Galahad at Blandings

by P. G. Wodehouse

  ‘Quite, quite. Very considerate of you to think of it. Now where is my cheque book? It should be somewhere, if Miss Callender hasn’t hidden it with her infernal tidying—’

  He broke off. Lady Hermione was entering the study.

  III

  Lady Hermione, like her brother Clarence, was looking stunned, flustered, disturbed, unnerved and disconcerted, so much so that Roget, had he been present, would have got the impression that these things run in families. Her face had taken on a purple tinge and her stocky body seemed to vibrate. Gally, who was given to homely similes, thought she was madder than a wet hen, and he was right. Only an exceptionally emotional hen when unusually moist could have exhibited an equal annoyance.

  It was Lord Emsworth whom she had come to see, but it was to Gally that she first addressed herself.

  ‘How dare you lock me in the library, Galahad?’

  Gally started.

  ‘Good heavens! Did I?’

  ‘I might have been there still, if Beach had not heard me calling and let me out.’

  ‘You’re sure it wasn’t Beach who locked you in? He has a very subtle sense of humour.’

  ‘Quite sure. I happened to try the door just after you had left, and it wouldn’t open.’

  ‘Probably just sticking.’

  ‘It was not.’

  ‘Doors do.’

  ‘This one didn’t. It was locked.’

  ‘Then,’ said Gally, generously accepting the blame, ‘I’m afraid it must have been me, but if I did it it was purely inadvertently. You know how you turn keys absent-mindedly. I’m terribly sorry.

  ‘Bah!’ said Lady Hermione.

  Lord Emsworth had been listening to these exchanges with growing impatience. Though there was no actual written rule to that effect, it was an understood thing that his study was a sanctuary into which the most thrustful sister must not penetrate. Sisters who wished to confer with him were supposed to do it in the library or the amber drawing-room or somewhere out in the grounds. It was the one flicker of spirit the downtrodden peer had ever been known to show. So now he intervened in the debate with something which if not truculence was very near it.

  ‘Hermione!’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I am having an important talk with Galahad.’

  ‘And I am going to have an important talk with you. I have just seen Daphne. She is furious. She says you were very rude to her.’

  Lord Emsworth was now definitely truculent. The mere mention of that name plumbed hidden depths in him and sent his blood pressure soaring into the higher brackets.

  ‘She does, does she? What did she expect me to be, coming in—’

  ‘Flouncing in,’ said Gally.

  ‘Yes, flouncing in and telling me I must have the Empress destroyed just because she bit that beastly little boy——’

  ‘Who started it,’ said Gally.

  ‘Exactly. He was trying to let the Empress out of her sty, and goodness knows what might have happened if he had succeeded. The meadow is full of holes and ditches. She might have broken a leg.’

  ‘Two legs,’ said Gally.

  ‘Yes, two legs. Apart from the nervous strain. The least thing upsets her and makes her refuse her food. It might have been days before she would have taken her proper meals, and if she does not consume daily nourishment amounting to fifty-seven hundred calories, these to consist of protein four pounds five ounces, carbohydrates twenty-five pounds—”

  For an instant it might have seemed that the afternoon’s thunderstorm had broken out again, but it was merely Lady Hermione banging the top of the desk. She had absent-mindedly, as Gally would have said, possessed herself of a heavy ruler, and she was using it with a lot of wrist work and follow through.

  ‘Will you stop babbling about that insufferable pig of yours! I did not come here to talk about pigs. You must apologise to Daphne.’

  Flame flashed from Lord Emsworth’s pince-nez. Just so had it done when he was dismissing George Cyril Wellbeloved from his employment for the second time.

  ‘I’m blowed if I apologise!’

  ‘Well spoken, Clarence. The right spirit. It is men like you who have made England what it is.’

  It was not Lady Hermione who said this, it was Gally, and she gave him a look which would have shrivelled anyone but an ex-member of the old Pelican Club.

  ‘I don’t want your opinion, Galahad.’

  ‘I can applaud, can’t I?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I shall. As I did, I remember, when I saw you being spanked by our mutual Nanny with a hairbrush.’

  Lady Hermione winced, as if the old wound still troubled her. She was silent for a moment, but it was not in her redoubtable character to let ancient memories silence her for long. With another look of a kind which no sister should have directed at a brother she resumed her observations.

  ‘Daphne says that unless you apologise she will leave.’

  ‘She must suit herself about that.’

  ‘If Daphne leaves, I leave. For the last time, will you apologise to her and have that pig destroyed?’

  ‘Of course I won’t.’

  ‘Then I shall take the first train to London tomorrow.

  ‘Voules can drive you in the car.’

  ‘I do not wish to be driven in the car. I shall go by train, and before I go I have something to say which may interest you. Has Galahad told you of the amusing practical joke he has been playing on you?’

  ‘Eh? What? No.’

  ‘You should have, Galahad. It spoils a joke to keep it up too long. This man he has passed off on you as Augustus Whipple is not Augustus Whipple at all.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘He is some loathsome friend of Galahad’s whom he has sneaked into the castle for some purpose of his own.’

  ‘I can’t believe it!’

  ‘Perhaps you will when I tell you that almost immediately after he arrived Beach took a telephone call from the real Augustus Whipple, speaking from the Athenaeum Club in London. Goodbye, Clarence. I shall probably not be seeing you in the morning.’

  The door closed behind her, and Lord Emsworth, after blinking some six times in rapid succession, said:

  ‘Galahad—”

  ‘Clarence,’ said Gally, in his enthusiasm cutting him short, you were superb. A colossal feat. We tip our hats respectfully to the man who can look Dame Daphne Winkworth in the eye and make her wilt, but when immediately afterwards he crushes Hermione and sends her, too, flouncing off, words fail us and we can only bow before him in silence, recognising him as a hero and a daredevil the like of whom one seldom sees. And you will reap your reward, Clarence. You have won for yourself a full, happy life alone with your pig, a life entirely free from sisters of every description. And you deserve every minute of it. But I interrupted you. You were going to say something, I think? Was it about that absurd charge of Hermione’s?’

  ‘Er — yes.

  ‘I thought so. You are wondering if there was any truth in it. My dear fellow, can you ask?’

  ‘But how very odd that Beach should have spoken on the telephone to someone claiming to be Augustus Whipple.’

  ‘Not really, when you come to think of it. I can explain that. I explained it to Hermione, but she wouldn’t listen. You know how Visitors’ Day always takes it out of Beach. Exhausting work showing people about the place. He was half asleep when he answered the phone. Got the name wrong. That sort of thing’s always happening. There was a girl I knew in the old days who was madly in love with a man called Joe Brice. Telephone goes one morning, voice says, “Hullo, Mabel or Jane or Kate or whatever her name was, this is Joe Brice. Will you marry me?” Naturally she says he can bet his Old Etonian socks she will and she asks where they can meet. He mentions a bar in the Haymarket, and she goes there and a chap called Joe Price, whom she hardly knew, leaps at her and folds her in a close embrace, and when she hauls off and socks him on the side of the head with a crocodile bag apparently filled with samples of ore
from a copper mine, he gets as sore as a gumboil and reproaches her bitterly. “You told me only an hour ago you would marry me,” he says. Took her quite a while to straighten the thing out, I believe. Oh, hullo, Egbert. You back?’

  The words were addressed to Colonel Egbert Wedge, who had come into the room at this moment looking travel-stained but less tired than might have been expected after his long journey from Worcestershire.

  ‘Just got here,’ he said. ‘I caught an early train. I stopped off for a quick one at the Emsworth Arms. Oh, Gally, that letter I was telling you to expect. Did you get it?’

  ‘I got it.’

  ‘Good,’ said Colonel Wedge, greatly relieved. He might have known, he felt, that he could rely on Gally. ‘What’s become of Hermione? Beach told me she was here.’

  ‘She left a few minutes ago.

  ‘Then I’ll catch her in our room. She’s probably gone to dress. Oh, Clarence,’ said Colonel Wedge, pausing at the door, ‘this’ll interest you. While I was having my quick one in the Emsworth Arms bar, a fellow came in whose face I thought I knew, and he turned out to be Whipple, the chap who wrote that book you’re always reading.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Yes. I asked him what he was doing in these parts, and he said you had invited him to the castle but couldn’t have him at the moment as you were in bed with German measles, so as he wanted badly to have a look at the Empress he had put up at the Emsworth Arms. There must be some mistake somewhere, because you don’t look as if you had German measles. You’d better give him a ring and find out what it’s all about. Well, I think I’ll be going along and having a bath. I’m caked with dust and cinders.’

  Lord Emsworth spoke in a low, quivering voice.

  ‘One moment, Egbert. You say you are personally acquainted with Mr Whipple?’

  ‘I’ve met him two or three times at the Athenaeum. Old General Willoughby takes me to lunch there occasionally.’

  ‘Thank you, Egbert.’

  A long silence followed the Colonel’s departure. Lord Emsworth broke it, and there was infinite reproach in his voice.

  ‘Well, really, Galahad!’

  It had often been said at the old Pelican Club that there was no situation, however sticky, which would not find Galahad Threepwood as calm and cool as a halibut on a fishmonger’s slab, and he proved now that this was no idle tribute. Where a lesser man with an elder brother looking at him as Lord Emsworth was looking would have blushed and twiddled his fingers, he preserved his customary poise and prepared to tell the tale as he had seldom told it before.

  ‘I know just how you’re feeling, Clarence,’ he said. ‘You’re as sore as a sunburned neck, and I don’t blame you. I blame myself. I ought not to have been guilty of this innocent deception, but it was a military necessity. This chap — his name’s Sam Bagshott and he’s the son of the late Boko Bagshott, whom you probably don’t remember though he was a bosom friend of mine — is in love with young Sandy Callender and there had been a rift within the lute and it was essential that he clock in at the castle and heal it. This I am glad to say he has now done thanks to you extending your hospitality. And I wanted to tap you for that thousand quid because he needs it in order to marry her. In fact, from start to finish I acted from the best and soundest motives, but don’t think I don’t see your point of view. You naturally jib at the idea of parting with a thousand of the best and brightest — though it would only be a loan and you’d get it back with interest — to someone you hardly know. And you are perfectly justified in taking this attitude. Don’t dream of parting. I was wrong to ask you. Keep the money in the old oak chest. It’s a pity, though, because if you did feel like paying out, you would be sitting on top of the world. You’ve got rid of the Winkworth, you’ve got rid of Hermione, and this way you’d be getting rid of Sandy, too. I beg your pardon, Clarence? You spoke?’

  Lord Emsworth had not spoken. What had proceeded from his lips had been a strangled cry. His pince-nez were gleaming with a strange light.

  ‘Galahad!’

  ‘Hullo?’

  ‘Do you mean that if I lend this fellow Boko Bagshott—”

  ‘Sam Bagshott. Boko’s the father.’

  ‘Do you mean that if I lend this Sam Bagshott a thousand pounds, he will take Miss Callender away from here?’

  ‘That’s right. But, as you say, there’s no earthly reason why you should — except of course that if you don’t she’ll be here as a fixture. No doubt you say to yourself that you are quite competent to give her the sack, but are you? I doubt it. She would cry buckets and your gentle heart would be melted. And as you could hardly expect a young girl to stay here unchaperoned, that would mean begging Hermione to return, and one presumes that Hermione would bring the Winkworth with her and there you would be, back where you started.’

  Lord Emsworth drew a deep breath.

  ‘I will give you that cheque, Galahad. I will write it immediately.’

  Gally was astounded.

  ‘You will?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Capital, capital, capital,’ said Gally. ‘Thank you, Clarence, he added a few moments later as he took the oblong strip of paper with its invigorating signature.

  He rose. He glanced at his watch. There would, he was glad to see, be just time before the dressing-for-dinner gong sounded for a quick visit to Beach’s pantry. He looked forward to it with bright anticipation. Not only would there be port there but in all probability an added attraction in the person of Constable Evans, with whom it was always a privilege and a pleasure to exchange ideas.

  THE END