Blandings Castle and Elsewhere (4 page)

So much so that, on arriving at the Savoy Hotel, he behaved
with a cunning of which he had never hitherto suspected himself
capable. On the very verge of giving his name to the desk-clerk,
he paused. It might well be, he reflected, that this daughter-in-law
of his, including the entire Emsworth family in her feud,
would, did she hear that he was waiting below, nip the whole
programme in the bud by refusing to see him. Better, he decided,
not to risk it. Moving away from the desk, he headed for the lift,
and presently found himself outside the door of Suite Sixty-seven.

He tapped on the door. There was no answer. He tapped
again, and, once more receiving no reply, felt a little nonplussed.
He was not a very far-seeing man, and the possibility that his
daughter-in-law might not be at home had not occurred to him.
He was about to go away when, peering at the door, he perceived
that it was ajar. He pushed it open; and, ambling in, found
himself in a cosy sitting-room, crowded, as feminine sitting-rooms
are apt to be, with flowers of every description.

Flowers were always a magnet to Lord Emsworth, and for
some happy minutes he pottered from vase to vase, sniffing.

It was after he had sniffed for perhaps the twentieth time that
the impression came to him that the room contained a curious
echo. It was almost as though, each time he sniffed, some other
person sniffed too. And yet the place was apparently empty. To
submit the acoustics to a final test, his lordship sniffed once more.
But this time the sound that followed was of a more sinister
character. It sounded to Lord Emsworth exactly like a snarl.

It was a snarl. Chancing to glance floorwards, he became
immediately aware, in close juxtaposition to his ankles, of
what appeared at first sight to be a lady's muff. But, this being
one of his bright afternoons, he realized in the next instant that
it was no muff, but a toy dog of the kind which women are only
too prone to leave lying about their sitting-rooms.

'God bless my soul!' exclaimed Lord Emsworth, piously
commending his safety to Heaven, as so many of his rugged
ancestors had done in rather similar circumstances on the battlefields
of the Middle Ages.

He backed uneasily. The dog followed him. It appeared to
have no legs, but to move by faith alone.

'Go away, sir!' said Lord Emsworth.

He hated small dogs. They nipped you. Take your eye off
them, and they had you by the ankle before you knew where you
were. Discovering that his manoeuvres had brought him to a
door, he decided to take cover. He opened the door and slipped
through. Blood will tell. An Emsworth had taken cover at
Agincourt.

He was now in a bedroom, and, judging by the look of things,
likely to remain there for some time. The woolly dog, foiled by
superior intelligence, was now making no attempt to conceal its
chagrin. It had cast off all pretence of armed neutrality and was
yapping with a hideous intensity and shrillness. And ever and
anon it scratched with baffled fury at the lower panels.

'Go away, sir!' thundered his lordship.

'Who's there?'

Lord Emsworth leaped like a jumping bean. So convinced
had he been of the emptiness of this suite of rooms that the
voice, speaking where no voice should have been, crashed into
his nerve centres like a shell.

'Who is there?'

The mystery, which had begun to assume an aspect of the
supernatural, was solved. On the other side of the room was a
door, and it was from behind this that the voice had spoken. It
occurred to Lord Emsworth that it was merely part of the
general malignity of Fate that he should have selected for a
formal father-in-lawful call the moment when his daughter-in-law
was taking a bath.

He approached the door, and spoke soothingly.

'Pray do not be alarmed, my dear.'

'Who are you? What are you doing in my room?'

'There is no cause for alarm—'

He broke off abruptly, for his words had suddenly been
proved fundamentally untrue. There was very vital cause for
alarm. The door of the bedroom had opened, and the muff-like
dog, shrilling hate, was scuttling in its peculiar legless
manner straight for his ankles.

Peril brings out unsuspected qualities in every man. Lord
Emsworth was not a professional acrobat, but the leap he gave
in this crisis would have justified his being mistaken for one. He
floated through the air like a homing bird. From where he had
been standing the bed was a considerable distance away but he
reached it with inches to spare, and stood there, quivering.
Below him, the woolly dog raged like the ocean at the base of
a cliff.

It was at this point that his lordship became aware of a young
woman standing in the doorway through which he had just
passed.

About this young woman there were many points which
would have found little favour in the eyes of a critic of feminine
charm. She was too short, too square, and too solid. She had a
much too determined chin. And her hair was of an unpleasing
gingery hue. But the thing Lord Emsworth liked least about her
was the pistol she was pointing at his head.

A plaintive voice filtered through the bathroom door.

'Who's there?'

'It's a man,' said the girl behind the gun.

'I know it's a man. He spoke to me. Who is he?'

'I don't know. A nasty-looking fellow. I saw him hanging
about the passage outside your door, and I got my gun and came
along. Come on out.'

'I can't. I'm all wet.'

It is not easy for a man who is standing on a bed with his
hands up to achieve dignity, but Lord Emsworth did the best he
could.

'My dear madam!'

'What are you doing here?'

'I found the door ajar—'

'And walked in to see if there were any jewel-cases ajar, too.
I think,' added the young woman, raising her voice so as to make
herself audible to the unseen bather, 'it's Dopey Smith.'

'Who?'

'Dopey Smith. The fellow the cops said tried for your jewels
in New York. He must have followed you over here.'

'I am not Dopey Smith, madam,' cried his lordship. 'I am the
Earl of Emsworth.'

'You are?'

'Yes, I am.'

'Yes, you are!'

'I came to see my daughter-in-law.'

'Well, here she is.'

The bathroom door opened, and there emerged a charming
figure draped in a kimono. Even in that tense moment Lord
Emsworth was conscious of a bewildered astonishment that such
a girl could ever have stooped to mate with his son Frederick.

'Who did you say he was?' she asked, recommending herself
still more strongly to his lordship's esteem by scooping up the
woolly dog and holding it securely in her arms.

'He says he's the Earl of Emsworth.'

'I
am
the Earl of Emsworth.'

The girl in the kimono looked keenly at him as he descended
from the bed.

'You know, Jane,' she said, a note of uncertainty in her voice,
'it might be. He looks very like Freddie.'

The appalling slur on his personal appearance held Lord
Emsworth dumb. Like other men, he had had black moments
when his looks had not altogether satisfied him, but he had
never supposed that he had a face like Freddie's.

The girl with the pistol uttered a stupefying whoop.

'Jiminy Christmas!' she cried. 'Don't you see?'

'See what?'

'Why, it
is
Freddie. Disguised. Trying to get at you this way.
It's just the sort of movie stunt he would think clever. Take them
off, Ralph Vandeleur – I know you!'

She reached out a clutching hand, seized his lordship's beard
in a vice-like grip, and tugged with all the force of a modern girl,
trained from infancy at hockey, tennis and Swedish exercises.

It had not occurred to Lord Emsworth a moment before that
anything could possibly tend to make his situation more uncomfortable
than it already was. He saw now that he had been
mistaken in this view. Agony beyond his liveliest dreams
flamed through his shrinking frame.

The girl regarded him with a somewhat baffled look.

'H'm!' she said disappointedly. 'It seems to be real. Unless,' she
continued, on a more optimistic note, 'he's fixed it on with
specially strong fish-glue or something. I'd better try again.'

'No, don't,' said his lordship's daughter-in-law. 'It isn't Freddie.
I would have recognized him at once.'

'Then he's a crook after all. Kindly step into that cupboard,
George, while I phone for the constabulary.'

Lord Emsworth danced a few steps.

'I will not step into cupboards. I insist on being heard. I don't
know who this woman is—'

'My name's Jane Yorke, if you're curious.'

'Ah! The woman who poisons my son's wife's mind against
him! I know all about you.' He turned to the girl in the kimono.
'Yesterday my son Frederick implored me by telegram to come to
London. I saw him at my club. Stop that dog barking!'

'Why shouldn't he bark?' said Miss Yorke. 'He's in his own
home.'

'He told me,' proceeded Lord Emsworth, raising his voice,
'that there had been a little misunderstanding between you—'

'Little misunderstanding is good,' said Miss Yorke.

'He dined with that woman for a purpose.'

'And directly I saw them,' said Miss Yorke, 'I knew what the
purpose was.'

The Hon. Mrs Threepwood looked at her friend,
wavering.

'I believe it's true,' she said, 'and he really is Lord Emsworth.
He seems to know all that happened. How could he know if
Freddie hadn't told him?'

'If this fellow is a crook from the other side, of course he
would know. The thing was in
Broadway Whispers
and
Town
Gossip,
wasn't it?'

All the same—'

The telephone bell rang sharply.

'I assure you—' began Lord Emsworth.

'Right!' said the unpleasant Miss Yorke, at the receiver.
'Send him right up.' She regarded his lordship with a brightly
triumphant eye. 'You're out of luck, my friend,' she said. 'Lord
Emsworth has just arrived, and he's on his way up now.'

There are certain situations in which the human brain may be
excused for reeling. Lord Emsworth's did not so much reel as
perform a kind of dance, as if it were in danger of coming
unstuck. Always a dreamy and absent-minded man, unequal to
the rough hurly-burly of life, he had passed this afternoon
through an ordeal which might well have unsettled the most
practical. And this extraordinary announcement, coming on top
of all he had been through, was too much for him. He tottered
into the sitting-room and sank into a chair. It seemed to him
that he was living in a nightmare.

And certainly in the figure that entered a few moments later
there was nothing whatever to correct this impression. It might
have stepped straight into anybody's nightmare and felt perfectly
at home right from the start.

The figure was that of a tall, thin man with white hair and a
long and flowing beard of the same venerable hue. Strange as it
seemed that a person of such appearance should not have been
shot on sight early in his career, he had obviously reached an
extremely advanced age. He was either a man of about a hundred
and fifty who was rather young for his years or a man of about a
hundred and ten who had been aged by trouble.

'My dear child!' piped the figure in a weak, quavering voice.

'Freddie!' cried the girl in the kimono.

'Oh, dash it!' said the figure.

There was a pause, broken by a sort of gasping moan from
Lord Emsworth. More and more every minute his lordship was
feeling the strain.

'Good God, guv'nor!' said the figure, sighting him.

His wife pointed at Lord Emsworth.

'Freddie, is that your father?'

'Oh, yes. Rather. Of course. Absolutely. But he said he wasn't
coming.'

'I changed my mind,' said Lord Emsworth in a low, stricken
voice.

'I told you so, Jane,' said the girl. 'I thought he was Lord
Emsworth all the time. Surely you can see the likeness now?'

A kind of wail escaped his lordship.

'Do I look like that?' he said brokenly. He gazed at his son
once more and shut his eyes.

'Well,' said Miss Yorke, in her detestable managing way,
turning her forceful personality on the newcomer, 'now that
you are here, Freddie Threepwood, looking like Father Christmas,
what's the idea? Aggie told you never to come near her
again.'

A young man of his natural limpness of character might well
have retired in disorder before this attack, but Love had apparently
made Frederick Threepwood a man of steel. Removing his
beard and eyebrows, he directed a withering glance at Miss
Yorke.

'I don't want to talk to you,' he said. 'You're a serpent in the
bosom. I mean a snake in the grass.'

'Oh, am I?'

'Yes, you are. You poisoned Aggie's mind against me. If it
hadn't been for you, I could have got her alone and told her my
story as man to man.'

'Well, let's hear it now. You've had plenty of time to rehearse
it.'

Freddie turned to his wife with a sweeping gesture.

'I—' He paused. 'I say, Aggie, old thing, you look perfectly
topping in that kimono.'

'Stick to the point,' said Miss Yorke.

'That is the point,' said Mrs. Freddie, not without a certain
softness. 'But if you think I look perfectly topping, why do you
go running around with movie-actresses with carroty hair?'

'Red-gold,' suggested Freddie deferentially.

'Carroty!'

'Carroty it is. You're absolutely right. I never liked it all
along.'

'Then why were you dining with it?'

'Yes, why?' inquired Miss Yorke.

'I wish you wouldn't butt in,' said Freddie petulantly. 'I'm not
talking to you.'

'You might just as well, for all the good it's going to do you.'

'Be quiet, Jane. Well, Freddie?'

'Aggie,' said the Hon. Freddie, 'it was this way'