Galahad at Blandings (17 page)

‘Perhaps
you are right,’ said Lord Emsworth.

‘I know
I’m right. The only safe way to get through life is to pickle your system
thoroughly in alcohol. Look at Freddie Potts and his brother Eustace the time
they ate the hedgehog.’

Ate
what?’

‘The
hedgehog. Freddie and Eustace were living on the Riviera at the time and they
had a French chef, one of whose jobs was to go to market and buy supplies. On
the way to Grasse that day, as he trotted off with the money in his pocket, he
saw a dead hedgehog lying by the side of the road. Now this chef was a thrifty
sort of chap and he saw immediately that if he refrained from buying the
chicken he’d been sent to buy and stuck to the money, he’d be that much up, and
he knew that with the aid of a few sauces he could pass that hedgehog off as
chicken all right, so he picked it up and went home with it and served it up
next day
en casserole.
Both brothers ate heartily, and here’s the point
of the story. Eustace, who was a teetotaller, nearly died, but Freddie, who had
lived mostly on whisky since early boyhood, showed no ill effects whatsoever. I
think there is a lesson in this for all of us, so press that bell, Clarence.’

Lord
Emsworth pressed it, and Beach, resting in his pantry from the labours of the
afternoon, was stirred to activity. Heaving himself up from his easy chair in
a manner which would certainly have led Huxley Winkworth, had he seen him, to
renew those offensive comparisons of his between him and Empress of Blandings
rising from her couch, he put on the boots which for greater comfort he had
removed and started laboriously up the stairs. His face as he went was careworn,
his manner preoccupied.

In the
nineteen years during which he had served Lord Emsworth in the capacity of
major-domo it had always been with mixed feelings that Beach found himself
regarding the weekly ceremony of Visitors’ Day at Blandings Castle. It had its
good points, and it had its drawbacks. On the one hand, it gratified his sense
of importance to conduct a flock of human sheep about the premises and watch
their awe-struck faces as he pointed out the various objects of interest: on
the other all that walking up and down stairs and along corridors and in and
out of rooms hurt his feet. It was a fact not generally known, for his stout
boots hid their secret well, that he suffered from corns.

On the
whole, however, the bright side may be said to have predominated over the dark
side, the spiritual’s pros to have outweighed the physical cons, and as a
general rule he performed his task with a high heart and in an equable frame of
mind. But not today. A butler who has been robbed of his silver watch can
hardly be expected to be the same rollicking cicerone as a butler who has
undergone no such deprivation. He had woken with his loss heavy on his mind,
and as he led his mob of followers about the castle he was still brooding on it
and blaming himself for not having kept a sharper eye on that fellow with whom
he had collided in the entrance of the Emsworth Arms bar. He might have known
that no good was to be expected from a man with a twisted ear.

On his
departure for America to take up his duties in the offices of Donaldson’s Dog
Joy Inc. of Long Island City, the country’s leading purveyors of biscuits to
the American dog, Freddie Threepwood, Lord Emsworth’s younger son, had
bequeathed to Beach his collection of mystery thrillers, said to be the finest
in Shropshire, and in three out of every ten of these the criminal, when
unmasked, had proved to be a man with a twisted ear. It should have warned him,
Beach felt, but unfortunately it had not, and it was with a feeling of dull
depression that he entered the study.

The
next moment, this dull depression had left him and he was tingling from head to
foot as if electrified. For there, apparently on the best of terms with his
lordship and Mr Galahad, sat the miscreant in person. His head was bent as he
scanned some photographs which Lord Emsworth was showing him, but that twisted
ear was unmistakable.

It is
probable that if Beach had not been a butler a startled cry would at this point
have echoed through the room, but butlers do not utter startled cries. All he
said was:

‘You rang,
m’lord?’

‘Eh?
Ah. Oh yes. Bring us a bottle of Bollinger, will you Beach.’

‘Very
good, m’lord.’

And
while it is coming, Mr Whipple,’ said Lord Emsworth, ‘there are some
photographs of the Empress in the library I would like you to see.’

He led
Sam from the room, and Gally was surprised to see that Beach, instead of
following them, had remained behind and was approaching his chair in a
conspiratorial manner. ‘Could I have a word, Mr Galahad?’

‘Certainly,
Beach. Have several.’

‘It is
with reference to the gentleman,’ said Beach, choking on the last word, ‘who
has just left us. Who is he, Mr Galahad?’

‘That
was my brother Clarence. You know him, don’t you? I thought you’d met.’

Beach
was in no mood for frivolity.

‘The
other gentleman, sir,’ he said austerely.

‘Oh the
other one? That was Augustus Whipple, the author.’ The name was familiar to
Beach. Lord Emsworth occasionally had trouble with his eyes and when so
afflicted sometimes asked Beach to read him passages from
On The Care Of The
Pig,
which Beach had always been happy to do, though no part of his duties.
At the mention of it now he stared a pop-eyed stare.

‘Whipple,
Mr Galahad?’

‘That’s
right. He wrote that pig book my brother’s always reading. He’s coming to stay
here.’

‘Sir!’
said Beach, reeling.

Gally
looked at him, surprised.

‘What
do you mean “Sir” and why does your jaw drop? Don’t you like the idea?’

‘No, Mr
Galahad, I do not. The man is a criminal.’

‘What
on earth makes you think that?’

‘He
stole my watch yesterday at the Emsworth Arms, Mr Galahad.’

‘Beach,
I believe you’ve been having a couple.’

‘No,
sir. If I might tell you what transpired.’

Gally
listened attentively to the twice-told tale. He thought Beach got even more
drama out of it than Sam had done. When it was finished, he shook his head.

‘Your
story sounds very thin to me, Beach. On your own showing you only had a
fleeting glance at the fellow.’

‘Long
enough to see his ear, Mr Galahad.’

‘His
what?’

‘He had
a twisted ear.’

Gally
laughed indulgently.

‘And
you’re making this extraordinary accusation purely because Whipple also had
one? Good heavens, you can’t go by that. Shropshire is stiff with men with
twisted ears. I believe they form clubs and societies. Anything further?’

‘Yes,
sir, his age.’

‘I
don’t get you.’

‘He is
not old enough to have written the book his lordship admires so much.’

‘You
find his appearance juvenile?’

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘He
tells me everybody does. He says it always surprises his fans to see how young
he looks, but the explanation is very simple. For years he has been doing
bending and stretching exercises every morning before breakfast. He also
avoids all fried foods and never misses his Vitamins A, B and C twice a day.
This keeps him fighting fit. He does seem young, I grant you that. But, dash
it, Beach, you can’t go about accusing respectable authors of nameless crimes
just because their ears are a bit out of the straight and they aren’t as
elderly as you would like them to be. These cases of mistaken identity are very
common. There was a man at the Pelican who was the living image of one of the
Cabinet Ministers, which made it very awkward for the latter, as the Pelican
chap was always getting thrown out of restaurants, frequently wearing a girl’s
hat. Didn’t my nephew Freddie bequeath you all those mystery stories of his
when he went to America?’

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘You
read them a good deal?’

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘Well,
there you are. They’ve inflamed your imagination and you see sinister
characters everywhere. I believe Agatha Christie suffers in the same way. You
mustn’t let yourself get worried. Just accept the fact calmly that the bloke
who was in here just now is Augustus Whipple all right and buzz off and get
that Bollinger.’

Beach
was so constructed that he could never be said actually to buzz off, his customary
mode of progression being modelled on that of an elephant sauntering through an
Indian jungle, but as he made his way to the cellar his pace was even slower
than usual. A whirling mind often has this effect on the pedestrian, and his
was whirling as it had seldom whirled before. He was convinced that the man to
slake whose thirst he was fetching Bollinger was the man who had robbed him of
his watch, but, if this was so, how had he come to be on such intimate terms
with his lordship and Mr Galahad?

It was
not an easy jigsaw puzzle to unravel, and he delivered the refreshments to the
study in a sort of trance. He was still in the same condition when he returned
to the pantry and took his boots off again. Shakespeare would have described
him as perplexed in the extreme. Erle Stanley Gardner would have drawn
inspiration from him for
The Case Of The Bewildered Butler.
He himself,
if questioned, would have said that his head was swimming.

At
times when the head swims, all butlers have the means of restoring its
equilibrium ready to hand. Port is what works the magic. Beach kept a bottle in
the pantry cupboard, and he now reached for it. And he was about to remove the
cork, when the telephone rang.

He
picked up the receiver and spoke in his usual measured tones.

‘Lord
Emsworth’s residence. His lordship’s butler speaking.’

The
voice that replied was high and reedlike. Gally would have called it the
typical voice of a member of the Athenaeum Club.

‘Oh,
good afternoon,’ it said. ‘This is Mr Augustus Whipple.’

CHAPTER 9

I

Visitors’ Day had come and
gone. The ‘Kindly Keep in Line’ and ‘No Smoking’ signs had been taken down, as
had the one that urged the public not to finger objects of art. The chars—
a-banc had left. George Cyril Wellbeloved had returned to Wolverhampton.
Beach’s feet had ceased to pain him. Except that the Empress had a severe
hangover and was feeling cross and edgy and inclined to take offence at
trifles, Blandings Castle might have been said to be back to normal.

At four
o’clock or thereabouts on the following afternoon Lady Hermione Wedge alighted
from the London train and stepped into the car which Voules the chauffeur had
brought to Market Blandings station to meet her. Sandy Callender, who had
travelled by the same train but in a humbler compartment at the other end of
it, boarded the station taxi cab (Jno. Robinson, prop’r). And simultaneously
Constable Evans of the local police force, mounting the bicycle which had now
been restored to him, started to pedal castlewards to give Beach his watch.

The day
seemed to be working up for a thunderstorm and her journey had left Lady
Hermione a little tired, but relief made her forget fatigue. It was worth
undergoing a certain amount of physical discomfort to feel that her child had
been extricated from a most undesirable entanglement. Her thoughts, as Voules
stepped on the gas, dwelt tenderly on Veronica, than whom no daughter could
have been more co-operative, more alive to the fact that Mother knew best. Her
attitude when taking down dictation from a parent’s lips had been
irreproachable. She could not have raised fewer objections if she had been a dictaphone.
Once only had she spoken, and that was to ask how many S’s there were in
‘distressed’. ‘Two, darling,’ Lady Hermione had said, though actually there are
three.

When
you have a Voules at the wheel, it does not take long to get from Market
Blandings station to Blandings Castle, and Lady Hermione found herself in her
boudoir in good time for a cup of tea. She rang the bell, and Beach put on his
boots, presented himself, booked the order and withdrew, to reappear after a
brief interval accompanied by a footman bearing a laden tray. The footman — Stokes
was his name, not that it matters —completed his share of the operations and
melted away, and Lady Hermione, having poured herself a steaming cup and begun
to sip, became aware that she still had Beach with her. He was standing in the
middle of the room with something of the air of a public monument waiting to be
unveiled, and his presence surprised her. It was not like him, when he had
delivered the goods, to continue to hover around, and she bit into her cucumber
sandwich with some annoyance, for she wished to be alone.

‘Yes,
Beach?’ she said.

‘Might
I have a word, m’lady?’

Lady
Hermione did not reply ‘Have several’ as Gally had done, contenting herself
with inclining her head. She did this stiffly, her manner seeming to suggest
that she was prepared to listen but that what he had to say had better be good.