Galahad at Blandings (9 page)

Of his
misadventures on the way — the beads of perspiration, the laboured breath, the
blister on the right foot — it is not necessary to speak. The historian passes
on to the moment when, arriving at the Emsworth Arms, he limped into the bar
and licking his lips surreptitiously requested the barmaid to draw him a mug of
the beer which Sam had found so palatable. He felt that he had earned it.

The
barmaid’s name was Marlene Wellbeloved and she was the niece of George Cyril Wellbeloved,
Lord Emsworth’s former pigman. Beach had never been fond of George Cyril,
considering him a low proletarian and worse than that a man with no respect
for his social superiors. Word had reached him that on several occasions he had
been referred to by this untouchable as ‘Old Fatty’ and ‘that stuffed shirt’,
and the occasion when the other had addressed him with the frightful words
‘Hoy, cocky’ was still green in his memory. Nothing in the way of chumminess
could ever exist between this degraded ex-pigman and himself, but for Marlene
he had a tolerant liking, and when after a few desultory exchanges he took out
the silver watch he had won in the darts tournament to see how the time was
getting along and she said, ‘Oo, Mr Beach, can I look at that?’ he readily
consented. He unhooked it from his waistcoat and laid it on the counter, well
pleased with her girlish interest.

Her
reactions were all that could have been desired. She uttered two squeaks and a giggle.

‘Why,
it’s beautiful, Mr Beach!’ A very handsome trophy.’

And you
really won it playing darts?’

‘I was
so fortunate.’

‘Well,
I think it’s lovely.’

It was
as she was saying You must be terribly good at darts, Mr Beach, and Beach was
deprecating her praise with a modest gesture of the hand that Constable Evans
of the Market Blandings police force entered the bar. He had parked his
bicycle outside and was coming in for a quick one before resuming his rounds.
On seeing Beach, he temporarily forgot his mission. At the station house that
morning he had heard a good one from his sergeant and he wanted to pass it
along.

‘Hi, Mr
Beach.’

‘Good
afternoon, Mr Evans.’ ‘Got a story for you.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Not
for your ears, Marlene. Come outside, Mr Beach.’

They
went out together just as Sam reached the doorway. A collision was unavoidable.

‘Pardon
me,
sir,’ said Beach.

‘My
fault. Entirely my fault. Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ said Sam.

He
spoke with a gay lilt in his voice, for he was in buoyant and optimistic mood.
It was not only the circumstances of having finished his story and seen the
last of a kitten he had never been fond of that induced this sense of
well-being. His conversation with Gally at Halsey Chambers had stimulated him,
as conversations with Gally so often stimulated people. It had left him
convinced that he had only to meet Sandy and inaugurate a frank round-table
talk and all misunderstandings, if you could call what had passed between them
a misunderstanding, would be forgotten. He would say he was sorry he had called
her a ginger-haired little fathead, she would say she was sorry she had thrown
the ring at him, they would kiss again with tears as the late Alfred, Lord
Tennyson had so well put it and everything would be all right once more.

There
was no possible doubt in his mind that Gally had been correct in describing the
thing as in the bag, and the world was looking good to him. He was loving
everyone he met. He had caught only a fleeting glimpse of the obese character
with whom he had collided in the doorway, but he was sure he was an awfully
nice obese character, once you got to know him. He liked the looks of Constable
Evans and also those of Marlene Wellbeloved, whom he now approached with a
charming smile and a request that she would let him have a stoup of the elixir
for which the Emsworth Arms was so justly famous.

‘Nice
day,’ said Marlene as she filled the order for she was a capital conversationalist.
A barmaid has to be as quick as lightning with these good things. They promote
a friendly atmosphere and stimulate trade.

‘Beautiful,’
said Sam with equal cordiality. ‘Hullo, has somebody been giving you a watch?
Your birthday is it, or something?’

Marlene
giggled. A most musical sound, Sam thought it. In the mood he was in he would
have been equally appreciative of a squeaking slate pencil.

‘It’s
Old Fatty’s. He won it in the darts tournament.’

‘Old
Fatty? You mean the gentleman I was dancing the rumba with just now?’

‘My
Uncle George always calls him Old Fatty. Uncle George is terribly funny.’

‘I’ll
bet he keeps one and all in stitches. What’s it doing on the counter?’

‘He was
showing it to me. He went out because Constable Evans wanted to tell him a
dirty story.’

‘What
was the story? You don’t happen to know?’

‘No, I
don’t.’

‘I must
get him to tell it to me some time. Yes,’ said Sam, picking it up, ‘it’s
certainly a handsome watch. Well worth winning even at the expense of having to
play darts, which to my mind is about the lousiest pastime in the—’

‘World’
he would have concluded, but the word died on his lips. The door of the
Emsworth Arms bar faced the road and was always kept open in fine weather and
passing it, wheeling a bicycle, was a red-haired girl at the sight of whom all
thoughts of beer, watches and barmaids were wiped from his mind as with a
sponge. He bounded out, calling her name, and she looked round startled. Then
as she saw him her eyes widened and leaping on her bicycle she rode off,
gathering speed as she went. And Sam, breathing a soft expletive, ran after
her, though with little hope that anything constructive would result.

As he
ran, he was dimly aware of a sound like a steam whistle in his rear, but he had
no leisure to give it his attention.

II

The steam-whistle-like
sound which had made so little impression on Sam had proceeded from the lips
of Marlene Well-beloved. It had taken her a few seconds to run to the door and
come on the air, for astonishment had held her momentarily paralysed. Hers
until now had been a placid existence, and nothing like this theft of valuable
watches beneath her very eyes had ever marred its even tenor. The bar of the
Emsworth Arms was not one of your Malemute saloons where anything may happen
when a bunch of the boys start whooping it up. Its clients were of the
respectable stamp of Beach the butler Jno. Robinson, proprietor of the station
taxi cab, and Percy Bulstrode the chemist. It was the first time that Dangerous
Dan McGrews like the customer who had just left had swum into her ken.

She
was, accordingly, deprived of speech. Then, her vocal cords in mid—season form again,
she expressed her concern and agitation with an EEEEEEEEEEEE!! which probably
made itself heard and excited interest in many a distant parish.

It
certainly interested Beach and Constable Evans, chuckling over the sergeant’s
story some dozen yards away. Her voice came to them like a bugle call to a
couple of war horses. They had seen Sam emerge and start running along the
road, but had thought nothing of it, attributing his mobility to an appointment
suddenly remembered. When, however they realised that his departure had been
the cause of Marlene Wellbeloved going EEEEEEEEEEEE!!, reason told them that
there was something sinister afoot. Level-headed girls like Marlene do not go
EEEEEEEEEEEE!! without solid grounds for doing so. With one accord they ran
towards her the constable in the lead, Beach, who was not built for speed, lying
a length or two behind.

‘Smatter?’
asked PC. Evans, always a man of few words. A trained observer he noticed that
Marlene was wringing her hands, and he found the gesture significant. Coming on
top of that EEEEEEEEEEEE!!, it seemed to PC. Evans that it meant something.

‘Oh, Mr
Beach! Oh, Mr Beach!’

‘What
is it, Miss Wellbeloved?’

‘That
feller’s gone off with your watch!’ cried Marlene, her hands continuing to
gyrate. ‘He put it in his pocket and ran off with it!’

The
effect of these words on the two men differed substantially. They froze Beach
into a statue of dismay, for his watch was very dear to him and the bereavement
made him feel like one of those nineteenth-century poets who were always losing
dear gazelles. He had not experienced such a sense of desolation and horror
since the night when a dinner guest at the castle had asked for a little water
to put in his claret. It made him wonder what the world was coming to.

Constable
Evans, on the other hand, had found in her statement all the uplifting
properties of some widely advertised tonic. Where Beach mourned, he rejoiced.
The cross which all English country policemen have to bear is the lack of
spirit and initiative in the local criminal classes. A man like New York’s
Officer Garroway has always more dope pushers and heist guys and fiends with
hatchet slaying six at his disposal than he knows what to do with, but in
Market Blandings you were lucky if you got an occasional dog without a collar
or Saturday-night drunk and disorderly. It was months since Constable Evans had
made a decent pinch, and this sudden outbreak of crime brought out all the best
in him. To leap on his machine and begin pedalling like a contestant in a
six-day bicycle race was with him the work of an instant. He did not even stop
to say ‘Ho’, his customary comment on the unusual.

It was
not long before he sighted the man wanted by the police. Sam had soon given up
the chase, realising the futility of trying to overtake on foot a cyclist who
had had fifty yards’ start. He was standing now in the middle of the road, his
lips moving in a silent soliloquy which, if audible, would have had no chance
of passing the censors even in these free—speaking days.

The
sunny mood in which he had begun the day had changed completely. Five minutes
before, he had been the little friend of all the world and could have stepped
straight into a Dickens’ novel and no questions asked, but now he viewed the
human race with a jaundiced eye and could see no future for it. When Constable
Evans came riding up, he thought he had never beheld a police officer he liked
the looks of less. The man seemed to him to have not a single quality to
recommend him to critical approval.

Nor did
the constable appear to be liking him. It would have taken a very poor
physiognomist to have read into his glance anything even remotely resembling
affection. He had a face that seemed to have been carved from some durable
substance like granite, and it was with a baleful glitter in his eye that he
lowered his bicycle to the ground. As he advanced on Sam, a traveller in the
East who knew his tigers of the jungle would have been struck by his
resemblance to one of them about to leap on its prey.

‘Ho!’
he said.

The
correct response to this would of course have been a civil ‘Ho to you,’ but Sam
was too preoccupied with his gloomy thoughts to make it. He stared bleakly at
Constable Evans. He was at a loss to know why this flatty had thrust his
society on him, and he resented his presence.

‘Well?’
he said briefly, speaking from between clenched teeth. ‘What do
you
want?’

‘You,’
said the constable even more briefly. ‘What are you doing with that watch?’

‘What
watch?’

‘This
watch,’ said Constable Evans, and deftly removed it from the right-hand pocket
of Sam’s coat by the chain which dangled from it.

Sam
stared as, when a child, he had so often stared at a conjurer who had just
produced from a borrowed top hat two rabbits and a bowl of goldfish.

‘Good
Lord!’ he said. ‘That belongs to the fat man at the Emsworth Arms.’

‘You’re
right it belongs to the fat man at the Emsworth Arms.’

‘I took
it away by mistake.’

Constable
Evans was a man who did not laugh readily. Even at the sergeant’s anecdote,
droll though it was, he had merely smiled. But this drew a quick guffaw from
him, and having guffawed he sneered. Another man would have said, ‘A likely
story!’ He merely said, ‘Ho!’

Sam saw
that explanations were in order.

‘What
happened was this. The girl behind the bar was showing it to me, and I
suddenly saw someone — er — someone I wanted to have a word with pass the door,
so I ran out.’

‘With
the watch in your pocket.’

‘I must
have put it there without knowing.’

‘Ho!’

Remorse
for having inadvertently deprived a good man of what was no doubt a treasured
possession had calmed Sam down a little. He still felt hostile to the human
race and would have been glad to do without it, but he could see that he had
put himself in the wrong and would have to make apologies. He clicked his
tongue self-reproachfully.

‘Idiotic
of me. I’ll take it back to the owner.’

‘I’ll
take it back to the owner.’

‘Will
you? That’s very nice of you. He’ll be amused. You’ll have a good laugh
together.’