CHAPTER SEVEN
The clock over the stables was chiming the quarter, with only another quarter to go before twelve p.m., when Gally came out of the portrait gallery carrying the fictitious reclining nude. He was wearing rubber-soled shoes and stepped softly as befitted a man engaged on a perilous mission. Cautiously, for the oak stairs were slippery, he made his way to the hall and the front door that lay beyond it, and shooting back the bolts which Beach had made fast before taking the tray of beverages into the drawing-room at nine-thirty passed through it into the night. He was conscious, as he went, of a momentary pang for the years which the locust had eaten. Just so, he remembered, when his heart was young and every member of the female sex looked like a million dollars to him, had he crept out in the darkness to exchange ideas with a girl named Maud, now a grandmother.
Arriving at his destination, he had no need to imitate the hoot of the white owl, for before he could display his virtuosity in that direction John stepped from the shadows.
‘I thought you were never coming,’ said John peevishly. He was unused to this sort of thing, and his nerves were on edge. He had reached the sty at eleven-fifteen, and it seemed to him that he had been there, inhaling the Empress’s bouquet, since childhood.
With his usual suavity Gally pointed out that he was not late but, if reliance could be placed on the clock over the stables, some ten minutes ahead of time, and John apologized. He said it was the darkness that got him down, and Gally agreed that darkness had its trying side.
‘But you can’t do these things by daylight. I remember saying that to Bill Bowman, a friend of mine in the old Pelican days. He was in love with a popsy and her parents were holding her incommunicado in the family residence somewhere in Kent. Bill wanted to get a letter to her, telling her to sneak out and run away with him, and his idea was to hide in the grounds till a gardener came along and tip him to give it to her. I told him he was making a great mistake.’
‘Do you think we ought to stand here talking?’ said John, but Gally proceeded with his tale. It was never easy, indeed it was almost impossible, to stop him when in spate.
‘“Do it by night,” I urged him. “You know which her room is. Climb up the water pipe to her window, having previously thrown gravel at it—the window, of course, not the water pipe, and get her views face to face. Only so can you hope to bring home the bacon. “Well, he made some fanciful objection, said climbing water pipes wouldn’t do his trousers any good or something frivolous like that, and persisted in his plan. Next morning he went and hid. A gardener came along. He tipped him and gave him the letter. And the gardener, who turned out of course to be the girl’s father, immediately got after him with the pitchfork he was carrying. Moreover, he stuck to the tip like glue. Bill has often told me that what really rankled with him was the thought that he had paid a pound just to be chased through a thickset hedge with a gardening fork. He was always a chap who liked to get value for money. So now you see what I meant when I said it’s better to do these things at night. By the way, talking of letters, has it ever occurred to you to write one to your popsy?’
John’s manner took on a touch of stiffness.
‘Must you call her my popsy?’
His tone hurt Gally. He was not conscious of having used a derogatory term.
‘Must call her something.’
‘You might try Miss Gilpin.’
‘Sounds a bit formal. Anyway, you know who I mean. Why not drop her a line?’
John shook his head. A wasted gesture, of course, for a man cloaked in darkness towards another man also cloaked in darkness.
‘It wouldn’t do any good. I must see her.’
‘Yes, on second thoughts you’re right. In my younger days I always found that when I wanted to melt the heart of a bookie and persuade him to wait another week for his money, it was essential to confer with him in person, so as to be able to massage his upper arm and pick bits of fluff off him, and no doubt the same principle applies when one is trying to get a girl thinking along the right lines. At any moment you may want to reach out and grab her and shower kisses on her upturned face, and this cannot be done by mail.’
John quivered. Those vivid words had conjured up a picture which moved him deeply.
‘I suppose it really is impossible to get me into the castle?’
The wistful note in his voice, so like that which used to come into his own in the old days when he was having business talks with turf accountants, stirred Gally’s sympathetic heart. He would have given much to be able to offer some word of cheer, but he could not encourage false hopes.
‘As a friend of mine absolutely impossible. It wouldn’t be worth your while to bother to pass the front door. “Throw this man out”, Connie would say to the knaves and scullions on the pay roll, and “I want to see him bounce twice”, she would add. The only way you could remain on the premises for more than ten minutes would be if you put on false whiskers and said you had come to inspect the drains. Which reminds me. A fellow at the Pelican did that once, and—’
But the case history of the fellow at the Pelican who, no doubt from the best motives, had bearded himself like the pard and shown an interest in drainage systems was not to be gone into with the thoroughness customary with Gally when in reminiscent mood. It has been stressed more than once in the course of this chronicle that he was a difficult man to stop, but one of the things that could stop him was the sight at a moment like this of a torch wobbling through the darkness in his direction. He broke off on the word ‘and’ as if some anecdote-disliking auditor had gripped him by the throat.
John, too, had seen the torch, and a single look at it was enough to galvanize him into immediate activity. He was gone with the wind, and Gally lost no time in following his astute example. Hilarious though he knew the story of the whiskered fellow at the Pelican to be, he felt no inclination to linger and tell it to the torch-bearer. Better, he decided, to withdraw while the withdrawing was good. He and John had long since exchanged reclining nudes, so there was really nothing to keep him.
Returning by a circuitous route to the house, he was careful to shoot the bolts of the front door, for he had no wish to wound Beach’s feelings by leading him to suppose, when he went his rounds in the morning, that he had omitted so important a part of his duties; and, this done, he climbed the stairs to his room.
It was in the same corridor as the portrait gallery, but he did not go there immediately. Hanging the picture was a thing that could be done any time in the next six hours, and the humid night had made him hot and sticky. His first move, obviously, was to take a bath. He gathered up his great sponge and trotted off along the corridor.
2
It was Lord Emsworth who had so abruptly applied the closure to the story of the fellow at the Pelican. As a rule, he was in bed and asleep at this hour, but tonight perturbation of soul had drawn him from between the sheets as if something spiked had come through the mattress. He was consumed with worry about the Empress.
Although, as he had told Vanessa, since the sinister affair of the rejected potato Mr. Banks, the veterinary surgeon, had several times assured him that the noble animal was in midseason form and concern on his part quite unnecessary, he was still as uneasy as ever. Admitted that Mr. Banks was a recognized expert whose skill in his profession had won golden opinions from all sorts of men, he might for once have been mistaken. Alternatively, he might have discerned symptoms of some wasting sickness, and not wanting to cause him anxiety had Kept It From Him.
These speculations made him wakeful, and when at length he did doze off, conditions were in no way improved. Sleep, so widely publicized as knitting up the ravelled sleeve of care, merely brought a nightmare of the most disturbing kind. He dreamed that he had gone to the sty, eagerly anticipating the usual feast for the eyes, and there before him had stood a lean, streamlined Empress, her ribs clearly defined and her whole aspect that of a pig which had been in hard training for weeks, the sort of pig that climbs Matterho
rns and wins the annual Stock Exchange walk from London to Brighton.
The shock woke him, but he did not follow his normal practice of blinking once or twice and falling asleep again. He rose, put on dressing gown and slippers and took a torch from the drawer where it nestled among his socks and handkerchiefs. He had to go and reassure himself that the horror he had beheld had been but a dream.
In a less preoccupied mood he might on arriving at the front door have been surprised to find it unbolted, but in his anxious state the phenomenon made no impression on him, and he went on his way unheeding.
It was more as a sort of concession to the lateness of the hour than because he needed its light to guide him that he switched on the torch. When he did so, he instantly became the centre of attraction to a rowdy mob of those gnats, moths and beetles which collect in gangs and stay up late in the rural districts. They appeared to have been waiting for a congenial comrade to come along and give a fillip to their nocturnal revels, and nothing could have been more hearty than the welcome they gave him. He was swallowing his sixth gnat as he reached the sty and paused, filling his lungs with its familiar scent.
The night was very still. From somewhere in the distance came faintly the sound of a belated car as it rounded a corner on the Shrewsbury road, while nearer at hand he could hear a sotto voce something which might have been the hoot of the white or possibly the brown owl. But from the sty not so much as a grunt, and for a moment this deepened his uneasiness. Then reason told him that at such an hour grunts were hardly to be expected. To Galahad, whose formative years had been passed at the Pelican Club, this might be early evening, but it was far too late for a well-adjusted pig like the Empress to be up and about and grunting. She would of course be getting her eight hours in her covered shed.
An imperious urge swept over him to take one look at her, and he made no attempt to resist it. To mount the rail was with him, as the phrase goes, the work of an instant; to slip, overbalance, catch his foot on the rail and fall face downward in the mud the work of another instant. Feeling damp but not discouraged, he rose and came without further misadventure to journey’s end, where a fascinating sight rewarded his perseverance. Stretched on her bed of straw and breathing gently through the nose, the Empress was enjoying her usual health-giving slumber, and a glance was enough to tell him how wide of the mark his dream had been. For three years in succession she had been awarded the silver medal in the Fat Pigs class at the annual Shropshire Agricultural Show, and it was plain that had she been entered for the contest again at this moment, the cry ‘The winner and still champion’ would have been on every judge’s lips. Julius Caesar, who liked to have men—and presumably pigs—about him that were fat, would have welcomed her without hesitation to his personal entourage.
It was with a mind darkened by nameless fears that the ninth Earl had embarked on this expedition, but it was in buoyant mood that he returned. That glimpse of the Empress, brief though it had been, had had the most invigorating effect on his morale. All, he felt, was for the best in this best of all possible worlds, and it was only when he reached the house that he was compelled to modify this view in one respect. All would have been for the best in this best of all possible worlds if somebody in his absence had not bolted the front door.
3
It can never be an agreeable experience for a householder to find himself locked out late at night from the house he is holding, and he cannot be censured for allowing it to disconcert him. Of course, if he is a man of determined character, there is a simple and easy way of coping with the situation, always provided that his lungs are in good order. Many years previously Lord Emsworth’s father, faced by a similar dilemma on his return in the small hours from the annual dinner of the Loyal Sons of Shropshire, had solved it by shouting at the top of a voice which even in his calmer moments always resembled that of a toastmaster at a public banquet. He also banged on the door with a stout stick, and in almost no time every occupant of the castle, with the exception of those who were having hysterics, had flocked to the spot and admitted him, and with a final brief curse he had thrown the stick at the butler and proceeded bedwards.
His son and heir, now peering dazedly at the door through his pince-nez, had not this resource to fall back on. His father, like so many Victorian fathers, had had the comfortable knowledge to support him that he was master in his home and that no reproaches were to be expected next morning from a wife who jumped six inches vertically if he spoke to her suddenly. His successor to the earldom was not so fortunately situated.
The thought of what Connie would have to say if roused from her slumbers by shouts in the night paralysed Lord Emsworth. He stood there congealed. The impression prevailing among the gnats, moths and beetles which had accompanied him on the home stretch was that he had been turned into a pillar of salt, and it came as a great surprise to them when at the end of perhaps five minutes he moved and stirred and seemed to feel the rush of life along his keel. It had suddenly occurred to him that on a warm night like this the Duke was sure to have left the french window of the garden suite open. And while Lord Emsworth would have been the last person to claim to be an acrobat and the first person to confess his inability to do anything so agile as climbing water pipes to second storey bedrooms, he did consider himself capable of walking through an open french window. With the feeling that the happy ending was only moments away he rounded the house, and there, just as he had anticipated, was the garden suite with its window as hospitably open as any window could be.
It drew him like a magnet.
It had also, though of this he was not aware, exercised a similar attraction for one of the cats which lived in the stables by day and wandered hither and thither at night. Inquisitive, as is the way with cats, it had been intrigued by the open window and wanted to ascertain what lay beyond it. At the moment when Lord Emsworth tip-toed across the threshold it was investigating one of the Duke’s shoes which had been left on the floor and not finding much in it to arrest the attention of a pleasure-seeker.
Lord Emsworth’s legs, arriving suddenly beside it, seemed to offer more in the way of entertainment, lending, as it were, the human touch. They had a peculiar scent, but, thought the cat, rather attractive, and being of an affectionate nature it always liked to have a man to rub itself against. Abandoning the shoe, it applied its head to Lord Emsworth’s dressing gown with a quick thrusting movement, and Lord Emsworth, filled with much the same emotions as had gripped him in his boyhood when a playful schoolmate, creeping up behind him in the street, had tooted a motor horn in his immediate rear, executed one of those sideways leaps which Nijinsky used to be so good at in his prime. It was followed by the sort of crash an active bull might have produced if let loose in a china shop.
It will be remembered that Lady Constance, having learned from the Duke that he proposed to occupy the garden suite, had hastened thither to make sure that everything in it would be just as he liked it. Among the things she had thought he would like was a piecrust table containing on its surface a clock, a bowl of roses, another bowl holding pot-pourri, a calender, an ashtray and a photograph of James Schoonmaker and herself in their wedding finery. It was with this that Lord Esmworth had collided as he made his entrechat, causing the welkin to ring as described.
It had scarcely ceased to ring, when lights flashed on, revealing the Duke in lemon-coloured pyjamas with a purple stripe.
The Duke of Dunstable, though pop-eyed and far too heavily moustached for most tastes, was no poltroon. Many men, made aware that their privacy had been invaded by nocturnal marauders, would have pulled the sheets over their heads and lain hoping that if they kept quiet the fellows would go away; but he was made of sterner stuff. He prided himself on being a man who stood no nonsense from anyone, and he was certainly not proposing to stand it from a lot of blasted burglars who got up informal games of football outside his bedroom door. Arming himself for want of a better weapon with a bottle which had contained mineral water, he burst upon the
scene with the animation of an Assyrian coming down like a wolf on the fold, and there was Lord Emsworth.
His militant spirit was offended by the anti-climax. He had come all keyed up to bean a bevy of burglars with his bottle, and there were no burglars to bean; only his host with a weak smile on his face. He was particularly irked by Lord Emsworth’s weak smile. Taken in conjunction with the fact that the latter had wandered into his room at one in the morning, apparently with the object of dancing pas seuls in the dark, it confirmed the impression he had already formed that the man was potty.
Lord Emsworth, though he would have been glad to let the whole thing drop, could not but feel that a word of explanation was called for and that it was for him to open the conversation. It was, he thought, for though vague he had his code, only civil. Smiling another weak smile, he said:
‘Er—good evening, Alaric.’
The greeting was unfortunately phrased. Even a colloquial ‘Hi’ or ‘Hullo there’ would have had a better chance of mollifying the Duke. It was in no kindly spirit that he replied.
‘Good evening? What do you mean good evening? It’s the middle of the blasted night. What the devil are you doing here?’
Something had told Lord Emsworth that this interview might prove to be a difficult one, and it was plain to him that that something had known what it was talking about.
‘I was just passing through to my room. I’m afraid I disturbed you, Alaric.’
‘Of course you disturbed me.’
‘I’m sorry. I upset a table. It was quite inadvertent. I was startled by the cat.’
‘What cat? I see no cat.’
Lord Emsworth peered about him with the vague stare which had so often exasperated his sisters Constance, Dora, Charlotte, Julia and Hermione. It took him rather longer than the Duke could have wished to discern the catlessness of the room.
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