The building has its scores of windows, but pay no attention to those on the first two floors, for there are only editors and things behind them. Concentrate the eye on the three in the middle of the third floor. These belong to Lord Tilbury’s private office, and there is just a chance, if you wait, that you may catch a glimpse of him leaning out to get a breath of air, than which nothing could be more calculated to make a sightseer’s day.
This morning, however, you would have been out of luck, for Lord Tilbury was sitting motionless at his desk. He had been sitting there for some little time. There were a hundred letters he should have been dictating to Millicent Rigby, his secretary, but Millicent remained in the outer office, undictated to. There were a dozen editors with whom he should have been conferring, but they stayed where they were, unconferred with.
He was deep in thought, and anyone seeing him would have asked himself with awe what it was that was occupying that giant mind. He might have been planning out some pronouncement which would shake the chancelleries, or pondering on the most suitable line to take in connexion with the latest rift in the Cabinet, or even, for he took a personal interest in all his publications, considering changes in the policy of Wee Tots, the journal which has done so much to mould thought in the British nursery. In actual fact, he was musing on Empress of Blandings.
In the life of every successful man there is always some little something missing. Lord Tilbury had wealth and power and the comforting knowledge that, catering as he did for readers who had all been mentally arrested at the age of twelve, he would continue to enjoy these indefinitely, but he had not got Empress of Blandings: and ever since the day when he and that ornament of her sex had met he had yearned to add her to his Buckinghamshire piggery. That was how the pig-minded always reacted to even the briefest glance at the Empress. They came, saw, gasped and went away unhappy and discontented, ever after, to move through life bemused, like men kissed by goddesses in dreams.
His sombre thoughts were broken in upon by the ringing of the telephone. Moodily he took up the receiver.
‘Hoy!’ shouted a voice in his ear, and he had no difficulty in identifying the speaker. He had a wide circle of acquaintances, but the Duke of Dunstable was the only member of it who opened conversations with this monosyllable in a booming tone reminiscent of a costermonger calling attention to his blood oranges. ‘Is that you, Stinker?’
Lord Tilbury frowned. There were only a few survivors of the old days who addressed him thus. Even in the distant past he had found the name distasteful, and now that he had become a man of distinction, it jarred upon him even more gratingly. In addition to frowning, he also swelled a good deal. He was a short, stout man who swelled readily when annoyed.
‘Lord Tilbury speaking,’ he said curtly, emphasizing the first two words. ‘Well?’
‘What?’ roared the Duke. He was a little deaf in the right ear.
‘Well?’
‘Speak up, Stinker. Don’t mumble.’
Lord Tilbury raised his voice to an almost Duke-like pitch.
‘I said “Well?”.’
‘Well?’
‘Yes.’
‘Damn silly thing to say,’ said the Duke and Lord Tilbury’s frown deepened.
‘What is it, Dunstable?’
‘Eh?’
‘What is it?’
‘What is what?’
‘What do you want?’ Lord Tilbury rasped, the band gripping the receiver about to crash it back on its cradle.’
‘It’s not what I want,’ bellowed the Duke. ‘It’s what you want. I’ve got that pig.’
‘What!’
‘What?’
Lord Tilbury did not reply. He had stiffened in his chair and presented the appearance of somebody in a fairy story who had had a spell cast upon him by the local wizard. His silence offended the Duke, never a patient man.
‘Are you there, Stinker?’ he roared, and Lord Tilbury thought for a moment that his ear drum had gone.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said, removing the receiver for a moment in order to massage his ear.
‘Then why the devil don’t you utter?’
‘I was overcome.’
‘What?’
‘I could hardly believe it. You have really persuaded Emsworth to sell you Empress of Blandings?’
‘We came to an arrangement. Is that offer of yours still open?’
‘Of course, of course.’
‘Two thousand, cash down?’
‘Certainly.’
‘What?’
‘I said certainly.’
‘Then you’d better come here and collect the animal.’
‘I will. I’ll —’
Lord Tilbury paused. He was thinking of all the correspondence he should have been dictating to Millicent Rigby. Could he neglect this? Then he saw the solution. He could take Millicent Rigby with him. He pressed a bell. His secretary entered.
‘Where do you live, Miss Rigby?’
‘Shepherd Market, Lord Tilbury.’
‘Take a taxi, go and pack some things for the night, and come back here. We’re driving down to Shropshire.’ He spoke into the telephone. ‘Are you there, Dunstable?’
Something not unlike an explosion in an ammunition dump made itself heard at the other end of the line.
‘Are you there, blast your gizzard? What’s the matter? Can’t get a word out of you.’
‘I was speaking to my secretary.’
‘Well, don’t. Do you realize what these trunk calls cost?’
‘I’m sorry. I am motoring down immediately. Where can I see you? I don’t want to come to the castle.’
‘Put up at the Emsworth Arms in Market Blandings. I’ll meet you there.’
‘I’ll be waiting for you.’
‘What?’
‘I said I’ll be waiting for you.’
‘What?’
Lord Tilbury gritted his teeth. He was feeling hot and exhausted. That was the effect the other’s telephone technique often had on people.
2
Lavender Briggs had caught the 12.30 train at Paddington. It set her down on the platform of Market Blandings station shortly after four.
The day was warm and the journey had been stuffy and somewhat exhausting, but her mood was one of quiet contentment. She had enjoyed every minute of her visit to the metropolis. She had deposited the Duke’s cheque. She had dined with a group of earnest friends at the Crushed Pansy, the restaurant with a soul, and at the conclusion of the meal they had all gone on to the opening performance at the Flaming Youth Group Centre of one of those avant-garde plays which bring the scent of boiling cabbage across the footlights and in which the little man in the bowler hat turns out to be God. And she was confident that when she saw him the Reverend Cuthbert Bailey would have made up his mind, rather than be unmasked, to lend his services to the purloining of Lord Emsworth’s pig. It seemed to her that a cup of tea was indicated by way of celebration, and she made her way to the Emsworth Arms. There were other hostelries in Market Blandings — one does not forget the Goose and Gander, the Jolly Cricketers, the Wheatsheaf, the Waggoner’s Rest, the Beetle and Wedge and the Stitch in Time — but the Emsworth Arms was the only one where a lady could get a refined cup of tea with buttered toast and fancy cakes. Those other establishments catered more to the George Cyril Wellbeloved type of client and were content to say it with beer.
At the Emsworth Arms, moreover, you could have your refreshment served to you in the large garden which was one of the features of Market Blandings. Dotted about with rustic tables, it ran all the way down to the river, and there were few of the rustic tables that did not enjoy the shade of a spreading tree or a clump of bushes. The one Lavender Briggs selected was screened from view by a green mass of foliage, and she had chosen it because she wanted complete privacy in which to meditate on the very satisfactory state of her affairs. Elsewhere in the garden one’s thoughts were apt to be interrupted by family groups presided over by flushed mothers telling Wilfr
ed to stop teasing Katie or Percival to leave off making faces at Jane.
She had finished the cakes and the buttered toast and was sipping her third cup of tea, when from the other side of the bushes, where she had noticed a rustic table similar to her own, a voice spoke. All it said was ‘Two beers’, but at the sound of it she stiffened in her chair, some sixth sense telling her that if she listened, she might hear something of interest. For it was the Duke’s voice that had shattered the afternoon stillness, and there was only one thing that could have brought the Duke to Market Blandings, the desire for a conference with the mystery man who was prepared to go as high as two thousand pounds to acquire Lord Emsworth’s peerless pig.
A moment later a second voice spoke, and if Lavender Briggs had stiffened before, she stiffened doubly now. The words it had said were negligible, something about the warmth of the day, but they were enough to enable her to recognize the speaker as her former employer, Lord Tilbury of the Mammoth Publishing Company. She had taken too much dictation from those august lips in the past to allow of any misconception.
Rigid in her chair, she set herself to listen with, in the Duke’s powerful phrase, her ears sticking up.
3
Conversation on the other side of the bushes was for awhile desultory. With a waiter expected back at any moment with beer, two men who have serious matters to discuss do not immediately plumb the deeps, but confine themselves to small talk. Lord Tilbury said once more that the day was warm, and the Duke agreed. The Duke said he supposed it had been even warmer in London, and Lord Tilbury said Yes, much warmer. The Duke said it wasn’t the heat he minded so much as the humidity, and Lord Tilbury confessed that it was the humidity that troubled him also. Then the beer arrived, and the Duke flung himself on it with a grunt. He must have abandoned rather noticeably the gentlemanly restraint which one likes to see in Dukes when drinking beer, for Lord Tilbury said:
‘You seem thirsty. Did you walk from the castle?’
‘No, got a lift. Bit of luck. It’s a warm day.’
‘Yes, very warm.’
‘Humid, too.’
‘Very humid.’
‘It’s the humidity I don’t like.’
‘I don’t like the humidity either.’
Silence followed these intellectual exchanges. It was broken by a loud chuckle from the Duke.
‘Eh?’ said Lord Tilbury.
‘What?’ said the Duke. ‘Speak up, Stinker.’
‘I was merely wondering what it was that was amusing you,’ said Lord Tilbury frostily. ‘And I wish you wouldn’t call me Stinker. Somebody might hear.’
‘Let them.’
‘What the devil are you giggling about?’ demanded Lord Tilbury, as a second chuckle followed the first. He had never been fond of the Duke of Dunstable, and he felt that having to put up with his society, after a fatiguing journey from London, was a heavy price to pay even for Empress of Blandings.
The Duke was not a man who made a practice of disclosing his private affairs to every dashed Tom, Dick and Harry, and at another time and under different conditions would have been blowed if he was going to let himself be pumped by Stinker Pyke, or Lord Tilbury, as he now called himself. He mistrusted these newspaper fellers. You told them something in the strictest confidence, and the next thing you knew it was spread all over the gossip page with a six-inch headline at the top and probably a photograph of you, looking like someone the police were anxious to question in connexion with, the Dover Street smash-and-grab raid.
But he was now fairly full of the Emsworth Arms beer, and, as everybody who has tried it knows, there is something about the home-brewed beer purveyed by G. Ovens, landlord of the Emsworth Arms, that has a mellowing effect. What G. Ovens put into it is a secret between him and his Maker, but it acts like magic on the most reticent. With a pint of this elixir sloshing about inside him, it seemed to the Duke that it would be churlish not to share his happiness with a sympathetic crony.
‘Just put one over on a blasted female,’ he said.
‘Lady Constance?’ said Lord Tilbury, jumping to what suggested itself to him as the obvious conclusion. His visit to Blandings Castle had been a brief one, but it had enabled him to become well acquainted with his hostess.
‘No, not Connie. Connie’s all right. Potty, but a good enough soul. This was Emsworth’s secretary, a frightful woman of the ghastly name of Briggs. Lavender Briggs,’ said the Duke, as if that made it worse.
Something stirred at the back of Lord Tilbury’s mind.
‘Lavender Briggs? I had a secretary named Briggs, and I seem to have a recollection of hearing someone address her as Lavender.’
‘Beastly name.’.
‘And quite unsuited to a woman of her appearance, if it’s the same woman. Is she (all and ungainly?’
‘Very.’
‘With harlequin glasses?’
‘If that’s what you call them.’
‘Large feet?’
‘Enormous.’
‘Hair like seaweed?’
‘Just like seaweed. And talks rot all the time about dusty answers.’
‘I never heard her do that, but from your description it must be the same woman. I sacked her.’
‘You couldn’t have done better.’
‘She had a way of looking at me as if I were some kind of worm, and I frequently caught her sniffing. Well, I wasn’t going to put up with that sort of thing. She was an excellent secretary as far as her work was concerned, but I told her she had to go. So she is with Emsworth now? He has my sympathy. But you were saying that you had — ah — put one over on her. How was that?’
‘It’s a long story. She tried to get five hundred pounds out of me.’
Lord Tilbury seemed for a moment bewildered. Then’ he understood. He was a quick-witted man.
‘Breach of promise, eh? Odd that you should have been attracted by a hideous woman like Lavender Briggs. Her glasses alone, one would have thought … However, there is no accounting for these sudden infatuations, though one would have expected a man of your age to have had more sense. No fool like an old fool, as they say. Well, if she could prove this breach of promise — had letters and so forth — I think you got off cheap, and it should be a valuable lesson to you.’
There is just this one thing more to be said about G. Ovens’ home-brewed beer. If you want to preserve that mellow fondness for all mankind which it imparts, you have to go on drinking it. The Duke, having had only a single pint, was unable to retain the feeling that Lord Tilbury was a staunch friend from whom he could have no secrets. He was conscious of a vivid dislike for him, and couldn’t imagine why a gracious sovereign had bestowed a barony on a man like that. Lavender Briggs, leaning forward, alert not to miss a word, nearly fell out of her chair, so loud was the snort that rang through the garden. When the Duke of Dunstable snorted, he held back nothing but gave it all he had.
‘It wasn’t breach of promise!’
‘What was it, then?’
‘If you want to know, she said she knew where she could lay her hands on a couple of willing helpers who would pinch Emsworth’s pig for me, so I engaged her services, and she demanded five hundred pounds for the job, cash down in advance, and I gave her a cheque for that sum.’
‘Well, really!’
‘What do you mean, Well, really? She wouldn’t settle for less.’
‘Then so far it would seem that she is the one who has put something over, as you express it.’
‘That’s what she thought, but she was mistaken. Immediately after coming to that arrangement I spoke of with Emsworth I got in touch with my bank and stopped the cheque. I telephoned the blighters and told them I’d scoop out their insides with my bare hands if they coughed up so much as a penny of it. I’d like to see her face when it comes back marked “Refer to drawer”.’
It seemed to Lord Tilbury that from somewhere near at hand, as it might have been from behind those bushes near which he was sitting, there had come a sudden gasping soun
d as if uttered by some soul in agony, but he paid little attention to it. He was following a train of thought.
‘So you have not had to pay anything for the pig?’
‘Not a bean.’
‘Then you ought to let me have it cheaper.’
‘You think so, do you? Well, let me tell you, Stinker,’ said the Duke, who had been deeply offended by his companion’s remark about old fools, ‘that my price for that pig has gone up. It’s three thousand now.’
‘What!’
‘That’s what it is. Three thousand pounds.’
A sudden hush seemed to have fallen on the garden of the Emsworth Arms. It was as though it and everything in it had been stunned into silence. Birds stopped chirping. Butterflies froze in mid-flutter. Wasps wading in strawberry jam paused motionless, as if they were having their photographs taken. And the general paralysis extended to Lord Tilbury. It was an appreciable time before he spoke. When he did, it was in the hoarse voice of a man unable to believe that he has heard correctly.
‘You’re joking!’
‘Like blazes I’m joking.’
‘You expect me to pay three thousand pounds for a pig?’
‘If you want the ruddy pig.’
‘What about our gentlemen’s agreement?’
‘Gentlemen’s agreements be blowed. If you care to meet my terms,’ the porker’s yours. If you don’t, I’ll sell it back to Emsworth. No doubt he’ll be glad to have it, even if the price is stiff. I’ll leave you to think it over, Stinker. No skin off my nose,’ said the Duke, ‘whichever way you decide.’
Chapter Nine
1
A man who has built up a vast business, starting from nothing, must of necessity be a man capable of making swift decisions, and until this moment Lord Tilbury had never had any difficulty in doing so. His masterful handling of the hundred and one problems that arise daily in a concern like the Mammoth Publishing Company was a byword in Fleet Street.
Service With a Smile Page 12