Pigs Have Wings (15 page)

The process of going to have a look at the Empress was always, when you did it in Lord Emsworth’s company, a lengthy one, and nearly forty minutes elapsed before Maudie and her host returned to the terrace.

Lord Emsworth had employed these forty minutes shrewdly and well. Playing on his companion’s womanly sympathy by telling her of the agonies he was enduring, having to make this dashed speech to these dashed Shropshire, Herefordshire, and South Wales Pig Breeders chaps, he had won from her a promise that she would accompany him next day and see him through his ordeal. It made such a difference to someone, he explained, if someone had someone someone could sort of lean on at times like this, and Maudie said she quite understood. They would have to make a pretty early start, he warned her, because Shropshire, Herefordshire, and South Wales Pig Breeders were assembling in Wolverhampton of all ghastly places, and Maudie said she liked early starts and spoke of seeing Wolverhampton as if it had been a lifelong dream of hers. In short, by the time they reached the terrace, their relations were practically those of Tristan and Isolde.

They found the terrace empty, for Penny had accepted Gally’s invitation to go off with him in the car. She might be heartbroken, but she was not so heartbroken as to hold herself aloof from an enterprise which involved stealing pigs. Except for the winged creatures of the night which haunt English country house terraces when the shadows have fallen, nothing was to be seen except a small oblong object lying in the fairway. It looked like a photograph, and Lord Emsworth, picking it up, found that it was a photograph.

‘God bless my soul!’ he said. ‘How very peculiar.’

‘What is it?’ asked Maudie.

‘It is a photograph of a neighbour of mine, a Sir Gregory Parsloe. Lives out Matchingham way. Somebody must have dropped it out of the window. Though what anyone would want with a photograph of Sir Gregory Parsloe I cannot understand,’ said Lord Emsworth, marvelling at the eccentric tastes of his fellow men.

Maudie took it from him, and gazed at it in silence. And as her eyes fell, for the first time in ten years, upon those once familiar features, her bosom seethed with feelings too deep for utterance. Like Gloria Salt, she had become a volcano.

Her once coherent thought, apart from the reflexion that this old love of hers had put on a bit of weight since she had seen him last, was that, even if it meant a three mile walk there and a three mile walk back, she intended to go to Matchingham Hall at the earliest opportunity and tell Tubby Parsloe what she thought of him.

Beach need have had no anxiety as to his guest’s ability to negotiate without disaster the three miles that separated him from home. George Cyril Wellbeloved, even when as brilliantly illuminated as he was when he started his journey, did not fall off bicycles. He might swoop from side to side of the road like a swallow in pursuit of mayfly, but the old skill was all there and he remained in the saddle. In due season he arrived at the back door of Matchingham Hall, singing ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ in a pleasant light baritone, and proceeded to Sir Gregory’s study to deliver Gloria Salt’s note. It would have been far more fitting, of course, for him to have given it to Binstead, to be taken to the presence on a silver salver, but he was in merry mood and welcomed this opportunity of a chat with his employer.

The latter was reading a cookery book as he entered. Some hold the view that a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things, but Sir Gregory found that it gave him a melancholy pleasure to be wafted back into the golden past by perusing the details of the sort of dishes where you start off with a dozen eggs and use plenty of suet for the pastry. At the moment he was deep in the chapter about Chocolate Soufflé. And he had just got to the part where the heroine takes two tablespoonfuls of butter and three ounces of Sunshine Sauce and was wondering how it all came out in the end, when he had a feeling that the air in the room had become a little close and, looking up, saw that he had a visitor.

‘What the devil are you doing here?’ was his kindly greeting, and George Cyril Wellbeloved, smiling a pebble-beached smile of indescribable suavity, replied that he had come to bring him a note. By a hair’s breadth he avoided calling Sir Gregory ‘cocky’, but only by a hair’s breadth, and the other gave him one of those keen looks of his.

‘You’ve been drinking!’ said Sir Gregory, an able diagnostician.

George Cyril Wellbeloved was amazed.

‘Drinking, sir? Me, sir? No, sir. Where would I get a drink, sir?’

‘You’re as tight as an owl.’

This was a wholly unjustified slur on a most respectable breed of bird, for owls are as abstemious as the most bigoted temperance advocate could wish, and at another time George Cyril Wellbeloved might have been tempted to take up the cudgels on their behalf. But his employer’s charge had cut him to the quick, and he sank into a chair and brushed a tear from his eye.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘you will regret those words, regret ’em on your dying bed you will. On that last awful day, when we are all called to render account before the judgement seat, you’ll be sorry you spoke so harsh. I’m not angry – just terribly, terribly hurt …’

‘Stop drivelling. What’s all this about a note? Who from?’

‘That I am unable to tell you, sir, not knowing. It was entrusted to me by Butsch the beetler at Blandings Castle. Or, rather,’ said George Cyril Wellbeloved, for he liked to get these things right, ‘by Beet the bushler –’

‘And might I ask what you were doing at Blandings Castle?’

George Cyril, though intoxicated, was able to dodge that one.

‘I was revisiting the scenes of the past, sir. Nos-something, they call it. I spent many a happy year at Blandings Castle, and I wanted to see what the old place looked like. I don’t know if you are familiar with the poem that begins “How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood, when fond recollection presents them to view.” I learned it at Sunday school. It goes on about an old oaken bucket.’

There was something in the manner in which Sir Gregory damned and blasted not only his companion but the latter’s Sunday school and the poems he had learned there that wounded the sensitive pig man afresh. He relapsed into a hurt silence, and Sir Gregory took the letter. He opened it, and the next moment a startled cry was echoing through the room.

‘Bad news, old man?’ asked George Cyril sympathetically, rising and leaning negligently on the arm of his host’s chair.

Sir Gregory had sprung to the telephone and was busy getting the number of Blandings Castle.

‘Beach?’ … This is Sir Gregory Parsloe … Never mind whether it’s a good evening or not. I want to speak to Miss Salt … Eh? … I don’t care if she has retired to her room. Go and fetch her. Tell her I want to speak to her about her letter –’

‘Let
me
see that letter,’ said George Cyril Wellbeloved, curtly.

He twitched it out of Sir Gregory’s hand and with a little difficulty, for his eyes for some reason were not at their best tonight, spelled his way through it with now a ‘Humph’ and anon a ‘Tut, tut’, while Sir Gregory at the telephone continued his unsuccessful efforts to establish communication with Miss Salt.

‘I tell you … Oh, hell!’ shouted Sir Gregory, and replaced the receiver with a bang.

George Cyril Wellbeloved laid down the letter.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘I suppose you’re waiting to hear what
I
think of all this.’

Sir Gregory, aware for the first time that his private correspondence had been read by a pig man, and a smelly pig man at that, was able for the moment merely to stare with bulging eyes, and George Cyril proceeded.

‘Well, I’ll tell you. It’s the bird all right. What you’ve been doing to bruise that gentle heart, I don’t know. That is a matter between you and your own conscience. But there’s no two questions about it, she’s given you the raspberry. If you’ve ordered your trousseau, cocky, cancel it.’

An animal howl burst from Sir Gregory Parsloe.

‘What the devil do you mean by reading my letters? Get out! You’re sacked!’

George Cyril’s eyebrows rose.

‘Did I hear you employ the word “sacked”?’

‘Yes, you did. Get out of here, you foul blot, and be off the place first thing tomorrow.’

It is at moments like this that you catch a pig man at his best. Nothing could have been more impressive in its quiet dignity than George Cyril Wellbeloved’s manner as he spoke.

‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Have it your own way.’ He paused on the verge of trying to say ‘It’s wholly immaterial to me,’ but wiser counsels prevailed and he substituted the more prudent ‘Okey doke’. ‘The Alligultural Show’ll be along at any minute now, and if you want to dispense with my services and see your ruddy pig fobbed off with an hon. mention, do so. But drop the pilot now, Sir Gregory Parsloe, and Queener Mash’n hasn’t a hope. Not a nope,’ said George Cyril Wellbeloved, and rested his case.

In these days when changes in the public taste have led to the passing from the theatre of the old-fashioned melodrama, it is not often that one sees a baffled Baronet. But anyone who had chanced to glance in at the window of Sir Gregory Parsloe’s study now would have been able to enjoy that spectacle. In the old melodramas the baffled Baronet used to grab at his moustache and twirl it. Sir Gregory, having no moustache, was unable to do this, but in every other respect he followed tradition.

He recognized the truth of this man’s words. Pigs are temperamental. With them, things have to be just so. Remove the custodian to whose society they have become accustomed and substitute a stranger, and they refuse their meals and pine away. Incredible as it seemed to Sir Gregory that a level-headed pig could detect charm in George Cyril Wellbeloved, he knew that it was so, and when he took out his handkerchief and blew his nose, that fluttering handkerchief was the white flag.

‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Go away and sleep it off,’ he added, a little offensively, and George Cyril Wellbeloved zigzagged to the door and left him to his thoughts.

Whether it was the gipsy in him, calling him out into the great open spaces, or merely a desire to cool a head heated almost to bursting point by his recent excesses, one cannot say. But now, zigzagging from the study and zigzagging to the front door, George Cyril Wellbeloved zigzagged out into the grounds of Matchingham Hall and presently found himself at Queen of Matchingham’s sty.

Grasping the rail, he chirruped. After that unpleasant scene with his employer, a few words with a personal friend like Queen of Matchingham were just what he needed to restore his composure.

Usually he had but to stand here and start chirruping, and the first chirrup brought the noble animal out at a gallop, all eagerness for the feast of reason and flow of soul. But now all was silence. Not a movement could be heard from within the shed where the Queen retired for the night. He chirruped again. No response. A little annoyed at this absence of the get-together spirit, he climbed the rail, not without difficulty, and peered in at the entrance of the shed. The next moment he had uttered a wordless gasp. If that gasp had had words, those words would have been ‘Gone! Gone without a cry!’ For the outstanding feature of the interior of that shed was its complete freedom from pigs of any description.

Nothing is more sobering than a sudden, severe shock. An instant before, George Cyril Wellbeloved had been a jovial roisterer, Bollinger swishing about inside him and the vine leaves in his hair. An instant later, it was as though he had spent the evening drinking the lime juice they had tried to push off on him at the Beetle and Wedge or the milk with which he had been insulted at the Jolly Cricketers.

Bravely and forcefully though George Cyril had spoken to Sir Gregory Parsloe in their recent interview when the subject of the sack had come up, his words had been dictated by the beer, whisky, gin, and champagne surging in his interior. Now that they had withdrawn their support, he quailed as he thought of what must befall when Sir Gregory discovered that he was a pig short. The last thing he desired was to lose his excellent position.

How long he stood there, leaning against the empty sty, he would not have been able to say. But after an extended period of limp stupefaction life slowly returned to his drooping limbs. His face pale and drawn, he tottered to the house and made for the butler’s pantry. There are moments when a fellow needs a friend, and his best friend on the premises of Matchingham Hall was Herbert Binstead.

When a man has gone about Market Blandings offering five to one on his employer’s pig and, having booked a number of bets at those odds with the younger sporting set, learns that the pig has vanished like a Cheshire cat, it is excusable for him to show a little emotion. Binstead, who was reading the morning paper when George Cyril arrived with the bad news, tore it in half with a convulsive jerk and leaped from his chair as if a red-hot skewer had come through its seat.

‘Pinched?’ he gasped.

‘R.,’ said George Cyril, and added, prefacing the latter’s name with some rather regrettable adjectives, that this was the work of the Hon. Galahad Threepwood. He mentioned some of the things, mostly of a crudely surgical nature, which, if given a free hand, he would have liked to do to that ingenious old gentleman.

Having said all he could think of on the spur of the moment with reference to Gally, he paused and looked at Herbert Binstead, not exactly confidently but with a faint touch of hope. It might be, he felt, that the other would have something to suggest. Binstead was one of those fox-faced, quick-witted young men who generally have something to suggest.

His trust had not been misplaced. A considerable time elapsed before his companion was able to point the way, but eventually a sudden gleam in his eye showed that he had received the necessary inspiration.

‘Look,’ said Binstead. ‘Do you know where this pig of old Emsworth’s is?’

George Cyril said the Empress was at Blandings Castle, and Binstead clicked his tongue impatiently.

‘Whereabouts at Blandings Castle?’

‘Down by the kitchen garden.’