A Pelican at Blandings (2 page)

'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.'

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.'

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,
drawing 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.

Well, nothing had come of it, of course. A Victorian father
with enough driving force for two fathers had shipped him off
to South Africa, and Dolly had married a fellow named
Cotterleigh in the Irish Guards and he had never seen her
again, but the memory of her still lingered, and this made him
a sympathetic listener to tales of young love. Instead, therefore,
of urging his godson not to make an ass of himself or
enquiring anxiously if he couldn't possibly get out of it, he
displayed the utmost interest and said:

'Good for you, Johnny. Tell me more. When did this
happen?'

'Tonight. Just before I came here.'

'You really clicked, did you?'

'I know it's hard to believe, but I did.'

'Who is she?'

'Her name's Linda Gilpin.'

Gally frowned thoughtfully.

'Gilpin. I know a young chap called Ricky Gilpin. The
Duke of Dunstable's nephew. Any relation?'

'His sister.'

'So she's Dunstable's niece?'

'Yes.'

'Have you ever met Dunstable?'

'No. I suppose I shall soon. What's he like?'

'He's a stinker.'

'Really?'

'And always has been. I've known him for thirty years. He
once tried to get elected to the Pelican, but he hadn't a hope.
The top hat we used at committee meetings burst at the seams
with black balls, several handfuls of them contributed by your
father. We were very firm about letting stinkers into the
Pelican.'

'Why is he a stinker?'

'Don't ask me. I'm not a psychiatrist.'

'I mean what's wrong with him? What does he do?'

'He doesn't do anything in particular. He just is. Too fond
of money, for one thing. When I first knew him, he was a
Guardee with an allowance big enough to choke a horse, and
he hung on to it with both hands. Then he married a girl who
had the stuff in sackfuls, the daughter of one of those chaps up
North who make cups and basins and things, and she died and
left him a fortune. Then he came into the title and all the land
and cash that went with it, and now he's a millionaire twice
over. But though so rich, he is constantly on the alert to
become richer. He never misses a trick. If the opportunity
presents itself of running a mile in tight shoes to chisel
someone out of twopence, he springs to the task. I can't
understand what these fellows see in money to make them
sweat themselves to get it.'

'Money's always useful.'

'But not worth going to a lot of fuss and bother to get more
of if you've already got your little bit. Dunstable makes me
sick. I'm beginning to feel dubious about this step you're
taking, Johnny. I wonder if you're being wise.'

John reminded him of the fact, which he seemed to have
overlooked, that it was not the Duke of Dunstable whom he
was planning to marry, but merely a relative of his, and Gally
admitted that he had a point there. It was not pleasant,
though, to think that John would have to go through life
calling the Duke Uncle Alaric, and John said that love would
enable him to face even that prospect with fortitude.

'Not that I expect to see enough of him to have to call him
anything.'

'You'll see him at the wedding.'

'I'll be in a sort of trance at the wedding and won't notice
him.'

'Something in that,' Gally agreed. 'Bridegrooms are seldom
in a frame of mind to take a calm look at their surroundings as
the situation starts to develop. How well I remember your
father when the parson was putting him through it. White as
a sheet and quivering in every limb. I was his best man, and I'm
convinced that if I hadn't kept near enough to him to grab him
by the coat tails, he'd have run like a rabbit.'

'I shan't do that. I shall quiver all right, but I'll stay put.'

'I hope so, for nothing so surely introduces a sour note into
the wedding ceremony as the abrupt disappearance of the
groom in a cloud of dust. Tell me about this girl of yours.'

'Don't tempt me. I should go on for hours.'

'Nice, is she?'

'That describes her exactly.'

'Big? Small?'

'Just the right size.'

'Slim? Slender?'

'Yes.'

'Eyes?'

'Blue.'

'Hair?'

'Brown. Sort of auburn. Chestnut.'

'Make up your mind.'

'All right, chestnut, then, damn you.'

'No need to let your angry passions rise. Naturally I'm
interested. I've known you since you were so high.'

'I suppose you dandled me on your knee when I was a baby?'

'I wouldn't have done it on a bet. You were a revolting baby.
More like a poached egg than anything. Well, from what you
tell me she seems to be all right. A godfather's blessing is
yours, if you care to have it. Where are you going for the
honeymoon?'

'We were thinking of Jamaica.'

'Expensive place.'

'So I hear.'

'Which brings me to a point I should like to discuss. How
about your finances? I know you're doing pretty well at the
Bar, but will it run to marriage?'

'I'm all right as far as money's concerned. I've got a nest egg
.
Do you know the Bender gallery?'

'Shooting gallery?'

'Picture gallery.'

'Never heard of it.'

'It's in Bond Street. Not one of the big ones, but doing all
right, and I'm a kind of sleeping partner. Joe Bender does all
the running of it. He's a man I knew at Oxford, and he took
over the gallery from his father. He needed more capital and I
had just been left quite a bit by an aunt of mine, so I put it in.'

'All you'd got?'

'Most of it.'

'A rash move.'

'Not rash at all. Joe's a very live wire, all tortoiseshell-rimmed
spectacles and zip. We'll make our fortunes.'

'Says who?'

'I read it in the crystal ball. Joe's just pulled off a big deal.
Ever heard of Robichaux?'

'No.'

'French painter. One of the Barbizon group.'

'What about him?'

'He's suddenly started getting hot. That's always happening
with these old French artists, Joe tells me. They jog along all
their lives hardly able to give their stuff away, and then they die
and suddenly the sky's the limit. There was a time when you
could buy a Renoir for a few francs, and now look at him. If
you want a Renoir today, you have to sell the family jewels. It's
getting to be the same with this bloke Robichaux. A year or
two ago nobody would touch him, but now a regular boom has
started, and what I was going to say was that Joe sold a
Robichaux the other day for a sum that made me gasp. I
wouldn't have thought it possible.'

'Anything's possible with the world as full of mugs as it is.
Who was this cloth-headed purchaser?'

'I was saving that up for the big surprise at the end. None
other than my future uncle-by-marriage.'

Gally snorted incredulously.

'Dunstable?'

'Yes, Uncle Alaric.'

'I don't believe it.'