‘You know perfectly well.’
‘If you mean that I was reminding Galahad in the most delicate way that poor Baxter here is not quite . . .’
‘Clarence!’
‘All very well to say “Clarence!” like that. You know yourself he isn’t right in the head. Didn’t he throw flower-pots at me? Didn’t he leap out of the window this very afternoon? Didn’t he try to make me think that Beach . . .’
Baxter interrupted. There were certain matters on which he considered silence best, but this was one on which he could speak freely.
‘Lord Emsworth!’
‘Eh?’
‘It has now come to my knowledge that Beach was not the prime mover in the theft of your pig. But I have ascertained that he was an accessory.’
‘A what?’
‘He helped,’ said Baxter, grinding his teeth a little. ‘The man who committed the actual theft was your nephew Ronald.’
Lord Emsworth turned to his sister with a triumphant gesture, like one who has been vindicated.
‘There! Now perhaps you’ll say he’s not potty? It won’t do, Baxter, my dear fellow,’ he went on, waggling a reproachful gun at his late employee. You really mustn’t excite yourself by making up these stories.’
‘Bad for the blood-pressure,’ agreed the Hon. Galahad.
‘The Empress was found this evening in your caravan,’ said Lord Emsworth.
‘What!’
‘In your caravan. Where you put her when you stole her. And, bless my soul,’ said Lord Emsworth, with a start, ‘I must be going and seeing that she is put back in her sty. I must find Pirbright. I must . . .’
‘In my caravan?’ Baxter passed a feverish hand across his dust-stained forehead. Illumination came to him. ‘Then that’s what that fellow Carmody did with the animal!’
Lord Emsworth had had enough of this. Empress of Bland-ings was waiting for him. Counting the minutes to that holy reunion, he chafed at having to stand here listening to these wild ravings.
‘First Beach, then Ronald, then Carmody! You’ll be saying I stole her next, or Galahad here, or my sister Constance. Baxter, my dear fellow, we aren’t blaming you. Please don’t think that. We quite see how it is. You will overwork yourself, and, of course, nature demands the penalty. I wish you would go quietly to your room, my dear fellow, and lie down. All this must be very bad for you.’
Lady Constance intervened. Her eye was aflame, and she spoke like Cleopatra telling an Ethiopian slave where he got off.
‘Clarence, will you kindly use whatever slight intelligence you may possess? The theft of your pig is one of the most trivial and unimportant things that ever happened in this world, and I consider the fuss that has been made about it quite revolting. But whoever stole the wretched animal . . .’
Lord Emsworth blenched. He started as if wondering if he had heard aright.
‘. . . and wherever it has been found, it was certainly not Mr Baxter who stole it. It is, as Mr Baxter says, much more likely to have been a young man like Mr Carmody. There is a certain type of young man, I believe, to which Mr Carmody belongs, which considers practical joking amusing. Do ask yourself, Clarence, and try to answer the question as reasonably as is possible for a man of your mental calibre: What earthly motive would Mr Baxter have for coming to Blandings Castle and stealing pigs?’
It may have been the feel of the gun in his hand which awoke in Lord Emsworth old memories of dashing days with the Shropshire Yeomanry and lent him some of the hot spirit of his vanished youth. The fact remains that he did not wilt beneath his sister’s dominating eye. He met it boldly, and boldly answered back.
‘And ask yourself, Constance,’ he said, ‘what earthly motive Mr Baxter has for anything he does.’
‘Yes,’ said the Hon. Galahad loyally. ‘What motive had our friend Baxter for coming to Blandings Castle and scaring girls stiff by hiding under beds?’
Lady Constance gulped. They had found the weak spot in her defences. She turned to the man who she still hoped could deal efficiently with this attack.
‘Mr Baxter!’ she said, as if she were calling on him for an after-dinner speech.
But Rupert Baxter had had no dinner. And it was perhaps this that turned the scale. Quite suddenly there descended on him a frenzied desire to be out of this, cost what it might. An hour before, half an hour before, even five minutes before, his tongue had been tied by a still lingering hope that he might yet find his way back to Blandings Castle in the capacity of private secretary to the Earl of Emsworth. Now, he felt that he would not accept that post, were it offered to him on bended knee.
A sudden overpowering hatred of Blandings Castle and all it contained gripped the Efficient Baxter. He marvelled that he had ever wanted to come back. He held at the present moment the well-paid and responsible position of secretary and adviser to J. Horace Jevons, the American millionaire, a man who not only treated him with an obsequiousness and respect which were balm to his soul, but also gave him such sound advice on the investment of money that already he had trebled his savings. And it was this golden-hearted Chicagoan whom he had been thinking of deserting, purely to satisfy some obscure sentiment which urged him to return to a house which, he now saw, he loathed as few houses have been loathed since human beings left off living in caves.
His eyes flashed through their lenses. His mouth tightened.
‘I will explain!’
‘I knew you would have an explanation,’ cried Lady Constance.
‘I have. A very simple one.’
And short, I hope?’ asked Lord Emsworth, restlessly. He was aching to have done with all this talk and discussion and to be with his pig once more. To think of the Empress languishing in a beastly caravan was agony to him.
‘Quite short,’ said Rupert Baxter.
The only person in the room who so far had remained entirely outside this rather painful scene was Sue. She had looked on from her place by the window, an innocent bystander. She now found herself drawn abruptly into the maelstrom of the debate. Baxter’s spectacles were raking her from head to foot, and he had pointed at her with an accusing forefinger.
‘I came to this room,’ he said, ‘to try to recover a letter which I had written to this lady who calls herself Miss Schoonmaker.’
‘Of course she calls herself Miss Schoonmaker,’ said Lord Emsworth, reluctantly dragging his thoughts from the Empress. ‘It’s her name, my dear fellow. That,’ he explained gently, ‘is why she calls herself Miss Schoonmaker. God bless my soul!’ he said, unable to restrain a sudden spurt of irritability. ‘If a girl’s name is Schoonmaker, naturally she calls herself Miss Schoonmaker.’
‘Yes, if it is. But hers is not. It is Brown.’
‘Listen, my dear fellow,’ said Lord Emsworth soothingly. ‘You are only exciting yourself by going on like this. Probably doing yourself a great deal of harm. Now, what I suggest is, that you go to your room and put a cool compress on your forehead and lie down and take a good rest. I will send Beach up to you with some nice bread-and-milk.’
‘Rum and milk,’ amended the Hon. Galahad. ‘It’s the only thing. I knew a fellow in the year ‘97 who was subject to these spells – you probably remember him, Clarence. Bellamy. Barmy Bellamy we used to call him – and whenever . . .’
‘Her name is Brown!’ repeated Baxter, his voice soaring in a hysterical crescendo. ‘Sue Brown. She is a chorus-girl at the Regal Theatre in London. And she is apparently engaged to be married to your nephew Ronald.’
Lady Constance uttered a cry. Lord Emsworth expressed his feelings with a couple of tuts. The Hon. Galahad alone was silent. He caught Sue’s eye, and there was concern in his gaze.
‘I overheard Beach saying so in this very room. He said he had had the information from Mr Pilbeam. I imagine it to be accurate. But in any case, I can tell you this much. Whoever she is, she is an impostor who has come here under a false name. While I was in the smoking-room some time back a telegram came through on the telephone from Market Blandings. It was sig
ned Myra Schoonmaker, and it had been handed in in Paris this afternoon. That is all I have to say,’ concluded Baxter. ‘I will now leave you, and I sincerely hope I shall never set eyes on any of you again. Good evening!’
His spectacles glinting coldly, he strode from the room and in the doorway collided with Ronnie, who was entering.
‘Can’t you look where you’re going?’ he asked.
‘Eh?’said Ronnie.
‘Clumsy idiot!’ said the Efficient Baxter, and was gone.
In the room he had left, Lady Constance Keeble had become a stony figure of menace. She was not at ordinary times a particularly tall woman, but she seemed now to tower like something vast and awful: and Sue quailed before her.
‘Ronnie!’ cried Sue weakly.
It was the cry of the female in distress, calling to her mate. Just so in prehistoric days must Sue’s cavewoman ancestress have cried to the man behind the club when suddenly cornered by the sabre-toothed tiger which Lady Constance Keeble so closely resembled.
‘Ronnie!’
‘What’s all this?’ asked the last of the Fishes.
He was breathing rather quickly, for the going had been fast. Pilbeam, once out in the open, had shown astonishing form at the short sprint. He had shaken off Ronnie’s challenge twenty yards down the drive, and plunged into a convenient shrubbery, and Ronnie, giving up the pursuit, had come back to Sue’s room to report. It occasioned him some surprise to find that in his absence it had become the scene of some sort of public meeting.
‘What’s all this?’ he said, addressing that meeting.
Lady Constance wheeled round upon him.
‘Ronald, who is this girl?’
‘Eh?’ Ronnie was conscious of a certain uneasiness, but he did his best. He did not like his aunt’s looks, but then he never had. Something was evidently up, but it might be that airy nonchalance would save the day. ‘You know her, don’t you? Miss Schoonmaker? Met her with me in London.’
‘Is her name Brown? And is she a chorus-girl?’
‘Why, yes,’ admitted Ronnie. It was a bombshell, but Eton and Cambridge stood it well. ‘Why, yes,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact, that’s right.’
Words seemed to fail Lady Constance. Judging from the expression on her face this was just as well.
‘I’d been meaning to tell you about that,’ said Ronnie. ‘We’re engaged.’
Lady Constance recovered herself sufficiently to find one word.
‘Clarence!’
‘Eh?’ said Lord Emsworth. His thoughts had been wandering.
‘You heard?’
‘Heard what?’
Beyond the stage of turbulent emotion, Lady Constance had become suddenly calm and icy.
‘If you have not been sufficiently interested to listen,’ she said, ‘I may inform you that Ronald has just announced his intention of marrying a chorus-girl.’
‘Oh, ah?’ said Lord Emsworth. Would a man of Baxter’s outstandingly unbalanced intellect, he was wondering, have remembered to feed the Empress regularly? The thought was like a spear quivering in his heart. He edged in agitation towards the door, and had reached it when he perceived that his sister had not yet finished talking to him.
‘So that is all the comment you have to make, is it?’
‘Eh? What about?’
‘The point I have been endeavouring to make you understand,’ went on Lady Constance, with laborious politeness, ‘is that your nephew Ronald has announced his intention of marrying into the Regal Theatre chorus.’
‘Who?’
‘Ronald. This is Ronald. He is anxious to marry Miss Brown, a chorus-girl. This is Miss Brown.’
‘How do you do?’ said Lord Emsworth. He might be vague, but he had the manners of the old school.
Ronnie interposed. The time had come to play the ace of trumps.
‘She isn’t an ordinary chorus-girl.’
‘From the fact of her coming to Blandings Castle under a false name,’ said Lady Constance, ‘I imagine not. It shows unusual enterprise.’
‘What I mean,’ continued Ronnie, ‘is, I know what a bally snob you are, Aunt Constance – no offence, but you know what I mean – keen on birth and family and all that sort of rot . . . well, what I’m driving at is that Sue’s father was in the Guards.’
‘A private? Or a corporal?’
‘Captain. A fellow named . . .’
‘Cotterleigh,’ said Sue in a small voice.
‘Cotterleigh,’ said Ronnie.
‘Cotterleigh!’
It was the Hon. Galahad who had spoken. He was staring at Sue open-mouthed.
‘Cotterleigh? Not Jack Cotterleigh?’
‘I don’t know whether it was Jack Cotterleigh,’ said Ronnie. ‘The point I’m making is that it was Cotterleigh and that he was in the Irish Guards.’
The Hon. Galahad was still staring at Sue.
‘My dear,’ he cried, and there was an odd sharpness in his voice, ‘was your mother Dolly Henderson, who used to be a Serio at the old Oxford and the Tivoli?’
Not for the first time Ronald Fish was conscious of a feeling that his Uncle Galahad ought to be in some kind of a home. He would drag in Dolly Henderson! He would stress the Dolly Henderson note at just this point in the proceedings! He would spoil the whole thing by calling attention to the Dolly Henderson aspect of the matter, just when it was vital to stick to the Cotterleigh, the whole Cotterleigh, and nothing but the Cotterleigh. Ronnie sighed wearily. Padded cells, he felt, had been invented specially for the Uncle Galahads of this world, and the Uncle Galahads, he considered, ought never to be permitted to roam about outside them.
Yes,’ said Sue.’ She was.’
The Hon. Galahad was advancing on her with outstretched hands. He looked like some father in melodrama welcoming the prodigal daughter.
‘Well, I’m dashed!’ he said. He repeated three times that he was in this condition. He seized Sue’s limp paws and squeezed them fondly. ‘I’ve been trying to think all this while who it was that you reminded me of, my dear girl. Do you know that in the years ‘96, ‘97, and ‘98, I was madly in love with your mother myself? Do you know that if my infernal family hadn’t shipped me off to South Africa I would certainly have married her? Fact, I assure you. But they got behind me and shoved me on to the boat, and when I came back I found that young Cotterleigh had cut me out. Well!’
It was a scene which some people would have considered touching. Lady Constance Keeble was not one of them.
‘Never mind about that now, Galahad,’ she said. ‘The point is . . .’
‘The point is,’ retorted the Hon. Galahad warmly, ‘that that young Fish there wants to marry Dolly Henderson’s daughter, and I’m for it. And I hope, Clarence, that you’ll have some sense for once in your life and back them up like a sportsman.’
‘Eh?’ said the ninth Earl. His thoughts had once more been wandering. Even assuming that Baxter had fed the Empress, would he have given her the right sort of food and enough of it?
‘You see for yourself what a splendid girl she is.’
‘Who?’
‘This girl.’
‘Charming,’ agreed Lord Emsworth courteously, and returned to his meditations.
‘Clarence!’ cried Lady Constance, jerking him out of them.
‘Eh?’
‘You are not to consent to this marriage.’
‘Who says so?’
‘I say so. And think what Julia will say.’
She could not have advanced a more impressive argument. In this chronicle the Lady Julia Fish, relict of the late Major-General Sir Miles Fish, C.B.O. of the Brigade of Guards, has made no appearance. We, therefore, know nothing of her compelling eye, her dominant chin, her determined mouth, and her voice, which, at certain times – as, for example, when rebuking a brother – could raise blisters on a sensitive skin. Lord Emsworth was aware of all these things. He had had experience of them from boyhood. His idea of happiness was to be where Lady Julia Fish was not. And t
he thought of her coming down to Blandings Castle and tackling him in his library about this business froze him to the marrow. It had been his amiable intention until this moment to do whatever the majority of those present wanted him to do. But now he hesitated.
‘You think Julia wouldn’t like it?’
‘Of course Julia would not like it.’
Julia’s an ass,’ said the Hon. Galahad.
Lord Emsworth considered this statement, and was inclined to agree with it. But it did not alter the main point.
‘You think she would make herself unpleasant about it?’
‘I do.’
‘In that case . . .’ Lord Emsworth paused. Then a strange soft light came into his eyes. ‘Well, see you all later,’ he said. ‘I’m going down to look at my pig.’
His departure was so abrupt that it took Lady Constance momentarily by surprise, and he was out of the room and well down the corridor before she could recover herself sufficiently to act. Then she, too, hurried out. They could hear her voice diminishing down the stairs. It was calling ‘Clarence!’
The Hon. Galahad turned to Sue. His manner was brisk, yet soothing.
‘A shame to inflict these fine old English family rows on a visitor,’ he said, patting her shoulder as one who, if things had broken right and there had not been a regular service of boats to South Africa in the nineties, might have been her father. ‘What you need, my dear, is a little rest and quiet. Come along, Ronald, we’ll leave you. The place to continue this discussion is somewhere outside this room. Cheer up, my dear. Everything may come out all right yet.’
Sue shook her head.
‘It’s no good,’ she said hopelessly.
‘Don’t you be too sure,’ said the Hon. Galahad.
‘I’ll jolly well tell you one thing,’ said Ronnie. ‘I’m going to marry you, whatever happens. And that’s that. Good heavens! I can work, can’t I?’
‘What at?’ asked the Hon. Galahad.
‘What at? Why – er – why, at anything.’
‘The market value of any member of this family,’ said the Hon. Galahad, who harboured no illusions about his nearest and dearest, ‘is about threepence-ha-penny per annum. No! What we’ve got to do is get round old Clarence somehow, and that means talk and argument, which had better take place elsewhere. Come along, my boy. You never know your luck. I’ve seen stickier things than this come out right in my time.’
Blanding Castle Omnibus Page 104