Lord Emsworth received the information with a gratified nod. Good plain English fare. How different, he was thinking, from the bad old era when his sister Constance had been the Fiihrer of Blandings Castle. Under her regime dinner would have meant dressing and sitting down, probably with a lot of frightful guests, to a series of ghastly dishes with French names, and fuss beyond belief if one happened to swallow one’s front shirt stud and substituted for it a brass paper-fastener.
‘And,’ Beach added, for he was a man who liked to be scrupulously accurate, ‘spinach.’
‘Capital, capital. And to follow?’
‘Roly-poly pudding, m’lord.’
‘Excellent. With plenty of jam, I hope?’
‘Yes, m’lord. I instructed Mrs. Willoughby—’
‘Who is Mrs. Willoughby?’
‘The Cook, m’lord.’
‘I thought her name was Perkins.’
‘No, m’lord, Willoughby. I instructed her to be careful that there was no stint.’
‘Thank you, Beach. Are you fond of roly-poly pudding?’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘With plenty of jam?’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘It’s quite essential, I always feel. Unless there is lots of jam roly-poly pudding is not worth eating. All right. Bring it when I ring, will you?’
‘Very good, m’lord.’
Left alone, Lord Emsworth attacked his good plain English fare with gusto, musing as he did on the stupendous improvement in conditions at the castle since his sister Constance had married that American fellow James Schoonmaker and gone to live in New York. Providence, moreover, never niggardly when attending to the welfare of a deserving man, had seen to it that there was no danger of any of his other sisters taking her place. At their last meeting he had so deeply offended Hermione that they were no longer on speaking terms, and as for Dora, Charlotte and Julia, they never left London except to go to fashionable resorts on the Riviera and in Spain. The peril of a visit from any of them was so remote that it could be dismissed, and it is scarcely to be wondered at that by the time Beach brought in the roly-poly pudding he was in so euphoric a frame of mind that he would probably not have noticed it if there had been a shortage in the accompanying jam. His brother Galahad had once said that it had been a mistake to have sisters and that they ought to have set their faces against it at the outset, but almost as good as no sisters were sisters who kept their distance.
There was just one small crumpled rose leaf. His younger son Frederick, now employed in a firm in Long Island City, N.Y., which manufactured dog biscuits, had most unnecessarily sent this chap Chesney to him with a letter of introduction and he had had to ask him to stay, but he had neutralized the man’s menace by cleverly having all his meals in the library and in between meals keeping out of his way. A host can always solve the problem of the unwanted guest if he has a certain animal cunning and no social conscience.
He finished the roly-poly pudding to the last speck of jam and took his coffee to the arm-chair in which he always reclined when in the library. It was within easy reach of the shelf of pig books which were his main source of mental refreshment. Selecting one of these, he became immersed, and it was not for some considerable time that his attention was diverted from its magic pages. What diverted it was the sound, plainly audible through the open window, of a car drawing up at the front door. It alarmed him, and when shortly afterwards Beach appeared, he addressed him in a voice that shook with pardonable anxiety. Callers at the castle had been infrequent since Connie’s departure, but he knew that they still lurked in near-by lairs and it was possible that in spite of his efforts he had not entirely stamped out the neighbourly spirit he so deplored.
‘Was that a car, Beach?’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘If it’s someone for me, say I’m in bed.’
‘It is her ladyship, m’lord.’
‘Eh? What? What ladyship?’
‘Lady Constance, m’lord.’
For one awful moment Lord Emsworth thought he had said ‘Lady Constance’. In the moment which succeeded it he realized that he had, and he quivered with natural resentment. In the long years during which Beach had been to him more a crony than a butler he had never detected in him a disposition to try to be funny, but it now seemed plain that the man was in the grip of the spirit of whimsy, and he burned with justifiable indignation. Too bad of the fellow to come bursting in like this and saying things like that, presumably as some sort of crude practical joke. Might have given one heart failure.
Then the mist before his eyes cleared and he saw the look in the eyes that met his. It was a look in which sadness, understanding and pity were blended; the look of one who knew how grave was the announcement he had made; of one who fully appreciated how his employer must be feeling and who, had their social relations permitted of it, would have patted him on the head and urged him to bear up like a man, for these things are sent to try us and make us more spiritual.
It convinced Lord Emsworth. He no longer felt that he had been cast in the role of straight man supporting a butler who was playing for laughs. Hideous though the truth was, it could not be evaded.
‘Where is she?’
‘In the amber drawing-room, m’lord. Her ladyship is accompanied by a Miss Polk—from her voice, I gather, of American origin.’
The pig book had long since fallen from Lord Emsworth’s nerveless hand, as had the pince-nez from his nose. He reeled the latter in at the end of their cord.
‘I suppose I had better go down,’ he said in a low, toneless voice, and with faltering steps made for the door. Beach, who sometimes read historical novels, though he preferred Rex Stout and Agatha Christie, was reminded of an apprehensive aristocrat in the days of the French Revolution on his way to the tumbril.
2
Precisely as stated Lady Constance was in the amber drawing-room, sipping sherry and looking as formidable and handsome as ever. All Lord Emsworth’s sisters were constructed on the lines of the severer type of Greek goddess, except Hermione, who looked like a cook, and Connie in particular was remarkable for aristocratic hauteur and forcefulness of eye. One felt immediately on seeing her that there stood the daughter of a hundred earls, just as when confronted with Lord Emsworth one had the impression that one had encountered the son of a hundred tramp cyclists. He was wearing at the moment patched flannel trousers, a ragged shirt, a shooting coat with holes in the elbows and bedroom slippers. These, of course, in addition to the apprehensive look always worn by him when entering this formidable woman’s presence. From childhood onward she had always dominated him, as she would have dominated Napoleon, Attila the Hun and an all-in wrestling champion.
‘Oh, there you are, Clarence,’ she said, and her eye told him more plainly than words could have done that he had failed to satisfy her fastidious taste in the matter of dress. ‘I want you to meet my friend Vanessa Polk, who was so kind to me on the boat. This is my brother Clarence, Vanessa,’ said Lady Constance with that touch of the apologetic which always came into her voice when she introduced him to visitors. Don’t go blaming me, it seemed to say, it’s not my fault.
Looking at Vanessa Polk one could readily imagine her being kind to people, whether on or off ocean liners, for her warmth and geniality were obvious at a glance. Where Lady Constance had winced at the sight of Lord Emsworth like a Greek goddess finding a caterpillar in her salad, she smiled upon him as if their meeting were something to which she had been looking forward for years. It was a wide, charming smile, and it brought about a marked improvement in his morale. He felt, as so many people did when smiled upon by Vanessa Polk, that he had found a friend.
‘How do you do?’ he said with a cordiality of which a short while before he would not have been capable. Then, remembering a good one, he added, ‘Welcome to Blandings Castle. Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I must show you my pig.’ It was not an invitation he often extended to female visitors, for experience had taught him that the Empre
ss was wasted on their shallow minds, but here, he saw, was one worthy of the privilege. ‘Are you fond of pigs?’
Miss Polk said she had not met many socially, but had got along fine with those which had come her way, never an angry word. Was this, she asked, kind of a special sort of pig, and Lord Emsworth answered eagerly in the affirmative.
‘Empress of Blandings,’ he said proudly, ‘has won the silver medal three years in succession in the Fat Pigs event at the Shropshire Agricultural Show.’
‘You’re kidding!’
‘I can show you the medals. It was an unparalleled feat.’
‘To what did she owe her success?’
‘Careful feeding.’
‘I thought as much.’
‘Some pig owners are guided by other authorities and for all I know,’ said Lord Emsworth generously, ‘get quite good results, but I have always pinned my faith on Wolff-Lehman. According to the Wolff-Lehman feeding standards a pig must consume daily nourishment amounting to fifty-seven thousand calories, proteins four pounds five ounces, carbohydrates twenty-five pounds.’
‘Exclusive, of course, of the last thing at night raid on the ice box?’
‘These calories to consist of barley meal, maize meal, linseed meal and separated buttermilk. I occasionally add on my own initiative a banana or a potato …’
One of those short, sharp, steely coughs proceeded from Lady Constance. It stopped Lord Emsworth like a bullet. He was not a very perceptive man, but he understood that he was expected to change the subject. Regretfully but with the docility of a well-trained brother he did so.
‘Bless my soul, Connie,’ he said with as much heartiness as he could manage on the spur of the moment, ‘this is certainly a surprise. Your being here, I mean. Quite a surprise, quite a surprise.’
This time the sound emitted by his sister was not, like the previous one, bronchial, but resembled more that made by drawing a wet thumb across a hot stove lid.
‘I don’t know why it should be,’ she said tartly. ‘You got my letter saying I was sailing.’
Lord Emsworth had not gulped since coming into the room, but he did so now, and with good reason. He had an odd sensation of having been slapped in the face with a wet fish. He was guiltily conscious that the communication she referred to had been lying unopened for some two weeks in a drawer of the desk in his study. Now that he was alone without a secretary to pester him and make him observe the ordinary decencies of life he seldom opened letters if they were not from the Shropshire, Herefordshire and South Wales Pig Breeders Association.
‘Oh, ah, yes, of course, certainly, your letter saying that you were sailing, yes, quite.’
‘To refresh your memory, I said in it that I was coming to spend the summer at Blandings—’
The faint hope Lord Emsworth had had that she might be just passing through on her way to join Dora or Charlotte or Julia at one of those Continental resorts of theirs choked and died.
‘—and that James will be here soon. He has been delayed in New York by an important business deal.’
The words ‘Who is James?’ started to frame themselves on Lord Emsworth’s lips, but fortunately before he could utter them she had gone on to another subject.
‘Whose hat is that?’
Lord Emsworth could not follow her. She seemed to be asking him whose hat that was, and he found the question cryptic.
‘Hat?’ he said, puzzled. ‘Hat? When you say hat, do you mean hat? What hat?’
‘I noticed a hat in the hall, much too good to be yours. Is someone staying here?’
‘Oh, ah, yes,’ said Lord Emsworth, enlightened. ‘A fellow … I can’t think of his name … Gooch, was it? Cooper? Finsbury? Bateman? Merry weather? … No, it’s gone. Frederick sent him with a letter of introduction. Been here some days. He has several hats.’
‘Oh, I see. I thought for a moment it might be Alaric. The Duke of Dunstable, an old friend of mine,’ Lady Constance explained to Miss Polk. ‘I do not see as much of him as I should like, as he lives in Wiltshire, but he comes here as often as he can manage. A little more sherry, Vanessa? No? Then I will show you your room. It is up near the portrait gallery, which you must see as soon as you are settled. Be careful of the stairs. The polished oak is rather slippery.’
3
Lord Emsworth returned to the library. He should have been feeling in uplifted mood, for he had certainly been lucky in the matter of that letter. Connie might quite easily have probed and questioned until the awful truth was revealed, and at the thought of what the harvest would then have been his blood froze. For far less serious offences he had often been talked at for days. Her comments on that paper-fastener in his shirt front had run to several thousand words, and even then she had seemed to feel that only the fringe of the subject had been touched on.
But what she had said about thinking that the Duke of Dunstable might be staying at the castle had shaken him. It seemed to him ominous. The hour that had produced her, he felt, might take it into its head to round the thing off by producing the Duke as well. Morbid? Perhaps so, but it was a possibility that could not be overlooked. He knew that she had an inexplicable affection for the fellow, and there was no telling to what lengths this might lead her.
Many people are fond of Dukes and place no obstacle in the way if the latter wish to fraternize with them, but few of those acquainted with Alaric, Duke of Dunstable, sought his society, Lord Emsworth least of all. He was an opinionated, arbitrary, autocratic man with an unpleasantly loud voice, bulging eyes and a walrus moustache which he was always blowing at and causing to leap like a rocketting pheasant, and he had never failed to affect Lord Emsworth unfavourably. Galahad, with his gift for the telling phrase, generally referred to the Duke as ‘that stinker’, and there was no question in Lord Emsworth’s mind that he had hit on the right label. So as he sat in the library with his pig book he was feeling uneasy. For the first time in his experience its perfect prose failed to grip him.
It is possible that solitude and a further go at the pig book might eventually have soothed him, but at this moment the solitude was invaded and the book sent fluttering to the floor. Lady Constance was standing in the doorway, and one look at her told him that trouble was about to raise its ugly head.
‘Well, really, Clarence!’
He wilted beneath her glare. Galahad, similarly situated, would have met it with a defiant ‘Well, really, what ?’, but he lacked that great man’s fortitude.
‘Those trousers! That coat! Those slippers! I can’t imagine what Vanessa Polk must have thought of you. I suppose she was wondering what a tramp was doing in the drawing-room, and I had to say “This is my brother Clarence.” I have never felt so embarrassed.’
Sometimes in these crises Lord Emsworth had found that it was possible to divert her thoughts from the item uppermost on the agenda paper by turning the conversation to other topics. He endeavoured to do so now.
‘Polk,’ he said. ‘That’s a very peculiar name, isn’t it? I remember noticing when I was over in America for your wedding how odd some of the names were that people had. Neptune was one of them. So was Stottlemeyer. And a colleague of Frederick’s in that dog biscuit concern of his was a Bream Rockmetteller. Curious, it struck me as.’
‘Clarence!’
‘Not that we don’t have some remarkable names over here. I was reading my Debrett the other day, and I came on a chap called Lord Orrery and Cork. I wondered how you would address him if you met. One’s natural impulse would be to say “How do you do, Lord Orrery?”, but if you did, wouldn’t he draw himself up rather stiffly and say “And Cork”? You’d have to apologize.’
‘Clarence!’
‘That fellow Neptune, by the way, was the head of a company that manufactures potato chips, those little curly things you eat at cocktail parties. I met him at a cocktail party Frederick took me to, and we got into conversation and he happened to mention that his firm had made the very potato chips we were eating. I said it was a small w
orld, and he agreed. “Sure,” he said. “It’s a very small world, no argument about that,” and we had some more potato chips. He said the great thing about being in the potato chip business was that nobody could eat just one potato chip, which of course was very good for the sales. What he meant was that once you’ve started you haven’t the strength of mind to stop; you’ve got to go on, first one potato chip, then another potato chip, then—’
‘Clarence,’ said Lady Constance, ‘stop babbling!’
He did as directed, and there was silence while she paused to select for utterance one of the three devastating remarks which had come into her mind simultaneously. It was as she stood wavering between them that the telephone rang.
Had he been alone, Lord Emsworth would have let it ring till it became exhausted, for his views on answering telephones were identical with those he held on reading letters not from the Shropshire, Herefordshire and South Wales Pig Breeders Association, but Lady Constance, like all women, was incapable of this dignified attitude. She hurried to the instrument, and he was at liberty to devote himself to thoughts of names and potato chips. But even as he started to do so he was jerked from his meditation by the utterance of a single word.
It was the word ‘Alaric!’ and it froze him from bald head to the soles of the bedroom slippers on which Lady Constance a moment before the bell rang had been about to comment. He feared the worst.
It happened. Five minutes later Lady Constance came away from the telephone.
‘That was Alaric,’ she said. ‘He has had a fire at his place, and he is coming here till everything is all right again. He says he wants the garden suite, so I had better be going and seeing that it is just as he likes it. He is coming by the early train tomorrow with his niece.’
She left the room, and Lord Emsworth sank back in his chair looking like the good old man in some melodrama of Victorian days whose mortgage the villain has just foreclosed. He felt none of the gentle glow which he was accustomed to feel when one of his sisters removed herself from his presence. The thought of a Blandings Castle infested not only by Connie but also by the Duke of Dunstable and his niece … probably, if she was anything like her uncle, one of those brassy-voiced domineering girls who always terrified him so much … left him as filletted as the Dover sole he had enjoyed at breakfast.
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