Heavy Weather (21 page)

'A butt of malmsey would have been more in your line, I should have thought.'

'Your attitude about young Sue infuriates me. Can't you see the girl's a nice girl... a sweet girl .. . and a lady, if it comes to that.'

'Tell me,
Gally
,' said Lady Julia, 'just as a matter of interest,
is
she your daughter?' The Hon. Galahad bristled.

'She is not. Her father was a man in the Irish Guards, named Cotterleigh. He and Dolly were married when I was in South Africa.'

He stood for a moment, his mind in the past.

'Fellow told me about it quite casually one day when I was having a drink in a Johannesburg bar,' he said with a far-off look in his eyes.' "I see that girl Dolly Henderson who used to be at the Tivoli has got married," he said. Out of a blue sky...'

Lady Julia took up her paper.

'Well, if you have no further observations of interest to make ...'

The Hon. Galahad came back to the present. 'Oh, I have.' 'Please hurry, then.'

'I have something to say which I fancy will interest you very much.'

'That will make a nice change.'

The Hon. Galahad paused a moment. His sister took advantage of the fact to interject a question. 'It isn't by any chance that, if this marriage of Ronnie's is
stopped, you will publish those Reminiscences of yours, is it?' 'It is.'

Lady Julia gave another of her jolly laughs.

'My dear man, I had all that days ago from Constance. And my flesh didn't even creep a bit. It seems to agitate Connie tremendously but speaking for myself I haven't the slightest objection to you publishing a dozen books of Reminiscences. It will be nice to think of you making some money at last, and as for the writhings of the nobility and gentry. ..'

'Julia,' said the Hon. Galahad, 'one moment.'

He eyed her intently. She returned his gaze with an air of faintly bored inquiry.

'Well?'

'You are the relict of the late Major-General Sir Miles Fish,
c.b.e
., late of the Brigade of Guards.' 'I have never denied it.'

'Let us speak for awhile,' said the Hon. Galahad gently, 'of the late Major-General Sir Miles Fish.'

Slowly a look of horror crept into Lady Julia's blue eyes. Slowly she rose from the chair in which she had been reclining. A hideous suspicion had come into her mind.

'When Miles Fish married you,' said the Hon. Galahad, 'he was a respectable - even a stodgily respectable - Colonel. I remember your saying the first time you met him that you thought him slow. Believe me, Julia, when I knew dear old Fishy Fish as a young subaltern, while you were still poisoning governesses' lives at Blandings Castle, he was quite the reverse of slow. His jolly rapidity was the talk of London.'

She stared at him, aghast. Her whole outlook on life, as one might say, had been revolutionized. Hitherto, her attitude towards the famous Reminiscences had been, as it were, airy . .. detached .. . academic is perhaps the word one wants. The thought of the consternation which they would spread among her friends had amused her. But then she had naturally supposed that this man would have exercised a decent reticence about the pasts of his own flesh and blood.

'Galahad! You haven't . . .?'

The historian was pointing a finger at her, like some finger of doom.

'Who rode a bicycle down Piccadilly in sky-blue underclothing in the late summer of
'97?' 'Galahad!'

'Who, returning to his rooms in the early morning of New Year's Day, 1902, mistook the coal-scuttle for a mad dog and tried to shoot it with the fire-tongs?'

'Galahad!'

'Who ...'

He broke oft'. Lady Constance had come into the room.

'Ah, Connie,' he said genially. 'I've just been having a chat with Julia. Get her to tell you all about it. I must be going down and seeing how the young folks are getting on.'

He paused at the door.

'Supplementary material,' he said, focusing his monocle on Lady Julia, 'will be found in Chapters Three, Eleven, Sixteen, Seventeen, and Twenty-one, especially Chapter Twenty-one.'

With a final beam, he passed jauntily from the room and began to descend the stairs.

In the billiard-room, the scene which he had rightly described as touching was still in progress. He wished he could take a snapshot of it to show to his sister Julia.

'That's right, my boy,' he said cordially. 'Capital!'

Ronnie detached himself and began to straighten his tie. He had not heard the door open.

"Oh, hullo, Uncle
Gally
,' he said. 'You here?'

Sue ran to the Hon. Galahad and kissed him.

'I shouldn't,' said the gratified but cautious man. 'He'll be getting jealous of me next.'

'There is no need,' said Ronnie with dignity, 'to rub it in.'

'Well, I won't, then. Merely contenting myself with remarking that of all the young poops I ever met...'

' He is not a poop!' said Sue.

' My dear,' insisted the Hon. Galahad,' I was brought up among poops. I spent my formative years among poops. I have been a member of clubs which consisted exclusively of poops. You will allow me to recognize a poop when I see one. Moreover, we won't argue the point. What I want to talk about now is that manuscript of mine.'A wordless cry broke from Ronnie's lips.

'Poop or no poop,' proceeded the Hon. Galahad, 'he has got to guard that manuscript with his life. Because if ever there were two women who would descend to the level of the beasts of the field to lay their hooks on it...'

'Uncle
Gally
!'

'Ronnie, darling,' cried Sue, 'What is it?'

She might well have asked. The young man's eyes were fixed in a ghastly stare. His usually immaculate hair was disordered where he had thrust a fevered hand through it. Even his waistcoat seemed ruffled.

'.. . they are your mother and Lady Constance,' proceeded the Hon. Galahad, who was never an easy man to interrupt. 'And here's something that will surprise you. Young Monty Bodkin is after the thing, too. Young Bodkin has turned out to be an Al snake in the grass, I'm sorry to say. He's under orders from the man who runs the firm that was going to publish my book to pinch it and take it to him - Lord Tilbury. I used to know him years ago as Stinker Pyke. Why they ever made young Stinker a peer...'

'Uncle
Gally
!'

A little testily the Hon. Galahad allowed the stream of his eloquence to be diverted at last. 'Well, what is it?'

A sort of frozen calm, the calm of utter despair, had come upon Ronnie Fish.

'Monty Bodkin was in here just now,' he said. 'He wanted that manuscript. I told him where it was. And he went off to get it.'

Chapter Eleven

No joy in the world is ever quite perfect.
Su
rgit,
as the old Roman said,
oliquid amari.
Monty Bodkin, having removed the manuscript from Ronnie's chest of drawers and gloated over it and taken it to his room and, after gloating over it again, deposited it in a safe place there, found his ecstasy a little dimmed by the thought of the awkward interview with Percy Pilbeam which now faced him. He was a young man who shrank from embarrassing scenes, and it seemed to him that this one threatened to be extremely embarrassing. Pilbeam, he realized, would have every excuse for being as sore as a gumboil.

Look at the thing squarely, he meant to say. A private detective has his feelings. He resents being made a silly ass of. If you commission him to do something, and then buzz off and do it yourself, pique inevitably supervenes. Suppose Sherlock Holmes, for instance, had sweated himself to the bone to recover the Naval Plans or something, and then the Admiralty authorities had come along and observed casually, 'Oh, I say, you know those Naval Plans, old man? Well, don't bother about them. We've just gone and snitched them ourselves.' Pretty sick the poor old human bloodhound would have felt, no doubt. And pretty sick in similar circumstances Monty anticipated that Percy Pilbeam was going to feel. He did not like the job of breaking the news at all.

However, it had to be done. He found the proprietor of the Argus (Pilgus, Piccy, London) in the smoking-room, massaging his moustache, and with some trepidation proceeded to edge into the agenda.

' Oh, there you are, Pilbeam. I say. ..'

The investigator looked up. It increased Monty's feeling of guilt to note that he had evidently been thinking frightfully hard. He had a sort of boiled look.'Ah, Bodkin, I was just coming to find you. I have been thinking ...'

Monty's tender heart bled for the fellow, but he supposed it was kindest to let him have it on the chin without preamble.

'I know you have, my poor old sleuth,' he said. 'I can see it in your
eye. Well,I've got a bit of bad news for you, I'm afraid. What I came to tell you was to switch off the brain-power. Stop scheming. Put the mind back into neutral. I'm taking you off the case.'

'Eh?'

'I'm sorry, but there it is. You see, what with one thing and another, I've been and got that manuscript myself.' 'What!' 'Yes.'

There was a long pause.

'Well, that's fine,' said Pilbeam. 'I hope you have hidden it carefully?'

'Oh, yes. It's shoved away under the bed in my room. Right up against the wall.'

'Well, that's fine,' said Pilbeam.

His attitude occasioned Monty much relief. He had braced himself up to endure reproaches, to wince beneath recriminations. It seemed to him extraordinarily decent of the man to take it like this. He was dashed, indeed, if he could remember ever having met anyone who, under such provocation, had been so extraordinarily decent.

'What are you going to do with it?' asked Pilbeam. 'I'm taking it down to the Emsworth Arms to a fellow of the name of Tilbury.' 'Not Lord Tilbury?'

'That's right,' said Mont}', surprised. 'Do you know him?' 'Before I opened the Argus, I was editor of
Soc
iety Spices
'No, really? Fancy that. Before he booted me out, I was assistant editor of
Tiny Tots.
It seems to bring us very close together what?'

'But why does Lord Tilbury want it?'

'Well, you see, he has a contract with
Gally
for the book, and when
Gally
refused to publish he saw himself losing the dickens of a lot of money. Naturally he wants it.'

'I see. He ought to gi
ve you a pretty big reward.'

'Oh, I'm not asking him for money. I've got lots of money. What I want is a job. He promised to take me back on
Tiny Tots
if I would get the thing for him.'

'You are leaving here, then?'

Monty chuckled amusedly.

'You bet I'm leaving here. I expect the sack any moment. I'd have got it yesterday, all right," said Monty, with another chuckle, 'if old Emsworth had happened to come along when I was working on the door of that potting-shed.'

'What was that?'

'Rather amusing. I found old Tilbury locked up in a species of shed yesterday afternoon. Apparently he had been caught in conversation with that pig of the old boy's, offering it potatoes and so forth, and was suspected of trying to poison the animal. So they shut him up in this shed, and I came along and let him out. Just imagine how quick I should be leaving if Emsworth knew that I was the chap who flung wide the gates.'

' My word, yes!' said Pilbeam, laughing genially.

'He'd throw me out in a second.'

'He certainly would.'

'Rummy, his attitude about that pig,' said Monty musingly. 'A few years ago, he used to be crazy about pumpkins. I suppose, if you really face the facts, he's the sort of chap who has to be practically off his rocker about something. Yesterday, pumpkins. Today, pigs. Tomorrow, rabbits. This time next year, roosters or rhododendrons.'

‘I
suppose so,' said Pilbeam. 'And when are you thinking of taking this manuscript to Lord Tilbury ?'

'Right away.'

'I wouldn't do that,' said Pilbeam, shaking his head.
'No, I don't think I would advise you to do that. You want to wait till everybody's dressing for dinner. Suppose you were to run into Thr
eep
wood.'