Blanding Castle Omnibus

by P. G. Wodehouse

  The Binks Holloway anecdote was one of Gally’s best. He had told it perhaps a hundred times in the course of his career to rapturous audiences, but he was not to tell it now. Lord Emsworth had uttered a strangled yelp and with a shaking finger was pointing at something in the sty. What it was, Gally was unable to see. Everything looked perfectly normal to him, no suggestion that the Empress had fallen in a fit or was being snatched up to heaven in a fiery chariot. Always a pig chary of exhibiting the stronger emotions, she seemed even more placid than usual.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter, Clarence?’ he asked with petulance. That sudden yelp had made him bite his tongue.

  For a moment Lord Emsworth struggled for speech. Then he achieved utterance, though in a shaking voice.

  ‘The potato!’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘She has not eaten it. Such a thing has never happened before. She is passionately fond of potatoes. She must be sickening for something.’

  ‘Shall I send for the vet?’

  Gally’s query had been satirical in intent. He resented this agitation about a pig which was obviously at the peak of its form, and his tongue was still paining him.

  ‘Or notify the police? Or call out the military?’

  All that penetrated to Lord Emsworth’s consciousness was the operative word.

  ‘Yes, will you telephone the vet, Galahad. I would do it myself, but I ought to stay with her. His name is Banks. Beach will know the number. Please go and see Beach without delay.’

  3

  It had been well said of Galahad Threepwood from the old Pelican days onward that blows beneath which lesser men reeled and collapsed left him as cool and unconcerned as a halibut on a fishmonger’s slab, and indeed there were very few socks on the spiritual jawbone that he could not take with a stiff and nonchalant upper lip. Nevertheless, it was with heart bowed down that he made for Beach’s pantry to perform his errand of mercy. It seemed abundantly clear to him from her remarks on the way to the yew alley that what had sundered Linda Gilpin and the godson for whom he had always felt a paternal fondness had not been one of those passing lovers’ tiffs which can be put right with a few kisses and a bottle of scent, but the real big time stuff. For some reason which had still to be explained John had fallen back so badly in the betting in the matrimonial stakes that he might as well have been actually scratched.

  It was not a pleasant state of things for a loving godfather to have to contemplate, and he was pondering deeply as he reached the house. He was an optimist and throughout his checkered career had always clung stoutly to the view that no matter how darkly the clouds might lower the sun would eventually come smiling through, but this time it looked as though the sun had other intentions.

  Musing thus, he was passing across the hall, when his meditations were interrupted by a voice calling his name. Lady Constance was standing in the doorway of the amber drawing-room, looking, he thought, extraordinarily like the Statue of Liberty.

  ‘Please come here, Galahad.’

  Conversations with Connie, tending as they so often did to become acrimonious, were never among the pleasures Gally went out of his way to seek, and at the moment, with so much on his mind, he was feeling particularly allergic to a tête-à-tête. He replied promptly.

  ‘Can’t now. I’m busy. Fully occupied.’

  ‘I don’t care how fully occupied you are. I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Oh, all right, but talk quick. The Empress has refused to eat a potato, Clarence is distracted, and I’ve got to call the vet. It’s a major crisis, and all good men have been notified that now is the time for them to come to the aid of the party.’

  He followed her into the drawing-room, sank into a chair and gave his monocle a polish, an action which drew from her a sharp ‘Oh, for goodness sake don’t do that!’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Fiddle with that revolting eyeglass.’

  It was evident to Gally that his sister was in one of her moods, which were roughly equivalent to those which Cleopatra and Boadicea used to have when things went wrong, and he braced himself to play the man. One of the rules he lived by was ‘When Connie starts throwing her weight about, sit on her head immediately’. It was a policy he had repeatedly urged on Lord Emsworth, but never with success.

  ‘I don’t know why you call it revolting,’ he said with dignity. ‘For years it has been admired by some of the most discriminating jellied eel sellers in London. What’s on your mind, Connie? You didn’t lug me in here merely to heap vulgar abuse on me.’

  ‘I lugged you in here, as you put it, because I want to speak to you about Vanessa Polk.’

  ‘That’s better. I am always happy to be spoken to about the Polk popsy. Charming creature.’

  ‘She is, and you have a habit of monopolizing charming creatures who visit the castle and never letting anyone else come near them.’

  ‘One tries to be civil.’

  ‘Well, this time don’t. There are others who would like to have an occasional word with Vanessa.’

  It was only a kindly reluctance to inflame passions beyond control that kept Gally from polishing his eyeglass again. The significance of her words had not escaped him. Excluding Howard Chesney, there could be only one person she had in mind, and it was unlikely that she would be concerning herself about Howard Chesney.

  ‘Do you mean Dunstable?’

  Lady Constance started irritably, like the Statue of Liberty stung by a mosquito which had wandered over from the Jersey marshes. She spoke with the petulance that always came into her manner sooner or later when she conversed with her brother Galahad.

  ‘Why do you persist in calling him that? You’ve known him for years. Why not Alaric?’

  ‘Never mind what I call him. If you knew some of the things I’d like to call him you would be astounded at my moderation. Are you telling me that that human walrus has fallen in love at first sight with Vanessa Polk?’

  ‘Alaric is not a human walrus.’

  ‘You criticize my use of the word human?’

  Lady Constance swallowed twice, and was thus enabled to overcome a momentary urge to hit her brother over the head with a glass vase containing gladioli. It is one of the tragedies of advancing age that the simple reactions of childhood have to be curbed. In their mutual nursery far less provocation than she was receiving now would have led her to an attack with tooth and claw. With an effort she forced herself to preserve the decencies of debate.

  ‘I am not going to waste the morning bickering with you, Galahad,’ she said. ‘Naturally I am not saying anything so foolish as that Alaric has fallen in love at first sight, but he is very interested in Vanessa and I’m not surprised. She is very attractive.’

  ‘But he isn’t,’ said Gally.

  Lady Constance gave him a stony glance. Wasted on him, for being too humane to polish his eyeglass he was assisting thought by lying back in his chair with his eyes closed. Her voice was icy as she said:

  ‘Alaric is extremely attractive.’

  ‘If you like walruses.’

  ‘And I want you to understand that you are not to interfere with—’

  ‘His wooing?’

  ‘If that is the word you care to use.’

  ‘Very well. But may I say in parting that if you’re trying to get Dunstable off this season, you haven’t a hope. He’s much too set in his ways and much too fond of his comforts to marry anyone. Don’t fool yourself. He may put on an act and make you think he’s going to jump off the dock, but he’ll always remember how snug he is as a widower and draw back in time.’

  And so saying Gally trotted off to Beach’s pantry to fulfil his mission.

  Beach was polishing silver when he arrived. Abandoning this duty for the moment, he called the veterinary surgeon at his office in Market Blandings and bade him hasten to the Empress’s sty; and he had scarcely replaced the receiver when the telephone rang again.

  ‘For you, Mr. Galahad. A Mr. Halliday.’

  ‘A
h, I was expecting him to call. Hullo, Johnny.’

  The conversation that ensued was brief, too brief for Beach, whose curiosity had been aroused. He gathered that this Mr. Halliday was speaking from the Emsworth Arms and wished to see Mr. Galahad at the earliest possible moment, but beyond that all was mystery.

  At length Gally hung up, and with a curt ‘Got to go to Market Blandings’ hurried out.

  Odd, thought Beach, most peculiar. Sinister, too, if you came to think of it, like those telephone calls in the novels of suspense which were his favourite reading.

  He hoped Mr. Galahad had not got mixed up with a gang of some kind.

  4

  The hollowness of John’s voice over the telephone had deepened Gally’s conviction that this rift between him and the Gilpin popsy must be the real West End stuff, and when he reached his destination and saw him, he realized how well-founded his apprehensions had been.

  What with the excellence of its beer and the charm of the shady garden running down to the river in which its patrons drink it, haggard faces are rarely seen at the Emsworth Arms, and the haggardness of John’s was all the more noticeable. In these idyllic surroundings it could not but attract attention, and Gally was reminded of his old friend Fruity Biffen on the occasion when he had gone into the ring at Hurst Park wearing a long Assyrian beard in order to avoid recognition by the half dozen bookmakers there to whom he owed money, and the beard, insufficiently smeared with fish glue, had come off. The same wan, drawn look.

  Until they were seated at one of the garden tables with tankards of Emsworth Arms beer before them no word was spoken. But it was never in Gally to refrain from speech for long, and after he had fortified himself with a draft of the elixir he leaned forward and gave his companion’s shoulder a fatherly pat.

  ‘Tell me all about it, my boy,’ he said in the hushed voice of one addressing a stretcher case on his stretcher. ‘I should mention that it was only an hour or so ago that Miss Gilpin and I were in conference, so I understand the situation more or less. That is to say, while short on details, I’m pretty clear on the general all-over picture. Your engagement, I gather from her, is off, and as it’s only a day or so since you plighted your troth it struck me as quick work. I was mystified.’

  ‘What did she say about me?’

  ‘Better, far better not to enquire. Suffice it that her obiter dicta differed substantially from the sort of thing Juliet used to say about Romeo. What on earth happened?’

  A beetle, descending from the tree in the shade of which they were sitting, fell on the table. John gave it a cold look.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he said. ‘I was simply doing my duty. Women don’t understand these things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘She ought to have realized that I couldn’t let Clutterbuck down.’

  ‘Clutterbuck?’

  ‘G. G. Clutterbuck.’

  Gally had intended to be all gentleness and sympathy at this interview, but he could not repress an irritated snort. If he had to listen to a story instead of telling one, he liked it to be clear and straightforward.

  ‘Who the hell is G. G. Clutterbuck?’

  ‘A chartered accountant for whom I was appearing in the action of Clutterbuck versus Frisby. And Frisby is the retired meat salesman whose car collided with Clutterbuck’s in the Fulham Road, shaking Clutterbuck up and possibly causing internal injuries. The defence, of course, pleaded that Clutterbuck had run into Frisby, and everything turned on the evidence of a Miss Linda Gilpin, who happened to be passing at the time and was an eye witness of the collision. It was my duty to examine her and make it plain to the jury that she was cockeyed and her testimony as full of holes as a Swiss cheese.’

  It is probable that Gally would have made at this point some ejaculation expressive of interest and concern, but he chanced at the moment to be drinking beer. It was not till he had finished choking and had been slapped on the back by a passing waiter that he was in a condition to offer any comment, and even then he was unable to, for John had resumed his narrative.

  ‘You can imagine my feelings. The court reeled about me. I thought for a moment I wouldn’t be able to carry on.’

  The drama of the situation was not lost on Gally. His eyeglass flew from its base.

  ‘But you did carry on?’

  ‘I did, and in about a minute and a half I had her tied in knots. She hadn’t a leg to stand on.’

  ‘You led her on to damaging admissions?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All that “Would it be fair to say” and “Is it not a fact” sort of thing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you wag a finger in her face?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t.’

  ‘I thought that was always done. But you gave her the works?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she resented it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you win your case?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That must have pleased Clutterbuck.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you see her afterwards?’

  ‘No. She wrote me a note saying the engagement was off.’

  Gally replaced his monocle. The look in the eye to which he fitted it and in the other eye which went through life in the nude was not an encouraging one. Nor was his ‘H’m’ a ‘H’m’ calculated to engender optimism.

  ‘You’re in a spot, Johnny.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You will have to do some heavy pleading if those wedding bells are to ring out in the little village church or wherever you were planning to have them ring out. And the problem that confronts us is How is that pleading to be done?’

  ‘I don’t follow you. She’s at the castle.’

  ‘Exactly, and you aren’t.’

  ‘But you’ll invite me there.’

  Gally shook his head. It pained him to be compelled to act as a black frost in his young friend’s garden of dreams, but facts had to be faced.

  ‘Impossible. Nothing would please me more, Johnny, than to slip you into the old homestead, but you don’t realize what my position there is. Connie can’t exclude me from the premises, I being a chartered member of the family, but she views me with concern and her conversation on the rare occasions when she speaks to me generally consists of eulogies of the various trains back to the metropolis. Any attempt on my part to ring in a friend would rouse the tigress that sleeps within her. You would be lucky if you lasted five minutes. She would have you by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the trousers and be giving you the bum’s rush before you had finished brushing your feet on the mat. I know just how you are feeling, and I couldn’t be sorrier not to be able to oblige you, but there it is. You’ll have to go back to London and leave me to look after your affairs. And if I may say so,’ said Gally modestly, ‘they could scarcely be in better hands. I will do the pleading with L. Gilpin, and I confidently expect to play on her as on a stringed instrument.’

  The words brought to his mind a very funny story about a member of the Pelican Club who had once tried to learn to play the banjo, but something whispered to him that this was not the moment to tell it. He gave John’s shoulder another fatherly pat and set off on the long trek back to the castle.

  John, his face more than ever like that of Fruity Biffen, put in an order for another beer.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In order to avoid the glare of the sun and the society of the Duke of Dunstable, who had suddenly become extremely adhesive, Vanessa Polk had slipped away after lunch to one of the shady nooks with which the grounds of Blandings Castle were so liberally provided, and was sitting there on a rustic bench. Lord Emsworth’s father had been a man much given to strewing rustic benches hither and thither. He had also, not that it matters, collected birds’ eggs and bound volumes of the proceedings of the Shropshire Archaeological Society.

  As she sat there, she was thinking of Wilbur Trout. The news that he was expected on the afternoon train had given her a
nostalgic thrill. He had probably forgotten it, his having been a life into which feminine entanglements had entered so largely, but they had once for a short time been engaged to be married, and though it was she who had broken the engagement, she had always retained a maternal fondness for him. Whenever she read of another of his marriages she could not help feeling that she had been wrong to desert her post and stop looking after him. Lacking her gentle supervision, he had lost all restraint, springing from blonde to blonde with an assiduity which seemed to suggest that he intended to go on marrying them till the supply gave out.

  Wilbur Trout was a young man of great amiability whose initial mistake in life had been to have a father who enjoyed making money and counted that day lost which had gone by without increasing his bank balance. Had he been the son of someone humble in the lower income tax brackets, he would have gone through the years as a blameless and contented filing clerk or something on that order, his only form of dissipation an occasional visit to Palisades Park or Coney Island. Inheriting some fifty million dollars in blue chip securities unsettled him, and he had become New York’s most prominent playboy, fawned on by head waiters, a fount of material to gossip columnists and a great giver of parties whose guests included both the rich and the poor. It was at one of these that Vanessa had met him, and she now sat in the shady nook thinking of old times.

  In favour of this shady nook there was much to be said. It was cool. It was pleasantly scented. The streamlet that trickled through it on its way to the lake gave out a musical tinkle. And above all Alaric, Duke of Dunstable, was not there. But against these advantages had to be set the fact that it was a sort of country club for all the winged insects in Shropshire. Wearying of their society after a while, Vanessa rose and made her way back to the house, and as she approached it Lord Emsworth came down the front steps.