‘Very good, m’lord. And in the matter of the stick—?’
‘Tell him to use his own judgement.’
Lord Emsworth sank back on his settee. His mental condition resembled that of a warrior who, crippled by wounds, must stay in his tent while the battle is joined without. He snorted restlessly. His place was by Pirbright’s side, and he could not get there. He put his foot to the floor and tentatively leaned his weight upon it but a facial contortion and a sharp ‘Ouch!’ showed that there was no hope. Pirbright, that strong shield of defence, must be left to deal with this matter alone.
‘I’m sure everything will be quite all right, Clarence,’ said Lady Julia, who believed in the methods of diplomacy, silencing with a little gesture her sister Constance, who did not.
‘You really feel that?’ said Lord Emsworth eagerly.
‘Of course. You can trust Pirbright to see that nothing happens.’
‘Yes. A good fellow, Pirbright.’
‘I expect that when Sir Gregory sees him,’ said Lady Julia, with a steady, quelling glance at her sister, who was once more sniffing in rather a marked manner, ‘he will run away.’
‘Pirbright will?’ said Lord Emsworth, starting.
‘No, Sir Gregory will. There is nothing for you to worry about at all. Just lie back and relax.’
‘Bless my soul, you’re a great comfort, Julia.’
‘I try to be,’ said Lady Julia virtuously.
‘You’ve made me feel easier in my mind.’
‘Splendid,’ said Lady Julia, and with another little gesture she indicated to Lady Constance that the subject was now calmed and that she could proceed.
Lady Constance gave her a masonic glance of understanding.
‘Julia is quite right,’ she said. ‘There is no need for you to worry.’
“Well, if you think that, too…’ said Lord Emsworth, beginning to achieve something like that delightful feeling of bien-etre.
‘I do, decidedly. You can dismiss the whole thing from your mind and give me your attention again.’
‘My attention? What do you want my attention for?’
‘We were speaking,’ said Lady Constance, ‘of this money of Ronald’s and the criminal folly of allowing him to have it in order that he may make a marriage of which Julia and I both disapprove so very strongly.’
‘Oh, that?’ said Lord Emsworth, the glow beginning to fade.
He looked at the door wistfully, feeling how easy a task it would have been, but for this ankle of his, to disappear through it like an eel and not let himself be cornered again before bedtime.
Cornered, however, he was. He leaned back against the cushions and women’s voices began to beat upon him like rain upon a roof.
Down at the Emsworth Arms, Monty Bodkin had just decided to make a small alteration in the plan of action which he had outlined for himself. It had been his original intention, it may be recalled, to follow Lord Tilbury to the trap which he had prepared for him, so that, lurking in the background—probably with folded arms, certainly with a bitter sneer of triumph on his lips—he might have the gratification of witnessing his downfall. But when, wearying of the Wisher-Fisher-Disher controversy, he hung up the receiver and left the telephone booth, he found this project looking less attractive to him.
A man who is by nature a light baritone cannot conduct a conversation for any length of time in a deep bass without acquiring a parched and burning throat. Monty came out of the booth feeling as if his had been roughly sandpapered, and the thought of that two and a half mile walk to the Castle and its little brother, the two and a half mile walk back, intimidated him. The more he thought of it, the less worthwhile did it seem to him to go to all that fearful sweat simply in order to see the scruff of Lord Tilbury’s neck grasped by a pig-man. Far better, he felt, to toddle along to the bar-parlour and there, over a soothing tankard, follow the scene with the eye of imagination.
Thither, accordingly, he made his way, and presently, seated in a corner with a stoup of the right stuff before him, was lubricating his tortured vocal chords and exchanging desultory chit-chat with the barmaid.
For himself, gripped as he still was by that melancholy which torments those who have loved and lost, Monty would have preferred to be allowed to meditate in silence. But as he happened to be the only customer in the place at the moment, the barmaid, a matronly lady in black satin with a bird’s nest of gold hair on her head, was able to give him her full attention, and her social sense urged her to converse. On such occasions she very rightly regarded herself as a hostess.
They spoke, accordingly, of the weather, touching on such aspects of it as the heat before the storm, the coolness after the storm, the violence of the storm, its possible effect on the crops and what always happened to the barmaid’s digestive organs when there was thunder. It was after she had finished a rather lengthy description (one which would, perhaps, have interested a physician more than a layman) of what she had suffered earlier in the summer through rashly eating cucumber during a storm that Monty happened to mention that he had been caught in the downpour.
‘Not reely?’ said the barmaid. ‘What, were you out in it?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Monty. ‘I got properly soaked.’
‘But what a silly you must be, if you’ll excuse me saying so,’ observed the barmaid, ‘not to have took shelter in a shop or somewhere. Or were you taking one of those country hikes?’
‘I was in the park. Up at Blandings.’
‘Oh, are you up at the Castle?’ said the barmaid, interested.
‘I was then,’ said Monty, with reserve.
The barmaid polished a glass.
‘There’s a great to-do up there,’ she said. ‘I expect you’ve heard?’
‘A to-do?’
‘About his lordship’s pig. Eating all that paper.’
‘Eh?’
‘Oh, you haven’t heard?’ said the barmaid, gratified. ‘Oh, yes, his lordship is terribly upset. I had it from Mr Webber, the vet., who stepped in for a quick one on his way up there. He’d just been phoned for, extremely urgent. About half an hour ago, it was.’
‘Paper?’
‘That’s what Mr Webber said. Somebook his lordship’s brother had been writing, he said, and somehow, he said, it had got into this pig’s sty, and the pig had eaten it. That’s what he said. Though how a book could have got into a pigsty, is more than I can tell you.’
The barmaid broke off to attend to a customer who came in for a stout-and-mild, and Monty was able to wrestle in silence with this extraordinary piece of news.
So that was why Pilbeam had been so urgent in demanding cash in advance! From the confused welter of Monty’s thoughts there emerged a clear realization that there must be a lot of hidden good in Percy Pilbeam that he had overlooked. A man with the resource and initiative to extract a thousand pounds from Lord Tilbury for a piece of property which he knew to be in the process of being digested by a pig was surely a man of whom one wished to see more, a fellow one would like to know better. As he reviewed that scene in the writing-room and remembered the confidence with which the detective had stated his terms, the gallant nonchalance of that take-it-or-leave-it of his which had sent Lord Tilbury scrambling for his cheque-book, something very like a warm affection for Percy Pilbeam began to burgeon in Monty. He did his hair in a pretty gruesome way, and there was no question but that that moustache of his was a bit above the odds—nevertheless, he definitely felt that he would like to fraternize with the man.
He saw now—what had puzzled him before—why that cheque-tearing stuff had gone so big. At the moment of the cheque’s destruction, Monty, like Ronnie Fish on another occasion, had intended merely the great gesture. Even while his fingers were busy, he was feeling that he was accomplishing little of practical value, because all the fellow had to do was to go and get another cheque from Lord Tilbury. But this news put an entirely different aspect on the matter. Obviously, Lord Tilbury would not do any more cheque-writing
now. The great gesture had landed Pilbeam squarely in the soup, he realized, and, oddly enough, he felt remorseful.
He could now see the thing from Pilbeam’s point of view. With a sum like a thousand pounds at stake, could the fellow be blamed for stooping to some fairly raw work? Was he not almost justified in going a bit near the knuckle in his methods? Absolutely, felt Monty as he sipped his tankard.
What with this dawning of the big, broad outlook and the excellence of the Emsworth Arms draught ale, he began to be conscious of an almost maudlin change in his attitude towards the investigator. Anyone who could send Lord Tilbury two and a half miles on a fool’s errand was Monty’s friend. More like a brother the detective now seemed than the tripe-hound he had once supposed him.
At this moment, just as he was at his mellowest, the man in person came into the bar-parlour.
‘Good evening, sir,’ said the barmaid in her spacious way. As with so many barmaids, there was always a suggestion in her manner of being somebody who was bestowing the Freedom of the City on someone.
‘Evening,’ said Pilbeam.
He caught sight of Monty in his corner, and frowned. If Monty had begun to warm to him, it was plain that he was nowhere near warming to Monty. He eyed him sourly. His intention had apparently been to consume liquid refreshment in the bar-parlour, but the sight of the person who had so recently impaired his finances made him change his mind. One does not drink in an atmosphere poisoned by a man who has just robbed one of a thousand pounds.
‘I want a double whisky,’ said Pilbeam. ‘Send it into the writing-room, will you?’
He stalked out. The barmaid, whose manner during their brief conversation had shown impressment, jerked a rather awed thumb at the door.
‘See that feller?’ she said. ‘Know who he is? Mr Voules, the chauffeur up at the Castle, was telling me. He runs a big detective agency in London. Employs hundreds and hundreds of skilled assistants, Mr Voules says. Sort of spider, if you get my meaning, sitting in his web and directing the movements of his skilled assistants.’
‘Good gosh!’ cried Monty.
‘Yes,’ said the barmaid, pleased at his emotion. She polished a glass with something of an air.
But Monty’s emotion had been caused by something of which she was not aware. Where she beheld a good-gosher who good-goshed from sheer astonishment at her sensational information, this young man’s good-goshing had not been due to surprise. It was that bit about the skilled assistants that had wrenched the ejaculation from Monty’s lips. Those two words had given him the idea of a lifetime.
Thirty seconds later he was in the writing-room, the detective looking up at him like a startled basilisk.
‘I know, I know,’ said Monty, rightly interpreting the message in his eye. ‘But I’ve got a bit of business to talk over. I can do you a spot of good, Pilbeam.’
It would be too much to say that the investigator’s eye melted. It still looked like that of a basilisk. But at these words it became that of a basilisk which reserves its judgement.
‘Well?’ he said.
Monty perpended.
‘It’s a little difficult to know where to begin.’
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ said Pilbeam, his feelings momentarily overcoming his business instinct, ‘you can begin by getting out of here and breaking your ruddy neck.’
Monty waved a pacific hand.
‘No, no.’ he urged. ‘Don’t talk like that. The wrong attitude, old soul. Not the right tone at all.’
At this moment there entered a lad in shirt-sleeves bearing the investigator’s double whisky. The interruption served to enable Monty to marshal his thoughts. When the lad had withdrawn, he began to speak fluently and with ease.
‘It’s like this, my dear old chap,’ he said, paying no heed to an odd noise which proceeded from his companion, who appeared not to like being called his dear old chap. ‘I seem to recollect mentioning to you this afternoon that as far as my affairs were concerned there were wheels within wheels. Well, there are. Not long ago I became betrothed to a girl, and her ass of a father won’t let me marry her unless I get a job and hold it down for a year. And, dash it, my every effort to do so seems to prove null and void, if null and void is the expression I want. No,’ said Monty, gently corrective, ‘it isn’t a bit of luck for the girl. It’s very tough on the girl. She loves me madly. On the other hand, being a sort of throwback to the Victorian age, she won’t go against her old dad’s wishes. So I’ve got to have that job. I tried being assistant editor of Tiny Tots. No good. The boot. I became secretary to old Emsworth. Again no good. Once more the boot. And this is the idea that struck me just now, listening to the conversation of that female who works the beer-engine out there. You run a detective agency. You employ hundreds of skilled assistants. Well, come on now, be a sport. Employ me!’
The only reason why Percy Pilbeam did not at this point interject a blistering comment on the proposal thus put before him was that three such comments entered his mind simultaneously, and in the effort to decide which was the most blistering he drank some whisky the wrong way. Before he had finished choking, Monty had gone on to speak further. And what he went on to say was so amazing, so arresting, that the investigator found himself choking again.
‘There’s a thousand quid in it for you.’
Percy Pilbeam at last contrived to clear his vocal chords.
‘A thousand quid?’
‘Oh, I’ve got packets of money,’ said Monty, misreading the look in those watering eyes and taking it for incredulity. ‘I’m simply ill with the stuff. If money had been the trouble, there never would have been any trouble, if you follow what I mean. That hasn’t been the difficulty. What’s been the difficulty has been the extraordinary mental attitude of J. G. Butterwick. He insists…’
An astonishing change had come over the demeanour of P. Frobisher Pilbeam. One has seen much the same thing, of course, in the film of Jekyll and Hyde, but on a much less impressive scale. His scowling face had melted into a face that glowed as if lit by some inner lantern. Aesthetically, he looked equally unpleasant whether scowling or smiling, but Monty was far from being in the frame of mind to regard him from the austere standpoint of a judge in a Beauty Competition. He saw the smile, and his heart leaped within him.
Pilbeam had still to wrestle with his emotions for a moment before he could speak.
‘You’ll pay a thousand pounds to come into my Agency?’
‘That exact figure.’
‘For a thousand pounds,’ said Pilbeam simply, ‘you can be a partner, if you like.’
‘But I don’t like,’ said Monty urgently. ‘You’re missing the idea. This has got to be a job. I want to be a skilled assistant.’
‘You shall be.’
‘For a year?’
‘For ten years, if you want to.’
Monty sat down. There was in the simple action something of the triumph and exhaustion of the winner of a Marathon race. He stared in silence for a moment at a framed advertisement of Sigbee’s Soda (‘It Sizzles’) which was assisting the wallpaper to impart to the room that note of hideousness at which hotel-keepers strive.
‘Butterwick’s her name,’ he said at length. ‘Gertrude Butterwick.’
‘Yes?’ said Pilbeam. ‘Where’s your cheque-book?’
‘Her eyes,’ said Monty, ‘are greyish. And yet, at the same time blue-ish.’
‘I bet they are,’ said Pilbeam. ‘In one of your pockets, perhaps?’
‘About her hair,’ said Monty. ‘Some people might call it brown. Chestnut has always seemed to me a closer description. She’s tallish, but not too tall. Her mouth…’
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Pilbeam.’ Let me get a sheet of paper.’
‘You want me to draw you a picture of her?’ said Monty, a little doubtfully.
‘I want you to write a cheque for me.’
‘Oh, ah, yes, I see what you mean. My cheque-book’s upstairs in my suitcase.’
‘Then come alon
g,’ said Pilbeam buoyantly, ‘and I’ll help you unpack.’
Beach sat in his pantry, sipping brandy. And if ever a butler was entitled to a glass of brandy, that butler, he felt, was himself. He rolled the stuff round his tongue, finding a certain comfort in the fiery sting of it.
His heart was heavy. It was a kindly heart, and from the very first it had been deeply stirred by the stormy romance of Mr Ronald and his young lady. He wished that life were as the writers of the detective stories, to which he had become so addicted, portrayed it. In those, no matter what obstacles Fate might interpose in the shape of gangs, shots in the night, underground cellars, sinister Chinamen, poisoned asparagus and cobras down the chimney, the hero always got his girl. In the present case Beach could see no such happy ending. The significance of the presence in the library of Lady Constance Keeble and Lady Julia Fish had not escaped him. He feared that it meant the worst.
Eighteen years of close association with Clarence, Earl of Emsworth, had left the butler with a very fair estimate of his overlord’s character. He wished well to everyone—Beach knew that. But where viewpoints clashed and arguments began, a passionate desire for peace at any price would undoubtedly lead him to decide in favour of whoever argued loudest. And eighteen years of close association with Lady Constance Keeble told Beach who, on the present occasion, that would be.
He saw no hope. Sighing despondently, he helped himself to another glass of brandy. Usually at this hour he drank port. But port to him was a symbol. He never touched it till dinner was over and the coffee served, and it signified that the responsibilities of his office were at an end and that until the morrow should bring its new cares and duties his soul was at rest. Port tonight would have been quite unsuitable.
Sighing again and about to start sipping once more, he became aware that he was no longer alone. Mr Ronald had entered the room.
‘Don’t get up, Beach,’ said Ronnie.
He sat down on the table. His face had a pinkness deeper than its wont. There was a repressed excitement in his manner. The butler was reminded of that other occasion, ten days ago, when this young man had come into his pantry looking much the same as he was looking now and, having announced that he intended to steal his lordship’s pig, had proceeded to cajole him into becoming his accomplice and helping him to feed the animal. The weighing machine in the servants’ bathroom had informed Beach that he had lost three pounds in two days over that little affair.
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