Galahad at Blandings, Page 2

  ‘You never know.’

  ‘If it was my Uncle Galahad, I wouldn’t say, but surely not Uncle Clarence.’

  ‘It’s a possibility that has to be taken into consideration. The most respectable of Limeys get it up their noses and start stepping out when they come to New York. It’s the air here. Very heady.’ What would you do in a case like this, Mr Garroway?’

  The policeman fingered a chin modelled on the ram of a battleship. There was a rasping sound as he scratched it.

  ‘Lemme get it straight. You want to make sure the guy’s in?’

  ‘The whole enterprise depends on that.’

  ‘Well, how about me calling him first? If he answers, it’ll mean he’s there and I’ll hang up. Then you give him a buzz.’

  Tipton eyed him reverently.’ A Daniel come to judgment, he was feeling. If this was the normal level of intelligence in New York’s police force, it was not to be wondered at that they were known as The Finest.

  ‘God bless you, Garroway,’ he said emotionally, ‘you’ve solved the whole problem. Tell Mrs Garroway next time she shops at Tipton’s Stores to mention my name and say I said she was to have anything she wants on the house, from certified butter to prime rib of beef and chicken noodle soup.’

  ‘Very kind of you, sir. She’ll be tickled pink. The Plaza I think you said, and your buddy’s name is Clarence?’

  ‘Emsworth.’

  ‘My mistake.’

  Ask for the Earl of Emsworth. He’s a lord.’

  ‘Oh, one of those? Right.’

  III

  The officer hurried off, and Tipton gazed after him, awed.

  ‘What malarkey people talk about the New York police being brutal,’ he said. ‘Brutal, my left eyeball. I never met a sweeter guy, did you?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘You can hear the milk of human kindness sloshing about inside him.’

  ‘Distinctly.”

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me to find he’d started life as a Boy Scout.’

  ‘Nor me.’

  ‘It shows how silly it is to go by people’s looks. It’s not his fault that he’s no oil painting.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And what is beauty, after all?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Skin deep, I often say.”

  ‘So do I, frequently.”

  ‘It’s the heart that counts.

  ‘Every time. And his is as big as the Yankee Stadium. Ah, Garroway.’ What’s the score?’

  ‘He’s there.

  ‘Three — no, make it four — rousing cheers. How did he seem?’

  ‘Sleepy.’

  ‘I mean in what sort of mood? Amiable? Docile? Friendly? A likely prospect for the touch, did you feel?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Then stand out of my way and let me get at that telephone,’ said Tipton.

  As he went, his head was still aching, but his heart was light. He was about to embark on a course of action which would fill the bosoms of several of his fellow creatures, notably Colonel and Lady Hermione Wedge, with alarm and despondency.’ but he did not know this. He was not clairvoyant.

  CHAPTER 2

  I

  The Blandings Castle of which mention was made in the previous chapter of this chronicle stands on a knoll of rising ground at the southern end of the Vale of Blandings in the county of Shropshire. It came into existence towards the middle of the fifteenth century at a time when the landed gentry of England, who never knew when a besieging army might not be coming along, particularly if they lived close to the Welsh border, believed in building their little nests solid. Huge and grey and majestic, adorned with turrets and battlements in great pro-fusion, it unquestionably takes the eye. Even Tipton Plimsoll, though not as a rule given to poetic rhapsodies, had become lyrical on first beholding it, making a noise with his tongue like the popping of a cork and saying ‘Some joint!’ The illustrated weeklies often print articles about it accompanied by photographs showing the park, the gardens, the yew alley and its other attractions. In these its proprietor, Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, sometimes appears, looking like an absentminded member of the Jukes family, for he has always been a careless dresser and when in front of a camera is inclined to let his mouth hang open in rather a noticeable way.’

  On a fine morning a few days after the hand of the law had fallen on Tipton and his fiancée’s cousin Wilfred Allsop the beauty of the noble building was enhanced by the presence outside it of Sebastian Beach, the castle butler. He was standing beside a luggage-laden car which was drawn up at the front door, waiting to give an official send-off to Lord Emsworth’s younger brother Galahad, who, with his niece Veronica Wedge, was about to drive to London to pick up the ninth Earl on his return from America.

  As is so often the case with butlers, there was a good deal of Beach. Julius Caesar, who liked to have men about him that were fat, would have taken to him at once. He was a man who had made two chins grow where only one had been before, and his waistcoat swelled like the sail of a racing yacht. You would never have thought, to look at him, that forty years ago he had come in first in a choir boys’ bicycle race, open to those whose voices had not broken by the first Sunday in Epiphany.’ and that only two days before the start of this story he had won the Market Blandings Darts Tournament, outshooting such seasoned experts as Jno. Robinson, who ran the station taxi cab, and Percy Bulstrode, the local chemist.

  He had been standing there for some minutes, when a brisk, dapper little gentleman in the early fifties appeared in the doorway and came down the steps. This was the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, a man disapproved of by his numerous sisters but considered in the Servants’ Hall to shed lustre on Blandings Castle.

  Gally Threepwood was the only genuinely distinguished member of the family of which Lord Emsworth was the head. Lord Emsworth himself had once won a first prize for pumpkins at the Shropshire Agricultural Show and his pig, Empress of Blandings, had three times been awarded the silver medal for fatness at that annual festival, but you could not say that he had really risen to eminence in the public life of England. Gally, on the other hand, had made a name for himself. The passage of the years had put him more or less in retirement now, but in his youth he had been one of the lights of London, one of the great figures at whom the world of the stage, the racecourse and the rowdier restaurants had pointed with pride. There were men in London — bookmakers, skittle sharps, jellied eel sellers at race meetings and the like — who would have been puzzled to know whom you were referring to if you had spoken of Einstein, but they were all familiar with Gally.’

  He was soberly dressed now for his visit to London, but even in this decorous costume he seemed to bring with him a whiff of the paddock and the American bar. He still gave the impression that he was wearing a checked coat, tight trousers and a grey bowler hat and that there were race glasses bumping against his left hip. His bright eyes, one of them adorned with a black-rimmed monocle, seemed to be watching horses rounding into the straight, his neatly shod foot to be pawing in search of a brass rail.

  He greeted Beach with the easy cordiality of a friend of long standing. There had existed between them a perfect rapport since they had both been slips of boys of forty. Each respected and admired the other for his many gifts.

  ‘Hullo, Beach. Lovely morning.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Gally looked at him sharply.’ The sombreness of his voice had surprised him. Scanning his face, he could see that it was a dull purple colour and that the lower of his two chins was quivering.

  ‘Something the matter, Beach? You have the air of a man whose soul is not at rest. What’s wrong?’

  From anyone else the butler would have hidden his secret sorrow, but everybody confided in Gally. Barmaids poured out their troubles to him, and the humblest racecourse tout knew that he could rely on him for sympathy and understanding.

  ‘I have been grossly insulted, Mr Galahad.’

  ‘You have? Who by? Or by whom, as the case may be
?’

  ‘The young gentleman.’

  ‘You don’t mean Wilfred Allsop?’

  ‘No, sir. Master Winkworth.’

  ‘Oh, Huxley? Unpleasant brat, that. And yet his mother dotes on him, which just shows there’s no accounting for tastes. What did he say?’

  ‘He criticised my personal appearance.

  ‘He must be hard to please.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Beach, prepared now to withhold nothing. He had been wanting a friendly shoulder to cry on ever since the affront to his dignity had occurred. ‘He told me that I was fatter than Empress of Blandings.’

  No vestige of a smile appeared on Gally’s face. He was all kindly reassurance.

  ‘You mustn’t pay any attention to what a little wart like that says. He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases. I hope you treated him with the contempt he deserved.’

  ‘I am afraid I came within an ace of clipping him on the side of the head, Mr Galahad.’

  ‘It would have done him all the good in the world, but I’m glad you didn’t. It wouldn’t have pleased his mother. But don’t let his critique worry you. Admittedly you get your money’s worth out of a weighing machine and if your body were fished out of the Thames it would be described as that of a well-nourished man of middle age, but what of it? I rather envy you.

  I could do with a few more pounds myself. Odd,’ said Gally thoughtfully, ‘how sensitive people are about their weight. I am reminded of Chet Tipton. Did I ever tell you about Chet Tipton?’

  ‘Not to my recollection, Mr Galahad.’

  ‘Uncle of the chap who’s marrying my niece Veronica. American, but spent a good deal of his time over here and I used to see a lot of him at the old Pelican Club. Enormously fat fellow. People used to chaff him about it, so at last he decided to buy one of those abdominal belts you see advertised. Rubber they’re made of and you clamp them round your tummy and melt inside them. Well, naturally they have to be a pretty tight fit and Chet could hardly breathe in his and of course could take no solid nourishment, but he stuck to it because he knew how slim it was making him look, and he was having a buttered rum in the Criterion bar one morning instead of lunch, when a friend of his came in and said “Hullo, Chef’, and he said “Hullo, George or Jack or Jimmy or whatever the name was”, and they chatted for a while, and then the chap said “Aren’t you rather stouter than when I saw you last? I’ll tell you what you ought to do, Chet. You ought to get one of those abdominal belts”. He gave it up after that. Sort of discouraged him. Dead now, poor fellow, as so many of the old crowd are. Yes, only a few of us left now. Well, is the luggage all in?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then if I’m going to pick Clarence up for lunch, we ought to be starting. What’s the time?’

  Beach drew from the pocket of his spreading waistcoat the handsome silver watch bestowed on him as the prize in the Market Blandings Darts Tournament. It was his dearest possession and never failed to give him a thrill when he looked at it.

  ‘Just on ten, Mr Galahad.’

  ‘Well, dash in and tell that Wedge girl to get a move on. Ah, here she is. No, it’s only Sandy Callender.’

  II

  The girl who was coming down the steps was in many respects a most agreeable sight for the eye to rest on. Her figure was trim, her nose and mouth above criticism and her hair that attractive red that Titian used to admire so much. But to a connoisseur of beauty like Gally the whole effect was spoiled by the tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles she was wearing. They seemed to cover most of her face, and he wondered when she had taken to them. There had been no sign of them at their last meeting, though of course she may have had them tucked away in her bag.

  ‘Hullo, young Sandy,’ he said.

  Alexandra (‘Sandy’) Callender and he were old friends. She had been working for the late Chet Tipton when he had first known her, and it was he who had obtained for her the post of secretary to his brother Clarence, a fact which he hoped would never come to his brother Clarence’s knowledge, for his reproaches would have been hard to bear. Lord Emsworth was, and always had been, allergic to secretaries.

  ‘You look very dusty, Sandy. Have you been rolling in something?’

  ‘I’ve been cleaning out Lord Emsworth’s study.’

  ‘Poor devil.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Clarence. He hates having his study cleaned.’

  ‘Does he like a mess?’

  ‘He loves it. It’s his idea of comfort. Well, you seem to have been putting in some strenuous work. Your appearance brings to mind a headline I saw in a paper once about Sons Of Toil Buried Beneath Tons Of Soil. Still, if it makes you happy.’

  ‘Oh, I’m quite happy. Gally, I wonder if you would mind posting this parcel in London for me.’

  ‘Of course.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sandy, and went back into the house.

  Gally looked after her thoughtfully. There had been a certain something in her manner that gave him the impression that she was not as happy as she had stated herself to be, and it disturbed him. It was not the first time he had noticed this. She had been below par since her arrival. In the Chet Tipton days he had found her a merry little soul, always good for a couple of laughs, but Blandings Castle seemed to have depressed her. Brooding on something, unless he was very much mistaken. He scanned the parcel, noting the address.

  ‘S. G. Bagshott, 4 Halsey Chambers, Halsey Court, London W.1. Unusual name. There can’t be many Bagshotts around. I wonder if he’s any relation to my old friend Boko. You remember Boko Bagshott, Beach?’

  ‘I fear not, Mr Galahad. I do not think he was ever a visitor at the castle.’

  ‘That’s right, I don’t believe he ever was. I used to see him in London and at a whacking big house he had down in Sussex near Petworth. Interesting personality. He made a practice every year of kidding some insurance company that he wanted to insure his life for a hundred thousand pounds or so and after the doctors had examined him telling them he had changed his mind. He thus got an annual medical check-up for nothing.’

  ‘Ingenious, Mr Galahad.’

  ‘Very. One of the brightest brains in the old Pelican. This chap might quite easily be his son. He had a son called Samuel Galahad. I recall that distinctly. He named him Samuel after Sam Bowles the jockey and Galahad because he was a bit superstitious and thought it might lead to the boy inheriting what he supposed to be my ability to spot winners. Not that I ever did spot many winners, but he always had a great respect for my judgment after I gave him a hundred to eight shot for the Jubilee Cup. He used to come to me before every important meeting and seek my advice. I wonder what young Sandy is sending him parcels about. There is a squashiness about this one that excites the interest. It feels as if—’

  He would have spoken further of the parcel’s squashiness and its possible contents, but at this moment an interruption occurred. A vision of beauty had appeared at the head of the steps, a girl of a radiant blonde loveliness that would have drawn a whistle from the least susceptible of the Armed Forces of the United States of America. Nature had not given Veronica Wedge more than about as much brain as would fit comfortably into an aspirin bottle, feeling no doubt that it was better not to overdo the thing, but apart from that she had everything and it is scarcely surprising that Tipton Plimsoll, when he spoke of her, did so with a catch in his throat and a tremolo in his voice.

  She was followed by her mother, Lord Emsworth’s sister Hermione, at whom not even Don Juan or Casanova would have whistled. Lady Hermione Wedge was the only one of the female members of the Emsworth family who was not statuesquely handsome. She was short and dumpy and looked like a cook — in her softer moods a cook well satisfied with her latest soufflé; when stirred to anger a cook about to give notice; but always a cook of strong character. Her husband, Colonel Egbert Wedge, was as wax in her hands, as was her daughter Veronica.

  The parcel attracted her attention.

  ‘What have you got there, Galahad?’


  ‘It’s something squashy the Callender girl wants me to post for her in London. Amazing that she has time to pack parcels with all the charlady work she’s doing in Clarence’s study. She’s certainly a competent secretary. Poor old Clarence!’

  ‘What do you mean, poor old Clarence?’

  ‘Well, you know how he dislikes competent secretaries. They bother him and get on his nerves. They keep him from evading his responsibilities.’

  ‘What does evading his responsibilities mean, Mummee?’ said Veronica.

  It was the sort of question she frequently asked, and as a rule her mother was prompt with patient explanations, sometimes taking as much as ten minutes over them, but now she found herself ignored. Lady Hermione’s thoughts were not on her offspring. Gally’s monocle had just flashed in the morning sun and she was thinking how much she disliked it. In common with all her sisters she considered Gally a disgrace to a proud family and a blot on the escutcheon, but she sometimes felt that she could have borne him with more fortitude if he had not worn a monocle. There were bookmakers and racecourse touts who held a similar view. Widely differing from Lady Hermione on almost every other point, they became, as she did, uncomfortable beneath the glare of Gally’s black-rimmed eyeglass.

  ‘Clarence must be made to realise that he cannot evade his responsibilities. The one thing he needs is a good secretary. Left to himself, he would never answer his letters.’

  His letters! A blinding light flashed upon Gally.

  ‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said, and leaped lissomely up the steps and into the house. Lady Hermione looked after him frowningly, her lips set. She liked him least when he behaved like a pea on a hot shovel.

  III

  Sandy was in Lord Emsworth’s study, more than ever encrusted with dust and deep in documents which should have been attended to weeks before. She looked up, surprised, as Gally came trotting in.