Heavy Weather (16 page)

At any other moment Beach would have been offended at such a mode of address and would have shown it in his manner. But just as he was about to draw himself up with a cold stare he chanced to catch sight of Lord Tilbury, who had retreated to the shadow of the inn wall.

On his marriage to the daughter of Donaldson's Dog-biscuits, of Long Island City, N.Y., and his subsequent departure for America, the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, Lord Emsworth's younger son, who had assembled in the days of his bachelorhood what was pretty generally recognized as the finest collection of mystery thrillers in Shropshire, had bequeathed his library to Beach; and the latter in his hours of leisure had been making something of a study of the literature of Crime of late.

Lord Tilbury, brooding there with folded arms, reminded him of The Man With The Twisted Eyebrows in
The Casterbridge Horror.

Shuddering strongly, Beach climbed into the cab.

When two careworn men, one of whom has just discovered that the other has criminal tendencies, take a drive together on a baking afternoon, conversation does not run trippingly. Monty was thinking out plans and schemes; and Beach, in the intervals of recoiling with horror from this desperado, was wondering why the latter had called him a stag at eve. Silence, accordingly, soon fell upon the station taxi and lasted till it drew up at the front door of the castle. Here Monty alighted, and the taxi took Beach round to the back door. As he got down and handed Robinson his fare, the butler was conscious of an unwilling respect for the fiendish cunning of the criminal mind - which, having offered you a lift in a cab, gets out first and leaves you to pay for it.

He hastened to his pantry. Reason told him that the manuscript must still be in the drawer where he had placed it, but he did not breathe easily until he had seen it with his own eyes. He took it out and, having done so, paused irresolutely. It was stuffy in the pantry and he longed to be in the open air, in that favourite seat of his near the laurel bush outside the back door. And yet he could not relax with any satisfaction there, separat
ed from his precious charge.

There is always a way. A few moments later he perceived that all anxiety might be obviated if he took the manuscript with him. He did so. Then, reclining in his deck-chair, he lit one of the cigarettes which it had cost him such labour to procure, and gave himself up to thought.

His moonlike face was drawn and grave. The situation, he realized, was becoming too complex for comfort.

The views of butlers who have been given important papers to guard and find that there are persons on the premises who wish to steal them are always clear-cut and definite. Broadly speaking, a butler in such a position can bear up with a reasonable amount of fortitude against the menace of one gang of would-be thieves. He may not like it, but he can set his teeth and endure. Add a second gang, however, and the thing seems to pass beyond his control.

Beach's researches in the library bequeathed to him by the Hon. Freddie Threepwood had left him extremely sensitive on the subject of Gangs. In most of the volumes in that library Gangs played an important part, and he had come to fear and dislike them. And here in Blandings Castle, groping about and liable at any moment to focus their malign attention on himself, were two Gangs - the Parsloe and the Tilbury. It made a butler think a bit.

To divert his mind, he began to read the manuscript. Being of an inquisitive nature, he had always wanted to do so, and this seemed an admirable opportunity. Opening the pages at random, therefore, and finding himself in the middle of Chapter Six (' Nightclubs of the Nineties'), he plunged into a droll anecdote about the Bishop of Bangor when an undergraduate at Oxford, and despite his cares was soon chuckling softly, like some vast kettle coming to the boil.

It was at this moment that Percy Pilbeam, who had been smoking cigarettes in the stable yard, came sauntering round the corner.

The stable yard had been a favourite haunt of Percy Pilbeam's ever since his arrival at the Castle. A keen motor-cyclist, he liked talking to Voules, the chauffeur, about valves and plugs and things. And, in addition to this, he found the place soothing because it was out of the orbit of the sisters and nephews of his host. You did not meet Lady Constance Keeble there, you did not meet Lady Julia Fish there, and you did
not meet Lady Julia Fish's son
Ronald there; and for Percy Pilbeam that was sufficient to make any spot Paradise enow.

He was also attracted to the stable-yard because he found it a good place to think in.

He had been thinking a great deal these last two days. A self-respecting private investigator is always loath to admit that he is baffled, but baffled was just what Pilbeam had been ever since a second visit to the small library had informed him that the manuscript which he had been commissioned to remove was no longer in its desk. Like Monty, he felt at a loss.

It was all very well, he felt sourly, for that Keeble woman to say in her impatient, duchess-talking-to-a-worm way that it must be somewhere and that she was simply amazed that he had not found it. The point was that it might be anywhere. No doubt if he had a Scotland Yard search-warrant, a troupe of African witch-doctors and unlimited time at his disposal he could find it. But he hadn't.

A well-defined dislike of Lady Constance Keeble had been germinating in Percy Pilbeam since the first moment they had met. He was brooding upon that unpleasantly supercilious manner of hers as he turned the corner now. And he had just come to the conclusion, as he always came on these occasions, that what she needed was a thoroughly good ticking off, when he was suddenly jerked out of his daydreams by the sound of a huge, reverberating, explosive laugh; and looking up with a start, espied protruding over the top of a deck-chair a few feet before him an egg
-
shaped head which he recognized as that of Beach, the butler.

We left Beach, it will be remembered, chuckling softly. And for a few minutes soft chuckles had contented him. But in a book of the nature of the Hon. Galahad Threepwood's Reminiscences the student is sure sooner or later to come upon some high spot, some supreme expression of the writer's art which demands a more emphatic tribute. What Beach was reading now was the story of Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe and the prawns.

'ha
.
.
.
hor
.
.
.
hoo
!' he roared.

Pilbeam stood spellbound. His had not been a wide experience of butlers, and he could not recall ever before having heard a butler laugh - let alone laugh in this extraordinary fashion, casting dignity to the winds and apparently wit
hout a thought for his high
blood-pressure and the stability of his waistcoat buttons. As soon as the first numbing shock had passed away, an intense curiosity seized him. He drew near, marvelling. On tiptoe he stole behind the chair, agog to see what it could be that had caused this unprecedented outburst.

The next moment he found himself gazing upon the manuscript of the Hon. Galahad's Reminiscences.

He recognized it instantly. Ever since that attempt upon it which this same butler had foiled, its shape and aspect had been graven upon his memory. And even if that straggling handwriting had not been familiar to him, the two lines which he read before uttering an involuntary cry would have told him what it was that flickered before his eyes.

'Oof!' said Pilbeam unable to check himself.

Beach gave a convulsive start, turned, and, looking up, beheld within six inches of his eyes the face of the leading executive of the sinister Parsloe Gang.

'Oof!' he exclaimed in his turn, and the deck-chair, as if in sympathy, also made an oof-like sound. Then, cracking under the strain, it spread itself out upon the ground.

Even under the most favourable conditions, the situation would have been one of embarrassment. The peculiar circumstances rendered it cataclysmic. Pilbeam, who had never seen a butler take a toss out of a deck-chair before, stood robbed of speech; while Beach, his heart palpitating dangerously, sat equally silent. He was frozen with horror. That the enemy should have succeeded in tracking him down already seemed to him to argue a cunning that transcended the human.

Rising with the manuscript clutched to the small of his back, if his back could be said to have a small, he began to retreat slowly towards the house. Continuing to recoil, he bumped into stonework, and with an infinite relief found that he was within leaping distance of the back door. With a last, lingering look, of a nature which a sensitive snake would have resented, he shot in, leaving Pilbeam staring like one in a dream.

Almost exactly at the instant when he reached the haven of his pantry, Monty Bodkin, taking a thoughtful stroll on the terrace, suddenly remembered with a start of shame and remorse that he had left Beach to pay that cab fare.

One points at Monty Bodkin with a good deal of pride. Most young men in his position would either have dismissed the matter with a careless 'What of it ?' or possibly even the still more ignoble reflection that a bit of luck had put them half a crown up; or else would have made a mental note to slip the fellow the money at some vague future date. For in the matter of Debts the young man of today wavers between straight repudiation and a moratorium.

But in a lax age Monty Bodkin had his code. To him this obligation was a blot on the Bodkin escutcheon which had to be wiped off immediately.

And so it came about that Beach, panting from his recent clash with the Parsloe Gang and in his dazed condition not having heard the door open, became suddenly aware of emotional breathing in the vicinity of his left ear and discovered that the right-hand man of the Tilbury Gang had now invaded his fastness.

It was a moment which would have tried the
morale
of the hero of a Secret Service novel. It made Beach feel like a rabbit with not one stoat but a whole platoon of stoats on its track. He had been sitting, relaxed. He now rose like a rocket and, snatching up the manuscript in the old familiar manner, stood holding it to his heaving chest.

Monty, who, like Pilbeam, had reacted strongly to the wholly unforeseen discovery of the precious object in the butler's possession, was the first to recover from the shock.

'What ho!' he said. 'Afraid I startled you, what ?'

Beach continued to pant.

'I came to give you the money for that cab.'

Beach, though reluctant to take even one hand off the manuscript, was not proof against half-crowns. Cautiously extending a palm, he accepted the coin, thrust it into his pocket, and restored his grasp to the papers almost in a single movement.

' Must have given you a jump. Sorry. Ought to have blown my horn.'

There was a pause.

'I see you've got that book of Mr Galahad's there,' said Monty, with a rather overdone carelessness.

To Beach it seemed more than rather overdone. He had been manoeuvring with the open door as his objective, and he now took a shuffling step in that direction.

'Pretty good, I should imagine? Now, there's a thing,' said Monty,' that I'd very much like to read.'

Beach had now reached the door, and the thought of having a clear way to safety behind him did something to restore his composure. That trapped feeling had left him, and in its stead had come a stern, righteous wrath. He stared at Monty, breathing heavily. A sort of glaze had come over his eyes, causing them to resemble two pools of cold gravy.

'You couldn't lend it to me, I suppose?'

'No, sir.'

'No?'

'No, sir.'

'You won't?'

'No, sir.'

There was a pause. Monty coughed. Beach, with an inward shudder, felt that he had never heard anything so roopy and so villainous. He was surprised at Monty. A nice, respectable young gentleman he had always considered him. He could only suppose that he had been getting into bad company since those early days when he had been a popular visitor at the Castle.

'I'd give a good deal to read that thing, Beach.'

'Indeed, sir?'

'Ten quid, in fact.'

'Indeed, sir?'

'Or, rather, twenty.'

'Indeed, sir?'

'And when I say twenty,' explained Monty,
‘I
mean, of course twenty-five.'

The sophisticated modern world has, one fears, a little lost its taste for the type of scene, so admired of an older generation, where Virtue, drawing itself up to its full height, scorns to be tempted by gold. Yet even the most hard-boiled and cynical could scarcely have failed to be thrilled had they beheld Beach now. He looked like something out of a symbolic group of statuary - Good Citizenship Refusing To Accept A Bribe From Big Business Interests In Connexion With The Contract For The New Inter-Urban Tramway System, or something of that kind. His eyes were hard, his waistcoat quivered, and when he spoke it was with a formal frigidity.