A Damsel in Distress

by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

  “You wished to see me, your lordship?”

  “Yes. Keggs, there are a number of outside men helping here tonight, aren’t there?”

  “Indubitably, your lordship. The unprecedented scale of the entertainment necessitated the engagement of a certain number of supernumeraries,” replied Keggs with an easy fluency which Reggie Byng, now cooling his head on the lower terrace, would have bitterly envied. “In the circumstances, such an arrangement was inevitable.”

  “You engaged all these men yourself?”

  “In a manner of speaking, your lordship, and for all practical purposes, yes. Mrs. Digby, the ‘ouse-keeper conducted the actual negotiations in many cases, but the arrangement was in no instance considered complete until I had passed each applicant.”

  “Do you know anything of an American who says he is the cousin of the page-boy?”

  “The boy Albert did introduce a nominee whom he stated to be ‘is cousin ‘ome from New York on a visit and anxious to oblige. I trust he ‘as given no dissatisfaction, your lordship? He seemed a respectable young man.”

  “No, no, not at all. I merely wished to know if you knew him. One can’t be too careful.”

  “No, indeed, your lordship.”

  “That’s all, then.”

  “Thank you, your lordship.”

  Lord Belpher was satisfied. He was also relieved. He felt that prudence and a steady head had kept him from making himself ridiculous. When George presently returned with the life-saving fluid, he thanked him and turned his thoughts to other things.

  But, if the young master was satisfied, Keggs was not. Upon Keggs a bright light had shone. There were few men, he flattered himself, who could more readily put two and two together and bring the sum to a correct answer. Keggs knew of the strange American gentleman who had taken up his abode at the cottage down by Platt’s farm. His looks, his habits, and his motives for coming there had formed food for discussion throughout one meal in the servant’s hall; a stranger whose abstention from brush and palette showed him to be no artist being an object of interest. And while the solution put forward by a romantic lady’s-maid, a great reader of novelettes, that the young man had come there to cure himself of some unhappy passion by communing with nature, had been scoffed at by the company, Keggs had not been so sure that there might not be something in it. Later events had deepened his suspicion, which now, after this interview with Lord Belpher, had become certainty.

  The extreme fishiness of Albert’s sudden production of a cousin from America was so manifest that only his preoccupation at the moment when he met the young man could have prevented him seeing it before. His knowledge of Albert told him that, if one so versed as that youth in the art of Swank had really possessed a cousin in America, he would long ago have been boring the servants’ hall with fictions about the man’s wealth and importance. For Albert not to lie about a thing, practically proved that thing non-existent. Such was the simple creed of Keggs.

  He accosted a passing fellow-servitor.

  “Seen young blighted Albert anywhere, Freddy?”

  It was in this shameful manner that that mastermind was habitually referred to below stairs.

  “Seen ‘im going into the scullery not ‘arf a minute ago,” replied Freddy.

  “Thanks.”

  “So long,” said Freddy.

  “Be good!” returned Keggs, whose mode of speech among those of his own world differed substantially from that which he considered it became him to employ when conversing with the titled.

  The fall of great men is but too often due to the failure of their miserable bodies to give the necessary support to their great brains. There are some, for example, who say that Napoleon would have won the battle of Waterloo if he had not had dyspepsia. Not otherwise was it with Albert on that present occasion. The arrival of Keggs found him at a disadvantage. He had been imprudent enough, on leaving George, to endeavour to smoke a cigar, purloined from the box which stood hospitably open on a table in the hall. But for this, who knows with what cunning counter-attacks he might have foiled the butler’s onslaught? As it was, the battle was a walk-over for the enemy.

  “I’ve been looking for you, young blighted Albert!” said Keggs coldly.

  Albert turned a green but defiant face to the foe.

  “Go and boil yer ‘ead!” he advised.

  “Never mind about my ‘ead. If I was to do my duty to you, I’d give you a clip side of your ‘ead, that’s what I’d do.”

  “And then bury it in the woods,” added Albert, wincing as the consequences of his rash act swept through his small form like some nauseous tidal wave. He shut his eyes. It upset him to see Keggs shimmering like that. A shimmering butler is an awful sight.

  Keggs laughed a hard laugh. “You and your cousins from America!”

  “What about my cousins from America?”

  “Yes, what about them? That’s just what Lord Belpher and me have been asking ourselves.”

  “I don’t know wot you’re talking about.”

  “You soon will, young blighted Albert! Who sneaked that American fellow into the ‘ouse to meet Lady Maud?”

  “I never!”

  “Think I didn’t see through your little game? Why, I knew from the first.”

  “Yes, you did! Then why did you let him into the place?”

  Keggs snorted triumphantly. “There! You admit it! It was that feller!”

  Too late Albert saw his false move—a move which in a normal state of health, he would have scorned to make. Just as Napoleon, minus a stomach-ache, would have scorned the blunder that sent his Cuirassiers plunging to destruction in the sunken road.

  “I don’t know what you’re torkin’ about,” he said weakly.

  “Well,” said Keggs, “I haven’t time to stand ‘ere chatting with you. I must be going back to ‘is lordship, to tell ‘im of the ‘orrid trick you played on him.”

  A second spasm shook Albert to the core of his being. The double assault was too much for him. Betrayed by the body, the spirit yielded.

  “You wouldn’t do that, Mr. Keggs!”

  There was a white flag in every syllable.

  “I would if I did my duty.”

  “But you don’t care about that,” urged Albert ingratiatingly.

  “I’ll have to think it over,” mused Keggs. “I don’t want to be ‘and on a young boy.” He struggled silently with himself. “Ruinin’ ‘is prospecks!”

  An inspiration seemed to come to him.

  “All right, young blighted Albert,” he said briskly. “I’ll go against my better nature this once and chance it. And now, young feller me lad, you just ‘and over that ticket of yours! You know what I’m alloodin’ to! That ticket you ‘ad at the sweep, the one with ‘Mr. X’ on it.”

  Albert’s indomitable spirit triumphed for a moment over his stricken body.

  “That’s likely, ain’t it!”

  Keggs sighed—the sigh of a good man who has done his best to help a fellow-being and has been baffled by the other’s perversity.

  “Just as you please,” he said sorrowfully. “But I did ‘ope I shouldn’t ‘ave to go to ‘is lordship and tell ‘im ‘ow you’ve deceived him.”

  Albert capitulated. “‘Ere yer are!” A piece of paper changed hands. “It’s men like you wot lead to ‘arf the crime in the country!”

  “Much obliged, me lad.”

  “You’d walk a mile in the snow, you would,” continued Albert pursuing his train of thought, “to rob a starving beggar of a ha’penny.”

  “Who’s robbing anyone? Don’t you talk so quick, young man. I’m doing the right thing by you. You can ‘ave my ticket, marked ‘Reggie Byng’. It’s a fair exchange, and no one the worse!”

  “Fat lot of good that is!”

  “That’s as it may be. Anyhow, there it is.” Keggs prepared to withdraw. “You’re too young to ‘ave all that money, Albert. You wouldn’t know what to do with it. It wouldn’t make you ‘appy. There’s other things in the
world besides winning sweepstakes. And, properly speaking, you ought never to have been allowed to draw at all, being so young.”

  Albert groaned hollowly. “When you’ve finished torkin’, I wish you’d kindly have the goodness to leave me alone. I’m not meself.”

  “That,” said Keggs cordially, “is a bit of luck for you, my boy. Accept my ‘eartiest felicitations!”

  Defeat is the test of the great man. Your true general is not he who rides to triumph on the tide of an easy victory, but the one who, when crushed to earth, can bend himself to the task of planning methods of rising again. Such a one was Albert, the page-boy. Observe Albert in his attic bedroom scarcely more than an hour later. His body has practically ceased to trouble him, and his soaring spirit has come into its own again. With the exception of a now very occasional spasm, his physical anguish has passed, and he is thinking, thinking hard. On the chest of drawers is a grubby envelope, addressed in an ill-formed hand to:

  R. Byng, Esq.

  On a sheet of paper, soon to be placed in the envelope, are written in the same hand these words:

  “Do not dispare! Remember! Fante hart never won fair lady. I shall watch your futur progres with considurable interest. Your Well-Wisher.”

  The last sentence is not original. Albert’s Sunday-school teacher said it to Albert on the occasion of his taking up his duties at the castle, and it stuck in his memory. Fortunately, for it expressed exactly what Albert wished to say. From now on Reggie Byng’s progress with Lady Maud Marsh was to be the thing nearest to Albert’s heart.

  And George meanwhile? Little knowing how Fate has changed in a flash an ally into an opponent he is standing at the edge of the shrubbery near the castle gate. The night is very beautiful; the banked spots on his hands and knees are hurting much less now; and he is full of long, sweet thoughts. He has just discovered the extraordinary resemblance, which had not struck him as he was climbing up the knotted sheet, between his own position and that of the hero of Tennyson’s Maud, a poem to which he has always been particularly addicted—and never more so than during the days since he learned the name of the only possible girl. When he has not been playing golf, Tennyson’s Maud has been his constant companion.

  “Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls Come hither, the dances are done, In glass of satin and glimmer of pearls. Queen lily and rose in one; Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls To the flowers, and be their sun.”

  The music from the ballroom flows out to him through the motionless air. The smell of sweet earth and growing things is everywhere.

  “Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, hath flown, Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone; And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the rose is blown.”

  He draws a deep breath, misled young man. The night is very beautiful. It is near to the dawn now and in the bushes live things are beginning to stir and whisper.

  “Maud!”

  Surely she can hear him?

  “Maud!”

  The silver stars looked down dispassionately. This sort of thing had no novelty for them.

  Chapter 15

  Lord Belpher’s twenty-first birthday dawned brightly, heralded in by much twittering of sparrows in the ivy outside his bedroom. These Percy did not hear, for he was sound asleep and had had a late night. The first sound that was able to penetrate his heavy slumber and rouse him to a realization that his birthday had arrived was the piercing cry of Reggie Byng on his way to the bath-room across the corridor. It was Reggie’s disturbing custom to urge himself on to a cold bath with encouraging yells; and the noise of this performance, followed by violent splashing and a series of sharp howls as the sponge played upon the Byng spine, made sleep an impossibility within a radius of many yards. Percy sat up in bed, and cursed Reggie silently. He discovered that he had a headache.

  Presently the door flew open, and the vocalist entered in person, clad in a pink bathrobe and very tousled and rosy from the tub.

  “Many happy returns of the day, Boots, old thing!”

  Reggie burst rollickingly into song.

  “I’m twenty-one today! Twenty-one today! I’ve got the key of the door! Never been twenty-one before! And father says I can do what I like! So shout Hip-hip-hooray! I’m a jolly good fellow, Twenty-one today.”

  Lord Belpher scowled morosely.

  “I wish you wouldn’t make that infernal noise!”

  “What infernal noise?”

  “That singing!”

  “My God! This man has wounded me!” said Reggie.

  “I’ve a headache.”

  “I thought you would have, laddie, when I saw you getting away with the liquid last night. An X-ray photograph of your liver would show something that looked like a crumpled oak-leaf studded with hob-nails. You ought to take more exercise, dear heart. Except for sloshing that policeman, you haven’t done anything athletic for years.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t harp on that affair!”

  Reggie sat down on the bed.

  “Between ourselves, old man,” he said confidentially, “I also—I myself—Reginald Byng, in person—was perhaps a shade polluted during the evening. I give you my honest word that just after dinner I saw three versions of your uncle, the bishop, standing in a row side by side. I tell you, laddie, that for a moment I thought I had strayed into a Bishop’s Beano at Exeter Hall or the Athenaeum or wherever it is those chappies collect in gangs. Then the three bishops sort of congealed into one bishop, a trifle blurred about the outlines, and I felt relieved. But what convinced me that I had emptied a flagon or so too many was a rather rummy thing that occurred later on. Have you ever happened, during one of these feasts of reason and flows of soul, when you were bubbling over with joie-de-vivre—have you ever happened to see things? What I mean to say is, I had a deuced odd experience last night. I could have sworn that one of the waiter-chappies was that fellow who knocked off your hat in Piccadilly.”

  Lord Belpher, who had sunk back on to the pillows at Reggie’s entrance and had been listening to his talk with only intermittent attention, shot up in bed.

  “What!”

  “Absolutely! My mistake, of course, but there it was. The fellow might have been his double.”

  “But you’ve never seen the man.”

  “Oh yes, I have. I forgot to tell you. I met him on the links yesterday. I’d gone out there alone, rather expecting to have a round with the pro., but, finding this lad there, I suggested that we might go round together. We did eighteen holes, and he licked the boots off me. Very hot stuff he was. And after the game he took me off to his cottage and gave me a drink. He lives at the cottage next door to Platt’s farm, so, you see, it was the identical chappie. We got extremely matey. Like brothers. Absolutely! So you can understand what a shock it gave me when I found what I took to be the same man serving bracers to the multitude the same evening. One of those nasty jars that cause a fellow’s head to swim a bit, don’t you know, and make him lose confidence in himself.”

  Lord Belpher did not reply. His brain was whirling. So he had been right after all!

  “You know,” pursued Reggie seriously, “I think you are making the bloomer of a lifetime over this hat-swatting chappie. You’ve misjudged him. He’s a first-rate sort. Take it from me! Nobody could have got out of the bunker at the fifteenth hole better than he did. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll conciliate the feller. A really first-class golfer is what you need in the family. Besides, even leaving out of the question the fact that he can do things with a niblick that I didn’t think anybody except the pro. could do, he’s a corking good sort. A stout fellow in every respect. I took to the chappie. He’s all right. Grab him, Boots, before he gets away. That’s my tip to you. You’ll never regret it! From first to last this lad didn’t foozle a single drive, and his approach-putting has to be seen to be believed. Well, got to dress, I suppose. Mustn’t waste life’s springtime sitting here talking to you. Toodle-oo, laddie! We shall mee
t anon!”

  Lord Belpher leaped from his bed. He was feeling worse than ever now, and a glance into the mirror told him that he looked rather worse than he felt. Late nights and insufficient sleep, added to the need of a shave, always made him look like something that should have been swept up and taken away to the ash-bin. And as for his physical condition, talking to Reggie Byng never tended to make you feel better when you had a headache. Reggie’s manner was not soothing, and on this particular morning his choice of a topic had been unusually irritating. Lord Belpher told himself that he could not understand Reggie. He had never been able to make his mind quite clear as to the exact relations between the latter and his sister Maud, but he had always been under the impression that, if they were not actually engaged, they were on the verge of becoming so; and it was maddening to have to listen to Reggie advocating the claims of a rival as if he had no personal interest in the affair at all. Percy felt for his complaisant friend something of the annoyance which a householder feels for the watchdog whom he finds fraternizing with the burglar. Why, Reggie, more than anyone else, ought to be foaming with rage at the insolence of this American fellow in coming down to Belpher and planting himself at the castle gates. Instead of which, on his own showing, he appeared to have adopted an attitude towards him which would have excited remark if adopted by David towards Jonathan. He seemed to spend all his spare time frolicking with the man on the golf-links and hobnobbing with him in his house.

  Lord Belpber was thoroughly upset. It was impossible to prove it or to do anything about it now, but he was convinced that the fellow had wormed his way into the castle in the guise of a waiter. He had probably met Maud and plotted further meetings with her. This thing was becoming unendurable.

  One thing was certain. The family honour was in his hands. Anything that was to be done to keep Maud away from the intruder must be done by himself. Reggie was hopeless: he was capable, as far as Percy could see, of escorting Maud to the fellow’s door in his own car and leaving her on the threshold with his blessing. As for Lord Marshmoreton, roses and the family history took up so much of his time that he could not be counted on for anything but moral support. He, Percy, must do the active work.