to Lord Emsworth, in the brief moment during which he was able to focus him, that he had a black eye. The next instant, there descended the stairs and flitted past with equal speed the form of Ronnie Fish.
Lord Emsworth got an entirely wrong conception of the affair. He had no means of knowing what had taken place in the Garden Room when Pilbeam, inspired by alcohol and flushed with the thought that now was the time to get into that apartment and possess himself of the manuscript of the Hon. Galahad’s reminiscences, had climbed the waterspout to put the plan into operation. He knew nothing of the detective’s sharp dismay at finding himself unexpectedly confronted with the menacing form of Ronnie Fish. He was ignorant of the lively and promising mix-up which had been concluded by Pilbeam’s tempestuous dash for life. All he saw was two men fleeing madly for the open spaces, and he placed the obvious interpretation upon this phenomenon.
Baxter, he assumed, had run amok and had done it with such uncompromising thoroughness that strong men ran panic-stricken before him.
Mild though the ninth Earl was by nature, a lover of rural peace and the quiet life, he had, like all Britain’s aristocracy, the right stuff” in him. It so chanced that during the years when he had held his commission in the Shropshire Yeomanry the motherland had not called to him to save her. But, had that call been made, Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, would have answered it with as prompt a ‘Bless my Soul! Of course. Certainly!’ as any of his Crusader ancestors. And in his sixtieth year the ancient fire still lingered. The Hon.
Galahad, who had turned to watch the procession through the front door with a surprised monocle, turned back and found that he was alone. Lord Emsworth had disappeared. He now beheld him coming back again. On his amiable face was a look of determination. In his hand was a gun.
‘Eh? What?’ said the Hon. Galahad, blinking.
The head of the family did not reply. He was moving towards the stairs. In just that same silent purposeful way had an Emsworth advanced on the foe at Agincourt.
A sound as of disturbed hens made the Hon. Galahad turn again.
‘Galahad! What is all this? What is happening?’
The Hon. Galahad placed his sister in possession of the facts as known to himself.
‘Clarence has just gone upstairs with a gun.’
‘With a gun!’
‘Yes. Looked like mine, too. I hope he takes care of it.’
He perceived that Lady Constance had also been seized with the urge to climb. She was making excellent time up the broad staircase. So nimbly did she move that she was on the second landing before he came up with her.
And, as they stood there, a voice made itself heard from a room down the corridor.
‘Baxter! Come out! Come out, Baxter, my dear fellow, immediately.’
In the race for the room from which the words had appeared to proceed, Lady Constance, getting off to a good start, beat her brother by a matter of two lengths. She was thus the first to see a sight unusual even at Blandings Castle, though strange things had happened there from time to time.
Her young guest, Miss Schoonmaker, was standing by the window, looking excited and alarmed. Her brother Clarence, pointing a gun expertly from the hip, was staring fixedly at the bed. And from under the bed, a little like a tortoise protruding from its shell, there was coming into view the spectacled head of the Efficient Baxter.
18 PAINFUL SCENE IN A BEDROOM
A man who has been lying under a bed for a matter of some thirty minutes and, while there, has been compelled to listen to the sort of dialogue which accompanies a lovers’
reconciliation seldom appears at his best or feels his brightest. There was fluff in Baxter’s hair, dust on his clothes, and on Baxter’s face a scowl of concentrated hatred of all humanity. Lord Emsworth, prepared for something pretty wild-looking, found his expectations exceeded. He tightened his grasp on the gun, and to ensure a more accurate aim raised the butt of it to his shoulder, closing one eye and allowing the other to gleam along the barrel.
‘I have you covered, my dear fellow,’ he said mildly.
Rupert Baxter had not yet begun to stick straws in his hair, but he seemed on the verge of that final piece of self-expression.
‘Don’t point that damned thing at me!’
‘I shall point it at you,’ replied Lord Emsworth with spirit. He was not a man to be dictated to in his own house. ‘And at the slightest sign of violence . . .’