Blanding Castle Omnibus

by P. G. Wodehouse

  'You just had one.'

  'A long, intimate talk on a matter closely affecting your happiness and well-being. You are the nephew of my old friend Chet Tipton—'

  'You already told me that.'

  '—and I decline, I positively refuse to see Chet Tipton's nephew ruining his future and bunging golden prospects of roseate bliss where the soldier bunged the pudding, when I can put the whole thing right in half a minute with a few simple words. Come now, my dear fellow, we needn't beat about the bush. You love my niece Veronica.'

  A convulsive start shook Tipton Plimsoll. His impulse was to deny the statement hotly. But even as he opened his mouth to do so, he found himself gazing at the lovely features of the camera study. Actually, the camera study was still in the small smoking-room, but he seemed to see it now, the rose dangling from its lips, and he had not the heart to speak. Instead, he gave a quick, low gulp like a bulldog choking on a piece of gristle, causing Gally to pat his shoulder five or six times in a fatherly manner.

  'Of course you do,' said Gally. 'No argument about that. You love her like a ton of bricks. The whole neighbourhood is ringing with the story of your passion. Then why on earth, my dear chap, are you behaving in this extraordinary way?'

  'What do you mean, extraordinary way?' said Tipton, weakly defensive.

  'You know what I mean,' said Gally, impatient of evasion. 'Many people would say you were playing fast and loose with the girl.'

  'Fast and loose?' said Tipton, shocked.

  'Fast and loose,' repeated Gally firmly. 'And you know what the verdict of men of honour is on chaps who play fast and loose with girls. I have often heard your Uncle Chet express himself particularly strongly on the subject.'

  The words 'To hell with my Uncle Chet' trembled on Tipton's lips, but he forced them back in favour of others more germane to the subject under discussion.

  'Well, what price her playing fast and loose with me?' he cried. 'Leading me on and then starting the old army game, the two-timing Jezebel.'

  'Don't you mean Delilah?'

  'Do I?' said Tipton, dubious.

  'I think so,' said Gally, none too sure himself. 'Jezebel was the one who got eaten by dogs.'

  'What a beastly idea.'

  'Not pleasant,' agreed Gally. 'Must have hurt like the dickens. However, the point is,' he said, a stern look coming into his face, 'that you are speaking of my niece and bringing a very serious accusation against her. What, exactly, do you imply by the expression "the old army game"?'

  'I mean she's giving me the run-around.'

  'I fail to understand you.'

  'Well, what would you call it if a girl let it be generally known that you were the blue-eyed boy and then you found her necking on benches with that heel Freddie?'

  This shook Gally.

  'Necking on benches? With Freddie?'

  'I saw them. He was kissing her. She was crying, and he was kissing her like nobody's business.'

  'When was this?'

  'Yesterday.'

  Daylight flooded in upon the Hon. Galahad. He was a man who could put two and two together.

  'Before you had failed to meet her behind the rhododendrons,' he asked keenly, 'or after?'

  'After,' said Tipton, and having spoken allowed his mouth to remain open like that of a sea lion expecting another fish. 'Gee! Do you think that was why she was crying?'

  'Of course it was. My dear chap, you're a man of the world and you know perfectly well that you can't go about the place telling girls to meet you behind rhododendrons and then not turning up without gashing their sensitive natures to the quick. One sees the whole picture. Having drawn blank in the rhododendrons, Veronica would naturally totter to the nearest bench and weep bitterly. Along comes Freddie, finds her in tears, and in a cousinly spirit kisses her.'

  'Cousinly spirit? You think that was it?'

  'Unquestionably. A purely cousinly spirit. They have known each other all their lives.'

  'Yes,' said Tipton moodily. 'People used to call her his little sweetheart.'

  'Who told you that?'

  'Lord Emsworth.'

  Gally clicked his tongue.

  'My dear fellow, one of the first lessons you have to learn, if you intend to preserve your sanity in Blandings Castle, is to pay no attention whatsoever to anything my brother Clarence says. He has been talking through the back of his neck for nearly sixty years. I never heard anyone call Veronica Freddie's little sweetheart.'

  'He used to be engaged to her.'

  'Well, weren't we all? I don't mean engaged to Veronica, but to somebody. Weren't you?'

  'Why, yes,' Tipton was forced to admit. 'I've been engaged about half a dozen times.'

  'And they mean nothing to you now, these momentary tendresses?'

  'Momentary what?'

  'Oh, get on with it,' said Gally. 'You don't care a damn for the girls now, what?'

  'I wouldn't say a damn,' said Tipton meditatively. 'There was one named Doris Jimpson ... Yes, I would too. No, I don't care a damn for any of them.'

  'Exactly. Well, there you are. You needn't worry about Freddie. He's devoted to his wife.'

  Hope dawned in his young friend's face.

  'You mean that?'

  'Certainly. A thoroughly happy marriage. They bill and coo incessantly.'

  'Gosh,' said Tipton, and mused awhile. 'Of course cousins do kiss cousins, don't they?'

  'They're at it all the time.'

  'And it doesn't mean a thing?'

  'Not a thing. Tell me, my dear chap,' said Gally, feeling that the sooner this point was settled the quicker the conference would begin to get results. 'Why did you hang back from that rhododendron tryst?'

  'Well, it's a long story,' said Tipton.

  It was not often that the Hon. Galahad found himself commending the shrewdness and intelligence of a nephew whom from infancy he had always looked upon as half-witted, but he did so now, as the tale of the face unfolded itself. In the course of a longish life spent in London's more Bohemian circles it had been his privilege to enjoy the friendship of quite a number of men who saw things, and he knew how sensitive and highly strung those so afflicted were, and how readily they had recourse to the bottle to ease the strain. Unquestionably, Freddie had been right. It would have been an error of the gravest nature to have put the pig in Tipton Plimsolls sleeping quarters.

  'I see,' he said thoughtfully, as the narrative drew to its conclusion. 'This face peered at you from the bushes?'

  'Not so much peered,' said Tipton, who liked to get things straight, 'as leered. And I rather think it said "Hi!"'

  'And had you given it any encouragement?'

  'Well, I did take a short snort from my flask.'

  'Ah! You have it here, this flask?'

  'It's in that drawer over there.'

  The Hon. Galahad cocked a dubious eyebrow at the drawer.

  'Hadn't you better let me take charge of that?'

  Tipton chewed his lip. It was as if the suggestion had been made to a drowning man that he part with his life-belt.

  'It is not the sort of thing you ought to have handy. And you won't need it. Believe me, my boy, this is going to be a walkover, I know for a fact that Veronica is head over ears in love with you. No earthly need to buck yourself up before proposing.'

  'The squirt thought otherwise.'

  'The squirt?'

  'That small, blue-eyed girl they call Prudence.'

  'She advised a gargle?'

  'A quick one.'

  'I think she was wrong. You could do it on lime juice.'

  Tipton continued dubious, but before any settlement could be reached, the debate was interrupted. From the hall below there burst upon their ears the sound of booming brass. Gally, who had been prepared for it, showed no concern, but Tipton, to whom it came as a complete surprise and who for a moment had mistaken it for the Last Trump, rose an inch or two into the air.

  'What the devil was that?' he asked, becoming calmer.

  'Just som
eone fooling about,' said Gally reassuringly. 'Probably Freddie. Pay no attention. Go right up to Veronica's room and get the thing over.'

  'To her room?'

  'I have an idea I saw her going there.'

  'But I can't muscle into a girl's room.'

  'Certainly not. Just knock, and ask her to come out and speak to you. Do it now,' said the Hon. Galahad.

  V

  It is a truism to say that the best-laid plans are often disarranged and sometimes even defeated by the occurrence of some small unforeseen hitch in the programme. The poet Burns, it will be remembered, specifically warns the public to budget for this possibility. The gong sequence now under our notice provides a case in point.

  What the Hon. Galahad had failed to allow for in arranging for Freddie to beat the gong as a signal that Veronica Wedge was on her way up to her room was that there is a certain type of girl, to which Veronica belonged, who on hearing gongs beaten when they are half-way upstairs come down again and start asking those who have beaten them why they have beaten them. Freddie was just replacing the stick on its hook with the gratifying feeling of having completed a good bit of work when he observed a pair of enormous eyes staring into his and realized that the starter's flag had dropped prematurely.

  The following dialogue took place:

  'Fred-dee, was that you?'

  'Was what me?'

  'Did you beat the gong?'

  'The gong? Oh yes. Yes, I beat the gong.'

  'Why did you beat the gong?'

  'Oh, I don't know. I thought I would.'

  'But what did you beat the gong for?'

  This sort of thing was threatening to go on for some time when Lady Hermione came out of the drawing-room.

  Lady Hermione said:

  'Who beat the gong?'

  To which Veronica replied: 'Fred-die beat the gong.'

  'Did you beat the gong, Freddie?'

  'Er – Yes. Yes, I beat the gong.'

  Lady Hermione swooped on this damaging admission like a cross-examining counsel.

  'Why did you beat the gong?'

  Veronica said that that was just what she had been asking him.

  'I was going up to my room to get my album of snapshots, Mum-mee, and he suddenly beat the gong.'

  Beach, the butler, appeared through the green baize door at the end of the hall.

  'Did somebody beat the gong, m'lady?'

  'Mr Frederick beat the gong.'

  'Very good, m'lady.'

  Beach withdrew, and the debate continued. It came out in the end that Freddie had beaten the gong just for a whim. A what? A whim! Dash it, you know how you get whims sometimes. He had got this sudden whim to beat the gong, so he had beaten the gong. He said he was blowed if he could see what all the fuss was about, and Veronica said: 'But, Fred-die,' and Lady Hermione said that America appeared to have made him even weaker in the head than he had been before crossing the Atlantic, and Veronica was just about to resume her progress up the stairs (still feeling that it was peculiar that her cousin should have beaten gongs), when it occurred to Lady Hermione that she had forgotten to tell Bellamy, her maid, to change the shoulder straps on her brassiere and that this was a task which could be very well undertaken by Veronica.

  Veronica, always dutiful, said: 'Yes, Mum-mee,' and set out for the room next to the servants' hall where Bellamy did her sewing. Lady Hermione went back to the drawing-room. Freddie, feeling that the situation had got beyond him, took refuge in the billiard room, and started thinking of dog biscuits.

  So that when the Hon. Galahad, misled by the beating of the gong, supposed that his niece was on her way up to her bedroom, she was really headed in a different direction altogether, and the chances of Tipton Plimsoll rescuing her from pigs and clasping her trembling form to his bosom and asking her to be his wife were for the moment nil. It was not until quite some little time later that Veronica, having delivered her message to Bellamy, turned her thoughts once more towards the fetching of snapshot albums.

  Tipton, meanwhile, having reached the Red Room, had paused before its closed door. He was breathing rather stertorously, and he balanced himself first on one leg, then on the other.

  In scouting Freddie's suggestion that a nephew of the late Chet Tipton might be suffering from cold feet in his relations with the opposite sex, the Hon. Galahad had erred. Nephews do not always inherit their uncles' dash and fire. You might have had to hold Chet back with ropes when there were girls around, but not Tipton. In spite of the encouragement which he had received both from Gally and the squirt Prudence, he was conscious now of a very low temperature in his extremities. Also, his heart was throbbing like a motor-cycle, and he experienced a strange difficulty in breathing. And the more he thought the situation over, the more convinced he became that a preliminary stimulant was essential to the task he had in hand.

  A look of decision crept into his face. He strode from the door and hurried back to his room. The flask was still in the drawer – he shuddered to think how near he had come in a moment of weakness to yielding to Gally's offer to take charge of it – and he raised it to his lips and threw his head back.

  The treatment was instantaneously effective. Resolution and courage seemed to run through his veins like fire. Defiantly he looked about the room, expecting to see the face and prepared to look it in the eye and make it wilt. But no face appeared. And this final bit of good luck set the seal on his feeling of well-being.

  Three minutes later he was outside the Red Room again, strong now and confident, and he lost no time in raising a hand and driving the knuckles against the panel.

  It was the sort of buffet which might have been expected to produce instant results, for in his uplifted mood he had put so much follow-through into it that he had nearly broken the skin. But no voice answered from within. And this struck Tipton as odd, for there could be no question that the girl was there. He could hear her moving about. Indeed, as he paused for a reply, there came a sudden crash, suggesting that she had bumped into a table or something with china on it.

  He knocked again.

  'Say!' he said, putting his lips to the woodwork and speaking in a voice tense with emotion.

  This time his efforts were rewarded. From the other side of the door there came an odd sound, rather like a grunt, and he took it for an invitation to enter. He had not actually expected the girl he loved to grunt, but he was not unduly surprised that she had done so. He assumed that she must have something in her mouth. Girls, he knew, often did put things in their mouths - hairpins and things like that. Doris Jimpson had frequently done this.

  He turned the handle ...

  It was a few minutes later that Beach, the butler, passing through the baize doors into the hall on one of those errands which take butlers through baize doors into halls, was aware of a voice from above that said, 'Hey!' and, glancing up, perceived that he was being addressed by the young American gentleman whom Mr Frederick had brought to the castle.

  'Sir?' said Beach.

  Tipton Plimsoll's manner betrayed unmistakable agitation. His face was pale, and the eyes behind the horn-rimmed spectacles seemed heavy with some secret sorrow. His breathing would have interested an asthma specialist.

  'Say, listen,' he said. 'Which is Mr Threepwood's room?'

  'Mr Frederick Threepwood, sir?'

  'No, the other one. The guy they call Gally.'

  'Mr Galahad is occupying the Garden Suite, sir. It is on the right side of the passage which you see before you. But I fancy he is out in the grounds at the moment, sir.'

  'That's all right,' said Tipton. 'I don't want to see him, just to leave something in his room. Thanks.'

  He made his way with faltering footsteps to the sitting-room of the Garden Suite and, drawing the flask from his pocket, placed it on the table with something of the sad resignation of a Russian peasant regretfully throwing his infant son to a pursuing wolf pack. This done, he came slowly out and slowly started to walk upstairs once more.

  And h
e had just reached the first landing, still in low gear, when something occurred that caused him to go abruptly into high, something that made him throw his head back like a war-horse at the sound of the bugle, square his shoulders, and skim up the stairs three at a time.

  From above, seeming to proceed from the direction of the Red Room, a girl's voice had spoken, and he recognized it as that of Veronica Wedge.

  'EEEEEEEEEEE!!!' it was saying.

  VI

  A girl with good lungs cannot exclaim 'EEEEEEEEEEE!!!' to the fullest extent of those lungs on the second floor of a country house during the quiet period which follows the consumption of lunch without exciting attention and interest. The afternoon being so fine, most of the residents of Blandings Castle were out in the open – Gally for one; Colonel Wedge for another; Prudence for a third; and Freddie, who had found the billiard room stuffy and had gone off to the stables to have a look at his two-seater, for a fourth. But Lady Hermione, who was in the drawing-room, got it nicely.

  At the moment when the drowsy summer stillness was ripped into a million quivering fragments, Lady Hermione had been reading for the third time a telegram which had just been brought to her on a silver salver by Beach, the butler. Signed 'Clarence' and despatched from Paddington Station at 12.40, it ran as follows:

  ARRIVING TEA TIME WITH LANDLADY

  When Lord Emsworth composed telegrams in railway stations two minutes before his train was due to leave, his handwriting, never at the best of times copperplate, always degenerated into something which would have interested a Professor of Hieroglyphics. The operator at Paddington, after a puzzled scrutiny, had substituted on his own responsibility 'Arriving' for 'Ariosto' and 'teatime' for what appeared to be 'totem' but the concluding word had beaten him completely. It had seemed to him a choice between 'lingfear', 'leprosy', and 'landlady'. He had discarded the first because there is no such word as 'lingfear'; the second because, though not a medical expert, he was pretty sure that Lord Emsworth had not got leprosy; and had fallen back on the third. He hoped that it would convey some meaning at the other end.

  He had been too optimistic. Lady Hermione stared at the missive blankly. Its surface import – that the head of the family, when he showed up for the afternoon cup of tea, would be accompanied by something stout in a sealskin coat and a Sunday bonnet – she rejected. If it had been her brother Galahad who had so telegraphed, it would have been another matter. Galahad, being the sort of man he was, might quite conceivably have decided to present himself at Blandings Castle with a landlady, or even a bevy of landladies, explaining that they had been dear friends of his years ago when they used to do clog dances on the halls. But not Clarence. She had never been blind to the fact that the head of the family was eccentric, but she knew him to be averse from feminine society. Landladies who wanted a breath of country air would never get it on his invitation.