A Damsel in Distress

by P. G. Wodehouse

  CHAPTER 7.

  The first requisite of an invading army is a base. George, havingentered Belpher village and thus accomplished the first stage inhis foreward movement on the castle, selected as his base theMarshmoreton Arms. Selected is perhaps hardly the right word, as itimplies choice, and in George's case there was no choice. There aretwo inns at Belpher, but the Marshmoreton Arms is the only one thatoffers accommodation for man and beast, assuming--that is to say--thatthe man and beast desire to spend the night. The other house, the BlueBoar, is a mere beerhouse, where the lower strata of Belpher societygather of a night to quench their thirst and to tell one anotherinterminable stories without any point whatsoever. But the MarshmoretonArms is a comfortable, respectable hostelry, catering for the villageplutocrats. There of an evening you will find the local veterinarysurgeon smoking a pipe with the grocer, the baker, and the butcher, withperhaps a sprinkling of neighbouring farmers to help the conversationalong. On Saturdays there is a "shilling ordinary"--which is ruralEnglish for a cut off the joint and a boiled potato, followed by hunksof the sort of cheese which believes that it pays to advertise, and thisis usually well attended. On the other days of the week, until late inthe evening, however, the visitor to the Marshmoreton Arms has the placealmost entirely to himself.

  It is to be questioned whether in the whole length and breadth ofthe world there is a more admirable spot for a man in love to passa day or two than the typical English village. The Rocky Mountains,that traditional stamping-ground for the heartbroken, may be wellenough in their way; but a lover has to be cast in a pretty stemmould to be able to be introspective when at any moment he may meetan annoyed cinnamon bear. In the English village there are no suchobstacles to meditation. It combines the comforts of civilizationwith the restfulness of solitude in a manner equalled by no otherspot except the New York Public Library. Here your lover may wanderto and fro unmolested, speaking to nobody, by nobody addressed, andhave the satisfaction at the end of the day of sitting down to acapitally cooked chop and chips, lubricated by golden English ale.

  Belpher, in addition to all the advantages of the usual village,has a quiet charm all its own, due to the fact that it has seenbetter days. In a sense, it is a ruin, and ruins are alwayssoothing to the bruised soul. Ten years before, Belpher had been aflourishing centre of the South of England oyster trade. It issituated by the shore, where Hayling Island, lying athwart themouth of the bay, forms the waters into a sort of brackish lagoon,in much the same way as Fire Island shuts off the Great South Bayof Long Island from the waves of the Atlantic. The water of BelpherCreek is shallow even at high tide, and when the tide runs out itleaves glistening mud flats, which it is the peculiar taste of theoyster to prefer to any other habitation. For years Belpher oystershad been the mainstay of gay supper parties at the Savoy, theCarlton and Romano's. Dukes doted on them; chorus girls wept ifthey were not on the bill of fare. And then, in an evil hour,somebody discovered that what made the Belpher Oyster soparticularly plump and succulent was the fact that it breakfasted,lunched and dined almost entirely on the local sewage. There is buta thin line ever between popular homage and execration. We see itin the case of politicians, generals and prize-fighters; andoysters are no exception to the rule. There was a typhoidscare--quite a passing and unjustified scare, but strong enough todo its deadly work; and almost overnight Belpher passed from aplace of flourishing industry to the sleepy, by-the-world-forgottenspot which it was when George Bevan discovered it. The shallowwater is still there; the mud is still there; even the oyster-bedsare still there; but not the oysters nor the little world ofactivity which had sprung up around them. The glory of Belpher isdead; and over its gates Ichabod is written. But, if it has lost inimportance, it has gained in charm; and George, for one, had noregrets. To him, in his present state of mental upheaval, Belpherwas the ideal spot.

  It was not at first that George roused himself to the point ofasking why he was here and what--now that he was here--he proposedto do. For two languorous days he loafed, sufficiently occupiedwith his thoughts. He smoked long, peaceful pipes in thestable-yard, watching the ostlers as they groomed the horses; heplayed with the Inn puppy, bestowed respectful caresses on the Inncat. He walked down the quaint cobbled street to the harbour,sauntered along the shore, and lay on his back on the little beachat the other side of the lagoon, from where he could see the redroofs of the village, while the imitation waves splashed busily onthe stones, trying to conceal with bustle and energy the fact thatthe water even two hundred yards from the shore was only eighteeninches deep. For it is the abiding hope of Belpher Creek that itmay be able to deceive the occasional visitor into mistaking it forthe open sea.

  And presently the tide would ebb. The waste of waters became a seaof mud, cheerfully covered as to much of its surface with greengrasses. The evening sun struck rainbow colours from the moistsoftness. Birds sang in the thickets. And George, heaving himselfup, walked back to the friendly cosiness of the Marshmoreton Arms.And the remarkable part of it was that everything seemed perfectlynatural and sensible to him, nor had he any particular feeling thatin falling in love with Lady Maud Marsh and pursuing her to Belpherhe had set himself anything in the nature of a hopeless task. Likeone kissed by a goddess in a dream, he walked on air; and, whileone is walking on air, it is easy to overlook the boulders in thepath.

  Consider his position, you faint-hearted and self-pitying young menwho think you have a tough row to hoe just because, when you payyour evening visit with the pound box of candy under your arm, yousee the handsome sophomore from Yale sitting beside her on theporch, playing the ukulele. If ever the world has turned black toyou in such a situation and the moon gone in behind a cloud, thinkof George Bevan and what he was up against. You are at least on thespot. You can at least put up a fight. If there are ukuleles in theworld, there are also guitars, and tomorrow it may be you and nothe who sits on the moonlit porch; it may be he and not you whoarrives late. Who knows? Tomorrow he may not show up till you havefinished the Bedouin's Love Song and are annoying the local birds,roosting in the trees, with Poor Butterfly.

  What I mean to say is, you are on the map. You have a sportingchance. Whereas George... Well, just go over to England and trywooing an earl's daughter whom you have only met once--and thenwithout an introduction; whose brother's hat you have smashedbeyond repair; whose family wishes her to marry some other man: whowants to marry some other man herself--and not the same other man,but another other man; who is closely immured in a mediaeval castle. . . Well, all I say is--try it. And then go back to your porchwith a chastened spirit and admit that you might be a whole lotworse off.

  George, as I say, had not envisaged the peculiar difficulties ofhis position. Nor did he until the evening of his second day at theMarshmoreton Arms. Until then, as I have indicated, he roamed in agolden mist of dreamy meditation among the soothing by-ways of thevillage of Belpher. But after lunch on the second day it came uponhim that all this sort of thing was pleasant but not practical.Action was what was needed. Action.

  The first, the obvious move was to locate the castle. Inquiries atthe Marshmoreton Arms elicited the fact that it was "a step" up theroad that ran past the front door of the inn. But this wasn't theday of the week when the general public was admitted. Thesightseer could invade Belpher Castle on Thursdays only, betweenthe hours of two and four. On other days of the week all he coulddo was to stand like Moses on Pisgah and take in the general effectfrom a distance. As this was all that George had hoped to be ableto do, he set forth.

  It speedily became evident to George that "a step" was a euphemism.Five miles did he tramp before, trudging wearily up a winding lane,he came out on a breeze-swept hill-top, and saw below him, nestlingin its trees, what was now for him the centre of the world. He saton a stone wall and lit a pipe. Belpher Castle. Maud's home. Thereit was. And now what?

  The first thought that came to him was practical, even prosaic--the thought that he couldn't possibly do this five-miles-thereand-five-miles-back walk, every t
ime he wanted to see the place.He must shift his base nearer the scene of operations. One of thosetrim, thatched cottages down there in the valley would be just thething, if he could arrange to take possession of it. They sat thereall round the castle, singly and in groups, like small dogs roundtheir master. They looked as if they had been there for centuries.Probably they had, as they were made of stone as solid as that ofthe castle. There must have been a time, thought George, when thecastle was the central rallying-point for all those scatteredhomes; when rumour of danger from marauders had sent all thatlittle community scuttling for safety to the sheltering walls.

  For the first time since he had set out on his expedition, acertain chill, a discomforting sinking of the heart, afflictedGeorge as he gazed down at the grim grey fortress which he hadundertaken to storm. So must have felt those marauders of old whenthey climbed to the top of this very hill to spy out the land. AndGeorge's case was even worse than theirs. They could at least hopethat a strong arm and a stout heart would carry them past thosesolid walls; they had not to think of social etiquette. WhereasGeorge was so situated that an unsympathetic butler could put him torout by refusing him admittance.

  The evening was drawing in. Already, in the brief time he had spenton the hill-top, the sky had turned from blue to saffron and fromsaffron to grey. The plaintive voices of homing cows floated up tohim from the valley below. A bat had left its shelter and waswheeling around him, a sinister blot against the sky. A sickle moongleamed over the trees. George felt cold. He turned. The shadowsof night wrapped him round, and little things in the hedgerowschirped and chittered mockery at him as he stumbled down the lane.

  George's request for a lonely furnished cottage somewhere in theneighbourhood of the castle did not, as he had feared, strike theBelpher house-agent as the demand of a lunatic. Every well-dressedstranger who comes to Belpher is automatically set down by thenatives as an artist, for the picturesqueness of the place hascaused it to be much infested by the brothers and sisters of thebrush. In asking for a cottage, indeed, George did precisely asBelpher society expected him to do; and the agent was reaching forhis list almost before the words were out of his mouth. In lessthan half an hour George was out in the street again, the owner forthe season of what the agent described as a "gem" and the employerof a farmer's wife who lived near-by and would, as was her customwith artists, come in the morning and evening to "do" for him. Theinterview would have taken but a few minutes, had it not beenprolonged by the chattiness of the agent on the subject of theoccupants of the castle, to which George listened attentively. Hewas not greatly encouraged by what he heard of Lord Marshmoreton.The earl had made himself notably unpopular in the village recentlyby his firm--the house-agent said "pig-headed"--attitude in respectto a certain dispute about a right-of-way. It was Lady Caroline,and not the easy-going peer, who was really to blame in the matter;but the impression that George got from the house-agent'sdescription of Lord Marshmoreton was that the latter was a sort ofNero, possessing, in addition to the qualities of a Roman tyrant,many of the least lovable traits of the ghila monster of Arizona.Hearing this about her father, and having already had the privilegeof meeting her brother and studying him at first hand, his heartbled for Maud. It seemed to him that existence at the castle insuch society must be little short of torture.

  "I must do something," he muttered. "I must do something quick."

  "Beg pardon," said the house-agent.

  "Nothing," said George. "Well, I'll take that cottage. I'd betterwrite you a cheque for the first month's rent now."

  So George took up his abode, full of strenuous--if vague--purpose,in the plainly-furnished but not uncomfortable cottage knownlocally as "the one down by Platt's." He might have found a worsebillet. It was a two-storied building of stained red brick, not oneof the thatched nests on which he had looked down from the hill.Those were not for rent, being occupied by families whose ancestorshad occupied them for generations back. The one down by Platt'swas a more modern structure--a speculation, in fact, of the farmerwhose wife came to "do" for George, and designed especially toaccommodate the stranger who had the desire and the money to rentit. It so departed from type that it possessed a small butundeniable bath-room. Besides this miracle, there was a cosysitting-room, a larger bedroom on the floor above and next to thisan empty room facing north, which had evidently served artistoccupants as a studio. The remainder of the ground floor was takenup by kitchen and scullery. The furniture had been constructed bysomebody who would probably have done very well if he had taken upsome other line of industry; but it was mitigated by a very fineand comfortable wicker easy chair, left there by one of last year'sartists; and other artists had helped along the good work byrelieving the plainness of the walls with a landscape or two. Infact, when George had removed from the room two antimacassars,three group photographs of the farmer's relations, an illuminatedtext, and a china statuette of the Infant Samuel, and stacked themin a corner of the empty studio, the place became almost a homefrom home.

  Solitude can be very unsolitary if a man is in love. George nevereven began to be bored. The only thing that in any way troubled hispeace was the thought that he was not accomplishing a great deal inthe matter of helping Maud out of whatever trouble it was that hadbefallen her. The most he could do was to prowl about roads nearthe castle in the hope of an accidental meeting. And such was hisgood fortune that, on the fourth day of his vigil, the accidentalmeeting occurred.

  Taking his morning prowl along the lanes, he was rewarded by thesight of a grey racing-car at the side of the road. It was empty,but from underneath it protruded a pair of long legs, while besideit stood a girl, at the sight of whom George's heart began to thumpso violently that the long-legged one might have been pardoned hadhe supposed that his engine had started again of its own volition.

  Until he spoke the soft grass had kept her from hearing hisapproach. He stopped close behind her, and cleared his throat. Shestarted and turned, and their eyes met.

  For a moment hers were empty of any recognition. Then they lit up.She caught her breath quickly, and a faint flush came into herface.

  "Can I help you?" asked George.

  The long legs wriggled out into the road followed by a long body.The young man under the car sat up, turning a grease-streaked andpleasant face to George.

  "Eh, what?"

  "Can I help you? I know how to fix a car."

  The young man beamed in friendly fashion.

  "It's awfully good of you, old chap, but so do I. It's the onlything I can do well. Thanks very much and so forth all the same."

  George fastened his eyes on the girl's. She had not spoken.

  "If there is anything in the world I can possibly do for you," hesaid slowly, "I hope you will let me know. I should like above allthings to help you."

  The girl spoke.

  "Thank you," she said in a low voice almost inaudible.

  George walked away. The grease-streaked young man followed him withhis gaze.

  "Civil cove, that," he said. "Rather gushing though, what?American, wasn't he?"

  "Yes. I think he was."

  "Americans are the civillest coves I ever struck. I remember askingthe way of a chappie at Baltimore a couple of years ago when I wasthere in my yacht, and he followed me for miles, shrieking adviceand encouragement. I thought it deuced civil of him."

  "I wish you would hurry up and get the car right, Reggie. We shallbe awfully late for lunch."

  Reggie Byng began to slide backwards under the car.

  "All right, dear heart. Rely on me. It's something quite simple."

  "Well, do be quick."

  "Imitation of greased lightning--very difficult," said Reggieencouragingly. "Be patient. Try and amuse yourself somehow. Askyourself a riddle. Tell yourself a few anecdotes. I'll be with youin a moment. I say, I wonder what the cove is doing at Belpher?Deuced civil cove," said Reggie approvingly. "I liked him. And now,business of repairing breakdown."

  His smiling face vanished under the car lik
e the Cheshire cat.Maud stood looking thoughtfully down the road in the direction inwhich George had disappeared.