The subeditor had done his work well. He had not been ambiguous. What he intended to convey to the reader was that Miss Aline Peters, of America, was going to marry the Honorable Frederick Threepwood, son of the Earl of Emsworth; and that was exactly the impression the average reader got.
George Emerson, however, was not an average reader. The subeditor’s work did not impress him.
“You mustn’t believe everything you see in the papers,” he said. “What are the stout children in the one-piece bathing suits supposed to be doing?”
“Those are Cupids, George, aiming at us with their little bow—a pretty and original idea.”
“Why Cupids?”
“Cupid is the god of love.”
“What has the god of love got to do with it?”
Aline placidly devoured a fried potato. “You’re simply trying to make me angry,” she said; “and I call it very mean of you. You know perfectly well how fatal it is to get angry at meals. It was eating while he was in a bad temper that ruined father’s digestion. George, that nice, fat carver is wheeling his truck this way. Flag him and make him give me some more of that mutton.”
George looked round him morosely.
“This,” he said, “is England—this restaurant, I mean. You don’t need to go any farther. Just take a good look at this place and you have seen the whole country and can go home again. You may judge a country by its meals. A people with imagination will eat with imagination. Look at the French; look at ourselves, The Englishman loathes imagination. He goes to a place like this and says: ‘Don’t bother me to think. Here’s half a dollar. Give me food—any sort of food—until I tell you to stop.’ And that’s the principle on which he lives his life. ‘Give me anything, and don’t bother me!’ That’s his motto.”
“If that was meant to apply to Freddie and me, I think you’re very rude. Do you mean that any girl would have done for him, so long as it was a girl?”
George Emerson showed a trace of confusion. Being honest with himself, he had to admit that he did not exactly know what he did mean—if he meant anything. That, he felt rather bitterly, was the worst of Aline. She would never let a fellow’s good things go purely as good things; she probed and questioned and spoiled the whole effect. He was quite sure that when he began to speak he had meant something, but what it was escaped him for the moment. He had been urged to the homily by the fact that at a neighboring table he had caught sight of a stout young Briton, with a red face, who reminded him of the Honorable Frederick Threepwood. He mentioned this to Aline.
“Do you see that fellow in the gray suit—I think he has been sleeping in it—at the table on your right? Look at the stodgy face. See the glassy eye. If that man sandbagged your Freddie and tied him up somewhere, and turned up at the church instead of him, can you honestly tell me you would know the difference? Come, now, wouldn’t you simply say, ‘Why, Freddie, how natural you look!’ and go through the ceremony without a suspicion?”
“He isn’t a bit like Freddie.”
“My dear girl, there isn’t a man in this restaurant under the age of thirty who isn’t just like Freddie. All Englishmen look exactly alike, talk exactly alike, and think exactly alike.”
“And you oughtn’t to speak of him as Freddie. You don’t know him.”
“Yes, I do. And, what is more, he expressly asked me to call him Freddie. ‘Oh, dash it, old top, don’t keep on calling me Threepwood! Freddie to pals!’ Those were his very words.”
“George, you’re making this up.”
“Not at all. We met last night at the National Sporting Club. Porky Jones was going twenty rounds with Eddie Flynn. I offered to give three to one on Eddie. Freddie, who was sitting next to me, took me in fivers. And if you want any further proof of your young man’s pin-headedness; mark that! A child could have seen that Eddie had him going. Eddie comes from Pittsburgh—God bless it! My own home town!”
“Did your Eddie win?”
“You don’t listen—I told you he was from Pittsburgh. And afterward Threepwood chummed up with me and told me that to real pals like me he was Freddie. I was a real pal, as I understood it, because I would have to wait for my money. The fact was, he explained, his old governor had cut off his bally allowance.”
“You’re simply trying to poison my mind against him; and I don’t think it’s very nice of you, George.”
“What do you mean—poison your mind? I’m not poisoning your mind; I’m simply telling you a few things about him. You know perfectly well that you don’t love him, and that you aren’t going to marry him—and that you are going to marry me.”
“How do you know I don’t love my Freddie?”
“If you can look me straight in the eyes and tell me you do, I will drop the whole thing and put on a little page’s dress and carry your train up the aisle. Now, then!”
“And all the while you’re talking you’re letting my carver get away,” said Aline.
George called to the willing priest, who steered his truck toward them. Aline directed his dissection of the shoulder of mutton by word and gesture.
“Enjoy yourself!” said Emerson coldly.
“So I do, George; so I do. What excellent meat they have in England!”
“It all comes from America,” said George patriotically. “And, anyway, can’t you be a bit more spiritual? I don’t want to sit here discussing food products.”
“If you were in my position, George, you wouldn’t want to talk about anything else. It’s doing him a world of good, poor dear; but there are times when I’m sorry Father ever started this food-reform thing. You don’t know what it means for a healthy young girl to try and support life on nuts and grasses.”
“And why should you?” broke out Emerson. “I’ll tell you what it is, Aline—you are perfectly absurd about your father. I don’t want to say anything against him to you, naturally; but—”
“Go ahead, George. Why this diffidence? Say what you like.”
“Very well, then, I will. I’ll give it to you straight. You know quite well that you have let your father bully you since you were in short frocks. I don’t say it is your fault or his fault, or anybody’s fault; I just state it as a fact. It’s temperament, I suppose. You are yielding and he is aggressive; and he has taken advantage of it.
“We now come to this idiotic Freddie-marriage business. Your father has forced you into that. It’s all very well to say that you are a free agent and that fathers don’t coerce their daughters nowadays. The trouble is that your father does. You let him do what he likes with you. He has got you hypnotized; and you won’t break away from this Freddie foolishness because you can’t find the nerve. I’m going to help you find the nerve. I’m coming down to Blandings Castle when you go there on Friday.”
“Coming to Blandings!”
“Freddie invited me last night. I think it was done by way of interest on the money he owed me; but he did it and I accepted.”
“But, George, my dear boy, do you never read the etiquette books and the hints in the Sunday papers on how to be the perfect gentleman? Don’t you know you can’t be a man’s guest and take advantage of his hospitality to try to steal his fiancee away from him?”
“Watch me.”
A dreamy look came into Aline’s eyes. “I wonder what it feels like, being a countess,” she said.
“You will never know.” George looked at her pityingly. “My poor girl,” he said, “have you been lured into this engagement in the belief that pop-eyed Frederick, the Idiot Child, is going to be an earl some day? You have been stung! Freddie is not the heir. His older brother, Lord Bosham, is as fit as a prize-fighter and has three healthy sons. Freddie has about as much chance of getting the title as I have.”
“George, your education has been sadly neglected. Don’t you know that the heir to the title always goes on a yachting cruise, with his whole family, and gets drowned—and the children too? It happens in every English novel you read.”
“Listen, Aline! Let us get
this thing straight: I have been in love with you since I wore knickerbockers. I proposed to you at your first dance—”
“Very clumsily.”
“But sincerely. Last year, when I found that you had gone to England, I came on after you as soon as the firm could spare me. And I found you engaged to this Freddie excrescence.”
“I like the way you stand up for Freddie. So many men in your position might say horrid things about him.”
“Oh, I’ve nothing against Freddie. He is practically an imbecile and I don’t like his face; outside of that he’s all right. But you will be glad later that you did not marry him. You are much too real a person. What a wife you will make for a hard-working man!”
“What does Freddie work hard at?”
“I am alluding at the moment not to Freddie but to myself. I shall come home tired out. Maybe things will have gone wrong downtown. I shall be fagged, disheartened. And then you will come with your cool, white hands and, placing them gently on my forehead—”
Aline shook her head. “It’s no good, George. Really, you had better realize it. I’m very fond of you, but we are not suited!”
“Why not?”
“You are too overwhelming—too much like a bomb. I think you must be one of the supermen one reads about. You would want your own way and nothing but your own way. Now, Freddie will roll through hoops and sham dead, and we shall be the happiest pair in the world. I am much too placid and mild to make you happy. You want somebody who would stand up to you—somebody like Joan Valentine.”
“That’s the second time you have mentioned this Joan Valentine. Who is she?”
“She is a girl who was at school with me. We were the greatest chums—at least, I worshiped her and would have done anything for her; and I think she liked me. Then we lost touch with one another and didn’t meet for years. I met her on the street yesterday, and she is just the same. She has been through the most awful times. Her father was quite rich; he died suddenly while he and Joan were in Paris, and she found that he hadn’t left a cent. He had been living right up to his income all the time. His life wasn’t even insured. She came to London; and, so far as I could make out from the short talk we had, she has done pretty nearly everything since we last met. She worked in a shop and went on the stage, and all sorts of things. Isn’t it awful, George!”
“Pretty tough,” said Emerson. He was but faintly interested in Miss Valentine.
“She is so plucky and full of life. She would stand up to you.”
“Thanks! My idea of marriage is not a perpetual scrap. My notion of a wife is something cozy and sympathetic and soothing. That is why I love you. We shall be the happiest—”
Aline laughed.
“Dear old George! Now pay the check and get me a taxi. I’ve endless things to do at home. If Freddie is in town I suppose he will be calling to see me. Who is Freddie, do you ask? Freddie is my fiance, George. My betrothed. My steady. The young man I’m going to marry.”
Emerson shook his head resignedly. “Curious how you cling to that Freddie idea. Never mind! I’ll come down to Blandings on Friday and we shall see what happens. Bear in mind the broad fact that you and I are going to be married, and that nothing on earth is going to stop us.”
* * *
It was Aline Peters who had to bear the brunt of her father’s mental agony when he discovered, shortly after Lord Emsworth had left him, that the gem of his collection of scarabs had done the same. It is always the innocent bystander who suffers.
“The darned old sneak thief!” said Mr. Peters.
“Father!”
“Don’t sit there saying ‘Father!’ What’s the use of saying ‘Father!’? Do you think it is going to help—your saying ‘Father!’? I’d rather the old pirate had taken the house and lot than that scarab. He knows what’s what! Trust him to walk off with the pick of the whole bunch! I did think I could leave the father of the man who’s going to marry my daughter for a second alone with the things. There’s no morality among collectors—none! I’d trust a syndicate of Jesse James, Captain Kidd and Dick Turpin sooner than I would a collector. My Cheops of the Fourth Dynasty! I wouldn’t have lost it for five thousand dollars!”
“But, father, couldn’t you write him a letter, asking for it back? He’s such a nice old man! I’m sure he didn’t mean to steal the scarab.”
Mr. Peters’ overwrought soul blew off steam in the shape of a passionate snort.
“Didn’t mean to steal it! What do you think he meant to do—take it away and keep it safe for me for fear I should lose it? Didn’t mean to steal it! Bet you he’s well-known in society as a kleptomaniac. Bet you that when his name is announced his friends pick up their spoons and send in a hurry call to police headquarters for a squad to come and see that he doesn’t sneak the front door. Of course he meant to steal it! He has a museum of his own down in the country. My Cheops is going to lend tone to that. I’d give five thousand dollars to get it back. If there’s a man in this country with the spirit to break into that castle and steal that scarab and hand it back to me, there’s five thousand waiting for him right here; and if he wants to he can knock that old safe blower on the head with a jimmy into the bargain.”
“But, father, why can’t you simply go to him and say it’s yours and that you must have it back?”
“And have him come back at me by calling off this engagement of yours? Not if I know it! You can’t go about the place charging a man with theft and ask him to go on being willing to have his son marry your daughter, can you? The slightest suggestion that I thought he had stolen this scarab and he would do the Proud Old English Aristocrat and end everything. He’s in the strongest position a thief has ever been in. You can’t get at him.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
“You don’t think at all. That’s the trouble with you,” said Mr. Peters.
Years of indigestion had made Mr. Peters’ temper, even when in a normal mood, perfectly impossible; in a crisis like this it ran amuck. He vented it on Aline because he had always vented his irritabilities on Aline; because the fact of her sweet, gentle disposition, combined with the fact of their relationship, made her the ideal person to receive the overflow of his black moods. While his wife had lived he had bullied her. On her death Aline had stepped into the vacant position.
Aline did not cry, because she was not a girl who was given to tears; but, for all her placid good temper, she was wounded. She was a girl who liked everything in the world to run smoothly and easily, and these scenes with her father always depressed her. She took advantage of a lull in Mr. Peters’ flow of words and slipped from the room.
Her cheerfulness had received a shock. She wanted sympathy. She wanted comforting. For a moment she considered George Emerson in the role of comforter; but there were objections to George in this character. Aline was accustomed to tease and chat with George, but at heart she was a little afraid of him; and instinct told her that, as comforter, he would be too volcanic and supermanly for a girl who was engaged to marry another man in June. George, as comforter, would be far too prone to trust to action rather than to the soothing power of the spoken word. George’s idea of healing the wound, she felt, would be to push her into a cab and drive to the nearest registrar’s.
No; she would not go to George. To whom, then? The vision of Joan Valentine came to her—of Joan as she had seen her yesterday, strong, cheerful, self-reliant, bearing herself, in spite of adversity, with a valiant jauntiness. Yes; she would go and see Joan. She put on her hat and stole from the house.
Curiously enough, only a quarter of an hour before, R. Jones had set out with exactly the same object in view.
* * *
At almost exactly the hour when Aline Peters set off to visit her friend, Miss Valentine, three men sat in the cozy smoking-room of Blandings Castle.
They were variously occupied. In the big chair nearest the door the Honorable Frederick Threepwood—Freddie to pals—was reading. Next to him sat a young man whose ey
es, glittering through rimless spectacles, were concentrated on the upturned faces of several neat rows of playing cards—Rupert Baxter, Lord Emsworth’s invaluable secretary, had no vices, but he sometimes relaxed his busy brain with a game of solitaire. Beyond Baxter, a cigar in his mouth and a weak highball at his side, the Earl of Emsworth took his ease.
The book the Honorable Freddie was reading was a small paper-covered book. Its cover was decorated with a color scheme in red, black and yellow, depicting a tense moment in the lives of a man with a black beard, a man with a yellow beard, a man without any beard at all, and a young woman who, at first sight, appeared to be all eyes and hair. The man with the black beard, to gain some private end, had tied this young woman with ropes to a complicated system of machinery, mostly wheels and pulleys. The man with the yellow beard was in the act of pushing or pulling a lever. The beardless man, protruding through a trapdoor in the floor, was pointing a large revolver at the parties of the second part.
Beneath this picture were the words: “Hands up, you scoundrels!”
Above it, in a meandering scroll across the page, was: “Gridley Quayle, Investigator. The Adventure of the Secret Six. By Felix Clovelly.”
The Honorable Freddie did not so much read as gulp the adventure of the Secret Six. His face was crimson with excitement; his hair was rumpled; his eyes bulged. He was absorbed.
This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if we do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers. Grave and earnest men, at Eton and elsewhere, had tried Freddie Threepwood with Greek, with Latin and with English; and the sheeplike stolidity with which he declined to be interested in the masterpieces of all three tongues had left them with the conviction that he would never read anything.
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