Summer Lightning Read online

  The butler gazed about him cautiously.

  ‘I fancy, sir, there was some Trouble.’

  ‘Pinched the spoons, eh? Always the way with these zealous workers.’

  ‘I never succeeded in learning the full details, sir, but there was something about some flower-pots.’

  ‘He pinched the flower-pots?’

  ‘Threw them at his lordship, I was given to understand.’

  Hugo looked injured. He was a high-spirited young man who chafed at injustice.

  ‘Well, I’m dashed if I see then,’ he said, ‘where this Baxter can claim to rank so jolly high above me as a secretary. I may be leisurely, I may forget to answer letters, I may occasionally on warm afternoons go in to some extent for the folding of the hands in sleep, but at least I don’t throw flower-pots at people. Not so much as a pen-wiper have I ever bunged at Lord Ems-worth. Well, I must be getting about my duties. That ride this morning and a slight slumber after lunch have set the schedule back a bit. You won’t forget that note, will you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Hugo reflected.

  ‘On second thoughts,’ he said, ‘perhaps you’d better hand it back to me. Safer not to have too much written matter circulating about the place. Just tell Miss Millicent that she will find me in the rose-garden at six sharp.’

  ‘In the rose-garden . . .’

  ‘At six sharp.’

  ‘Very good, sir. I will see that she receives the information.’

  II

  For two hours after this absolutely nothing happened in the grounds of Blandings Castle. At the end of that period there sounded through the mellow, drowsy stillness a drowsy, mellow chiming. It was the clock over the stables striking five. Simultaneously, a small but noteworthy procession filed out of the house and made its way across the sun-bathed lawn to where the big cedar cast a grateful shade. It was headed by James, a footman, bearing a laden tray. Following him came Thomas, another footman, with a gate-leg table. The rear was brought up by Beach, who carried nothing, but merely lent a tone.

  The instinct which warns all good Englishmen when tea is ready immediately began to perform its silent duty. Even as Thomas set the gate-leg table to earth there appeared, as if answering a cue, an elderly gentleman in stained tweeds and a hat he should have been ashamed of. Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, in person. He was a long, lean, stringy man of about sixty, slightly speckled at the moment with mud, for he had spent most of the afternoon pottering round pig-styes. He surveyed the preparations for the meal with vague amiability through rimless pince-nez.

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘Yes, your lordship.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Lord Emsworth. ‘Ah? Tea, eh? Tea? Yes. Tea. Quite so. To be sure, tea. Capital.’

  One gathered from his remarks that he realized that the tea hour had arrived and was glad of it. He proceeded to impart his discovery to his niece, Millicent, who, lured by that same silent call, had just appeared at his side.

  ‘Tea, Millicent.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Er – tea,’ said Lord Emsworth, driving home his point.

  Millicent sat down, and busied herself with the pot. She was a tall, fair girl with soft blue eyes and a face like the Soul’s Awakening. Her whole appearance radiated wholesome innocence. Not even an expert could have told that she had just received a whispered message from a bribed butler and was proposing at six sharp to go and meet a quite ineligible young man among the rose-bushes.

  ‘Been down seeing the Empress, Uncle Clarence?’

  ‘Eh? Oh, yes. Yes, my dear. I have been with her all the afternoon.’

  Lord Emsworth’s mild eyes beamed. They always did when that noble animal, Empress of Blandings, was mentioned. The ninth Earl was a man of few and simple ambitions. He had never desired to mould the destinies of the State, to frame its laws and make speeches in the House of Lords that would bring all the peers and bishops to their feet, whooping and waving their hats. All he yearned to do, by way of ensuring admittance to England’s Hall of Fame, was to tend his prize sow, Empress of Blandings, so sedulously that for the second time in two consecutive years he would win the silver medal in the Fat Pigs class at the Shropshire Agricultural Show. And every day, it seemed to him, the glittering prize was coming more and more within his grasp.

  Earlier in the summer there had been one breathless sickening moment of suspense, and disaster had seemed to loom. This was when his neighbour, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, of Matchingham Hall, had basely lured away his pig-man, the superbly gifted George Cyril Wellbeloved, by the promise of higher wages. For a while Lord Emsworth had feared lest the Empress, mourning for her old friend and valet, might refuse food and fall from her high standard of obesity. But his apprehensions had proved groundless. The Empress had taken to Pirbright, George Cyril’s successor, from the first, and was tucking away her meals with all the old abandon. The Right triumphs in this world far more often than we realize.

  ‘What do you do to her?’ asked Millicent, curiously. ‘Read her bedtime stories?’

  Lord Emsworth pursed his lips. He had a reverent mind, and disliked jesting on serious subjects.

  ‘Whatever I do, my dear, it seems to effect its purpose. She is in wonderful shape.’

  ‘I didn’t know she had a shape. She hadn’t when I last saw her.’

  This time Lord Emsworth smiled indulgently. Gibes at the Empress’s rotundity had no sting for him. He did not desire for her that school-girl slimness which is so fashionable nowadays.

  ‘She has never fed more heartily,’ he said. ‘It is a treat to watch her.’

  ‘I’m so glad. Mr Carmody,’ said Millicent, stooping to tickle a spaniel which had wandered up to take pot-luck, ‘told me he had never seen a finer animal in his life.’

  ‘I like that young man,’ said Lord Emsworth emphatically. ‘He is sound on pigs. He has his head screwed on the right way.’

  ‘Yes, he’s an improvement on Baxter, isn’t he?’

  ‘Baxter!’ His lordship choked over his cup.

  ‘You didn’t like Baxter much, did you, Uncle Clarence?’

  ‘Hadn’t a peaceful moment while he was in the place. Dreadful feller! Always fussing. Always wanting me to do things. Always coming round corners with his infernal spectacles gleaming and making me sign papers when I wanted to be out in the garden. Besides he was off his head. Thank goodness I’ve seen the last of Baxter.’

  ‘But have you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If you ask me,’ said Millicent, Aunt Constance hasn’t given up the idea of getting him back.’

  Lord Emsworth started with such violence that his pince-nez fell off. She had touched on his favourite nightmare. Sometimes he would wake trembling in the night, fancying that his late secretary had returned to the castle. And though on these occasions he always dropped off to sleep again with a happy smile of relief, he had never ceased to be haunted by the fear that his sister Constance, in her infernal managing way, was scheming to restore the fellow to office.

  ‘Good God! Has she said anything to you?’

  ‘No. But I have a feeling. I know she doesn’t like Mr Carmody.’

  Lord Emsworth exploded.

  ‘Perfect nonsense! Utter, absolute, dashed nonsense. What on earth does she find to object to in young Carmody? Most capable, intelligent boy. Leaves me alone. Doesn’t fuss me. I wish to heaven she would . . .’

  He broke off, and stared blankly at a handsome woman of middle age who had come out of the house and was crossing the lawn.

  ‘Why, here she is!’ said Millicent, equally and just as disagreeably surprised. ‘I thought you had gone up to London, Aunt Constance.’

  Lady Constance Keeble had arrived at the table. Declining, with a distrait shake of the head, her niece’s offer of the seat of honour by the tea-pot, she sank into a chair. She was a woman of still remarkable beauty, with features cast in a commanding mould and fine eyes. These eyes were at the moment dull and brooding.

&nbs
p; ‘I missed my train,’ she explained. ‘However, I can do all I have to do in London to-morrow. I shall go up by the eleven-fifteen. In a way, it will be more convenient, for Ronald will be able to motor me back. I will look in at Norfolk Street and pick him up there before he starts.’

  ‘What made you miss your train?’

  Yes,’ said Lord Emsworth, complainingly. ‘You started in good time.’

  The brooding look in his sister’s eyes deepened.

  ‘I met Sir Gregory Parsloe.’ Lord Emsworth stiffened at the name. ‘He kept me talking. He is extremely worried.’ Lord Emsworth looked pleased. ‘He tells me he used to know Galahad very well a number of years ago, and he is very much alarmed about this book of his.’

  ‘And I bet he isn’t the only one,’ murmured Millicent.

  She was right. Once a man of the Hon. Galahad Threep-wood’s antecedents starts taking pen in hand and being reminded of amusing incidents that happened to my dear old friend So-and-So, you never know where he will stop; and all over England, among the more elderly of the nobility and gentry, something like a panic had been raging ever since the news of his literary activities had got about. From Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, of Matchingham Hall, to grey-headed pillars of Society in distant Cumberland and Kent, whole droves of respectable men who in their younger days had been rash enough to chum with the Hon. Galahad were recalling past follies committed in his company and speculating agitatedly as to how good the old pest’s memory was.

  For Galahad in his day had been a notable lad about town. A beau sabreur of Romano’s. A Pink ‘Un. A Pelican. A crony of Hughie Drummond and Fatty Coleman; a brother-in-arms of the Shifter, the Pitcher, Peter Blobbs and the rest of an interesting but not strait-laced circle. Bookmakers had called him by his pet name, barmaids had simpered beneath his gallant chaff. He had heard the chimes at midnight. And when he had looked in at the old Gardenia, commissionaires had fought for the privilege of throwing him out. A man, in a word, who should never have been taught to write and who, if unhappily gifted with that ability, should have been restrained by Act of Parliament from writing Reminiscences.

  So thought Lady Constance, his sister. So thought Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, his neighbour. And so thought the pillars of society in distant Cumberland and Kent. Widely as they differed on many points, they were unanimous on this.

  ‘He wanted me to try to find out if Galahad was putting anything about him into it.’

  ‘Better ask him now,’ said Millicent. ‘He’s just come out of the house and seems to be heading in this direction.’

  Lady Constance turned sharply: and, following her niece’s pointing finger, winced. The mere sight of her deplorable brother was generally enough to make her wince. When he began to talk and she had to listen, the wince became a shudder. His conversation had the effect of making her feel as if she had suddenly swallowed something acid.

  ‘It always makes me laugh,’ said Millicent, ‘when I think what a frightfully bad shot Uncle Gally’s godfathers and godmothers made when they christened him.’

  She regarded her approaching relative with that tolerant – indeed, admiring – affection which the young of her sex, even when they have Madonna-like faces, are only too prone to lavish on such of their seniors as have had interesting pasts.

  ‘Doesn’t he look marvellous?’ she said. ‘It really is an extraordinary thing that anyone who has had as good a time as he has can be so amazingly healthy. Everywhere you look, you see men leading model lives and pegging out in their prime, while good old Uncle Gaily, who apparently never went to bed till he was fifty, is still breezing along as fit and rosy as ever.’

  ‘All our family have had excellent constitutions,’ said Lord Emsworth.

  And I’ll bet Uncle Gaily needed every ounce of his,’ said Millicent.

  The Author, ambling briskly across the lawn, had now joined the little group at the tea-table. As his photograph had indicated, he was a short, trim, dapper little man of the type one associates automatically in one’s mind with checked suits, tight trousers, white bowler hats, pink carnations, and race-glasses bumping against the left hip. Though bare-headed at the moment and in his shirt-sleeves, and displaying on the tip of his nose the ink-spot of the literary life, he still seemed out of place away from a paddock or an American bar. His bright eyes, puckered at the corners, peered before him as though watching horses rounding into the straight. His neatly-shod foot had about it a suggestion of pawing in search of a brass rail. A jaunty little gentleman, and, as Millicent had said, quite astonishingly fit and rosy. A thoroughly misspent life had left the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, contrary to the most elementary justice, in what appeared to be perfect, even exuberantly perfect physical condition. How a man who ought to have had the liver of the century could look and behave as he did was a constant mystery to his associates. His eye was not dimmed nor his natural force abated. And when, skipping blithely across the turf, he tripped over the spaniel, so graceful was the agility with which he recovered his balance that he did not spill a drop of the whisky-and-soda in his hand. He continued to bear the glass aloft like some brave banner beneath which he had often fought and won. Instead of the blot on the proud family, he might have been a teetotal acrobat.

  Having disentangled himself from the spaniel and soothed the animal’s wounded feelings by permitting it to sniff the whisky-and-soda, the Hon. Galahad produced a black-rimmed monocle, and, screwing it into his eye, surveyed the table with a frown of distaste.

  ‘Tea?’

  Millicent reached for a cup.

  ‘Cream and sugar, Uncle Gaily?’

  He stopped her with a gesture of shocked loathing.

  ‘You know I never drink tea. Too much respect for my inside. Don’t tell me you are ruining your inside with that poison.’

  ‘Sorry, Uncle Gaily. I like it.’

  ‘You be careful,’ urged the Hon. Galahad, who was fond of his niece and did not like to see her falling into bad habits. ‘You be very careful how you fool about with that stuff. Did I ever tell you about poor Buffy Struggles back in ‘ninety-three? Some misguided person lured poor old Buffy into one of those temperance lectures illustrated with coloured slides, and he called on me next day ashen, poor old chap – ashen. “Gaily,” he said. “What would you say the procedure was when a fellow wants to buy tea? How would a fellow set about it?” “Tea?” I said. “What do you want tea for?” “To drink,” said Buffy. “Pull yourself together, dear boy,” I said. “You’re talking wildly. You can’t drink tea. Have a brandy-and-soda.” “No more alcohol for me,” said Buffy. “Look what it does to the common earthworm.” “But you’re not a common earthworm,” I said, putting my finger on the flaw in his argument right away. “I dashed soon shall be if I go on drinking alcohol,” said Buffy. Well, I begged him with tears in my eyes not to do anything rash, but I couldn’t move him. He ordered in ten pounds of the muck and was dead inside the year.’

  ‘Good heavens! Really?’

  The Hon. Galahad nodded impressively.

  ‘Dead as a door-nail. Got run over by a hansom cab, poor dear old chap, as he was crossing Piccadilly. You’ll find the story in my book.’

  ‘How’s the book coming along?’

  ‘Magnificently, my dear. Splendidly. I had no notion writing was so easy. The stuff just pours out. Clarence, I wanted to ask you about a date. What year was it there was that terrible row between young Gregory Parsloe and Lord Burper, when Parsloe stole the old chap’s false teeth, and pawned them at a shop in the Edgware Road? ‘96? I should have said later than that – ‘97 or ‘98. Perhaps you’re right, though. I’ll pencil in ‘96 tentatively.’

  Lady Constance uttered a sharp cry. The sunlight had now gone quite definitely out of her life. She felt, as she so often felt in her brother Galahad’s society, as if foxes were gnawing her vitals. Not even the thought that she could now give Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe the inside information for which he had asked was able to comfort her.

  ‘Galahad! Yo
u are not proposing to print libellous stories like that about our nearest neighbour?’

  ‘Certainly I am.’ The Hon. Galahad snorted militantly ‘And, as for libel, let him bring an action if he wants to. I’ll fight him to the House of Lords. It’s the best documented story in my book. Well, if you insist it was ‘96, Clarence . . . I’ll tell you what,’ said the Hon. Galahad, inspired. ‘I’ll say “towards the end of the nineties”. After all, the exact date isn’t so important. It’s the facts that matter.’

  And, leaping lightly over the spaniel, he flitted away across the lawn.

  Lady Constance sat rigid in her chair. Her fine eyes were now protruding slightly, and her face was drawn. This and not the Mona Lisa’s, you would have said, looking at her, was the head on which all the sorrows of the world had fallen.

  ‘Clarence!’

  ‘My dear?’

  ‘What are you going to do about this?’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘Can’t you see that something must be done? Do you realize that if this awful book of Galahad’s is published it will alienate half our friends? They will think we are to blame. They will say we ought to have stopped him somehow. Imagine Sir Gregory’s feelings when he reads that appalling story!’

  Lord Emsworth’s amiable face darkened.

  ‘I am not worrying about Parsloe’s feelings. Besides, he did steal Burper’s false teeth. I remember him showing them to me. He had them packed up in cotton-wool in a small cigar-box.’

  The gesture known as wringing the hands is one that is seldom seen in real life, but Lady Constance Keeble at this point did something with hers which might by a liberal interpretation have been described as wringing.

  ‘Oh, if Mr Baxter were only here!’ she moaned.

  Lord Emsworth started with such violence that his pince-nez fell off and he dropped a slice of seed-cake.