A Pelican at Blandings: Page 10

  'A very hearty good morning to you, Dunstable,' he said. 'You look astonishingly bright and happy. But I'm afraid those bubbling high spirits of yours are going to sag a bit when you hear what we have come to say. Clarence has an amazing story to relate. Relate your amazing story, Clarence.'

  'Er,' said Lord Emsworth.

  'That's not all there is of it,' Gally assured the Duke. 'There's a lot more, and the dramatic interest mounts steadily as it goes on.'

  'Do you know what time it is?' the Duke demanded, finding speech. 'It's two o'clock in the blasted morning,' and Gally said he had supposed it was something like that. He would, he said, be thinking of bed in another hour or so, for nothing was better for the health than turning in early, ask any well-known Harley Street physician.

  'But first the amazing story, and as Clarence shows a tendency to blow up in his lines, perhaps we shall get on quicker if I do the relating. We bring grave news, Dunstable, news which will make your knotted and combined locks to part and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine. You know that picture of yours, the one of the one-girl nudist colony.'

  'Two o'clock! Past two! And you come here—'

  'It was in the portrait gallery. Note my choice of tense. I use the past deliberately. It was in the portrait gallery, but it isn't. One might put it that Annie doesn't live there any more.'

  'What the devil are you talking about?'

  'It's quite true, Alaric,' said Lord Emsworth. 'I went to the portrait gallery just now to get a book I had left there, and the picture had disappeared. I was shocked and astounded.'

  'To what conclusion, then,' said Gally, 'do we come? If credit is to be given to the testimony of the witness Clarence, somebody with a liking for reclining nudes must have pinched it.'

  'What!'

  'Well, reason it out for yourself.'

  For some moments bewilderment was the only emotion visible on the Duke's face. Then abruptly it changed to righteous wrath. He was not a man whom ideas often struck, but one had just struck him with the force of a bullet, and in the circumstances this was not surprising. It did not require a Sherlock Holmes to solve the riddle. Doctor Watson could have done it easily. Turning as purple as the stripe on his pyjamas, he gulped twice, blew at his moustache, allowed his eyes to protrude in the manner popularized by snails and in a voice of thunder uttered a single word.

  'Trout!'

  Then, as if fearing that he had not made himself sufficiently clear, he added:

  'Trout, curse him! Trout, the larcenous hellhound! Trout, the low-down sneak thief! I might have known it, dammit. I ought to have guessed he would be up to something like this. He doesn't want to pay for the thing like a gentleman, so he steals it. But if he thinks he'll get away with it, he's very much mistaken. I'll confront him. I'll tax him with his crime. I'll make him return my picture if I have to stick lighted matches between his toes.'

  Seeing that Lord Emsworth was gaping like the goldfish to which his sister Constance had so often compared him when he failed to grasp the gist, Gally came to his assistance with a brief footnote.

  'Dunstable was hoping to sell the picture to Trout, but apparently Trout prefers to get it for nothing, his view being that a penny saved is a penny earned. I've known other men to think along the same lines.'

  The Duke continued to sketch out his plans.

  'I shall go to him and say "Trout, you have three seconds to produce that reclining nude," and if he raises the slightest objection, I shall twist his head off at the roots and make him swallow it,' he said, and Gally agreed that nothing could be fairer than that. Trout, he said, could scarcely fail to applaud such a reasonable attitude.

  'I'll go to his room and put it up to him without an instant's delay. Which is his room?'

  'I don't know,' said Gally. 'Which is Trout's room, Clarence?'

  'I'm afraid I couldn't tell you, Galahad,' said Lord Emsworth, surprised that anyone should suppose that he knew anything. 'There are fifty-two bedrooms in the castle. Many of them are of course unoccupied, as for instance the one where Queen Elizabeth slept and a number of those known as state rooms, but I imagine Mr. Trout would be in one of the others.

  Connie is sure to have put him somewhere.'

  'Then the thing to do,' said the Duke, who could reason things out as well as the next man, 'is to go and ask Connie.'

  It was unfortunate that during this conversation Lord Emsworth should once again have been standing near the table on which the Duke had replaced the two bowls (now empty), the clock, the ash-tray, the calendar and the photograph of James Schoonmaker and Lady Constance on their wedding day, for as these appalling words penetrated to his consciousness he made another of his convulsive leaps and the table and its contents crashed to the floor in the old familiar manner, causing the Duke to exclaim 'Good God, Emsworth!' and Gally to warn 'his brother against getting into a rut.

  He was impervious to reproaches.

  'But, Alaric!'

  'Now what?'

  'You can't wake Connie at this time of night!'

  'Can't I!'

  'I don't know what she will say.'

  'Then let's go and find out,' said Gally in his helpful way. 'No need,' he added, for he was a humane man and had no wish to see his brother's adrenal glands stimulated beyond their capacity, 'for you to come, Clarence. Dunstable and I can manage all right, and you ought to be in bed. Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.'

  6

  To say that Lady Constance was glad to see her visitors when they knocked at her door some minutes later would be an over-statement. She was plainly stirred, and her gaze, resting first on Gally, had in it something of a Medusa quality. Only when she saw the Duke did the flame in her eye diminish in intensity. There was no outrage of which she did not think Galahad capable, but she could not believe that Alaric would come disturbing her slumbers without some good reason.

  The Duke was the first to speak. A lesser man would have been taken aback by the spectacle of this majestic woman with a mud pack on her face, but he was not a lesser man.

  'Hoy!' he said. 'Where's Trout's room, Connie?'

  She answered question with question.

  'What in the world are you doing, Alaric, wandering about the house at this time of night?'

  The Duke had a short way with this sort of thing. He had not climbed two flights of stairs to take part in a quiz show.

  'Never mind what I'm doing wandering about the house. If you really want to know, I'm looking for the reptile Trout.'

  'Why on earth do you want Mr. Trout? If you've something to say to him, why can't it wait till you meet him at breakfast?'

  'Because it can't, that's why it can't. He'll have made his getaway long before breakfast. I only hope he hasn't made it already.'

  So unequal to the intellectual pressure of the conversation was Lady Constance that she actually turned for support to her brother Galahad.

  'I don't understand. What does he mean, Galahad?'

  Gally was helpful, as always.

  'It's quite simple, Connie. He thinks Trout has stolen that picture of his, and he wants to recover it. He feels the thing must be cunningly hidden somewhere by Trout, and his plan, as he outlined it to me, is to stick lighted matches between Trout's toes with a view to persuading him to come clean about its hiding place. Very sensible, it seemed to me. Just the sort of thing to get results.'

  Well meant though this explanation was, it left Lady Constance still bewildered.

  'But, Alaric, what makes you think Mr. Trout has stolen your picture?'

  'Who else could have stolen it?'

  'I mean, why are you under the impression that anyone has stolen it?'

  'Pictures don't walk away, do they?'

  'I don't understand you.'

  'If one disappears, somebody must have taken it, and Emsworth was in the portrait gallery just now and says my reclining nude had gone.'

  'Clarence!' The mention of he
r brother's name had had the immediate result of restoring Lady Constance to her normal composure. 'Have you really built up this case against Mr. Trout on the strength of something Clarence told you? You know what he is. You can't rely on anything he says. It's just the same as when he was a child and used to insist that there were Red Indians under his bed.'

  The Duke rapped imperiously on the chest of drawers.

  'Produce Trout!'

  'I will not produce Trout. I am quite convinced that Clarence has made some absurd mistake and that the picture is still there. Let us go to the portrait gallery and see for ourselves.'

  It was several minutes before she spoke again. When she did, it was with the complacency of a woman who is entitled to say 'I told you so'.

  'You see,' she said, and the Duke had no reply to make. 'Just as I supposed,' she went on. 'A typical instance of Clarence's muddleheadedness. And now perhaps I may be allowed to go back to bed and, if possible, get some sleep for the remainder of the night.'

  She withdrew with a hauteur which none of the portraits of her ancestresses could have exceeded, though many of them had rather specialized in hauteur, and Gally clicked his tongue sympathetically.

  'Connie's upset,' he said.

  'So am I,' said the Duke.

  'Extraordinary that Clarence should have made such a mistake.'

  The Duke's pent-up feelings exploded in one of the loudest snorts he had ever achieved.

  'Nothing extraordinary about it. Connie may say all she likes about him being muddleheaded, but what he's suffering from isn't muddleheadedness, he's potty to the core, and I can't see the point of trying to pretend he isn't. Goes out in the middle of the night to look at that pig of his because he's had a dream about it. Sneaks into my room and starts upsetting tables, and when asked what the hell he thinks he's up to babbles about non-existent cats. And on top of that can't see a ruddy picture when it's staring him in the face. He ought to be certified.'

  Gally stroked his chin thoughtfully. He removed his eyeglass, and gave it a polish.

  'I don't think I can go as far as that,' he said, 'but he certainly ought to see a psychiatrist.'

  'A what?'

  'One of those fellows who ask you questions about your childhood and gradually dig up the reason why you go about shouting "Fire" in crowded theatres. They find it's because somebody took away your all day sucker when you were six.'

  'I know the chaps you mean. They dump you on a couch and charge you some unholy fee per half hour. Only I thought they were called head-shrinkers.'

  'That, I believe, is the medical term.'

  'I've heard fellows speak of someone called Glossop.'

  'Sir Roderick Glossop? Yes, he is generally recognized as at the top of the profession.'

  'We'll get hold of him.'

  'Unfortunately I read in the paper the other day that he had gone to America.'

  'That's too bad.'

  'But,' Gally continued, 'by a really extraordinary coincidence I was chatting only this afternoon with his junior partner, a young man named Halliday. I ran into him at the Emsworth Arms. He would be as good for our purpose as Glossop, for they tell me that, though young, he is brilliantly gifted.'

  'Think you can get him?'

  'I'm sure he would be delighted to come. Connie is the difficulty.'

  'Why?'

  'Can we get her to invite him to the castle? We want to keep it from her, if possible, that Clarence is undergoing treatment. You know what women are; they become nervous. Could you pretend he's a friend of yours and persuade her to invite him?'

  'Persuade her?' Again a snort like the sound of the Last Trump rang through the portrait gallery. 'I don't have to persuade Connie to invite people. I'll invite him.'

  'Splendid,' said Gally. 'It only needs a telephone call. I'll get in touch with him first thing tomorrow.'

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Lady Constance's boudoir, on the second floor of the castle, looked out on the front drive and the spacious parkland beyond it, and so, two days after the events just recorded, did Lady Constance. She was standing at the window blowing puffs of flame through her shapely nostrils, and every now and then a quiver shook her as if some unseen hand had prodded her with a pin. She was thinking of Alaric, Duke of Dunstable, and a stylist like Gustave Flaubert, with his flair for the mot juste, would have described her as being as mad as a wet hen.

  Years ago, in her childhood, a series of governesses had been at pains to implant in her the desirability of self-control. 'Ladies never betray emotion, Connie dear', they had warned her, and she had taken the lesson to heart. But though today she always preserved a patrician calm in public, she considered herself entitled to a certain measure of relaxation when alone in the privacy of her own apartment. And quite rightly, any impartial judge would have said. If, looking out of the window, she frowned and quivered, not even the most censorious of governesses would have held her unjustified in frowning and quivering. She was a proud woman, and this habit of Alaric's of inviting every kind of Tom, Dick and Harry to Blandings Castle without a word to her gashed her haughty spirit like a knife. First Trout, and now this man Halliday, and who knew how many more there would be. She had only one crumb of comfort. Unwelcome though they were, these Trouts and Hallidays might have been worse. They might have been friends of her brother Galahad.

  It was as she stood there with her adrenal glands working overtime that the Market Blandings station cab ( Jno Robinson, proprietor) drove up to the front door with its usual pants and gaspings, and a young man alighted. This, she presumed, was the Mr. Halliday whom Alaric had inflicted on her, and she followed him into the house with a stare which would have aroused the respectful envy of a basilisk. Not that he had a repulsive or criminal aspect. As far as looks were concerned, he might have been someone she had invited to the castle herself. But it was not at her bidding that he had come, and she was at her iciest when some minutes later he entered the room accompanied by Gally, whom she supposed he had met in the hall and who was bringing him to be introduced to an unwilling hostess. A nervous young man, she noted. He seemed ill at ease.

  In this diagnosis she was correct. John was definitely ill at ease. The exhilaration he had felt when informed by Gally that the substitution of the pictures had gone without a hitch and that owing to his, Gally's, superlative generalship he was to come as a guest to the castle had given way to emotions such as a cat might feel which finds itself in a strange alley and muses dubiously on what the future may hold. Gally had spoken of his hostess as a woman whose impulse it would be to attach herself to the scruff of his neck and the seat of his trousers, and start heaving, and looking at her he could well believe her capable of this form of self-expression. The dullest eye could not have failed to detect in her all the qualities which go to make a good chucker-out, and it seemed to him that her fingers were already twitching in anticipation of the task. Recalling what Gally had told him about her being the wife of an American named Schoonmaker, he could not but feel that this Schoonmaker must be a rugged composite of Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson, who talked out of the side of his mouth and fed on raw meat. Not even when rebuked by the Judge during the case of Onapoulos and Onapoulos versus the Lincolnshire and Eastern Counties Glass Bottling Company had his fortitude so dwindled to the level of that of the common earthworm.

  Gally, in sharp contradistinction, was at his perkiest. Connie never had the quelling effect on him that she had on others. When a man has seen a sister spanked with a hairbrush by a disciplinarian Nanny, her spell weakens. Today, moreover, he was loving everybody. If there is one thing more than another which makes a man feel like a benevolent character out of Dickens, it is the thought that he has been instrumental in extracting a fellow human being from the soup which was threatening to engulf him. And nobody could say that he had not performed this kindly office for his godson. Owing to his efforts John Preferred, which had been down in the cellar with no takers, was now enjoying the most spectacular rise one could wis
h.

  Thinking thus, he bubbled over with cheeriness.

  'Hullo there, Connie,' he carolled, more like a lark in Springtime than a disgrace to a proud family. 'This is the Mr. Halliday in anticipation of whose coming you have been counting the minutes. I knew you would want to see him the moment he arrived.'

  'Oh?' said Lady Constance. There was no ring of pleasure in her voice. 'How do you do?'

  'Great friend of Dunstable's.'

  'Oh?'

  'And of mine. We have only just met, but already we are like brothers. He calls me Gally, I call him John. Each would lend the other a fiver without a murmur.'

  'Oh?'

  'It's a great bit of luck getting him here, as he's generally engaged three deep at this time of year. So we must do all we can to make his stay pleasant. What I'm hoping is that he will hit it off with the Gilpin wench. Is she back yet?'

  'No.'

  'When do you expect her?'

  'Some time today, I suppose.'

  'Good. Girl called Linda Gilpin who's staying here,' Gally explained to John. 'You'll like her. She went off yesterday in her car to attend some sort of jamboree at her old school. Sports Day or Founder's Day or something. I warned her it would bore her stiff, but she would go. Well, I mustn't stand here talking all the afternoon, I want to show John round the place. So come along, Johnny. You're in luck. If you'd come on Visitors Day, you'd have been soaked half a crown, but now you'll be getting it all for nothing.'

  As the door closed behind them, Lady Constance expelled the breath which she had been holding back during these exchanges. In a woman of less breeding it would have come out as an oath, for conversing with Gally had had its usual effect on her, making her feel as if her nerve centres had been scrubbed with sandpaper. It increased her exasperation that she could not in fairness hold him responsible for the intrusion of this man Halliday, the blame resting entirely on Alaric. She looked forward to having a word with Alaric, and a moment later she was given the opportunity of doing so, for the door opened and he came in.