'Hermione is anti-Landseer. She has taken one of her absurd prejudices against the poor chap.'
'I have done nothing of the kind,' said Lady Hermione. 'I preserve an open mind on the subject of Mr Landseer. I am quite prepared to find him reasonably respectable, even though he is a friend of yours. I merely feel, as I have always felt, that it is a ridiculous waste of money to have that pig's portrait painted.'
Lord Emsworth stiffened. He was shocked, not only by the sentiment but by the allusion to his ewe lamb as 'that pig'. He felt it to be lacking in respect.
'The Empress has twice in successive years won the silver medal in the Fat Pigs' class at the Shrewsbury Show,' he reminded her coldly.
'Exactly,' said Gally. 'The only celebrity we have ever produced. She has a far better right to be in the family portrait gallery than half those bearded bounders who disfigure it.'
Lady Hermione became rigid. Like her sisters, she revered her ancestors with an almost Chinese fervour and had always resented the casual attitude towards them of the male members of the family.
'Well, we will not discuss it,' she said, closing the debate. 'I hope you remembered to buy Veronica her birthday present, Clarence?'
From sheer force of habit Lord Emsworth started guiltily. And he was just about to assume the weak, blustering manner customary with him on these occasions and to demand how the dickens a man like himself, with a hundred calls on his time, could be expected to remember to buy birthday presents, when he recollected that he had done so.
'Certainly I did,' he replied with dignity. 'A most excellent wrist watch. I have it in my pocket.'
He produced it as he spoke with quiet pride, and with it another package also bearing the famous label of the Bond Street firm of Aspinall, at which he peered perplexedly.
'Now what the deuce is this?' he queried. 'Ah, yes, I remember. It is something Freddie asked me to pick up at the shop. His present for Veronica, I understand. Where is Freddie?' he asked, scanning the furniture vaguely as if expecting to see his younger son lurking behind some chair or settee.
'I saw him going hell for leather down the drive in that car of his about two hours ago,' said Gally. 'He had young Plimsoll with him. I don't know where they were off to.'
'Shrewsbury,' said Lady Hermione. 'Tipton wanted to buy Veronica a birthday present. They are engaged, Clarence.'
'Eh?'
'They are engaged.'
'Ah,' said Lord Emsworth, becoming interested in a plate of cucumber sandwiches. 'Sandwiches, eh? Sandwiches, sandwiches. Sandwiches,' he added, taking one.
'They are engaged,' said Lady Hermione, raising her voice.
'Who?'
'Veronica and dear Tipton.'
'Who is dear Tipton?'
'"Dear Tipton,"' explained Gally, 'is Hermione's nickname for young Plimsoll.'
'Plimsoll? Plimsoll? Plimsoll? Oh, Plimsoll} I remember him,' said Lord Emsworth, pleased at his quick intelligence. 'You mean the young man with those extraordinary spectacles. What about him?'
'I am trying to tell you,' said Lady Hermione patiently, 'that he and Veronica are engaged.'
'God bless my soul!' said Lord Emsworth, a look of startled concern coming into his face. 'I didn't know these sandwiches were cucumber. I thought they were potted meat. I would never have eaten one if I'd known they were cucumber.'
'Oh, Clarence!'
'Can't digest cucumber. Never could.'
'Well, really, Clarence. I thought you might take a little interest in your niece.'
'What's she been doing?'
'They keep these things from you, Clarence,' said Gally sympathetically. 'You ought to be told. Veronica and young Plimsoll are engaged.'
'Ah,' said Lord Emsworth, now thoroughly abreast of the position of affairs. 'Well, that's all right. No harm in that. I like him. He is sound on pigs.'
'And Hermione likes him because he's a millionaire,' said Gally. 'So you're all happy.'
Lady Hermione was asserting with some warmth that her fondness for Tipton Plimsoll was due entirely to the fact that he was a charming, cultured young man and devoted to Veronica, and Gally was challenging her to deny that at least a portion of the Plimsoll glamour proceeded from the circumstance of his having got the stuff in sackfuls, and Lord Emsworth was saying again that he would never have eaten that cucumber sandwich if he had known it was cucumber, because cucumbers did something to his inside, when Freddie appeared in the french windows.
'Hullo, Guv'nor. Hullo, Aunt Hermione. Hullo, Uncle Gally,' said Freddie. 'Hope I'm not too late for a beaker. We rather overstayed our time in Shrewsbury owing to Tippy insisting on buying up the whole place. The two-seater returned laden with apes, ivory, and peacocks like a camel of the epoch of King Solomon. Did you remember to pick up that little thing of mine at Aspinall's, Guv'nor?'
Secure in the fact that he was holding it in his hand, Lord Emsworth permitted himself to become testy.
'Certainly I did. Everybody asks me if I have remembered something. I never forget anything. Here it is.'
'Thanks, Guv'nor. A quick cup of tea, and I'll go and give it to her.'
'Where is Veronica?' asked Lady Hermione.
'Tippy was expecting to locate her in the rhododendrons. They had a date there, I understand.'
'Go and tell them to come in to tea. Poor Tipton must be exhausted after his long drive.'
'He didn't seem to be. He was panting emotionally and breathing flame through the nostrils. God bless my soul,' said Freddie, 'how it brings back one's bachelor days, does it not, to think of young lovers hobnobbing in shrubberies. I often used to foregather with Aggie in the local undergrowth in my courting days, I recollect. Well, I will do my best to get your kindly message through to him, Aunt Hermione, but always with the proviso that I am not muscling in on a sacred moment. If in my judgement he doesn't want to be interrupted, I shall tiptoe away and leave him. See you later, folks. Pip-pip, Guv'nor; don't take any wooden nickels.'
He drained his cup and departed, and Lord Emsworth had just begun to say that since his younger son had returned from America he had observed in him a sort of horrible briskness and jumpiness which he deplored, when there came from without the sound of some heavy body tripping over a rug, and Bill came in.
II
Bill was looking fresher than might have been expected after a four-hour railway journey with Lord Emsworth, the explanation of this being that the latter always slept in the train, so that he had had nothing to do but lie back and look out of the window and think long thoughts of Prudence.
These had been not only loving, but optimistic. Well in advance of his arrival, he presumed, Gally would have given her that letter of his, and from its perusal he confidently expected the happiest results. He had put his whole heart into the communication, and when a man with a heart as large as his does that, something has got to give. The Prue whom he would shortly meet would, he anticipated, be a vastly different Prue from the scornful girl who had called him a fathead, broken the engagement, and whizzed off like a jack rabbit before he could even start to appeal to her better nature.
But though such reflections as these had unquestionably tended to raise his spirits, it would be too much to say that William Lister, as he clumped across the threshold of the drawing-room of Blandings Castle, was feeling completely carefree. He was in the pink, yes, but not so entirely in the pink as to preclude a certain wariness and anxiety. His mental attitude might be compared to that of a cat entering a strange alley whose resident population may or may not be possessed of half-bricks and inspired with the urge to heave them.
To the discomfort of being in the society of an elderly gentleman whom in a moment of pique he had once told to go and boil his head he had become inured. He no longer regarded Lord Emsworth as a potential obstacle in his path. The occasional puzzled stares which the other had bestowed upon him in the train before stretching out his legs and closing his eyes and starting to grunt and gurgle had fallen off him like blunted arrows. That
the thought behind these stares was that Lord Emsworth was conscious of a nebulous feeling that his face was somehow familiar, he was aware; but basing his trust on the statement of the Hon. Galahad that the ninth earl had an I.Q. thirty points lower than a jellyfish he had been enabled to meet with an easy nonchalance the pince-nezed eyes that gazed perplexedly into his.
But the formidable woman seated behind the teapot was a different proposition. Here, beyond a question, danger lurked. You might not admire Lady Hermione Wedge as you would admire Helen of Troy, or the current Miss America, but there was no gainsaying her intelligence. It would have to be an exceptionally up-and-coming jellyfish which could even contemplate challenging her I.Q. He could only hope that at their previous encounter the beard had done its silent work well, obscuring his features beyond recognition.
Her greeting, if you could call it a greeting, seemed to suggest that everything was all right so far. She was unable entirely to conceal the fact that she regarded him as a pest and an intruder who if she had had her way would have been dumped at the Emsworth Arms and not allowed to inflict his beastly presence on a decent castle; but she directed at him no quick, suspicious stare, uttered no sharp cry of denunciation. She said: 'How do you do, Mr Landseer,' in a voice that suggested that she hoped he was going to tell her that the doctors had given him three weeks to live, and supplied him with a cup of tea. Bill knocked over a cake table, and they all settled down to make a cosy evening of it.
Conversation became general. Lord Emsworth, sniffing the scented breeze which floated in through the open windows, said that it was nice to be back in civilized surroundings after a visit to London, and Gally said that he had never been able to understand his brother's objections to London, a city which he himself had always found an earthly Paradise. He applied to Bill to support him in this view, and Bill, who had fallen into a dream about Prudence, started convulsively and kicked over the small table on which he had placed his cup. In response to his apologies Lady Hermione assured him that it did not matter in the least. Anybody who had not caught her eye, as Bill did, would have supposed her to be one of those broad-minded hostesses who prefer tea on their carpets.
Lord Emsworth then said that his distaste for London was due to the circumstance of it being a nasty, noisy, filthy, smelly hole, full of the most frightful cads, and Gally said that they were probably all charming chaps once you got to know them, instancing the case of a one-eyed three-card-trick man back in the early days of the century to whom he had taken an unreasoning dislike at their first meeting, only to discover, after they had been on a binge together one evening, that the fellow was the salt of the earth.
Lady Hermione, who deprecated the introduction into the tea-table conversation in her drawing-room of reminiscences of one-eyed three-card-trick men, however sound their hearts, changed the subject by asking Bill if this was his first visit to Shropshire, and the latter, shaken to his foundations by the innocent query, once more kicked over the cake table. The fact was that Bill, though an admirable character, was always a little large for any room in which he was confined. To ensure his not kicking over cake tables, you would have had to place him in the Gobi Desert.
Gally in his genial way had just offered, if Bill wanted to make a nice clean job of smashing up the premises, to bring him an axe, and was asking Lord Emsworth if he remembered the time when their mutual uncle, Harold, who had never been quite himself after that touch of sunstroke in the East, had wrecked this same drawing-room with a borrowed meatchopper in an attempt to kill a wasp, when Lady Hermione, who had been regarding Bill with quiet loathing, suddenly gave a start and intensified her scrutiny.
It had just occurred to her, as it had occurred to Lord Emsworth in Duke Street, that somewhere, at some time and place, she had seen him before.
'Your face seems oddly familiar, Mr Landseer,' she said, gazing at it with a raptness which only Tipton Plimsoll could have surpassed.
Lord Emsworth peered through his pince-nez, intrigued.
'Just what I said when I met him. Struck me at once. It's a peculiar face,' he said, scanning it closely and noting that it had now turned a rich vermilion. 'Sort of face that stamps itself on the memory. Galahad's suggestion was that I must have seen his photograph in the papers.'
'Does Mr Landseer's photograph appear in the papers?' asked Lady Hermione, her tone suggesting that, if so, it lowered her opinion of the British Press.
'Of course it does,' said Gally, correctly divining that Bill would appreciate a helping hand. 'Repeatedly. As I told Clarence, Landseer is a dashed celebrated chap.'
Lord Emsworth endorsed this view.
'He painted the Stag at Bay,' he said admiringly.
There was a special sound which Lady Hermione often found it convenient to employ when conversing with her elder brother and feeling the need of relieving her feelings. It was not exactly a sniff and not precisely a snort, but a sort of blend of the two. It proceeded from her now.
'Mr Landseer did not paint the Stag at Bay. It was painted by Sir Edwin Landseer, who has been dead for years.'
'That's odd. Galahad told me it was this chap who painted the Stag at Bay'
Gally laughed indulgently.
'You've muddled the whole thing as usual, Clarence. I said the Pig at Bay'
'The Pig at Bay?'
'Yes. A very different thing.'
Lord Emsworth digested this. A question occurred to him almost immediately.
'But are pigs at bay?'
'This one was.'
'It seems most unusual.'
'Not when you remember, as you would if you were a travelled man, that Bée is a village in the Pyrenees famous for its pigs. If Landseer goes to Bée on a sketching tour one summer and sees a pig there and paints it and, hunting round for a title, decides to call it the Pig at Bée, it seems to me quite a natural sequence of events. I don't see what all the argument is about, anyway. The only thing that matters, to my mind, is that you have got hold of a man who knows his pigs and can be relied on to turn out a speaking likeness of the Empress. You ought to be rejoicing unstintedly.'
'Oh, I am,' said Lord Emsworth. 'Oh, yes, indeed. It's a great relief to feel that Mr Landseer is going to attend to the thing. I'm sure he will be an enormous improvement on the other fellow. By George!' cried Lord Emsworth with sudden animation. 'God bless my soul! Now I know why I thought I'd seen him before. He's the living image of that other fellow – the frightful chap you sent down a few days ago, the one who did a horrible caricature of the Empress and then told me to go and boil my head because I ventured on the mildest of criticisms. What was his name?'
'Messmore Breamworthy.' Gally eyed Bill with mild interest. 'Yes, there is a resemblance,' he agreed. 'Quite understandably of course, considering that they are half-brothers.'
'Eh?'
'Landseer's widowed mother married a man named Bream-worthy. The union culminated in young Messmore. A good enough chap in his way, but I would never have sent him down if I had known that Landseer was available. No comparison between the two men as artists.'
'Odd that they should both be artists.'
'Would you say that? Surely these things often run in families.'
'That's true,' agreed Lord Emsworth. 'There's a man living near here who breeds cocker spaniels, and he has a brother in Kent who breeds sealyhams.'
During these exchanges Lady Hermione had been silent. It was the burgeoning within her of a monstrous suspicion that had made her so. Slowly and by degrees this suspicion was gathering strength. Indeed, the only barrier to a complete understanding on her part was the feeling that there must surely be some things of which her brother Galahad was not capable. She knew him to be a man possessed to an impressive degree of the gall of an army mule, but even an army mule, she considered, would hesitate to smuggle into Blandings Castle an ineligible suitor from whose society one of its sacred nieces was being rigorously withheld.
She looked at Bill and closed her eyes, trying to conjure up that interv
iew on the lawn. She wished she could be sure....
Too little, the chronicler realizes, has been said about that beard of Fruity Biffen's, and it may be that its concealing properties have not been adequately stressed. But reading between the lines, the public must have gathered an impression of its density. The Fruities of this world, when they are endeavouring to baffle the scrutiny of keen-eyed bookmakers, do not skimp in the matter of face fungus. The man behind this beard was not so much a man wearing a beard as a pair of eyes staring out of an impenetrable jungle; and, try as she might, Lady Hermione was unable to recall any more definite picture than just that.
She sat back in her chair frowning. The whole thing turned, of course, on whether her brother Galahad was or was not capable of drawing the line somewhere. She mused on this, and the conversation flowed about her unheard.
As a matter of fact, there was nothing in it particularly worth hearing. Lord Emsworth said that he had been wrong in asserting that the man who lived near here bred cocker spaniels – he had meant retrievers. And as the mention of dogs of any breed could scarcely fail to remind Gally of a rather amusing story which might possibly be new to those present, he told one.
He had finished it and was starting another, begging them to stop him if they had heard it before, when Lord Emsworth, who had been showing signs of restlessness, said that he thought he ought to be going down and seeing Pott, his pig man, in case the latter should have anything of interest to report concerning the affairs of the Empress during his absence.
The words brought Gally to an abrupt halt in his narrative. They reminded him that he had still to see this Pott and purchase his silence. If Lord Emsworth were to contact the fellow before this was done, who knew what sensational confidences might not be poured into his quivering ear. Gally was extremely fond of his brother and shrank from having him upset. He also disliked arguments and discussions.
Policy plainly called to him to race off and sweeten Pott. But this involved leaving Bill. And was it safe to leave Bill to cope unsupported with a situation which he was quite aware was delicate and difficult?
Blanding Castle Omnibus Page 194