Galahad at Blandings

  P. G. WODEHOUSE

  Galahad at Blandings

  CHAPTER 1

  I

  Of the two young men sharing a cell in one of New York’s popular police stations Tipton Plimsoll, the tall thin one, was the first to recover, if only gradually, from the effect of the potations which had led to his sojourn in the coop. The other, Wilfred Allsop, pint-size and fragile and rather like the poet Shelley in appearance, was still asleep.

  For some time after life had returned to the rigid limbs Tipton sat with his head between his hands, the better to prevent it floating away from the parent neck. He was still far from feeling at the peak of his form and would have given much for a cake of ice against which to rest his forehead, but he was deriving a certain solace from the thought that his betrothed, Veronica, only daughter of Colonel and Lady Hermione Wedge of Rutland Gate, London S.W.7, was three thousand miles away and would never learn of his doings this summer night. He was also reviewing the past, trying to piece together the events that had led up to the tragedy, and little by little they began to come back to him.

  The party in the Greenwich Village studio. Quite a good party, with sculptors, avant garde playwrights and other local fauna dotted around, busy with their bohemian revels. There had occurred that morning on the New York Stock Exchange one of those slumps or crashes which periodically spoil the day for Stock Exchanges, but it had not touched the lives of residents in the Washington Square neighbourhood, where intellect reigns and little interest is taken in the fluctuations of the money market. Unmoved by the news in the evening papers that Amalgamated Cheese had closed twenty points off and Consolidated Hamburgers fifteen, the members of the party, most of whom would not have known a stock certificate from a greeting card, were all cutting up and having a good time, and so was Tipton. The large fortune he had recently inherited from a deceased uncle was invested in the shares of Tipton’s Stores, which never varied more than a point or two, no matter what financial earthquakes might be happening elsewhere.

  Over in a corner of this Greenwich Village studio he had perceived a pint-size character at the piano, tickling the ivories with a skill that commanded admiration. His compliments to this pint-size bozo on his virtuosity. The ‘Oh, thanks awfully’ which betrayed the other’s English origin. The subsequent fraternisation. The exchange of names. The quick start of surprise on the bozo’s part. Plimsoll, did you say? Not Tipton Plimsoll? Sure. Are you the chap who’s engaged to Veronica Wedge? That’s right. Do you know her? She’s my cousin. She’s what? My cousin. You mean you’re Vee’s cousin? Have been for years. Well, fry me for an oyster, I think this calls for a drink, don’t you?

  And that was how it had all begun. Circumstances, it came out in the course of conversation, had rendered Wilfred Allsop low-spirited, and when he sees a friend low-spirited, especially a friend linked by ties of blood to the girl he loves, the man of sensibility spares no effort or expense to alleviate his depression and bring the roses back to his cheeks. One beaker had led to another, the lessons learned at mother’s knee had been temporarily forgotten, and here they were, behind bars.

  Tipton had been nursing his throbbing head for perhaps a quarter of an hour and had just assured himself by delicate experiment that it was not, as he had at one time feared, going to explode like a high-powered shell, when a soft moan in his rear caused him to turn. Wilfred Allsop was sitting up, his face pale, his eyes glassy, his hair disordered. He looked like the poet Shelley after a big night out with Lord Byron.

  ‘What’s this place?’ he asked in a faint whisper. ‘Is it a jug of some description?’

  ‘That’s just about what it is, Willie. We call them hoosegows over here, but the general effect is the same. How’s the boy?’

  ‘What boy?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Oh, me? I’m dying.’

  ‘Of course you’re not.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ said Wilfred with some asperity. A man is entitled to know whether he is dying or not. ‘And before I pass on there’s something I want you to promise you’ll do for me. If you’re engaged to Vee, I take it you’ve visited Blandings Castle?’

  ‘Sure. It was there I met her.’

  ‘Well, did you happen, while there, to run into a girl called Monica Simmons?’

  ‘The name doesn’t ring a bell. Who is she?’

  ‘She looks after Empress of Blandings, that pig of my Uncle Clarence’s.’

  ‘Ah, then I’ve seen her. Old Emsworth took me to the sty a couple of times and she was there, ladling out the bran mash. Girl who looks like an all-in wrestler.’

  Wilfred’s asperity became more marked. Their evening together had filled him with a deep affection for Tipton Plimsoll, but even from a great friend he could not countenance loose talk of this sort.

  ‘I am sorry you think she looks like an all-in wrestler,’ he said stiffly. ‘To me she seems to resemble one of those Norse goddesses. However, be that as it may, I love her, Tippy. I fell in love with her at first sight.’

  Recalling the picture of Miss Simmons in smock and trousers with a good deal of mud on her face, Tipton found this difficult to believe, but he was sympathetic.

  ‘Good for you. Peach of a girl, I should imagine. Did you tell her so?’

  ‘I couldn’t do it. I hadn’t the nerve. She’s so majestic, and I’m such a little squirt. You agree that I’m a little squirt, Tippy?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know I’d put it just that way, but I guess ones got to face it, there are taller guys around.’

  ‘All I’ve done so far is look at her and talk about the weather.’

  ‘Not much percentage in that.’

  ‘No, the whole thing’s quite hopeless. But here’s what I was starting to say. I want you, when I am gone, to see that she gets my cigarette case. It’s all I have to leave. Can I trust you to do this when I have passed beyond the veil?’

  ‘You aren’t going to pass beyond the veil.’

  ‘I am going to pass beyond the veil,’ said Wilfred petulantly. ‘You’ve made a note of what I was saying. Cigarette case. To be given to Monica Simmons after my decease.’

  ‘Does she smoke?’

  ‘Of course she smokes.’

  ‘She’ll be able to blow smoke rings at the pig.’

  Wilfred stiffened.

  ‘There is no need to be flippant about it, Plimsoll. I am asking you as a friend to perform this small act of kindness for me. Can I rely on you?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll attend to it.’

  ‘Tell her my last thoughts were of her and I expired with her name on my lips.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ said Wilfred, and went to sleep again.

  II

  Deprived of human companionship, Tipton felt sad and lonely. He was a gregarious soul and it always made him uneasy when he had no one to talk to. Throughout these exchanges with Wilfred Allsop he had been aware of a policeman pacing up and down the corridor on the other side of the bars, and policemen, while often not ideal as conversationalists, being inclined to confine themselves to monosyllables and those spoken out of the side of their mouths, are better than nothing. He went to the bars and, peering through them like some rare specimen in a zoo, uttered a husky ‘Hey, officer.’

  The policeman was a long, stringy policeman, who flowed out of his uniform at odd spots. His face was gnarled, his wrists knobbly and of a geranium hue, and he had those three or four extra inches of neck which disqualify a man for high honours in a beauty competition. But beneath this forbidding exterior there lay a kindly heart and he could make allowances for the indiscretions of youth. Muggers, stick-up men and hoodlums in general he disliked, but towards the Tipton type of malefactor he was able to be indulgent. So w
here to one of his ordinary clientele he would have replied with a brusque ‘Pipe down, youse,’ he now said ‘Hi’ in a not uncordial voice and joined Tipton at the bars, through which they proceeded to converse like a modern Pyramus and Thisbe.

  ‘How’s it coming?’ he asked.

  Tipton replied that he had a headache, and the policeman said that that occasioned him no surprise.

  ‘You certainly earned it, Mac.’

  ‘I guess I was kind of high.’

  ‘You sure were,’ said the policeman. ‘The boys were saying it took three of them to get you into the paddy wagon.

  His manner had not been censorious and his voice had contained admiration rather than reproof, but nevertheless Tipton felt it incumbent on him to justify himself.

  ‘You mustn’t think I do this sort of thing often,’ he said. At one time, yes, but not since I became engaged. I promised my fiancée I’d go easy on the nights of wine and roses. But this was a special case. I was trying to cheer up my friend over there and bring a little sunshine into his life.’

  ‘Feeling low, was he?’

  ‘In the depths, officer, and with reason. He was telling me the whole story. He’s a musician. Plays the piano and composes things. He came here from England some months ago hoping to crash Tin Pan Alley or get taken on by one of the bands, but couldn’t make the grade. Ran out of money and had to cable home for supplies.’

  ‘And the folks wouldn’t send him none?’

  ‘Oh sure, they sent him enough to buy his passage to England. He leaves the day after tomorrow. But his Aunt Hermione said it was high time he stopped fooling around and settled down to a regular job, and she’d found one for him. And do you know what that job is? Teaching music in a girls’ school. And that’s not all. The woman who runs the school is a rabid Dry and won’t let her staff so much as look at a snifter. It means that poor old Willie won’t be able to take aboard the simplest highball except in vacation time.’

  ‘What he had tonight ought to last him quite a while.’

  ‘Don’t mock, officer, don’t scoff,’ said Tipton, frowning. ‘The thing’s a tragedy. It has absolutely shattered Willie, and I don’t wonder. There was a guy at the Drones Club in London, of which I am a member, who once got roped in to make a speech to a girls’ school, and he never really recovered from the experience. To this day he trembles like a leaf if he sees anything in a straw hat and a blazer, with pigtails down its back. Teaching a bunch of girls music will be ten times worse. They’ll put their heads together and whisper. They’ll nudge each other and giggle. They’ll probably throw spitballs at him. And nothing to strengthen him for the ordeal but lemonade and sarsaparilla. But I notice you’re yawning. I’m not keeping you up, am I?’

  The policeman said he was not. He was, he explained, on all-night duty and was glad of a chat to while the time away.

  ‘Fine,’ said Tipton, reassured. ‘Yes, I can imagine you must find it pretty dull without anyone to shoot the breeze with. It can’t be all jam being a cop.

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘Still, you have compensations.’

  ‘Name three.’

  ‘Well, you meet such interesting people — bandits, porch climbers, dope pushers, sex fiends and what not. The whole boiling from deadbeats to millionaires.’

  ‘We don’t get a lot of millionaires.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘Never seen one myself.’

  ‘Is that so? Well, you’re seeing one now. Take a gander.’ The policeman stared.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘No kidding?’

  ‘None whatever. You know Tipton’s Stores?’

  ‘Sure. The wife does her marketing there.’

  ‘Well, tell her when you get home that you were host tonight to the guy who owns the controlling interest in them. My Uncle Chet founded Tipton’s Stores. He checked out not long ago and I inherited his block of shares, practically all there are. I’m rolling.’

  ‘Then why don’t you pay your ten bucks and get out of here?’

  ‘What ten bucks?’

  ‘For bail. I’d do it if it was me.’

  A bitter laugh escaped Tipton, the sort of laugh a toad beneath the harrow might have uttered if some passer-by had asked it why it did not move from beneath the harrow, where conditions must be far from comfortable.

  ‘I dare say you would,’ he said, ‘and so would I if I had the dough. But I’ve no funds of any description. Oh, I don’t mean I’ve been wiped out in this Stock Exchange crash they’ve been having — I may be a chump, but I’m not chump enough to play the market — but I don’t have a nickel on me at the moment. At some point in this evening’s proceedings some child of unmarried parents got away with my entire wad, leaving me without a cent. I own a controlling interest in the country’s largest supermarket, with branches in every town in the United States. I own a ranch out west. I own an apartment house on Park Avenue. I even own a music publishing business in London.

  But I can’t get out of this darned dungeon because I haven’t ten dollars in my kick. Can you beat that for irony?’

  The policeman said he was unable to, but seemed to see no cause for despair.

  ‘You got friends, ain’t you?’

  ‘Lashings of them.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you phone one of them and get him to help you out?’

  Tipton was surprised.

  ‘Do they let you phone from here?’

  ‘You’re allowed one call.’

  ‘Is that the law?’

  ‘That’s the law.’

  ‘Then … Oh, finished your little nap, Willie?’

  Wilfred Allsop had risen, blinked his eyes several times, groaned, shuddered from head to foot and was now joining the party. He seemed in slightly better shape than on the occasion of his previous resurrection. His resemblance to a corpse that had been in the water several days was still pronounced, but it had become a cheerier corpse, one that had begun to look on the bright side.

  ‘Oh, Tippy,’ he said, ‘I thought you would be interested to know that I’m not going to die. I’m feeling a little better.’

  ‘That’s the spirit.’

  ‘Not much better, but a little. So never mind about the cigarette case. Who’s that you’re talking to? I can’t see him very distinctly, but isn’t he a policeman?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you think he could tell us how to get out of here?’

  ‘The very point I was discussing with him when you came to the surface. He says the hellhounds of the system will release us if we slip them ten bucks apiece.’

  Wilfred’s mind was still clouded, but he was capable of formulating an idea.

  ‘Let’s slip them ten bucks apiece,’ he suggested.

  ‘How? You haven’t any dough, have you?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Nor have I. Somebody swiped my roll. But this gentleman, Mr —?’

  ‘Garroway.’’

  ‘Mr Garroway here says I can phone a friend for some.’

  Again Wilfred Allsop had a constructive proposal to put forward.

  ‘Go and phone a friend for some.’

  Tipton shook his head, and uttered a sharp howl. There are times when shaking the head creates the illusion that one has met Jael the wife of Heber, incurred her displeasure and started her going into her celebrated routine.

  ‘It isn’t as simple as all that. There’s a catch. One’s only allowed one call.’

  ‘I don’t get your point.’

  ‘Then you must be still stewed. You get it, don’t you, Mr Garroway?’

  ‘Sure. Your buddy mightn’t be there. Then you’ll have used up your call and got nowheres.’

  ‘Exactly.’ It’s the middle of August and all the guys I know are out of town. They’ll be coming back after Labour Day, but it won’t be Labour Day for another three weeks, and we don’t want to have to wait till then. Gosh, I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ said Tipton, winci
ng.

  He was alluding to a sudden sharp barking sound which had proceeded from his fellow prisoner’s lips. It had affected his head unpleasantly, creating the passing impression that someone had touched off a stick or two of dynamite inside it.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Wilfred. ‘I was thinking of Uncle Clarence.’

  The statement did nothing to mollify Tipton. He said with a good deal of bitterness that that did credit to a nephew’s heart. It was nice of him, he said, to think of his Uncle Clarence.

  ‘He’s in New York. He’s at the Plaza. He came over here for my Aunt Constance’s wedding. She was marrying a Yank called Schoonmaker.’

  Tipton saw that he had judged his friend too hastily.’ What he had taken for an idle changing of the subject had been in reality most pertinent to the issue.

  ‘That’s right,’ he exclaimed. ‘I read about it in the papers. This begins to look good. You’re sure he’s at the Plaza?’

  ‘Certain. Aunt Hermione told me to go and look him up there.’

  ‘But can I wake him at this time of night?’

  ‘If you explain that it’s an emergency. You’ll have to make it quite clear that your need is urgent. You know what a muddleheaded old ass he is.’

  This was perfectly true. Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, that vague and dreamy peer, was not one of England’s keenest brains. The life he led made for slowness of the thinking processes. Except when he was attending sisters’ weddings in America, he spent his time pottering about the gardens and messuages of Blandings Castle, his rural seat, his thoughts, such as they were, concentrated on his prize sow, Empress of Blandings. When indoors you could generally find him in his study engrossed in a book of porcine interest, most frequently that monumental work On The Care Of The Pig by Augustus Whipple (Popgood and Grooly.’ thirty-five shillings), of which he never wearied.

  Tipton’s first enthusiasm had begun to wane. Like Hamlet, he had become irresolute. He chewed his lower lip dubiously.’

  ‘It’s taking a big chance. Suppose he’s out on a toot somewhere?’

  ‘Is it likely that a staid old bird like Uncle Clarence would go on toots?’