'The fault,' he said tonelessly, 'was, I suppose, yours?'
'In a way, yes. But—'
'What precisely occurred?'
'Well, it was like this, guv'nor. You know how keen I've always been on the movies. Going to every picture I could manage, and so forth. Well, one night, as I was lying awake, I suddenly got the idea for a scenario of my own. And dashed good it was, too. It was about a poor man who had an accident, and the coves at the hospital said that an operation was the only thing that could save his life. But they wouldn't operate without five hundred dollars down in advance, and he hadn't got five hundred dollars. So his wife got hold of a millionaire.'
'What,' inquired Lord Emsworth, 'is all this drivel?'
'Drivel, guv'nor?' said Freddie, wounded. 'I'm only telling you my scenario.'
'I have no wish to hear it. What I am anxious to learn from you – in as few words as possible – is the reason for the breach between your wife and yourself.'
'Well, I'm telling you. It all started with the scenario. When I'd written it, I naturally wanted to sell it to somebody; and just about then Pauline Petite came East and took a house at Great Neck, and a pal of mine introduced me to her.'
'Who is Pauline Petite?'
'Good Heavens, guv'nor!' Freddie stared, amazed. 'You don't mean to sit there and tell me you've never heard of Pauline Petite! The movie star. Didn't you see "Passion's Slaves"?'
'I did not.'
'Nor "Silken Fetters"?'
'Never.'
'Nor "Purple Passion"? Nor "Bonds of Gold"? Nor "Seduction"? Great Scott, guv'nor, you haven't lived!'
'What about this woman?'
'Well, a pal introduced me to her, you see, and I started to pave the way to getting her interested in this scenario of mine. Because, if she liked it, of course it meant everything. Well, this involved seeing a good deal of her, you understand, and one night Jane Yorke happened to come on us having a bite together at an inn.'
'Good God!'
'Oh, it was all perfectly respectable, guv'nor. All strictly on the up-and-up. Purely a business relationship. But the trouble was I had kept the thing from Aggie because I wanted to surprise her. I wanted to be able to come to her with the scenario accepted and tell her I wasn't such a fool as I looked.'
'Any woman capable of believing that—'
'And most unfortunately I had said that I had to go to Chicago that night on business. So, what with one thing and another— Well, as I said just now, she's at the Savoy and I'm—'
'Who is Jane Yorke?'
A scowl marred Freddie's smooth features.
A pill, guv'nor. One of the worst. A Jebusite and Amalekite. If it hadn't been for her, I believe I could have fixed the thing. But she got hold of Aggie and whisked her away and poisoned her mind. This woman, guv'nor, has got a brother in the background, and she wanted Aggie to marry the brother. And my belief is that she is trying to induce Aggie to pop over to Paris and get a divorce, so as to give the blighted brother another look in, dash him! So now, guv'nor, is the time for action. Now is the moment to rally round as never before. I rely on you.'
'Me? What on earth do you expect me to do?'
'Why, go to her and plead with her. They do it in the movies. I've seen thousands of pictures where the white-haired old father—'
'Stuff and nonsense!' said Lord Emsworth, stung to the quick – for, like so many well-preserved men of ripe years, he was under the impression that he was merely slightly brindled. 'You have made your bed, and you must stew in it.'
'Eh?'
'I mean, you must stew in your own juice. You have brought this trouble on yourself by your own idiotic behaviour, and you must bear the consequences.'
'You mean you won't go and plead?'
'No.'
'You mean yes?'
'I mean no.'
'Not plead?' said Freddie, desiring to get this thing clear.
'I refuse to allow myself to be drawn into the matter.'
'You won't even give her a ring on the telephone?'
'I will not.'
'Oh, come, guv'nor. Be a sport. Her suite's Number Sixty-seven. You can get her in a second and state my case, all for the cost of twopence. Have a pop at it.'
'No.'
Freddie rose with set face.
'Very well,' he said tensely. 'Then I may as well tell you, guv'nor, that my life is as good as over. The future holds nothing for me. I am a spent egg. If Aggie goes to Paris and gets that divorce, I shall retire to some quiet spot and there pass the few remaining years of my existence, a blighted wreck. Good-bye, guv'nor.'
'Good-bye.'
'Honk-honk!' said Freddie moodily.
As a general rule, Lord Emsworth was an early and a sound sleeper, one of the few qualities which he shared with Napoleon Bonaparte being the ability to slumber the moment his head touched the pillow. But that night, weighed down with his troubles, he sought unconsciousness in vain. And somewhere in the small hours of the morning he sat up in bed, quaking. A sudden grisly thought had occurred to him.
Freddie had stated that, in the event of his wife obtaining a divorce, he proposed to retire for the rest of his life to some quiet spot. Suppose by 'quiet spot' he meant Blandings Castle! The possibility shook Lord Emsworth like an ague. Freddie had visited Blandings for extended periods before, and it was his lordship's considered opinion that the boy was a worse menace to the happy life of rural England than botts, green-fly, or foot-and-mouth disease. The prospect of having him at Blandings indefinitely affected Lord Emsworth like a blow on the base of the skull.
An entirely new line of thought was now opened. Had he in the recent interview, he asked himself, been as kind as he should have been? Had he not been a little harsh? Had he been just a shade lacking in sympathy? Had he played quite the part a father ought to have played?
The answers to the questions, in the order stated, were as follows: No. Yes. Yes. And No.
Waking after a belated sleep and sipping his early tea, Lord Emsworth found himself full of a new resolve. He had changed his mind. It was his intention now to go to this daughter-in-law of his and plead with her as no father-in-law had ever pleaded yet.
A man who has had a disturbed night is not at his best on the following morning. Until after luncheon Lord Emsworth felt much too heavy-headed to do himself justice as a pleader. But a visit to the flowers at Kensington Gardens, followed by a capital chop and half a bottle of claret at the Regent Grill, put him into excellent shape. The heaviness had vanished, and he felt alert and quick-witted.
So much so that, on arriving at the Savoy Hotel, he behaved with a cunning of which he had never hitherto suspected himself capable. On the very verge of giving his name to the desk-clerk, he paused. It might well be, he reflected, that this daughter-in-law of his, including the entire Emsworth family in her feud, would, did she hear that he was waiting below, nip the whole programme in the bud by refusing to see him. Better, he decided, not to risk it. Moving away from the desk, he headed for the lift, and presently found himself outside the door of Suite Sixty-seven.
He tapped on the door. There was no answer. He tapped again, and, once more receiving no reply, felt a little nonplussed. He was not a very far-seeing man, and the possibility that his daughter-in-law might not be at home had not occurred to him. He was about to go away when, peering at the door, he perceived that it was ajar. He pushed it open; and, ambling in, found himself in a cosy sitting-room, crowded, as feminine sitting-rooms are apt to be, with flowers of every description.
Flowers were always a magnet to Lord Emsworth, and for some happy minutes he pottered from vase to vase, sniffing.
It was after he had sniffed for perhaps the twentieth time that the impression came to him that the room contained a curious echo. It was almost as though, each time he sniffed, some other person sniffed too. And yet the place was apparently empty. To submit the acoustics to a final test, his lordship sniffed once more. But this time the sound that followed was of a more sinister
character. It sounded to Lord Emsworth exactly like a snarl.
It was a snarl. Chancing to glance floorwards, he became immediately aware, in close juxtaposition to his ankles, of what appeared at first sight to be a lady's muff. But, this being one of his bright afternoons, he realized in the next instant that it was no muff, but a toy dog of the kind which women are only too prone to leave lying about their sitting-rooms.
'God bless my soul!' exclaimed Lord Emsworth, piously commending his safety to Heaven, as so many of his rugged ancestors had done in rather similar circumstances on the battlefields of the Middle Ages.
He backed uneasily. The dog followed him. It appeared to have no legs, but to move by faith alone.
'Go away, sir!' said Lord Emsworth.
He hated small dogs. They nipped you. Take your eye off them, and they had you by the ankle before you knew where you were. Discovering that his manoeuvres had brought him to a door, he decided to take cover. He opened the door and slipped through. Blood will tell. An Emsworth had taken cover at Agincourt.
He was now in a bedroom, and, judging by the look of things, likely to remain there for some time. The woolly dog, foiled by superior intelligence, was now making no attempt to conceal its chagrin. It had cast off all pretence of armed neutrality and was yapping with a hideous intensity and shrillness. And ever and anon it scratched with baffled fury at the lower panels.
'Go away, sir!' thundered his lordship.
'Who's there?'
Lord Emsworth leaped like a jumping bean. So convinced had he been of the emptiness of this suite of rooms that the voice, speaking where no voice should have been, crashed into his nerve centres like a shell.
'Who is there?'
The mystery, which had begun to assume an aspect of the supernatural, was solved. On the other side of the room was a door, and it was from behind this that the voice had spoken. It occurred to Lord Emsworth that it was merely part of the general malignity of Fate that he should have selected for a formal father-in-lawful call the moment when his daughter-in-law was taking a bath.
He approached the door, and spoke soothingly.
'Pray do not be alarmed, my dear.'
'Who are you? What are you doing in my room?'
'There is no cause for alarm—'
He broke off abruptly, for his words had suddenly been proved fundamentally untrue. There was very vital cause for alarm. The door of the bedroom had opened, and the muff-like dog, shrilling hate, was scuttling in its peculiar legless manner straight for his ankles.
Peril brings out unsuspected qualities in every man. Lord Emsworth was not a professional acrobat, but the leap he gave in this crisis would have justified his being mistaken for one. He floated through the air like a homing bird. From where he had been standing the bed was a considerable distance away but he reached it with inches to spare, and stood there, quivering. Below him, the woolly dog raged like the ocean at the base of a cliff.
It was at this point that his lordship became aware of a young woman standing in the doorway through which he had just passed.
About this young woman there were many points which would have found little favour in the eyes of a critic of feminine charm. She was too short, too square, and too solid. She had a much too determined chin. And her hair was of an unpleasing gingery hue. But the thing Lord Emsworth liked least about her was the pistol she was pointing at his head.
A plaintive voice filtered through the bathroom door.
'Who's there?'
'It's a man,' said the girl behind the gun.
'I know it's a man. He spoke to me. Who is he?'
'I don't know. A nasty-looking fellow. I saw him hanging about the passage outside your door, and I got my gun and came along. Come on out.'
'I can't. I'm all wet.'
It is not easy for a man who is standing on a bed with his hands up to achieve dignity, but Lord Emsworth did the best he could.
'My dear madam!'
'What are you doing here?'
'I found the door ajar—'
'And walked in to see if there were any jewel-cases ajar, too. I think,' added the young woman, raising her voice so as to make herself audible to the unseen bather, 'it's Dopey Smith.'
'Who?'
'Dopey Smith. The fellow the cops said tried for your jewels in New York. He must have followed you over here.'
'I am not Dopey Smith, madam,' cried his lordship. 'I am the Earl of Emsworth.'
'You are?'
'Yes, I am.'
'Yes, you are!'
'I came to see my daughter-in-law.'
'Well, here she is.'
The bathroom door opened, and there emerged a charming figure draped in a kimono. Even in that tense moment Lord Emsworth was conscious of a bewildered astonishment that such a girl could ever have stooped to mate with his son Frederick.
'Who did you say he was?' she asked, recommending herself still more strongly to his lordship's esteem by scooping up the woolly dog and holding it securely in her arms.
'He says he's the Earl of Emsworth.'
'I am the Earl of Emsworth.'
The girl in the kimono looked keenly at him as he descended from the bed.
'You know, Jane,' she said, a note of uncertainty in her voice, 'it might be. He looks very like Freddie.'
The appalling slur on his personal appearance held Lord Emsworth dumb. Like other men, he had had black moments when his looks had not altogether satisfied him, but he had never supposed that he had a face like Freddie's.
The girl with the pistol uttered a stupefying whoop.
'Jiminy Christmas!' she cried. 'Don't you see?'
'See what?'
'Why, it is Freddie. Disguised. Trying to get at you this way. It's just the sort of movie stunt he would think clever. Take them off, Ralph Vandeleur – I know you!'
She reached out a clutching hand, seized his lordship's beard in a vice-like grip, and tugged with all the force of a modern girl, trained from infancy at hockey, tennis and Swedish exercises.
It had not occurred to Lord Emsworth a moment before that anything could possibly tend to make his situation more uncomfortable than it already was. He saw now that he had been mistaken in this view. Agony beyond his liveliest dreams flamed through his shrinking frame.
The girl regarded him with a somewhat baffled look.
'H'm!' she said disappointedly. 'It seems to be real. Unless,' she continued, on a more optimistic note, 'he's fixed it on with specially strong fish-glue or something. I'd better try again.'
'No, don't,' said his lordship's daughter-in-law. 'It isn't Freddie. I would have recognized him at once.'
'Then he's a crook after all. Kindly step into that cupboard, George, while I phone for the constabulary.'
Lord Emsworth danced a few steps.
'I will not step into cupboards. I insist on being heard. I don't know who this woman is—'
'My name's Jane Yorke, if you're curious.'
'Ah! The woman who poisons my son's wife's mind against him! I know all about you.' He turned to the girl in the kimono. 'Yesterday my son Frederick implored me by telegram to come to London. I saw him at my club. Stop that dog barking!'
'Why shouldn't he bark?' said Miss Yorke. 'He's in his own home.'
'He told me,' proceeded Lord Emsworth, raising his voice, 'that there had been a little misunderstanding between you—'
'Little misunderstanding is good,' said Miss Yorke.
'He dined with that woman for a purpose.'
'And directly I saw them,' said Miss Yorke, 'I knew what the purpose was.'
The Hon. Mrs Threepwood looked at her friend, wavering.
'I believe it's true,' she said, 'and he really is Lord Emsworth. He seems to know all that happened. How could he know if Freddie hadn't told him?'
'If this fellow is a crook from the other side, of course he would know. The thing was in Broadway Whispers and Town Gossip, wasn't it?'
All the same—'
The telephone bell r
ang sharply.
'I assure you—' began Lord Emsworth.
'Right!' said the unpleasant Miss Yorke, at the receiver. 'Send him right up.' She regarded his lordship with a brightly triumphant eye. 'You're out of luck, my friend,' she said. 'Lord Emsworth has just arrived, and he's on his way up now.'
There are certain situations in which the human brain may be excused for reeling. Lord Emsworth's did not so much reel as perform a kind of dance, as if it were in danger of coming unstuck. Always a dreamy and absent-minded man, unequal to the rough hurly-burly of life, he had passed this afternoon through an ordeal which might well have unsettled the most practical. And this extraordinary announcement, coming on top of all he had been through, was too much for him. He tottered into the sitting-room and sank into a chair. It seemed to him that he was living in a nightmare.
And certainly in the figure that entered a few moments later there was nothing whatever to correct this impression. It might have stepped straight into anybody's nightmare and felt perfectly at home right from the start.
The figure was that of a tall, thin man with white hair and a long and flowing beard of the same venerable hue. Strange as it seemed that a person of such appearance should not have been shot on sight early in his career, he had obviously reached an extremely advanced age. He was either a man of about a hundred and fifty who was rather young for his years or a man of about a hundred and ten who had been aged by trouble.
'My dear child!' piped the figure in a weak, quavering voice.
'Freddie!' cried the girl in the kimono.
'Oh, dash it!' said the figure.
There was a pause, broken by a sort of gasping moan from Lord Emsworth. More and more every minute his lordship was feeling the strain.
'Good God, guv'nor!' said the figure, sighting him.
His wife pointed at Lord Emsworth.
Blandings Castle and Elsewhere Page 4