Blanding Castle Omnibus

by P. G. Wodehouse

  But the strain of baffling against that handicap was telling on Agnes Flack. Once or twice, her iron resolution seemed to waver.

  And on the seventeenth Nature took its toll. She missed a short putt for the half, and they came to the eighteenth tee with Julia Prebble dormy one.

  The eighteenth hole takes you over the water. A sort of small lake lies just beyond that tee, spanned by a rustic bridge. Across the bridge I now beheld Smallwood Bessemer approaching.

  “How’s it going?” he asked, as he came to where I stood.

  I told him the state of the game, and he shook his head.

  “Looks bad,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t like Agnes Flack, and never shall, but one has one’s human feelings. It will cut her to the heart to lose that Vase. And when you reflect that if she had only let me come along, she would have been all right, it all seems such a pity, doesn’t it? I could have given her a pointer from time to time, which would have made all the difference. But she doesn’t seem to want my advice. Prefers to trust to Alex Morrison. Sad. Very sad. Ah,” said Smallwood Bessemer, “She didn’t relax.”

  He was alluding to Julia Prebble, who had just driven off. Her ball had cleared the water nicely, but it was plain to the seeing eye that it had a nasty slice on it. It came to rest in a patch of rough at the side of the fairway, and I saw her look sharply round, as if instinctively about to tell her betrothed that she wished he wouldn’t shuffle his feet just as she was shooting. But he was not there. He had withdrawn to the clubhouse, where I was informed later, he drank six Scotches in quick succession, subsequently crying on the barman’s shoulder and telling him what was wrong with women.

  In the demeanour of Agnes Flack, as she teed up, there was something that reminded me of Boadicea about to get in amongst a Roman legion. She looked dominant and conquering. I knew what she was thinking. Even if her opponent recovered from the moral shock of a drive like that, she could scarcely be down in less than six, and this was a hole which she, Agnes, always did in four. This meant that the match would go to the thirty-seventh, in which case she was confident that her stamina and the will to win would see her through.

  She measured her distance. She waggled. Slowly and forcefully she swung back. And her club was just descending in a perfect arc, when Smallwood Bessemer spoke.

  “Hey!” he said.

  In the tense silence the word rang out like the crack of a gun. It affected Agnes Flack visibly. For the first time since she had been a slip of a child, she lifted her head in the middle of a stroke, and the ball, badly topped, trickled over the turf, gathered momentum as it reached the edge of the tee, bounded towards the water, hesitated on the brink for an instant like a timid diver on a cold morning and then plunged in.

  “Too bad,” said Julia Prebble.

  Agnes Flack did not reply. She was breathing heavily through her nostrils. She turned to Smallwood Bessemer.

  “You were saying something?” she asked.

  “I was only going to remind you to relax,” said Smallwood Bessemer. “Alex Morrison lays great stress on the importance of pointing the chin and rolling the feet. To my mind, however, the whole secret of golf consists in relaxing. At the top of the swing the muscles should be—”

  “My niblick, please,” said Agnes Flack to her caddie.

  She took the club, poised it for an instant as if judging its heft, then began to move forward swiftly and stealthily, like a tigress of the jungle.

  Until that moment, I had always looked on Smallwood Bessemer as purely the man of intellect, what you would describe as the thoughtful reflective, type. But he now showed that he could, if the occasion demanded it, be the man of action. I do not think I have ever seen anything move quicker than the manner in which he dived head-foremost into the thick clump of bushes which borders the eighteenth tee. One moment, he was there; the next, he had vanished. Eels could have taken his correspondence course.

  It was a move of the highest strategic quality. Strong woman though Agnes Flack was, she was afraid of spiders. For an instant, she stood looking wistfully at the bushes; then, hurling her niblick into them, she burst into tears and tottered into the arms of Sidney McMurdo, who came up at this juncture. He had been following the match at a cautious distance.

  “Oh, Sidney!” she sobbed.

  “There, there,” said Sidney McMurdo.

  He folded her in his embrace, and they walked off together. From her passionate gestures, I could gather that she was explaining what had occurred and was urging him to plunge into the undergrowth and break Smallwood Bessemer’s neck, and the apologetic way in which he waved his hands told me that he was making clear his obligations to the Jersey City and All Points West Mutual and Co-operative Life and Accident Insurance Co.

  Presently, they were lost in the gathering dusk, and I called to Bessemer and informed him that the All Clear had been blown.

  “She’s gone?” he said.

  “She has been gone some moments.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure.”

  There was a silence.

  “No,” said Bessemer. “It may be a trap. I think I’ll stick on here a while.”

  I shrugged my shoulder and left him.

  The shades of night were falling fast before Smallwood Bessemer, weighing the pro’s and con’s, felt justified in emerging from his lair. As he started to cross the bridge that spans the water, it was almost dark. He leaned on the rail, giving himself up to thought.

  The sweet was mingled with the bitter in his meditations. He could see that the future held much that must inevitably be distasteful to a man who liked a quiet life. As long as he remained in the neighbourhood, he would be compelled to exercise ceaseless vigilance and would have to hold himself in readiness, should the occasion arise, to pick up his feet and run like a rabbit.

  This was not so good. On the other hand, it seemed reasonable to infer from Agnes Flack’s manner during the recent episode that their engagement was at an end. A substantial bit of velvet.

  Against this, however, must be set the fact that he had lost Celia Todd. There was no getting away from that, and it was this thought that caused him to moan softly as he gazed at the dark water beneath him. And he was still moaning, when there came to his ears the sound of a footstep. A woman’s form loomed up in the dusk. She was crossing the bridge towards him. And then suddenly a cry rent the air.

  Smallwood Bessemer was to discover shortly that he had placed an erroneous interpretation upon this cry, which had really been one of agitation and alarm. To his sensitive ear it had sounded like the animal yowl of an angry woman sighting her prey, and he had concluded that this must be Agnes Flack, returned to the chase. Acting upon this assumption, he stood not on the order of going but immediately sored over the rail and plunged into the water below. Rising quickly to the surface and clutching out for support, he found himself grasping something wet and furry.

  For an instant, he was at a loss to decide what this could be. It had some of the properties of a sponge and some of a damp hearthrug. Then it bit him in the fleshy part of the thumb and he identified it as Celia Todd’s Pekinese, Pirbright. In happier days he had been bitten from once to three times a week by this animal, and he recognized its technique.

  The discovery removed a great weight from his mind. If Pirbright came, he reasoned, could Celia Todd be far behind. He saw that it must be she, and not Agnes Flack, who stood on the bridge. Greatly relieved, he sloshed to the shore, endeavouring as best he might to elude the creature’s snapping jaws.

  In this he was not wholly successful. Twice more he had to endure nips, and juicy ones. But the physical anguish soon passed away as he came to land and found himself gazing into Celia’s eyes. They were large and round, and shone with an adoring light.

  “Oh, Smallwood!” she cried. “Thank heaven you were there! If you had not acted so promptly, the poor little mite would have been drowned.”

  “It was nothing,” protested Bessemer modestly.


  “Nothing? To have the reckless courage to plunge in like that? It was the sort of thing people get expensive medals for.”

  “Just presence of mind,” said Bessemer. “Some fellows have it, some haven’t. How did it happen?”

  She caught her breath.

  “It was Sidney McMurdo’s doing.”

  “Sidney McMurdo’s?”

  “Yes. Pirbright was not well to-day, and I told him to fetch the vet. And he talked me into trying some sort of tonic port, which he said was highly recommended. We gave Pirbright a saucer full, and he seemed to enjoy it. And then he suddenly uttered a piercing bark and ran up the side of the wall. Finally he dashed out of the house. When he returned, his manner was lethargic, and I thought a walk would do him good. And as he came on to the bridge, he staggered and fell. He must have had some form of vertigo.”

  Smallwood Bessemer scrutinized the animal. The visibility was not good, but he was able to discern in its bearing all the symptoms of an advanced hangover.

  “Well, I broke off the engagement right away,” proceeded Celia Todd. “I can respect a practical joker. I can admire a man who is cruel to animals. But I cannot pass as fit for human consumption a blend of the two. The mixture is too rich.”

  Bessemer started.

  “You are not going to marry Sidney McMurdo?”

  “I am not.”

  “What an extraordinary coincidence. I am not going to marry Agnes Flack.”

  “You aren’t?”

  “No. So it almost looks—”

  “Yes, doesn’t it?”

  “I mean, both of us being at a loose end, as it were…”

  “Exactly.”

  “Celia!”

  “Smallwood!”

  Hand in hand they made their way across the bridge. Celia uttered a sudden cry causing the dog Pirbright to wince as if somebody had driven a red hot spike into his head.

  “I haven’t told you the worst,” she said. “He had the effrontery to assert that you had advised the tonic port.”

  “The low blister!”

  “I knew it could not be true. Your advice is always so good. You remember telling me I ought to have let Pirbright fight Agnes Flack’s wolfhound? Well, you were quite right. He met it when he dashed out of the house after drinking that tonic port, and cleaned it up in under a minute. They are now the best of friends. After this, I shall always take your advice and ask for more.”

  Smallwood Bessemer mused. Once again he was weighing the pro’s and con’s. It was his habit of giving advice that had freed him from, Agnes Flack. On the other hand, if it had not been for his habit of giving advice, Agnes Flack would never, so to speak, have arisen.

  “Do you know,” he said, “I doubt if I shall be doing much advising from now on. I think I shall ask the paper to release me from my columnist contract. I have a feeling that I shall be happier doing something like the Society News or the Children’s Corner.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  Birth of a Salesman

  THE day was so fair, the breeze so gentle, the sky so blue and the sun so sunny, that Lord Emsworth that vague and woollen-headed peer, who liked fine weather, should have been gay and carefree, especially as he was looking at flowers, a thing which always gave him pleasure. But on his face, as he poked it over the hedge beyond which the flowers lay, a close observer would have noted a peevish frown. He was thinking of his younger son Freddie.

  Coming to America to attend the wedding of one of his nieces to a local millionaire of the name of Tipton Plimsoll, Lord Emsworth had found himself, in the matter of board and lodging, confronted with a difficult choice. The British Government, notoriously slow men with a dollar, having refused to allow him to take out of England a sum sufficient to enable him to live in a New York hotel, he could become the guest of the bridegroom’s aunt, who was acting as M.C. of the nuptials, or he could dig in with Freddie in the Long Island suburb where the latter had made his home. Warned by his spies that Miss Plimsoll maintained in her establishment no fewer than six Pekinese dogs, a breed of animal which always made straight for his ankles, he had decided on Freddie and was conscious now of having done the wrong thing. Pekes chew the body, but Freddie seared the soul.

  The flowers grew in the garden of a large white house at the end of the road, and Lord Emsworth had been goggling at them for some forty minutes, for he was a man who liked to take his time over these things, when his reverie was interrupted by the tooting of a horn and the sound of a discordant voice singing “Buttons and Bows”. Freddie’s car drew up, with Freddie at the wheel.

  “Oh, there you are, guv’nor,” said Freddie.

  “Yes,” said Lord Emsworth, who was. “I was looking at the flowers. A nice display. An attractive garden.”

  “Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile,” said Freddie austerely. “Keep away from the owner of that joint, guv’nor. He lowers the tone of the neighbourhood.”

  “Indeed? Why is that?”

  “Not one of the better element. His wife’s away, and he throws parties. I’ve forgotten his name… Griggs or Follansbee or something… but we call him the Timber Wolf. He’s something in the lumber business.”

  “And he throws parties?”

  “Repeatedly. You might say incessantly. Entertains blondes in droves. All wrong. My wife’s away, but do you find me festooned in blondes? No. I pine for her return. Well, I must be oozing along. I’m late.”

  “You are off somewhere?”

  Freddie clicked his tongue.

  “I told you yesterday, guv’nor, and I told you twice this morning, that I was giving a prospect lunch to-day at the golf club. I explained that I couldn’t ask you to join us at the trough, because I shall be handing this bird a sales talk throughout the meal. You’ll find your rations laid out on a tray. A cold collation today, because it’s Thursday and on Thursdays the domestic staff downs tools.”

  He drove on, all briskness and efficiency, and Lord Emsworth tut-tutted an irritable tut-tut.

  There, he was telling himself, you had in a nutshell what made Freddie such a nerve-rasping companion. He threw his weight about. He behaved as if he were the Spirit of Modem Commerce. He was like something out of one of those advertisements which show the employee who has taken the correspondence course in Confidence and Self-Reliance looking his boss in the eye and making him wilt.

  Freddie worked for Donaldson’s Inc., dealers in dog biscuits of Long Island City, and had been doing so now for three years. And in those three years some miracle had transformed him from a vapid young London lizard into a go-getter, a live wire and a man who thought on his feet and did it now. Every night since Lord Emsworth had come to enjoy his hospitality, if enjoy is the word, he had spoken lyrically and at length of his success in promoting the interests of Donaldson’s Dog Joy (“Get Your Dog Thinking The Donaldson Way”), making no secret of his view that it had been a lucky day for the dear old firm when it had put him on the payroll. As a salesman he was good, a fellow who cooked with gas and did not spare himself, and he admitted it.

  All of which might have been music to Lord Emsworth’s ears, for a younger son earning his living in America is unquestionably a vast improvement on a younger son messing about and getting into debt in England, had it not been for one circumstance. He could not rid himself of a growing conviction that after years of regarding this child of his as a drone and a wastrel, the child was now regarding him as one. A world’s worker himself, Freddie eyed with scorn one who, like Lord Emsworth, neither toiled nor spun. He patronized Lord Emsworth. He had never actually called Lord Emsworth a spiv, but he made it plain that it was in this category that he had mentally pencilled in the author of his being. And if there is one thing that pierces the armour of an English father of the upper classes, it is to be looked down on by his younger son. Little wonder that Lord Emsworth, as he toddled along the road, was gritting his teeth. A weaker man would have gnashed them.

  His gloom was not lightened by the sight of the cold coll
ation which leered at him on his return to the house. There was the tray of which Freddie had spoken, and on it a plate on which, like corpses after a baffle, lay a slice of vermilion ham, a slice of sepia corned beef, a circle of mauve liverwirst and, of all revolting things, a large green pickle. It seemed to Lord Emsworth that Freddie’s domestic staff was temperamentally incapable of distinguishing between the needs of an old gentleman who had to be careful what he ate and those of a flock of buzzards taking pot luck in the Florida Everglades.

  For some moments he stood gaping at this unpleasant picture in still life; then there stole into his mind the thought that there might be eggs in the ice-box. He went thither and tested his theory and it was proved correct.

  “Ha!” said Lord Emsworth. He remembered how he had frequently scrambled eggs at school.

  But his school days lay half a century behind him, and time in its march robs us of our boyhood gifts. Since the era when he had worn Eton collars and ink spots on his face, he had lost the knack, and it all too speedily became apparent that Operation Eggs was not going to be the walkover he had anticipated. Came a moment when he would have been hard put to it to say whether he was scrambling the eggs or the eggs were scrambling him. And he had paused to clarify his thoughts on this point, when there was a ring at the front door bell. Deeply incrusted in yolk, he shuffled off to answer the summons.

  A girl was standing in the porch. He inspected her through his pince-nez with the vacant stare on which the female members of his family had so often commented adversely. She seemed to him, as he drank her slowly in, a nice sort of girl. A man with a great many nieces who were always bursting in on him and ballyragging him when he wanted to read his pig book, he had come to fear and distrust the younger members of the opposite sex, but this one’s looks he liked immediately. About her there was none of that haughty beauty and stormy emotion in which his nieces specialized. She was small and friendly and companionable.