Plum Pie (9 page)

"I beg your pardon?" said the Professor.

"Listen," said Cyril, and his voice shook like a jelly in a high wind. "Does it count if you ask a girl to marry you when you're hypnotised?"

"You are speaking of Miss Flack?"

"Yes, I proposed to her on the practice green, carried away by the super-excellence of her chip shots, and I can't stand the sight of her. And, what's more, in about three weeks I'm supposed to be marrying someone else. You remember Patricia Binstead, the girl who showed you into my office?"

"Very vividly."

"She holds the copyright. What am I to do? You couldn't go and hypnotise Agnes Flack and instil her, as you call it, with the idea that I'm the world's leading louse, could you?"

"My dear fellow, nothing easier."

"Then do it without an instant's delay," said Cyril. "Tell her I'm scratch and pretended to have a twenty-four handicap in order to win the medal. Tell her I'm sober only at the rarest intervals. Tell her I'm a Communist spy and my name's really Groolinsky. Tell her I've two wives already. But you'll know what to say."

He waited breathlessly for the Professor's return. "Well?" he cried.

"All washed up, my dear Cyril. I left her reunited to McMurdo. She says she wouldn't marry you if you were the last publisher on earth and wouldn't let you sponsor her novel if you begged her on bended knees. She says she is going to let Simon and Schuster have it, and she hopes that will be a lesson to you."

Cyril drew a deep breath.

"Pepperidge, you're wonderful!"

"One does one's best," said the Professor modestly. "Well, now that the happy ending has been achieved, how about returning to the bar? I'll buy you a lemon squash."

"Do you really like that stuff?"

"I love it."

It was on the tip of Cyril's tongue to say that one would have thought he was a man who would be more likely to share Count Dracula's preference for human blood when thirsty, but he refrained from putting the thought into words. It might, he felt, be lacking in tact, and after all, why criticise a man for looking like something out of a horror film if his heart was so patently of the purest gold. It is the heart that matters, not the features, however unshuffled.

"I'm with you," he said. "A lemon squash would be most refreshing."

"They serve a very good lemon squash here."

"Probably made from contented lemons."

"I shouldn't wonder," said the Professor.

He smiled a hideous smile. It had just occurred to him that if he hypnotised the waiter, he would be spared the necessity of disbursing money, always a consideration to a man of slender means.

Our Man in America

The trend in Television Westerns is now towards sweetness and light. 'Adult Westerns' they call them, an adult Western broadly speaking, being one where gun play is kept down to a minimum and the good guy does not kill the bad guy but tries to understand him. The sheriff who used to start the conversational ball rolling with some such remark as "Best say your prayers, Hank Spivis, 'cos Ah'm a-goin' to drill yer like a dawg" is out of vogue. Today he leads the man to the office couch and psychoanalyses him. It turns out in the end that the reason why Hank rustles cattle and shoots up the Malemute saloon on Saturday nights is that, when he was three, his mother took away his all-day sucker, and we fade out on a medium shot of him, a reformed character in a morning coat and top hat, selling his life story to a motion picture studio for a hundred thousand dollars.

Indians, too, rarely bite the dust nowadays on the Television screen. They have a quiet talk with the Commandant of the U.S. Cavalry at the fort ("Is your scalping really necessary?") as the result of which they toddle off and go into the hay, corn and feed business and do well.

*

The mystery, which has puzzled so many, of where all these darned American novels come from is partially solved by an interview in one of the papers with a Mrs. Handy, who runs the Handy Colony for Writers at Marshall, Illinois, and encourages young authors in their dark work, taking in twenty at a time.

"Everybody's up at five each morning," says Mrs. Handy, "then a quick bite and right to work on their novels. I go over everything they write, keeping after them, making them rewrite. Everybody writes around the camp. My mother-in-law is ninety. She learned to type at eighty-five and has just finished her first novel. It's not right. She'll have to do it again."

To me the interesting thing about this is that it makes it plain that American novels are produced deliberately. For years I had been looking on them as just Acts of God like those waterspouts, attacks by pirates and mutiny on the high seas which you are warned to look out for when you travel on the White-Star-Cunard line.

*

Dieting continues to be all the go. on this side of the Atlantic and the number of those who hope to become streamlined by pushing their plates away untasted increases daily. But there are still some sturdy souls who enjoy a square meal, notably in Detroit, Michigan. The health commissioner of that city has just published a list of the peculiar things eaten and drunk by the citizens during his three years of office. It includes insecticides, detergents, laundry bleaches, chalk and charcoal (washed down with ink) and lighter fluid. I have never actually attended any of these Detroit parties, but the picture I conjure up is of a sort of Dickens Christmas, the detergent bowl circulating freely and the air ringing with merry cries of "Don't spare the shoe-polish, Percy" and "After you with the insecticide, George". And the extraordinary thing is that the revellers seem to thrive on the stuff. The rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes to be seen in Detroit would reach, if placed end to end, for miles and miles and miles.

*

Good news for those who want rabbits' ears to droop limply instead of sticking up as they do at present comes from the New York Heart Association, whose Doctor Lewis Thomas has discovered that all you have to do is inject enzyme-papain into the rabbit. The Association chaps are pretty pleased about it, but in my opinion too easily pleased. It is all very well to go slapping Doctor Lewis Thomas on the back and standing him drinks, but when all the smoke has cleared away, what has he got? Merely a rabbit from whose ears the starch has been removed. If he likes that sort of rabbit, well and good, and I have nothing to say. But I think children and nervous people should be warned in case they meet one accidentally.

*

And now let us take a quick glance at the cat situation in Tennessee. We learn that Mrs. Chester Missey of Knoxville in that state had put some towels in her automatic clothes dryer the other day when she was called to the telephone. She had not been talking long before a suspicion floated into her mind that something was amiss.

"I glanced at the dryer," she told reporters, "and saw this white thing going around inside. I knew I hadn't put anything white in there, just brown towels."

So she opened the door, and there was her cat Murphy doing, like a South American republic. sixty revolutions to the minute. It is pleasant to be able to record that after five minutes, during which he was getting back his breath, Murphy was "just as alive as he can be"—which, if you know Tennessee cats, is saying a lot.

3. Sticky Wicket at Blandings

It was a beautiful afternoon. The sky was blue, the sun yellow, butterflies flitted, birds tooted, bees buzzed and, to cut a long story short, all Nature smiled. But on Lord Emsworth's younger son Freddie Threepwood, as he sat in his sports model car at the front door of Blandings Castle, a fine Alsatian dog at his side, these excellent weather conditions made little impression. He was thinking of dog biscuits.

Freddie was only an occasional visitor at the castle these days. Some years before, he had married the charming daughter of Mr. Donaldson of Donaldson's Dog Joy, the organization whose aim it is to keep the American dog one hundred per cent red-blooded by supplying it with wholesome and nourishing biscuits, and had gone off to Long Island City, U.S.A., to work for the firm. He was in England now because his father-in-law, anxious to extend Dog Joy's sphere of influence, had sent him back there to see what he could do in the Way of increasing sales in the island kingdom. Aggie, his wife, had accompanied him, but after a week or so had found life at Blandings too quiet for her and had left for the French Riviera. The arrangement was that at the conclusion of. his English campaign Freddie should join her there.

He was drying his left ear, on which the Alsatian had just bestowed a moist caress, when there came down the front steps a small, dapper elderly gentleman with  a  black-rimmed monocle in his eye. This was that notable figure of London's Bohemia, his Uncle Galahad, at whom the world of the theatre, the racecourse and the livelier type of restaurant had been pointing with pride for years. He greeted him cordially. To his sisters Constance, Julia, Dora and Hermione Gaily might be a blot on the escutcheon, but in Freddie he excited only admiration. He considered him a man of infinite resource and sagacity, as indeed he was.

"Well, young Freddie," said Gaily. "Where are you off to with that dog?"

"I'm taking him to the Fanshawes."

"At Marling Hall? That's where that pretty girl I met you with the other day lives, isn't it?"

"That's right. Valerie Fanshawe. Her father's the local Master of Hounds. And you know what that means."

"What does it mean?"

"That he's the managing director of more dogs than you could shake a stick at, each dog requiring the daily biscuit. And what could be better for them than Donaldson's Dog Joy, containing as it does all the essential vitamins?"

"You're going to sell him dog biscuits?"

"I don't see how I can miss. Valerie is the apple of his eye, to whom he can deny nothing. She covets this Alsatian and says if I'll give it to her, she'll see that the old man comes through with a substantial order. I'm about to deliver it F.O.B."

"But, my good Freddie, that dog is Aggie's dog. She'll go up in flames."

"Oh, that's all right. I've budgeted for that. I have my story all set and ready. I shall tell her it died and I'll get her another just as good. That'll fix Aggie. But I mustn't sit here chewing the fat with you, I must be up and about and off and away. See you later," said Freddie, and disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

He left Gaily pursing his lips. A lifetime spent in the society of bookies, racecourse touts and skittle sharps had made him singularly broadminded, but he could not regard these tactics with approval. Shaking his head, he went back into the house and in the hall encountered Beach, the castle butler. Beach was wheezing a little, for he had been hurrying, and he was no longer the streamlined young butler he had been when he had first taken office.

"Have I missed Mr. Frederick, sir?"

"By a hair's breadth. Why?"

"This telegram has arrived for him, Mir. Galahad. I thought it might be important."

"Most unlikely. Probably somebody just wiring him the result of the four o'clock race somewhere. Give it to me. I’ll see that he gets it on his return."

He continued on his way, feeling now rather at a loose end. A sociable man, he wanted someone to talk to. He could of course go and chat with his sister Lady Constance, who was reading a novel on the terrace, but something told him that there would be little profit and entertainment in this. Most of his conversation consisted of anecdotes of his murky past, and Connie was not a good audience for these. He decided on consideration to look up his brother Clarence, with whom it was always a pleasure to exchange ideas, and found that mild and dreamy peer in the library staring fixedly at nothing.

"Ah, there you are, Clarence," he said, and Lord Emsworth sat up with a startled 'Eh, what?', his stringy body quivering.

"Oh, it's you, Galahad."

"None other. What's the matter, Clarence?"

"Matter?"

"There's something on your mind. The symptoms are unmistakable. A man whose soul is at rest does not leap like a nymph surprised while bathing when somebody tells him he's there. Confide in me."

Lord Emsworth was only too glad to do so. A sympathetic listener was precisely what he wanted.

"It's Connie," he said. "Did you hear what she was saying at breakfast?"

"I didn't come down to breakfast."

"Ah, then you probably missed it. Well, right in the middle of the meal—I was eating a kippered herring at the time—she told me she was going to get rid of Beach."

"What! Get rid of Beach?"

" 'He is so slow', she said. 'He wheezes. We ought to have a younger, smarter butler'. I was appalled. I choked on my kippered herring."

"I don't blame you. Blandings without Beach is unthinkable. So is Blandings with what she calls a young, smart butler at the helm. Good God! I can picture the sort of fellow she would get, some acrobatic stripling who would turn somersaults and slide down the banisters. You must put your foot down, Clarence."

"Who, me?" said Lord Emsworth.

The idea seemed to him too bizarre for consideration. He was, as has been said, a mild, dreamy man, his sister Constance a forceful and imperious woman modelled on the lines of the late Cleopatra. Nominally he was the master of the house and as such entitled to exercise the Presidential Veto, but in practice Connie's word was always law. Look at the way she made him wear a top hat at the annual village school treat. He had reasoned and pleaded, pointing out in the clearest possible way that for a purely rural festivity of that sort a simple fishing hat would be far more suitable, but every year when August came  around there he was, balancing the beastly thing on his head again and just asking the children in the tea tent to throw rock cakes at it.

"I can't put my foot down with Connie."

"Well, I can, and I'm going to. Fire Beach, indeed! After eighteen years devoted service. The idea's monstrous."