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We have called Rupert Baxter efficient, and efficient he was. The word, as we interpret it, implies not only a capacity for performing the ordinary tasks of life with a smooth firmness of touch but in addition a certain alertness of mind, a genius for opportunism, a gift for seeing clearly, thinking swiftly, and Doing It Now. With these qualities Rupert Baxter was pre-eminently equipped; and it had been with him the work of a moment to perceive, directly the Hon. Galahad had left the house with Sue, that here was his chance of popping upstairs, nipping in to the small library, and abstracting the manuscript of the Reminiscences. Having popped and nipped, as planned, he was in the very act of searching the desk when the sound of a footstep outside froze him from his spectacles to the soles of his feet. The next moment, fingers began to turn the door-handle.

You may freeze a Baxter’s body, but you cannot numb his active brain. With one masterful, lightning-like flash of clear thinking he took in the situation and saw the only possible way out. To reach the door leading to the large library, he would have to circumnavigate the desk. The window, on the other hand, was at his elbow. So he jumped out of it.

All these things Baxter could have explained in a few words. Refraining from doing so, he rose to his feet and began to brush the mould from his knees.

‘Baxter! What on earth?’

The ex-secretary found the gaze of his late employer trying to nerves which had been considerably shaken by his fall. The occasions on which he disliked Lord Emsworth most intensely were just these occasions when the other gaped at him open-mouthed like a surprised halibut.

‘I overbalanced,’ he said curtly.

‘Overbalanced?’

‘Slipped.’

‘Slipped?’

‘Yes. Slipped.’

‘How? Where?’

It now occurred to Baxter that by a most fortunate chance the window of the small library was not the only one that looked out on to this arena into which he had precipitated himself. He might equally well have descended from the larger library which adjoined it.

‘I was leaning out of the library window . . .’

‘Why?’

‘Inhaling the air . . .’

‘What for?’

‘And I lost my balance.’

‘Lost your balance?’

‘I slipped.’

‘Slipped?’

Baxter had the feeling – it was one which he had often had in the old days when conversing with Lord Emsworth – that an exchange of remarks had begun which might go on for ever. A keen desire swept over him to be – and that right speedily – in some other place. He did not care where it was. So long as Lord Emsworth was not there, it would be Paradise enow.

‘I think I will go indoors and wash my hands,’ he said.

And face,’ suggested the Hon. Galahad.

‘My face, also,’ said Rupert Baxter coldly.

He started to move round the angle of the house, but long before he had got out of hearing Lord Emsworth’s high and penetrating tenor was dealing with the situation. His lordship, as so often happened on these occasions, was under the impression that he spoke in a hushed whisper.

‘Mad as a coot!’ he said. And the words rang out through the still summer air like a public oration.

They cut Baxter to the quick. They were not the sort of words to which a man with an inch and a quarter of skin off his left shinbone ought ever to have been called upon to listen. With flushed ears and glowing spectacles, the Efficient Baxter passed on his way.

Statistics relating to madness among coots are not to hand, but we may safely doubt whether even in the ranks of these notoriously unbalanced birds there could have been found at this moment one who was feeling half as mad as he did.

Lord Emsworth continued to gaze at the spot where his late secretary had passed from sight.

‘Mad as a coot,’ he repeated.

In his brother Galahad he found a ready supporter.

‘Madder,’ said the Hon. Galahad.

‘Upon my word, I think he’s actually worse than he was two years ago. Then, at least, he never fell out of windows.’

‘Why on earth do you have the fellow here?’

Lord Emsworth sighed.

‘It’s Constance, my dear Galahad. You know what she is. She insisted on inviting him.’

‘Well, if you take my advice, you’ll hide the flower-pots. One of the things this fellow does when he gets these attacks,’ explained the Hon. Galahad, taking Sue into the family confidence, ‘is to go about hurling flower-pots at people.’

‘Really?’

‘I assure you. Looking for me, Beach?’

The careworn figure of the butler had appeared, walking as one pacing behind the coffin of an old friend.

‘Yes, sir. The gentleman has arrived, Mr Galahad. I looked in the small library, thinking that you might possibly be there, but you were not.’

‘No, I was out here.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘That’s why you couldn’t find me. Show him up to the small library, Beach, and tell him I’ll be with him in a moment.’

‘Very good, sir.’

The Hon. Galahad’s temporary delay in going to see his visitor was due to his desire to linger long enough to tell Sue, to whom he had taken a warm fancy and whom he wished to shield as far as it was in his power from the perils of life, what every girl ought to know about the Efficient Baxter.

‘Never let yourself be alone with that fellow in a deserted spot, my dear,’ he counselled.

‘If he suggests a walk in the woods, call for help. Been off his head for years. Ask Clarence.’

Lord Emsworth nodded solemnly.

‘And it looks to me,’ went on the Hon. Galahad, ‘as if his mania had now taken a suicidal turn. Overbalanced, indeed! How the deuce could he have overbalanced? Flung himself out bodily, that’s what he did. I couldn’t think who it was he reminded me of till this moment. He’s the living image of a man I used to know in the nineties. The first intimation any of us had that this chap had anything wrong with him was when he turned up to supper at the house of a friend of mine – George Pallant. You remember George, Clarence? – with a couple of days’ beard on him. And when Mrs George, who had known him all her life, asked him why he hadn’t shaved – “Shaved?” says this fellow, surprised.

Packleby, his name was. One of the Leicestershire Packlebys. “Shaved, dear lady?” he says. “Well, considering that they even hide the butter-knife when I come down to breakfast for fear I’ll try to cut my throat with it, is it reasonable to suppose they’d trust me with a razor?” Quite stuffy about it, he was, and it spoiled the party. Look after Miss Schoonmaker, Clarence. I shan’t be long.’

Lord Emsworth had little experience in the art of providing diversion for young girls.

Left thus to his native inspiration, he pondered a while. If the Empress had not been stolen, his task would, of course, have been simple. He could have given this Miss Schoonmaker a half-hour of sheer entertainment by taking her down to the piggeries to watch that superb animal feed. As it was, he was at something of a loss.

‘Perhaps you would care to see the rose-garden?’ he hazarded.

‘I should love it,’ said Sue.

‘Are you fond of roses?’

‘Tremendously.’

Lord Emsworth found himself warming to this girl. Her personality pleased him. He seemed dimly to recall something his sister Constance had said about her – something about wishing that her nephew Ronald would settle down with some nice girl with money like that Miss Schoonmaker whom Julia had met at Biarritz. Feeling so kindly towards her, it occurred to him that a word in season, opening her eyes to his nephew’s true character, might prevent the girl making a mistake which she would regret for ever when it was too late.

‘I think you know my nephew Ronald?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

Lord Emsworth paused to smell a rose. He gave Sue a brief biography of it before returning to the theme.

‘That boy’s an ass,’ he said.

‘Why?’ said Sue sharply. She began to feel less amiable towards this stringy old man. A moment before, she had been thinking that it was rather charming, that funny, vague manner of his. Now she saw him clearly for what he was – a dodderer, and a Class A dodderer at that.

‘Why?’ His lordship considered the point. ‘Well, heredity, probably, I should say. His father, old Miles Fish, was the biggest fool in the Brigade of Guards.’ He looked at her impressively through slanting pince-nez, as if to call her attention to the fact that this was something of an achievement. ‘The boy bounces tennis-balls on pigs,’ he went on, getting down to the ghastly facts.

Sue was surprised. The words, if she had caught them correctly, seemed to present a side of Ronnie’s character of which she had been unaware.

‘Does what?’

‘I saw him with my own eyes. He bounced a tennis-ball on Empress of Blandings. And not once but repeatedly.’

The motherly instinct which all girls feel towards the men they love urged Sue to say something in Ronnie’s defence. But, apart from suggesting that the pig had probably started it, she could not think of anything. They left the rose-garden and began to walk back to the lawn, Lord Emsworth still exercised by the thought of his nephew’s shortcomings. For one reason and another, Ronnie had always been a source of vague annoyance to him since boyhood. There had even been times when he had felt that he would almost have preferred the society of his younger son, Frederick.

‘Aggravating boy,’ he said. ‘Most aggravating. Always up to something or other. Started a night-club the other day. Lost a lot of money over it. Just the sort of thing he would do.

My brother Galahad started some kind of a club many years ago. It cost my old father nearly a thousand pounds, I recollect. There is something about Ronald that reminds me very much of Galahad at the same age.’

Although Sue had found much in the author of the Reminiscences to attract her, she was able to form a very fair estimate of the sort of young man he must have been in the middle twenties. This charge, accordingly, struck her as positively libellous.

‘I don’t agree with you, Lord Emsworth.’

‘But you never knew my brother Galahad as a young man,’ his lordship pointed out cleverly.

‘What is the name of that hill over there?’ asked Sue in a cold voice, changing the unpleasant subject.

‘That hill? Oh, that one?’ It was the only one in sight. ‘It is called the Wrekin.’

‘Oh?’ said Sue.

‘Yes,’ said Lord Emsworth.

‘Ah,’ said Sue.

They had crossed the lawn and were on the broad terrace that looked out over the park.

Sue leaned on the low stone wall that bordered it and gazed before her into the gathering dusk.

The castle had been built on a knoll of rising ground, and on this terrace one had the illusion of being perched up at a great height. From where she stood, Sue got a sweeping view of the park and of the dim, misty Vale of Blandings that dreamed beyond. In the park, rabbits were scuttling to and fro. In the shrubberies birds called sleepily. From somewhere out across the fields there came the faint tinkling of sheep-bells. The lake shone like old silver, and there was a river in the distance, dull grey between the dull green of the trees.

It was a lovely sight, age-old, orderly and English, but it was spoiled by the sky. The sky was overcast and looked bruised. It seemed to be made of dough, and one could fancy it pressing down on the world like a heavy blanket. And it was muttering to itself. A single heavy drop of rain splashed on the stone beside Sue, and there was a low growl far away as if some powerful and unfriendly beast had spied her.

She shivered. She had been gripped by a sudden depression, a strange foreboding that chilled the spirit. That muttering seemed to say that there was no happiness anywhere and never could be any. The air was growing close and clammy. Another drop of rain fell, squashily like a toad, and spread itself over her hand.

Lord Emsworth was finding his companion unresponsive. His stream of prattle slackened and died away. He began to wonder how he was to escape from a girl who, though undeniably pleasing to the eye, was proving singularly difficult to talk to. Raking the horizon in search of aid, he perceived Beach approaching, a silver salver in his hand. The salver had a card on it, and an envelope.

‘For me, Beach?’

‘The card, your lordship. The gentleman is in the hall.’

Lord Emsworth breathed a sigh of relief.

‘You will excuse me, my dear? It is most important that I should see this fellow immediately. My brother Galahad will be back very shortly, I have no doubt. He will entertain you. You don’t mind?’

He bustled away, glad to go, and Sue became conscious of the salver, thrust deferentially towards her.

‘For you, miss.’

‘For me?’

Yes, miss,’ moaned Beach, like a winter wind wailing through dead trees.

He inclined his head sombrely, and was gone. Sue tore open the envelope. For one breath-taking instant she had thought it might be from Ronnie. But the writing was not Ronnie’s familiar scrawl. It was bold, clear, decisive writing, the writing of an efficient man.

She looked at the last page.

‘Yours sincerely,

‘R.J. BAXTER’

Sue’s heart was beating faster as she turned back to the beginning. When a girl in the position in which she had placed herself has been stared at through steel-rimmed spectacles in the way this R. J. Baxter had stared at her through his spectacles, her initial reaction to mysterious notes from the man behind the lenses cannot but be a panic fear that all has been discovered.

The opening sentence dispelled her alarm. Purely personal motives, it appeared, had caused Rupert Baxter to write these few lines. The mere fact that the letter began with the words,

‘Dear Miss Schoonmaker,’

was enough in itself to bring comfort.

At the risk of annoying you by the intrusion of my private affairs (wrote the Efficient
Baxter), I feel that I must give you an explanation of the incident which occurred in the
garden in your presence this afternoon. From the observation – in the grossest taste –

which Lord Emsworth let fall in my hearing I fear you may have placed a wrong
construction on what took place. {I allude to the expression “Mad as a coot”, which I
distinctly heard Lord Emsworth utter as I moved away.)