'Are you in trouble, too ?'
'Trouble?' Monty held up a warning hand. 'Listen. Don't
tempt me. One more word of encouragement, and I'll be monopolizing the conversation.'
'Go on. I can wait.'
'You're sure?'
'Quite.'
Monty sighed gratefully.
'Well, it'll be a relief, I must own,' he admitted. 'Sue, old girl, I am becoming conscious of an impending doom. The future is looking black. For some reason which I am unable to fathom I don't seem to have made a hit with my employer.'
' What makes you think that ?'
'Signs, Sue. Signs and portents. The old blighter bites at me. He clicks his tongue irritably. I look up and find his eyes fixed on me with an expression of loathing. You wouldn't think it possible that a man who could stick Hugo Carmody as a secretary for a matter of eleven weeks would be showing distress signs after a mere two days of me, but there it is. Why, I cannot say, but the ninth Earl obviously hates my insides.'
'Quite sure.'
'But it seems so unlike Lord Emsworth. I've always thought him such an old dear.'
'Precisely how I had remembered him from boyhood days. He used to tip me when I went back to school - tip me lavishly and with the kindest of smiles. But no longer. Not any more. He now views me with concern and dogs my footsteps.'
'Does what?’
'Dogs my footsteps. Tails me up, as they say at Scotland Yard. Do you recall that hymn about "See the hosts of Midian prowl and prowl around"? Well, that's what this extraordinary bloke does. For some strange reason of his own he has started watching me, as if he were suspecting me of nameless crimes. I'll give you an instance. Yesterday afternoon I had gone down to the pig-bin to chirrup to that pig of his in the hope of establishing cordial relations, as you advised, and as I approached the animal's lair I happened to glance round, and there he was peering out from behind a tree, his face alight with mistrust. Wouldn't you call that prowling?'
'It certainly seems like prowling.'
'It is prowling. Grade A prowling. And what, I am asking myself, will the harvest be ? You may say, Oh, why worry ? arguing that an Earl, on his own ground, has a perfect right to hide behind trees and glare at secretaries. But I go deeper than that. I look on the thing as a symptom, and a dangerous symptom. I contend that the Earl who hides behind trees today is an Earl who intends to apply the order of the boot tomorrow. And, my gosh, Sue, I can't afford to go getting the boot twice daily like this. If I don't stay put in some sort of job for a year, I fail to gather in Gertrude, and how am I to get another job if I lose this one? I'm not an easy man to place. I have my limitations, and I know it.'
'Poor old Monty!'
'"Poor old Monty" sums up the thing extraordinarily neatly,' agreed the haunted man. 'I'm sunk if this old bird fires me. And what makes it so particularly foul is that I haven't a notion what he's got against me. I've made a point of being so fearfully alert and obsequious and the perfect secretary generally. I've been simply fascinating. The whole thing's a mystery.'
Sue reflected.
'I'll tell you what to do. Why not get hold of Ronnie and ask him to ask Lord Emsworth tactfully ...' Monty shook his head.
'Not Ronnie. No. Not within the sphere of practical politics. Now, there's another mystery, Sue. Old Ronnie. Once one of my closest pals, and now frigid, aloof, distant. Says "Oh, yes?" and "Really?" when I speak to him, and turns away as if desirous of terminating the conversation.'
'Really?'
'And "Oh, yes?'"
' I mean, does he really seem not to like you ?'
' He's as sniffy as dammit. And I can't.. . Great Scott, Sue,' cried Monty, struck with an idea, 'you don't suppose that by any chance he Knows All?'
' That you and I were once engaged ? How could he ?'
'No, that's right. He couldn't, could he?'
'Nobody here can have told him, because nobody knows. Except Gally, who wouldn't breathe a word.'
'True. It only occurred to me as a rather rummy coincidence that he's upstage like this with both of us. Why, if he does not Know All, should he be keeping out of your way, as you say he's doing?'
All Sue's pent-up misery found voice. She had not intended to confide in Monty, for she was a girl whom life had trained to keep her troubles to herself. But Ronnie had gone to Shrewsbury, and the heat was making her head ache, and the sky was looking like the underside of a dead fish, and she wished she were dead, so she poured out all the poison that was in her heart.
'I'll tell you why. Because his mother has been talking to him .. . never stopped since she got here . . . talking to him and nagging at him and telling him what a fool he is to think of marrying a girl like me, when there are dozens of girls in his own set... Oh, yes, she has. I know it just as if I had been there. I know exactly the sort of things she would say. And all quite true, too, I suppose. " My dear boy, a chorus-girl!" Well, so I am. You can't get away from that. Why should anyone want to marry me?'
Monty clicked his tongue. He could not subscribe to this.
'My dear old egg! Do it myself tomorrow, if not already earmarked elsewhere. I consider Ronnie dashed lucky.'
'That's sweet of you, Monty, but I'm afraid Ronnie doesn't agree with you.'
'Oh, rot!'
' I wish I could think so.'
'Absolute rot. Ronnie's not the sort of chap to back out of marrying a girl he's asked to marry him.'
'Oh, I know that. His word is his bond. We men of honour! My poor old Monty, you don't really think I would marry a man who has stopped being fond of me, simply because he's too decent to break the engagement ? If there's one person I despise in the world, it's the girl who clings to a man when she knows it's only politeness that keeps him from telling her for goodness' sake to go away and leave him in peace. If ever I really feel certain that Ronnie wants to be rid of me,' said Sue, staring dry-eyed at the menacing sky. 'I'll chuck it all up in a second, no matter how much it hurts.'
Monty shuffled uneasily.
'I think you're making too much of it all,' he said, but without conviction. 'If you boil it down, probably all that's happened is that the old chap's got a touch of liver. Enough to give anyone a touch of liver, weather like this.'
Sue did not reply. She had walked to the battlements and was looking down. Something in the aspect of her back seemed to tell Monty Bodkin that she was either crying or about to cry, and he did not know what to do for the best. The face of Gertrude Butterwick, floating between him and the sky, forbade the obvious move. A man with a Gertrude Butterwick on his books cannot lightly put his arms round other waists and murmur 'There, there!' into other ears.
He coughed and said, 'Er - well...'
Sue did not turn. He coughed again. Then, with a' Well - I - er -ah...' he sidled to the stairs. The clang of the closing door came to Sue's ears as she dabbed at her eyes with the tiny fragment of lace which she called a handkerchief. She was relieved that he had gone. There are moments when a girl must be alone to wrestle single-handed with her own particular devils.
This she did, bravely and thoroughly. There was in her small body the spirit of an Amazon. She fought the devils and routed the devils, till presently a final sniff told that the battle had been won. Shropshire, which had been a thing of mist, became firmer in its outlines. She put away the handkerchief and stood blinking defiantly.
She was happier now. The determination to finish everything, if she saw Ronnie wanted it finished had not weakened. It still lay rooted at the back of her mind. But hope had dawned again. She was telling herself that she understood Ronnie's odd behaviour. He was worried, poor darling, as who would not be with a woman of Lady Julia Fish's powerful personality going on at him all the time. And when a man is worried, he naturally becomes preoccupied.
The sound of a car drawing up on the other side of the house broke in upon her meditations. She hurried across the roof, her heart quickening.
She turned away, disappointed. It was not Ronnie, back fr
om Shrewsbury. It was only a short, stout man who had driven up in the station taxi. A short, stout, stumpy man of no importance whatever.
So thought Sue in her ignorance. The stout man, had he known that he was being thus casually dismissed as negligible, would have been not only offended, but amazed.
For this visitor to Blandings Castle, for all that he arrived without pomp, driven to his destination by charioteer Robinson in that humble conveyance, the Market Blandings station taxi, was none other than George Alexander Pyke, first Viscount Tilbury, founder and proprietor of the Mammoth Publishing Company of Tilbury House, Tilbury Street, London.
There are men of the bulldog breed who do not readily admit defeat. Crushed to earth, they rise again. To this doughty band belonged George Alexander, Viscount Tilbury. He had built up a very large fortune chiefly by the simple method of never knowing when he was beaten, and the fact that he was now ringing the doorbell of Blandings Castle proved that the ancient spirit still lingered. He had come to tackle the Hon. Galahad Threepwood in person about those Reminiscences of his, and he meant to stand no nonsense.
Many men in his position, informed that the Hon. Galahad had decided to withhold his book from publication, would have felt that there was nothing to be done about it. They would have accepted the situation as one beyond their power to change, and would have contented themselves with grieving over their monetary loss and thinking hard thoughts of the man responsible. Lord Tilbury was made of sterner stuff. He grieved - we have seen him grieving - and he thought hard thoughts: but it never occurred to him for an instant not to do something about it.
A busy man, he could not get away from his office immediately. Pressure of work had delayed the starting of the expedition-until today. But at eleven-fifteen that morning he had taken train for Market Blandings and, after establishing himself at the Emsworth Arms in that sleepy little town, had directed Robinson, of the station taxi, to take him on to the Castle.
His mood was one of stern self-confidence. The idea that he might fail in his mission did not strike him as even a remote possibility. He had only a dim recollection of the Hon. Galahad, for he had not met him for twenty-five years, and even in the old days had never been really an intimate of his, but he retained a sort of general impression of an amiable, easygoing man. Not at all the type of man to hold out against a forceful, straight from the shoulder talk such as he proposed to subject him to as soon as this door-bell was answered. Lord Tilbury had great faith in the magic of speech. Beach answered the bell.
'Is Mr Threepwood in? Mr Galahad Threepwood?' 'Yes, sir. What name shall I say?' 'Lord Tilbury.'
'Very good, m'lord. If you will step this way. I fancy Mr Galahad is in the small library.'
The small library, however, proved empty. It contained evidence of the life literary in the shape of a paper-piled desk and a good deal of ink on the carpet and elsewhere, but it had no human occupant.
'Possibly Mr Galahad is on the lawn. He walks there sometimes,' said the butler indulgently, as one tolerant of the foibles of genius. 'If your lordship will take a seat. . .'
He withdrew, and began to descend the stairs with measured tread, but Lord Tilbury did not take a seat. He was staring, transfixed, at something that lay upon the desk. He drew closer - furtively, with a sidelong eye on the door.
Yes, his surmise had been correct. It was the manuscript of the Reminiscences that lay before him. Evidently its author had only just risen from the task of polishing it, for the ink was still wet on a paragraph where, searching like some Flaubert for the mot juste, he had run his pen through the word 'intoxicated' and substituted it for the more colourful' pickled to the gills'.
Lord Tilbury's eyes, always prominent, bulged a trifle farther from their sockets. His breathing quickened.
Every man who by his own unaided efforts has succeeded in wresting a great fortune from a resistant world has something of the buccaneer in him, a touch of the practical, Do-It-Now pirate of the Spanish Main. In Lord Tilbury, as a younger man, there had been quite a good deal. And while prosperity and the diminishing necessity of giving trade rivals the elbow had tended to atrophy this quality, it had not died altogether. Standing there within arm's length of the manuscript, with the coast clear and a taxi waiting at the front door, he was seriously contemplating the quick snatch and the masterful dash for the open.
And it was perhaps fortunate, for sudden activity of the kind might have proved injurious to a man of his full habit, that 92 before he could quite screw his courage to the sticking point his ear caught the sound of approaching footsteps. He drew back like a cat from a cream-jug, and when the Hon. Galahad arrived was looking out of the window, humming a careless barcarolle.
The Hon. Galahad paused in the doorway and stuck his black-rimmed monocle in his eye. Behind the glass the eye was bright and questioning. His forehead wrinkled with mental strain as he surveyed his visitor.
'Don't tell me,' he begged. 'Let me think. I pride myself on my memory. You're fatter and you've aged a lot, but you're someone I used to know quite well at one time. In some odd way I seem to associate you with a side of beef . .. Shorty Smith? ... Stumpy Whiting? . . . No, I've got it, by gad! Stinker Pyke!' He beamed with honest satisfaction. 'Not bad, that, considering that it must be fully twenty-five years since I saw you last. Pyke. That's who you are. And we used to call you Stinker. Well, well, how are you, Stinker?'
Lord Tilbury's face had taken on an austere pinkness. He disliked the reference to his increased bulk, and advancing years, and it is never pleasant for an elderly man of substance to be addressed by a name which even in his youth was offensive to him. He said as much.
'Well, all right. Pyke, then,' said the Hon. Galahad agreeably. 'How are you, Pyke? Good Lord, this certainly puts the clock back. The last time I saw you must have been that night at Romano's when Plug Basham started throwing bread and got a little over-excited, and one thing led to another and in about two minutes there you were on the floor, laid out cold by a dashed great side of beef and all the undertakers present making bids for the body. I can see your face now,' said the Hon. Galahad, chuckling. 'Most amusing.'
He grew more serious. His smile vanished. He shook his head sadly.
'Poor old Plug!' he sighed. 'A fellow who never knew where to stop. His only fault, poor chap.'
Lord Tilbury had not come a hundred and fourteen miles to talk about the late Major Wilfred Basham, a man who, even before the episode alluded to, had never been a favourite of his. He endeavoured to intimate this, but the Hon. Galahad when in reminiscent mood was not an easy man to divert.
'I took the whole thing up with him at the Pelican next day. I tried to reason with him. Throwing sides of beef about in restaurants wasn't done, I said. Not British. Bread, yes, I said. Sides of beef, no. I pointed out that all the trouble was caused by his fatal practice of always ordering a quart where other men began with pints. He saw it, too. "I know, I know," he said. "I'm a darned fool. In fact, between you and me, Gally, I suppose I'm one of those fellows my father always warned me against. But the Bashams have always ordered quarts. It's an old Basham family custom." Then the only way was, I said, to swear off altogether. He said he couldn't. A little something with his meals was an absolute necessity to him. So there I had to leave it. And then one day I met him again at a wedding reception at one of the hotels.'
'I. . .' said Lord Tilbury.
'A wedding reception,' proceeded the Hon. Galahad. 'And, by a curious coincidence, there was another wedding reception going on at the same hotel, and, oddly enough, their bride was some sort of connexion of our bride. So pretty soon these two wedding parties began to mix and mingle, everybody happy and having a good time, and suddenly I felt something pluck at my elbow and there was old Plug, looking as white as a sheet. "Yes Plug?" I said, surprised. The poor, dear fellow uttered a hollow groan. "Gally, old man," he said, "lead me away old chap. The end has come. The stuff has begun to get me. I have had only the merest sip of champagne, and yet I assur
e you I can distinctly see two brides".'
'I. . .' said Lord Tilbury.
'A shock to the poor fellow, as you can readily imagine. I could have set his mind at rest, of course, but I saw that this was providential. Just the sort of jolt he had been needing. I drew him into a corner and talked to him like a Dutch uncle. And this time he gave me his solemn word that from that day onward he would never touch another drop. "Can you do it, Plug?" I said. "Have you the strength, the will-power?" "Yes, Gally," he replied bravely, "I can. Why, dash it," he said, "I've got to. I can't go through the rest of my life seeing two of everything. Imagine! Two bookies you owe money to... Two process-servers... Two Stinker Pykes..."
Yes, old man, in that grim moment he thought of you . . . And he went off with a set, resolute look about his jaw which it did me good to see.'
'I...' said Lord Tilbury.
'And about two weeks later I came on him in the Strand, and he was bubbling over with quiet happiness. "It's all right, Gally." he said, "it's all right, old lad. I've done it. I've won the battle." "Amazing, Plug," I said. "Brave chap! Splendid fellow! Was it a terrific strain?" His eyes lit up. "It was at first," he said. "In fact, it was so tough that I didn't think I should be able to stick it out. And then I discovered a teetotal drink that is not only palatable but positively appetising. Absinthe, they call it, and now I've got that I don't care if I never touch wine, spirits, or any other intoxicants again".'
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