A Pelican at Blandings Page 11

  To those familiar with her imperious temperament it will no doubt seem surprising that she should have waited till now to have a word with him, but this is readily explained. The news of John's impending visit had brought on one of those neuralgic attacks to which she was so subject, and she had spent the previous day in bed. The neuralgia having yielded to treatment, she proposed to take up the point at issue and if necessary fight it out, like General Grant, if it took all summer.

  It has been stated that Lady Constance had a sisterly affection for the Duke of Dunstable. Of this affection in the gaze she now directed at him there was no trace. She looked more like an aunt than a sister.

  'Yes, Alaric?'

  'Eh?'

  'I said Yes, Alaric.'

  'A pretty potty thing to say,' the Duke commented critically. Connie's total lack of sense sometimes made him uneasy, though it was about what you would naturally expect in one of her sex. 'What do you mean, yes? I didn't ask you anything or say it was a fine day or anything.'

  Lady Constance, who had stiffened at his entry, stiffened still further. As was his custom when he visited her boudoir, the Duke was pottering about, fiddling with the objects on her desk, picking up a letter, putting it down after giving its contents a cursory glance and looking with offensive curiosity at a photograph of James Schoonmaker on one of the tables. And as always this habit of his made her feel that ants in large numbers were parading up and down her spine. But true to the teaching of the governesses who had told her that ladies never betrayed emotion, she forced herself to be reasonably calm.

  'I said "Yes, Alaric?" because I was anxious to know what your motive was in coming here.'

  'Eh?'

  Lady Constance's sisterly affection touched a new low. The ranks of the parading ants seemed to have become augmented by new recruits.

  'Is there anything I can do for you, Alaric?'

  'Yes, I want a stamp. I'm writing to the Times about the disgraceful mess the Government has got the country into. Lot of incompetent poops, if you ask me. Do them good if somebody came along and shot them all. Who's Jane?'

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'This letter is signed Jane. I was wondering who she was.'

  'I wish you would not read my letters.'

  'No pleasure to me to read them. They're always damned dull. Why has Schoonmaker got that silly grin on his face?'

  Several authorities have stated that the thing to do when your self-control seems about to leave you is to draw a deep breath. Lady Constance drew the deepest she could manage.

  'I am sorry,' she said, 'that my husband's smile does not meet with your approval, but it is, I believe, customary to smile when you are having your photograph taken. If you wish, I will get James on the transatlantic telephone and acquaint him with your criticism, and no doubt he will arrange his features next time more in accordance with your exacting tastes.'

  'Eh?' said the Duke. He spoke absently. He had picked up a letter signed Amy and was finding it better reading than the others. 'What's Fred been doing?'

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'This woman says she's thinking of divorcing him. Must have been some trouble in the home.'

  Lady Constance drew another deep breath.

  'Put down that letter, Alaric, and listen to me!'

  There was nothing of the sensitive plant about the Duke of Dunstable, but even he could recognize hostility if it was thrust upon him with a heavy enough hand.

  'You seem very ratty, Connie. What's biting you?'

  'I am extremely annoyed, Alaric. I will not have you inviting people here like this. It seems to be your object to turn Blandings Castle into a residential hotel.'

  'Trout, you mean?'

  'And this Mr. Halliday.'

  Conscious of the excellence of his motives, the Duke was quite willing to explain.

  'I had to invite Trout because I want to sell him that picture, and I couldn't do it if he wasn't on the spot.' Even a woman, he told himself, ought to be able to understand anything as simple as that. 'And as for this chap Halliday, I hadn't meant to tell you about him, but as the subject has come up, I may as well.'

  'Please do. As a hostess I am naturally interested. Is he, too, one of your customers? Quite a novel idea, turning Blandings Castle into a trading centre. What are you planning to sell him?'

  The rule by which Gally lived his life—'Whenever Connie starts to throw her weight about, sit on her head immediately' —was also the foundation stone of the Duke's domestic policy. There was an authoritative note in his voice as he said:

  'No need to get sarcastic, Connie.'

  'I disagree with you. There is every need.'

  'I'll tell you about Halliday. If I don't, you'll be coming the grande dame over him, and he'll leave us flat. It isn't everybody who can stand that manner of yours. I've often wondered how it goes down with the Yanks. You have a way of curling your upper lip and looking down your nose at people which gives a lot of offence. I've had to speak of it before. Well, here's what happened. After you left us that night—'

  'What night?'

  'The night Emsworth went off his head and told me my picture had been stolen. By the way, did anybody ever take away his all day sucker when he was six?'

  'I haven't the remotest notion what you're talking about.'

  'Never mind. We can leave all that to Halliday. Probably the first question he'll ask him. I was saying that after you'd gone off to bed Threepwood and I got talking, and we decided that what Emsworth needs is psychiatric treatment, if you know what that is.'

  'Of course I know what it is.'

  'Well, that's what we decided he's got to have. It's essential to engage an expert head-shrinker to put a stopper on his pottiness. I recommended this once before, you may remember, when he said he was going to enter his pig for the Derby.'

  'Clarence did not say he was going to enter his pig for the Derby.'

  'It may have been the Grand National.'

  The ants on Lady Constance's spine had now been joined by a good many of their sisters, cousins and uncles and were marching to the tune of The Stars And Stripes Forever. Her voice rose formidably.

  'He did not say anything of the sort. I asked him, and he told me so.'

  The Duke remained unmoved.

  'Naturally he would deny it. He makes a damaging statement like that in an unguarded moment, realizes how it will sound and tries to hush it up. But the fact remains. I was there when he said it, and I remember telling him that it was very doubtful if the Stewards would accept a pig. However, that is a side issue into which we need not go at the moment. The point is that Threepwood and I were solid on the necessity for bringing in a head-shrinker, and our first choice was Sir Roderick Glossop. He, however, was not available, and we were baffled till Threepwood remembered that he knew Glossop's junior partner, this chap Halliday, so we got in touch with him. He was fortunately at liberty, and we engaged his services. That's how Halliday comes to be at the castle.'

  Lady Constance's animosity had waned considerably as this explanation proceeded. She still felt that she should have been consulted before additions were made to the castle's guest list, but on the whole she approved of what had been done. The incidents of that disturbed night had shaken her. She had never been under the illusion that Clarence's was a keen mind, but not till then had he given so substantial a cause for anxiety to his nearest and dearest. Psychiatric treatment was unquestionably called for. Whatever it might do to him, it could scarcely fail to be an improvement. The only doubt that lingered with her was whether this Mr. Halliday was sufficiently mature to undertake the task of penetrating to his subconscious and bringing to the surface the contents of its hidden depths.

  'He's very young,' she said dubiously.

  The Duke's attention was engaged once more with the photograph of Lady Constance's husband.

  'Funny-shaped head Schoonmaker's got. Like a Spanish onion.'

  It was a statement which at any other time Lady Constance woul
d have contested hotly, but her mind was on Sir Roderick Glossop's junior partner.

  'He's very young,' she repeated.

  'I wouldn't call Schoonmaker young. Depends of course what you mean by young.'

  'I was speaking of this Mr. Halliday. I was saying he was very young.'

  'Of course he's young. Why wouldn't he be? If a man's a junior partner, how can he help being junior?' said the Duke, taking, as so few women were able to, the reasonable view.

  Extraordinary, he was thinking, how mingling with those Yanks had sapped Connie's intellect. She didn't seem able nowadays to understand the simplest thing.

  2

  For perhaps two or possibly three minutes after they had left Lady Constance's boudoir Gally and John preserved an unbroken silence. Gally was plunged again in thoughts of how cleverly he had grappled with the various problems which had confronted him, a feat possible only to one trained in the hard school of the Pelican Club, while John was in the grip of the peculiar numbed sensation, so like that caused by repeated blows on the head from a blunt instrument, which came to all but the strongest who met Lady Constance for the first time when she was feeling frosty. It was as though he had been for an extended period shut up in a frigidaire with the first Queen Elizabeth.

  'I think you came through that well, Johnny,' said Gally at length. 'Just the right blend of amiability and reserve. It is not every man who can come through the ordeal of being introduced to Connie with such elan and aplomb. It leads me to hope that when you come up against La Gilpin, she will be less than the dust beneath your chariot wheels. Too bad she's away, but she ought to be with us in an hour or so.'

  'By which time I may have started to recover.'

  'Yes, I could see that, however little you showed it, you found Connie overpowering. Long association has made me immune, but she does take the stuffing out of most people. Somebody wrote a story years ago entitled The Bird With The Difficult Eye, and I have always thought the author must have had Connie in mind. She takes after my late father, a man who could open an oyster at sixty paces with a single glance. But you mustn't let her sap your nerve, for you'll need all you have for the coming get-together with that popsy of yours.'

  'I wish you wouldn't—'

  'I am a plain man. I call a popsy a popsy. How were you thinking of playing the scene of reunion, by the way, always taking into consideration the fact that she, too, will have a difficult eye? Her mood when we were discussing you the other day was not sunny. You will need to pick your words carefully. I would advise the tender reminiscent note, what you might call the Auld Lang Syne touch. Remind her of those long sunlit afternoons when you floated down the river in your punt or canoe, just she and you, the world far away, no sound breaking the summer stillness except the little ripples whispering like fairy bugles among the rushes.'

  'We didn't float.'

  'Didn't you ever go on the river?'

  'No.'

  Gally was surprised. He said that in his day you always took a spin with the popsy in a punt or canoe, with a bite to eat afterwards at Skindles. It was the first step towards a fusion of souls.

  'Then where did you plan your future?'

  'We didn't plan it anywhere. I asked her to marry me and she said she would, and that was that. We hadn't any time to plan futures. It all happened quite suddenly in a taxi.'

  'But you must have seen something of her before then?'

  'At parties and so on.'

  'But not in canoes on long sunlit afternoons?'

  'No.'

  'Disappointing. When was your first meeting?'

  'One morning in her shop.'

  'She runs a shop?'

  'She used to. It didn't pay.'

  'What sort of shop?'

  'Flower.'

  'And you went in to buy long-stemmed roses?'

  'No, I went in because I had seen her through the window.'

  'Love at first sight?'

  'It was at my end.'

  'What happened then?'

  'We got talking. It turned out that I had been at Oxford with her brother.'

  'And then?'

  'We met again somewhere.'

  'And went on talking about her brother?'

  'Among other things.'

  'And after that?'

  'Some lunches.'

  'Many?'

  'No. She always seemed to be booked up. She was very popular. Whenever I met her, there was always a gang of Freddies, Algies and Claudes from the Brigade of Guards frisking round her. That's why asking her to marry me seemed such a long shot. I didn't think I had a hope. After all, who am I?'

  'You are my godson,' said Gally with dignity, 'and furthermore you have a golf handicap of six. Dash it all, Johnny, Linda Gilpin isn't the Queen of Sheba.'

  'Yes, she is.'

  'Or Helen of Troy.'

  'Yes, she is, and also Cleopatra. You ought to know. You've met her.'

  A sidelong glance at his godson told Gally that these words had not been lightly spoken. There was a soul's-awakening look on John's face that emphasized their sincerity. It left no doubt that Linda Gilpin was the girl he wanted and that he was prepared to accept no just-as-good substitute, and it was an attitude Gally understood. He had felt the same himself about Dolly Henderson. Nevertheless, he considered it his duty as a godfather to assume, if only halfheartedly, the role of devil's advocate. He had taken an immediate liking to Linda, but he was not blind to the fact that in making her his wedded wife Johnny would be running up against something hot. She was no Ben Bolt's Alice, who would weep with delight when he gave her a smile and tremble with fear at his frown. She was a girl of spirit, and any husband rash enough to frown at her would very shortly know that he had been in a fight.

  This he proceeded to point out to John in well-chosen words.

  'I agree,' he said, 'that she is a personable wench and has what it takes, but looks aren't everything. The conversation I had with her when we were going to see the yew alley left me with the conviction that she was anything but meek and insipid. Admittedly the proceedings in the case of Clutterbuck versus Frisby had stirred her up very considerably, but she reminded me of a girl I knew in the old days who once wound up an argument we were having by spiking me in the leg with a hat pin. She recalled to my memory a poem I read in my youth, the protagonist of which was a young costermonger who took his donah to Hampstead Heath on Bank Holiday. The expedition started out well, but when it came on to rain and the ham sandwiches got wet, the gentler side of her nature went into abeyance, and this is how he expresses himself. "There is some girls wot cry, says I, while some don't shed a tear, but just has tempers and when they has 'em, reaches a point in their sawcassum wot only a dorg could bear to hear. Thus unto Nancy by and by, says I". Linda Gilpin seemed to me very much the Nancy type. Are you prepared to face a married life into which tempers and sawcassum are bound to enter?'

  'Yes.'

  'You don't feel like calling the whole thing off?'

  'No.'

  'Taking to the hills while escape is still possible?'

  'No.'

  'Then,' said Gally, gladly abandoning the functions of devil's advocate, 'we know how we stand, and I may say that I agree with you wholeheartedly. My acquaintance with Linda Gilpin has not been a long one, but I have seen enough of her to know that she is what the doctor ordered. Good Lord, what does an occasional bit of sawcassum matter? It prevents married life from becoming stodgy. What we must do now is think of a good approach for you to make. The approach is everything. There are dozens to choose from. There was a chap at the Pelican who pretended to commit suicide when the girl turned him down. He swallowed an aspirin tablet and fell back with a choking cry. The trouble was that after they had worked on him with the stomach pump and he went back to the girl, she simply refused him again, and all that weary work wasted. Still, it was an idea. Something on those lines might be worth trying. It strikes you favourably?'

  'No.'

  'Then how about having an accident?
If she sees you lying on the floor, spouting blood all over the carpet, there'll soon be an end to her sales resistance. I knew a man who won his bride by getting hit over the head with a stone tobacco jar, the sort with the college arms on them which you buy when you're a freshman at the University. Clarence has a stone tobacco jar, and Beach would bean you with it if you slipped him a couple of quid. Indeed, if you played your cards right, he would probably do it for nothing. How about it? No? You're a hard man to help, Johnny. Finnicky is the word that springs to the lips. There seems no way of pleasing you.'

  They walked on in silence, John's a thoughtful, Gally's a wounded silence. But it was never the latter's habit to leave a story unfinished.

  'There was rather an odd conclusion to that romance I was speaking of,' he said as they came in view of the lake. 'I should have mentioned that the suicide chap's girl was the hat check girl at Oddenino's, and he had left his hat with her before putting on his act. You know how at many restaurants the O.C. in charge of hats sticks a slip of paper with a description of the customer in each lid to assist identification, the idea being that they'll feel complimented at being remembered, which they wouldn't be if they just got a ticket. Mine, for instance, would probably have been something like "Slim, distinguished, wearing eyeglass". Well, as I say, this fellow had handed over the headgear, and when they had finished working on him with the stomach pump and he went back to the girl and proposed again and she refused him once more, he thought he might at least save something from the wreck by getting his hat, so he asked for it in a heartbroken sort of way and she gave it to him and he tottered off still heartbroken. His distress was not longlived. He found the girl had forgotten to take out the slip, and it read "Face that would stop a clock". He was so indignant that his love died instantaneously and he lived happily ever after.'

  John had not given this human drama the attention it deserved. He was staring at the lake with the intensity of Tennyson's bold Sir Bedivere, suddenly conscious of how warm and sticky the sultry summer afternoon had rendered him. He pointed emotionally.