A Pelican at Blandings: Read online

  Looking at Vanessa Polk one could readily imagine her being kind to people, whether on or off ocean liners, for her warmth and geniality were obvious at a glance. Where Lady Constance had winced at the sight of Lord Emsworth like a Greek goddess finding a caterpillar in her salad, she smiled upon him as if their meeting were something to which she had been looking forward for years. It was a wide, charming smile, and it brought about a marked improvement in his morale. He felt, as so many people did when smiled upon by Vanessa Polk, that he had found a friend.

  'How do you do?' he said with a cordiality of which a short while before he would not have been capable. Then, remembering a good one, he added, 'Welcome to Blandings Castle. Tomorrow,' he said, 'I must show you my pig.' It was not an invitation he often extended to female visitors, for experience had taught him that the Empress was wasted on their shallow minds, but here, he saw, was one worthy of the privilege. 'Are you fond of pigs?'

  Miss Polk said she had not met many socially, but had got along fine with those which had come her way, never an angry word. Was this, she asked, kind of a special sort of pig, and Lord Emsworth answered eagerly in the affirmative.

  'Empress of Blandings,' he said proudly, 'has won the silver medal three years in succession in the Fat Pigs event at the Shropshire Agricultural Show.'

  'You're kidding!'

  'I can show you the medals. It was an unparalleled feat.'

  'To what did she owe her success?'

  'Careful feeding.'

  'I thought as much.'

  'Some pig owners are guided by other authorities and for all I know,' said Lord Emsworth generously, 'get quite good results, but I have always pinned my faith on Wolff-Lehman. According to the Wolff-Lehman feeding standards a pig must consume daily nourishment amounting to fifty-seven thousand calories, proteins four pounds five ounces, carbohydrates twenty-five pounds.'

  'Exclusive, of course, of the last thing at night raid on the ice box?'

  'These calories to consist of barley meal, maize meal, linseed meal and separated buttermilk. I occasionally add on my own initiative a banana or a potato . . .'

  One of those short, sharp, steely coughs proceeded from Lady Constance. It stopped Lord Emsworth like a bullet. He was not a very perceptive man, but he understood that he was expected to change the subject. Regretfully but with the docility of a well-trained brother he did so.

  'Bless my soul, Connie,' he said with as much heartiness as he could manage on the spur of the moment, 'this is certainly a surprise. Your being here, I mean. Quite a surprise, quite a surprise.'

  This time the sound emitted by his sister was not, like the previous one, bronchial, but resembled more that made by drawing a wet thumb across a hot stove lid.

  'I don't know why it should be,' she said tartly. 'You got my letter saying I was sailing.'

  Lord Emsworth had not gulped since coming into the room, but he did so now, and with good reason. He had an odd sensation of having been slapped in the face with a wet fish. He was guiltily conscious that the communication she referred to had been lying unopened for some two weeks in a drawer of the desk in his study. Now that he was alone without a secretary to pester him and make him observe the ordinary decencies of life he seldom opened letters if they were not from the Shropshire, Herefordshire and South Wales Pig Breeders Association.

  'Oh, ah, yes, of course, certainly, your letter saying that you were sailing, yes, quite.'

  'To refresh your memory, I said in it that I was coming to spend the summer at Blandings—'

  The faint hope Lord Emsworth had had that she might be just passing through on her way to join Dora or Charlotte or Julia at one of those Continental resorts of theirs choked and died.

  '—and that James will be here soon. He has been delayed in New York by an important business deal.'

  The words 'Who is James?' started to frame themselves on Lord Emsworth's lips, but fortunately before he could utter them she had gone on to another subject.

  'Whose hat is that?'

  Lord Emsworth could not follow her. She seemed to be asking him whose hat that was, and he found the question cryptic.

  'Hat?' he said, puzzled. 'Hat? When you say hat, do you mean hat? What hat?'

  'I noticed a hat in the hall, much too good to be yours. Is someone staying here?'

  'Oh, ah, yes,' said Lord Emsworth, enlightened. 'A fellow . . . I can't think of his name . . . Gooch, was it? Cooper? Finsbury? Bateman? Merry weather? . . . No, it's gone. Frederick sent him with a letter of introduction. Been here some days. He has several hats.'

  'Oh, I see. I thought for a moment it might be Alaric. The Duke of Dunstable, an old friend of mine,' Lady Constance explained to Miss Polk. 'I do not see as much of him as I should like, as he lives in Wiltshire, but he comes here as often as he can manage. A little more sherry, Vanessa? No? Then I will show you your room. It is up near the portrait gallery, which you must see as soon as you are settled. Be careful of the stairs. The polished oak is rather slippery.'

  3

  Lord Emsworth returned to the library. He should have been feeling in uplifted mood, for he had certainly been lucky in the matter of that letter. Connie might quite easily have probed and questioned until the awful truth was revealed, and at the thought of what the harvest would then have been his blood froze. For far less serious offences he had often been talked at for days. Her comments on that paper-fastener in his shirt front had run to several thousand words, and even then she had seemed to feel that only the fringe of the subject had been touched on.

  But what she had said about thinking that the Duke of Dunstable might be staying at the castle had shaken him. It seemed to him ominous. The hour that had produced her, he felt, might take it into its head to round the thing off by producing the Duke as well. Morbid? Perhaps so, but it was a possibility that could not be overlooked. He knew that she had an inexplicable affection for the fellow, and there was no telling to what lengths this might lead her.

  Many people are fond of Dukes and place no obstacle in the way if the latter wish to fraternize with them, but few of those acquainted with Alaric, Duke of Dunstable, sought his society, Lord Emsworth least of all. He was an opinionated, arbitrary, autocratic man with an unpleasantly loud voice, bulging eyes and a walrus moustache which he was always blowing at and causing to leap like a rocketting pheasant, and he had never failed to affect Lord Emsworth unfavourably. Galahad, with his gift for the telling phrase, generally referred to the Duke as 'that stinker', and there was no question in Lord Emsworth's mind that he had hit on the right label. So as he sat in the library with his pig book he was feeling uneasy. For the first time in his experience its perfect prose failed to grip him.

  It is possible that solitude and a further go at the pig book might eventually have soothed him, but at this moment the solitude was invaded and the book sent fluttering to the floor. Lady Constance was standing in the doorway, and one look at her told him that trouble was about to raise its ugly head.

  'Well, really, Clarence!'

  He wilted beneath her glare. Galahad, similarly situated, would have met it with a defiant 'Well, really, what ?', but he lacked that great man's fortitude.

  'Those trousers! That coat! Those slippers! I can't imagine what Vanessa Polk must have thought of you. I suppose she was wondering what a tramp was doing in the drawing-room, and I had to say "This is my brother Clarence." I have never felt so embarrassed.'

  Sometimes in these crises Lord Emsworth had found that it was possible to divert her thoughts from the item uppermost on the agenda paper by turning the conversation to other topics. He endeavoured to do so now.

  'Polk,' he said. 'That's a very peculiar name, isn't it? I remember noticing when I was over in America for your wedding how odd some of the names were that people had. Neptune was one of them. So was Stottlemeyer. And a colleague of Frederick's in that dog biscuit concern of his was a Bream Rockmetteller. Curious, it struck me as.'

  'Clarence!'

  'Not that
we don't have some remarkable names over here. I was reading my Debrett the other day, and I came on a chap called Lord Orrery and Cork. I wondered how you would address him if you met. One's natural impulse would be to say "How do you do, Lord Orrery?", but if you did, wouldn't he draw himself up rather stiffly and say "And Cork"? You'd have to apologize.'

  'Clarence!'

  'That fellow Neptune, by the way, was the head of a company that manufactures potato chips, those little curly things you eat at cocktail parties. I met him at a cocktail party Frederick took me to, and we got into conversation and he happened to mention that his firm had made the very potato chips we were eating. I said it was a small world, and he agreed. "Sure," he said. "It's a very small world, no argument about that," and we had some more potato chips. He said the great thing about being in the potato chip business was that nobody could eat just one potato chip, which of course was very good for the sales. What he meant was that once you've started you haven't the strength of mind to stop; you've got to go on, first one potato chip, then another potato chip, then—'

  'Clarence,' said Lady Constance, 'stop babbling!'

  He did as directed, and there was silence while she paused to select for utterance one of the three devastating remarks which had come into her mind simultaneously. It was as she stood wavering between them that the telephone rang.

  Had he been alone, Lord Emsworth would have let it ring till it became exhausted, for his views on answering telephones were identical with those he held on reading letters not from the Shropshire, Herefordshire and South Wales Pig Breeders Association, but Lady Constance, like all women, was incapable of this dignified attitude. She hurried to the instrument, and he was at liberty to devote himself to thoughts of names and potato chips. But even as he started to do so he was jerked from his meditation by the utterance of a single word.

  It was the word 'Alaric!' and it froze him from bald head to the soles of the bedroom slippers on which Lady Constance a moment before the bell rang had been about to comment. He feared the worst.

  It happened. Five minutes later Lady Constance came away from the telephone.

  'That was Alaric,' she said. 'He has had a fire at his place, and he is coming here till everything is all right again. He says he wants the garden suite, so I had better be going and seeing that it is just as he likes it. He is coming by the early train tomorrow with his niece.'

  She left the room, and Lord Emsworth sank back in his chair looking like the good old man in some melodrama of Victorian days whose mortgage the villain has just foreclosed. He felt none of the gentle glow which he was accustomed to feel when one of his sisters removed herself from his presence. The thought of a Blandings Castle infested not only by Connie but also by the Duke of Dunstable and his niece . . . probably, if she was anything like her uncle, one of those brassy-voiced domineering girls who always terrified him so much . . . left him as filletted as the Dover sole he had enjoyed at breakfast.

  He sat there for several minutes motionless. But though his limbs were inert, his brain was working with the speed which so often accompanies the imminence of peril. He saw that he was faced with a situation impossible for him to handle alone. He needed an ally who would give him moral support, and it was not long before he realized that there was only one man who could fill this position. He went to the telephone and called a London number, and after what seemed to him an eternity a cheery voice spoke at the other end of the wire.

  'Hullo?'

  'Oh, Galahad,' Lord Emsworth bleated. 'This is Clarence, Galahad. A most terrible thing has happened, Galahad. Connie's back.'

  CHAPTER TWO

  At about the moment when Lady Constance was mounting the stairs that led to the library of Blandings Castle, all eagerness to confront her brother Clarence and let him know what she thought of his outer crust, a dapper little gentleman with a black-rimmed monocle in his left eye paid off the cab which had brought him from Piccadilly, trotted in at the front door of Berkeley Mansions, London W.I. and ascended to the fourth floor where he had his abode. He was feeling in excellent fettle after a pleasant dinner with some of his many friends, and as he started upward he hummed a melody from the music halls of another day.

  Thirty years ago it would have been most unusual for Galahad Threepwood to return home at so early an hour as this, for in his bohemian youth it had been his almost nightly custom to attend gatherings at the Pelican Club which seldom broke up till the milkman had begun his rounds—a practice to which he always maintained that he owed the superb health he enjoyed in middle age.

  'It really is an extraordinary thing,' a niece of his had once said, discussing him with a friend, 'that anyone who has had as good a time as Gally has had can be so frightfully fit. Everywhere you look you see men who have led model lives pegging out in their thousands, while good old Gally, who was the mainstay of Haig and Haig for centuries and as far as I can make out never went to bed till he was fifty, is still breezing along as rosy and full of beans as ever.'

  But a man tends to slow up a little as the years go by, and he was not averse nowadays to an occasional quiet home evening. He was looking forward to one tonight. The Pelican Club had been dead for ages and with its going had taken much of his enthusiasm for the more energetic forms of night life.

  Opening the door of his apartment and passing through the little hall into the sitting-room, he was surprised to see pacing the floor a human form. This naturally startled him, but it did not give him the instant feeling of impending doom which it would have done in his younger days, when a human form on his premises would almost certainly have been a creditor or a process server. A moment later he had recognized his visitor.

  'Why, hullo, Johnny, my boy. I thought for a second you were a ghost someone had hired to haunt the place. How did you get in?'

  'The hall porter let me in with his pass key.'

  Gally could not repress a slight frown. Of course it did not really matter now that he was respectable and solvent, but it was the principle of the thing. Hall porters, he felt, ought not to let people in; it undermined the whole fabric of civilized society. Like one wincing at the twinge of an old wound, he recalled the occasion many years ago when a landlady had admitted to his little nest a bookmaker trading under the name of Honest Jerry Judson, to whom a shortage of funds had compelled him to owe ten pounds since the last Newmarket Spring Meeting.

  'I told him I was your godson.'

  'I see. Still . . . Nevertheless . . . Oh, well, never mind. Always delighted to see you.'

  Gally had quite a number of godsons, offspring of old Pelican Club cronies. They were practically all of them orphans, for few of the Pelicans had had the stamina which had enabled him to take the life of that institution in his stride and thrive on it. John Halliday, the young man who had dropped in on him this evening, was the son of the late J.D. ('Stiffy') Halliday, one of the many for whom the club's pace had proved too rapid. He had signed his last I.O.U. in his early forties, and it was a matter of surprise to his circle of intimates that he had managed to continue functioning till then.

  Scrutinizing John through his monocle, Gally, as always when they met, was impressed by the thought of how little resemblance there was between poor old Stiffy and this son of his. The former—splendid chap, but let's face it not everybody's cup of tea—had presented, as so many Pelicans did, the appearance of a man with a severe hangover who had slept in his clothes and had not had time to shave: the latter was neat, trim, fit and athletic looking. There was about him something suggestive of a rising young barrister who in his leisure hours goes in a good deal for golf and squash racquets, and that, oddly enough, was what he was. His golf handicap was six, his skill at squash racquets formidable, and he had been a member of the Bar for some five years, and while far from being one of the silk-robed giants whose briefs are marked in four figures, was doing quite nicely.

  During these brief exchanges he had continued to pace the room. Passing the open window, he paused and looked out, dra
wing an emotional breath.

  'What a night!' he said. 'What a night!'

  To Gally it appeared an ordinary London summer night. He conceded that it was not raining, but was not prepared to go further than that.

  'Seems pretty run-of-the-mill to me.'

  'The moon!'

  'There isn't a moon. You must have been misled by the lights from the pub on the corner.'

  'Well, anyway, it's a wonderful night, and to hell with anyone who says it isn't.'

  For the first time Gally became aware of something unusual in his godson's manner, a sort of fizzing and bubbling like that of a coffee percolator about to come to the height of its fever. In the old Pelican days he would automatically have attributed a similar exuberance in a fellow member to his having had one, if not more, over the eight, but he knew John to be as abstemious as befits a rising young barrister and told himself that it would be necessary to probe more deeply for an explanation.

  'What's the matter with you?' he said. 'You seem very happy about something. Did you back a winner today?'

  'I certainly did.'

  'What odds?'

  'A thousand to one.'

  'What on earth are you talking about?'

  'A thousand to one against was what I was estimating my chances at. Gally, I came here to tell you. I'm engaged.'

  'What!'

  'Yes, you can start pricing wedding presents. A marriage has been arranged, and will shortly take place.'

  An elderly bachelor with a record like Gally's might have been expected to receive such an announcement from a godson whose best interests he had at heart with pursed lips and a shake of the head, for nothing saddens a benevolent senior more than the discovery that a junior of whom he is fond is contemplating a step which can only lead to disaster and misery. Gally, however, though his sisters Constance, Dora, Charlotte, Julia and Hermione would have contested such a description of him hotly, was a man of sentiment. In the long ago he too had loved, the object of his affections a girl called Dolly Henderson who sang songs in pink tights at the old Oxford and Tivoli music halls. It had been the refrain of one of them that he had hummed tonight as he went up to his apartment.