Heavy Weather (4 page)

'Well, I don't see why you should. Everything's gone without a hitch so far.'

'That's just what I mean. I've been so frightfully happy, and I feel that all the beastly things that spoil happiness are just biding their time. Waiting. They can't do nothin' till Martin gets here!'

'Eh?'

'I was thinking of a thing one of the girls used to play on her gramophone in the dressing-room, the last show I was in. It was about a Negro who goes to a haunted house, and demon cats keep coming in, each bigger and more horrible than the last, and as each one comes in it says to the others, "Shall we start in on him now ?" and they shake their heads and say, "Not yet. We can't do nothin' till Martin gets here." Well, I can't help feeling that Martin soon will be here.'

Ronnie had found the word for which he had been searching. 'Morbid. I knew it began with an
m.
Don't be so dashed morbid!'

Sue gave herself a little shake, like a dog coming out of a pond. She put her arm in Ronnie's and gave it a squeeze. 'I suppose it is morbid.' 'Of course it is.' 'Everything may be all right.'

'Everything's going to be fine. Mother will be crazy about you. She won't be able to help herself. Because of all the ...'

On the verge of becoming lyrical, Ronnie broke off abruptly. The Castle car had just come round the corner from the stables with Voules, the chauffeur, at the helm.

'I didn't know it was as late as that,' said Ronnie discontentedly.

The car drew up beside them, and he eyed Voules with a touch of austerity. It was not that he disliked the chauffeur, a man whom he had known since his boyhood and one with whom he had many a time played village cricket. It was simply that there are moments when a fellow wishes to be free from observation, and one of these is when he is about to bid farewell to his affianced.

However, there was good stuff in Ronald Fish. Ignoring the chauffeur's eye, which betrayed a disposition to be roguish, he gathered his loved one to him and, his face now a pretty cerise, kissed her with all a Fish's passion. This done, he entered the car, leaned out of the window, waved, went on waving, and continued 30 to wave till Sue was out of sight. Then, sitting down, he gazed straight before him, breathing a little heavily through the nostrils.

Sue, having lingered until the car had turned the corner of the drive and was hidden by a clump of rhododendrons, walked pensively back to the terrace.

The August sun was now blazing down in all its imperious majesty. Insects were
chirping sleepily in the grass, and the hum of bees in the lavender borders united with the sun and the chirping to engender sloth. A little wistfully Sue looked past the shrubbery at the cedar-shaded lawn where the Hon. Galahad Threep-wood, thoughtfully sipping a whisky and soda, lay back in a deep chair, cool and at his ease. There was another chair beside him, and she knew that he had placed it there for her.

But duty is duty, no matter how warm the sun and drowsy the drone of insects. Ronnie had asked her to go and talk pig to Lord Emsworth, and the task must be performed.

She descended the broad stone steps and, turning westward, made for the corner of the estate sacred to that noble Berkshire sow, Empress of Blandings.

The boudoir of the Empress was situated in a little meadow, dappled with buttercups and daisies, round two sides of which there flowed in a silver semicircle the stream which fed the lake. Lord Emsworth, as his custom was, had pottered off there directly after breakfast, and now, at half past twelve, he was still standing, in company with his pig-man Pirbright, draped bonelessly over the rail of the sty, his mild eyes beaming with the light of a holy devotion.

From time to time he sniffed sensuously. Elsewhere throughout this fair domain the air was fragrant with the myriad scents of high summer, but not where Lord Emsworth was doing his sniffing. Within a liberal radius of the Empress's headquarters other scents could not compete. This splendid animal diffused an aroma which was both distinctive and arresting. Attractive, too, if you liked that sort of thing, as Lord Emsworth did.

Between Empress of Blandings and these two human beings who ministered to her comfort there was a sharp contrast in physique. Lord Emsworth was tall and thin and scraggy, Pirbright tall and thin and scraggier. The Empress, on the other hand, you're as much trouble as a baby. Why you want to waste your time staring at beastly pigs, I can't imagine.'

Lord Emsworth accompanied her across the paddock, but his face - there was hardly any mud on it at all, really, just a couple of splashes or so - was sullen and mutinous. This was not the first time his sister had alluded in this offensive manner to one whom he regarded as the supreme ornament of her sex and species. Beastly pigs, indeed! He pondered moodily on the curious inability of his immediate circle to appreciate the importance of the Empress in the scheme of things. Not one of them seemed to have the sagacity to realize her true worth.

Well, yes, one, perhaps. That little girl what-was-her-name, who was going to marry his nephew Ronald, had always displayed a pleasing interest in the silver medallist.

'Nice girl,' he said, following this train of thought to its conclusion.

'What
are
you talking about, Clarence ?' asked Lady Constance wearily.' Who is a nice girl ?'

'That little girl of Ronald's. I've forgotten her name. Smith, is it?'

'Brown,' said Lady Constance shortly. 'That's right, Brown. Nice girl.'

'You are entitled to your opinion, I suppose,' said Lady Constance.

They walked on in silence for some moments.

'While we are on the subject of Miss Brown,' said Lady Constance, speaking the name as she always did with her teeth rather tightly clenched and a stony look in her eyes, 'I forgot to tell you that I had a letter from Julia this morning.'

'Did you?’
said Lord Emsworth, giving the matter some two-fifty-sevenths of his attention. 'Capital, capital. Who,' he asked politely, 'is Julia?'

Lady Constance was within easy reach of his head and could quite comfortably have hit it, but she refrained.
Noblesse oblige.

'Julia?
’
she said, with a rising inflection. 'There's only one Julia in our family.'

'Oh, you mean Julia?' said Lord Emsworth, enlightened. 'And what had Julia got to say for herself? She's at Biarritz, isn't she?' he said, making a great mental effort. 'Having a good time, I hope?'

'She's in London.'

'Oh, yes?'

'And she is coming here tomorrow by the two forty-five.'

Lord Emsworth's vague detachment vanished. His sister Julia was not a woman to whose visits he looked forward with joyous enthusiasm.

' Why ?' he asked, with a strong note of complaint in his voice. 'It is the only good train in the afternoon, and gets her here in plenty of time for dinner.' ' I mean, why is she coming ?'

It would be too much to say that Lady Constance snorted. Women of her upbringing do not snort. But she certainly sniffed.

'Well, really!' she said. 'Does it strike you as so odd that a mother whose only son has announced his intention of marrying a ballet-girl should wish to see her?'

Lord Emsworth considered this.

'Not ballet-girl. Chorus-girl, I understood.'

'It's the same thing.'

'I don't think so,' said Lord Emsworth doubtfully. 'I must ask Galahad.' A sudden idea struck him. 'Don't you like this Smith girl?' 'Brown.'

'Don't you like this Brown girl?' 'I do not."

'Don't you want her to marry Ronald?'

'I should have thought I had made my views on that matter sufficiently clear. I think the whole thing deplorable. I am not a snob . ..'

' But you are,' said Lord Emsworth, cleverly putting his finger on the flaw in her reasoning. Lady Constance bridled.

'Well, if it is snobbish to prefer your nephew to marry in his own class. ..'

'Galahad would have married her mother thirty years ago if he hadn't been shipped off to South Africa.' ' Galahad was - and is - capable of anything.'

'I can remember her mother,' said Lord Emsworth meditatively. 'Galahad took me to the Tivoli once, when she was singing there. Dolly Henderson. A little bit of a thing in pink tights, with the jolliest smile you ever saw. Made you think of spring mornings. The gallery joined in the chorus, I recollect. Bless my soul, how did it go ? Turn turn tumpty turn ... Or was it Umpty tiddly tiddly pum?'

'Never mind how it went,' s
aid Lady Constance. One reminis
cencer in the family, she considered, was quite enough. 'And we are not talking of the girl's mother. The only thing I have to say about Miss Brown's mother is that I wish she had never had a daughter.'

'Well, I like her,' said Lord Emsworth stoutly. 'A very sweet, pretty, nice-mannered little thing, and extremely sound on pigs. I was saying so to young Pilbeam only yesterday.'

' Pilbeam!' cried Lady Constance.

She spoke with feeling, for the name had reminded her of another grievance. She had been wanting to get to the bottom of this Pilbeam mystery for days. About that young man's presence at the Castle there seemed to her something almost uncanny. She had no recollection of his arrival. It was as if he had materialized out of thin air. And being a conventional hostess, with a conventional hostess's dislike of the irregular, she objected to finding that visitors with horrible moustaches, certainly not invited by herself, had suddenly begun to pervade the home like an escape of gas.

'Who is that nasty little man?' she demanded. 'He's an investigator.' 'A
what?’

'A private investigator. He investigates privately.' There was a touch of quiet pride in Lord Emsworth's voice. He was sixty years old, and this was the first time he had ever found himself in the romantic role of an employer of private investigators. 'He runs the something detective agency. The Argus. That's it. The Argus Private Inquiry Agency.'

Lady Constance breathed emotionally.

'Ballet-girls ... Detectives ... I wonder you don't invite a few skittle-sharps here.'

Lord Emsworth said he did not know any skittle-sharps.

'And is one permitted to ask what a private detective is doing as a guest at Blandings Castle ?'

‘I
got him down to investigate that mystery of the Empress's disappearance.'

'Well, that idiotic pig of yours has been back in her sty for days. What possible reason can there be for this man staying on?'

'Ah, that was Galahad's idea. It was Galahad's suggestion that he should stay on till after the Agricultural Show. He thought it would be a good thing to have somebody like that handy in case Parsloe tried any more of his tricks.'

'Clarence!'

'And I consider,' went on Lord Emsworth firmly, 'that he was quite right. I know it was Baxter who actually stole my pig, and you will no doubt say that Baxter is notoriously potty. But Galahad feels - and I feel - that it was not primarily his pottiness that led him to steal the Empress. We both think that Parsloe was behind the whole thing. And Galahad maintains - and I agree with him - that it is only a question of time before he makes another attempt. So the more watchers we have on the place the better. Especially if they have trained minds and are used to mixing with criminals, like Pilbeam.'

'Clarence, you're insane!'

'No, lam not insane,' retorted Lord Emsworth warmly.
'I
know Parsloe. And Galahad knows Parsloe. You should read some of the stories about him in Galahad's book - thoroughly well documented stories, he assures me, showing the sort of man he was when Galahad used to go about London with him in their young days. Are you aware that in the year 1894 Parsloe filled Galahad's dog Towser up with steak and onions just before the big Rat contest, so that his own terrier Banjo should win? A fellow who stuck at nothing to attain his ends. And he's just the same today. Hasn't changed a bit. Look at the way he stole that man Wellbeloved away from me - the chap who used to be m
y pig-man before Pirbright. Fell
ow capable of that is capable of anything.'

Lady Constance spurned the grass with a frenzied foot. She would have preferred to kick her brother with it, but one has one's breeding.

'You are a perfect imbecile about Sir Gregory,' she cried. 'You

ought to be ashamed of yourself. So ought Galahad, if it were possible for him to be ashamed of anything. You are behaving like a couple of half-witted children. I hate this idiotic
quarrel. If there's one thing that's detestable in the country, it is being on bad terms with one's neighbours.'

' I don't care how bad terms I'm on with Parsloe.'

' Well, I do. And that is why I was so glad to oblige him when he rang up about his nephew.'

'Eh?'

'I was delighted to have the chance of proving to him that there was at least one sane person in Blandings Castle.' 'Nephew? What nephew?'

'Young Montague Bodkin. You ought to remember him. He was here often enough when he was a boy.' 'Bodkin? Bodkin? Bodkin?'

'Oh, for pity's sake, Clarence, don't keep saying "Bodkin" as if you were a parrot. If you have forgotten him, as you forget everything that happened more than ten minutes ago, it does not matter in the least. The point is that Sir Gregory asked me as a personal favour to engage him as your secretary...'

Lord Emsworth was a mild man, but he could be stirred.

'Well, I'm dashed! Well, I'm hanged! The man steals my pig-man and engineers the theft of my pig, and he has the nerve.'

'. . . and I said I should be delighted.'

'What!'

'I said I should be delighted.' 'You don't mean you've done it?' 'Certainly. It's all arranged.'

'You mean you're letting a nephew of Parsloe's loose in Blandings Castle, with two weeks to go before the Agricultural Show?'

'He arrives tomorrow by the two-forty-five,' said Lady Constance.

And as she had thrown her bomb and seen it explode and had now reached the front door and had no wish to waste her time listening to futile protests, she swept into the house and left Lord Emsworth standing.

He remained standing for perhaps a minute. Then the imperative necessity of sharing this awful news wi
th a cooler, wiser mind than
his own stirred him to life and activity. His face drawn, his long legs trembling beneath him, he hurried towards the lawn where his brother Galahad, whisky and soda in hand, reclined in his deckchair.

Chapter Four

Cooled by the shade of the cedar, refreshed by the contents of the amber glass in which ice tinkled so musically when he lifted it to his lips, the Hon. Galahad, at the moment of Lord Emsworth's arrival, had achieved a Nirvana-like repose. Storms might be raging elsewhere in the grounds of Blandings Castle, but there on the lawn there was peace - the perfect unruffled peace which in this world seems to come only to those who have done nothing whatever to deserve it.

The Hon. Galahad Threepwood, in his fifty-seventh year, was a dapper little gentleman on whose grey but still thickly-covered head the weight of a consistently misspent life rested lightly. His flannel suit sat jauntily upon his wiry frame, a black-rimmed monocle gleamed jauntily in his eye. Everything about this Musketeer of the nineties was jaunty. It was a standing mystery to all who knew him that one who had had such an extraordinarily good time all his life should, in the evening of that life, be so superbly robust. Wan contemporaries who had once painted a gas-lit London red in his company and were now doomed to an existence of dry toast, Vichy water, and German cure resorts felt very strongly on this point. A man of his antecedents, they considered, ought by rights to be rounding off his career in a bath-chair instead of flitting about the place, still chaffing head waiters as of old and calling for the wine list without a tremor.

A little cock-sparrow of a man. One of the Old Guard which dies but does not surrender. Sitting there under the cedar, he looked as if he were just making ready to go to some dance-hall of the days when dance-halls were dance-halls, from which in the quiet dawn it would take at least three waiters, two commissionaires and a policeman to eject him.

In a world so full of beautiful things, where he felt we should all be as happy as kings, the spectacle of his agitated brother shocked the Hon. Galahad.

'Good God, Clarence! You look like a bereaved tapeworm. What's the matter?'

Lord Emsworth fluttered for a moment, speechless. Then he found words.

'Galahad, the worst has happened!'

'Eh?'

'Parsloe has struck!'

'Struck? You mean he's been biffing you?'

'No, no, no. I mean it has happened just as you warned me. He has been too clever for us. He has got round Connie and persuaded her to engage his nephew as my new secretary.'

The Hon. Galahad removed his monocle, and began to polish it thoughtfully. He could understand his companion's concern now.

'She told me so only a moment ago. You see what this means? He is determined to work a mischief on the Empress, and now he has contrived to insinuate an accomplice into the very heart of the home. I see it all,' said Lord Emsworth, his voice soaring to the upper register. 'He failed with Baxter, and now he is trying again with this young Bodkin.'

'Bodkin? Young Monty Bodkin?'

'Yes. What are we to do, Galahad ?' said Lord Emsworth.

He trembled. It would have pained the immaculate Monty, could he have known that his prospective employer was picturing him at this moment as a furtive, shifty-eyed, rat-like person of the gangster type, liable at the first opportunity to sneak into the sties of innocent pigs and plant pineapple bombs in their bran-mash.

The Hon. Galahad replaced his monocle.

'Monty Bodkin?' he said, refreshing himself with a sip from his glass.' I remember him well. Nice boy. Not at all the sort of fellow who would nobble pigs. Wait a minute, Clarence. This wants thinking over.'

He mused awhile.

'No,' he said, 'you can dismiss young Bodkin as a hostile force altogether.' 'What!'

'Put him right out of your mind,' insisted the Hon. Galahad. ' Parsloe isn't planning to strike through him at all.'