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‘One moment,’ said Lord Emsworth.

He scuttled into the house again, and came out looking happier. He was carrying a stout walking-stick with an ivory knob on it.

13 COCKTAILS BEFORE DINNER

I

Blandings Castle basked in the afterglow of a golden summer evening. Only a memory now was the storm which, two hours since, had raged with such violence through its parks, pleasure grounds and messuages. It had passed, leaving behind it peace and bird-song and a sunset of pink and green and orange and opal and amethyst. The air was cool and sweet, and the earth sent up a healing fragrance. Little stars were peeping down from a rain-washed sky.

To Ronnie Fish, slumped in an armchair in his bedroom on the second floor, the improved weather conditions brought no spiritual uplift. He could see the sunset, but it left him cold. He could hear the thrushes calling in the shrubberies, but did not think much of them. It is, in short, in no sunny mood that we re-introduce Ronald Overbury Fish to the reader of this chronicle.

The meditations of a man who has recently proposed to and been accepted by a girl, some inches taller than himself, for whom he entertains no warmer sentiment than a casual feeling that, take her for all in all, she isn’t a bad sort of egg, must of necessity tend towards the sombre: and the surroundings in which Ronnie had spent the latter part of the afternoon had not been of a kind to encourage optimism. At the moment when the skies suddenly burst asunder and the world became a shower-bath, he had been walking along the path that skirted the wall of the kitchen-garden: and the only shelter that offered itself was a gloomy cave or dug-out that led to the heating apparatus of the hothouses. Into this he had dived like a homing rabbit, and here, sitting on a heap of bricks, he had remained for the space of fifty minutes with no company but one small green frog and his thoughts.

The place was a sort of Sargasso Sea into which had drifted all the flotsam and jetsam of the kitchen-garden which it adjoined. There was a wheelbarrow, lacking its wheel and lying drunkenly on its side. There were broken pots in great profusion. There was a heap of withered flowers, a punctured watering-can, a rake with large gaps in its front teeth, some potatoes unfit for human consumption and half a dead blackbird. The whole effect was extraordinarily like Hell, and Ronnie’s spirits, not high at the start, had sunk lower and lower.

Sobered by rain, wheelbarrows, watering-cans, rakes, potatoes, and dead blackbirds, not to mention the steady, supercilious eye of a frog which resembled that of a Bishop at the Athenaeum inspecting a shy new member, Ronnie had begun definitely to repent of the impulse which had led him to ask Millicent to be his wife. And now, in the cosier environment of his bedroom, he was regretting it more than ever.

Like most people who have made a defiant and dramatic gesture and then have leisure to reflect, he was oppressed by a feeling that he had gone considerably farther than was prudent. Samson, as he heard the pillars of the temple begin to crack, must have felt the same. Gestures are all very well while the intoxication lasts. The trouble is that it lasts such a very little while.

In asking Millicent to marry him, he had gone, he now definitely realized, too far. He had overdone it. It was not that he had any objection to Millicent as a wife. He had none whatever – provided she were somebody else’s wife. What was so unpleasant was the prospect of being married to her himself.

He groaned in spirit, and became aware that he was no longer alone. The door had opened, and his friend Hugo Carmody was in the room. He noted with a dull surprise that Hugo was in the conventional costume of the English gentleman about to dine. He had not supposed the hour so late.

‘Hullo,’ said Hugo. ‘Not dressed? The gong’s gone.’

It nowbecame clear to Ronnie that he simply was not equal to facing his infernal family at the dinner-table. He supposed that Millicent had spread the news of their engagement by this time, and that meant discussion, wearisome congratulations, embraces from his Aunt Constance, chaff of the vintage of 1895 from his Uncle Galahad – in short, fuss and gabble. And he was in no mood for fuss and gabble. Pot-luck with a tableful of Trappist monks he might just have endured, but not a hearty feed with the family.

‘I don’t want any dinner.’

‘No dinner?’

‘No.’

‘Ill or something?’

‘No.’

‘But you don’t want any dinner? I see. Rummy! However, your affair, of course. It begins to look as if I should have to don the nose-bag alone. Beach tells me that Baxter also will be absent from the trough. He’s upset about something, it seems, and has asked for a snort and sandwiches in the smoking-room. And as for the pustule Pilbeam,’ said Hugo grimly, ‘I propose to interview him at the earliest possible date. And after that he won’t want any dinner, either.’

‘Where are the rest of them?’

‘Didn’t you know?’ said Hugo, surprised. ‘They’re dining over at old Parsloe’s. Your aunt, Lord Emsworth, old Galahad, and Millicent.’ He coughed. A moment of some slight embarrassment impended. ‘I say, Ronnie, old man, while on the subject of Millicent.’

‘Well?’

You know that engagement of yours?’

‘What about it?’

‘It’s off.’

‘Off?’

‘Right off. A wash-out. She’s changed her mind.’

‘What!’

Yes. She’s going to marry me. I may tell you we have been engaged for weeks – one of those secret betrothals – but we had a row. Row now over. Complete reconciliation. So she asked me to break it to you gently that in the circs, she proposes to return you to store.’

A thrill of ecstasy shot through Ronnie. He felt as men on the scaffold feel when the messenger bounds in with the reprieve.

‘Well, that’s the first bit of good news I’ve had for a long time,’ he said.

You mean you didn’t want to marry Millicent?’

‘Of course I didn’t.’

‘Not so much of the “of course”, laddie,’ said Hugo, offended.

‘She’s an awfully nice girl . . .’

An angel. Shropshire’s leading seraph.’

‘. . . but I’m not in love with her any more than she’s in love with me.’

‘In that case,’ said Hugo, with justifiable censure, ‘why propose to her? A goofy proceeding, it seems to me.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘Of course! I see what happened. You grabbed Millicent to score off Sue, and she grabbed you to score off me. And now, I suppose, you’ve fixed it up with Sue again. Very sound. Couldn’t have made a wiser move. She’s obviously the girl for you.’

Ronnie winced. The words had touched a nerve. He had been trying not to think of Sue, but without success. Her picture insisted on rising before him. Not being able to exclude her from his thoughts, he had tried to think of her bitterly.

‘I haven’t,’ he cried.

Extraordinary how difficult it was, even now, to think bitterly of Sue. Sue was Sue. That was the fundamental fact that hampered him. Try as he might to concentrate it on the tragedy of Mario’s restaurant, his mind insisted on slipping back to earlier scenes of sunshine and happiness.

‘You haven’t?’ said Hugo, damped.

That Ronnie could possibly be in ignorance of Sue’s arrival at the castle never occurred to him. Long ere this, he took it for granted, they must have met. And he assumed, from the equanimity with which his friend had received the news of the loss of Millicent, that Sue and he must have had just such another heart-to-heart talk as had taken place in the room above the gamekeeper’s cottage. The dour sullenness of Ronnie’s face made his kindly heart sink.

‘You mean you haven’t fixed things up?’

‘No.’

Ronnie writhed. Sue in his car. Sue up the river. Sue in his arms to the music of sweet saxophones. Sue laughing. Sue smiling. Sue in the springtime, with the little breezes ruffling her hair . . .

He forced his mind away from these weakening visions. Sue at Mario’s . . . That was better . . . Sue letting him down . . . . Sue hobnobbing with the blister Pilbeam . . . That was much better.

‘I think you’re being very hard on that poor little girl, Ronnie.’

‘Don’t call her a poor little girl.’

‘I will call her a poor little girl,’ said Hugo firmly. ‘To me, she is a poor little girl, and I don’t care who knows it. I don’t mind telling you that my heart bleeds for her. Bleeds profusely. And I must say I should have thought . . .’

‘I don’t want to talk about her.’

‘. . . after her doing what she has done . . .’

‘I don’t want to talk about her, I tell you.’

Hugo sighed. He gave it up. The situation was what they called an
impasse.
Too bad. His best friend and a dear little girl like that parted for ever. Two jolly good eggs sundered for all eternity. Oh, well, that was Life.

‘If you want to talk about anything,’ said Ronnie, ‘you had much better talk about this engagement of yours.’

‘Only too glad, old man. Was afraid it might bore you, or would have touched more freely on subject.’

‘I suppose you realize the Family will squash it flat?’

‘Oh, no, they won’t.’

‘You think my Aunt Constance is going to leap about and bang the cymbals?’

‘The Keeble, I admit,’ said Hugo, with a faint shiver, ‘may make her presence felt to some extent. But I rely on the ninth Earl’s support and patronage. Before long, I shall be causing the ninth to look on me as a son.’

‘How?’

For a moment Hugo almost yielded to the temptation to confide in this friend of his youth. Then he realized the unwisdom of such a course. By an odd coincidence, he was thinking exactly the same of Ronnie as Ronnie at an earlier stage of this history had thought of him. Ronnie, he considered, though a splendid chap, was not fitted to be a repository of secrets. A babbler. A sieve. The sort of fellow who would spread a secret hither and thither all over the place before nightfall.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I have my methods.’

‘What are they?’

‘Just methods,’ said Hugo, ‘and jolly good ones. Well, I’ll be pushing off. I’m late. Sure you won’t come down to dinner? Then I’ll be going. It is imperative that I get hold of Pilbeam with all possible speed. Don’t want the sun to go down on my wrath. All has ended happily in spite of him, but that’s no reason why he shouldn’t be massacred. I look on myself as a man with a public duty.’

For some minutes after the door had closed, Ronnie remained humped up in the chair.

Then, in spite of everything, there began to creep upon him a desire for food, too strong to be resisted. Perfect health and a tealess afternoon in the open had given him a compelling appetite. He still shrank from the thought of the dining-room. Fond as he was of Hugo, he simply could not stand his conversation tonight. A chop at the Ems-worth Arms would meet the case. He could get down there in five minutes in his two-seater.

He rose. His mind, as he moved to the door, was not entirely occupied with thoughts of food. Hugo’s parting words had turned it in the direction of Pilbeam again.

What had brought Pilbeam to the castle, he did not know. But, now that he was here, let him look out for himself! A couple of minutes alone with P. Frobisher Pilbeam was just the medicine his bruised soul required. Apparently, from what he had said, Hugo also entertained some grievance against the man. It could be nothing compared with his own.

Pilbeam! The cause of all his troubles. Pilbeam! The snake in the grass. Pilbeam . . .!

Yes . . .! His heart might be broken, his life a wreck, but he could still enjoy the faint consolation of dealing faithfully with Pilbeam.

He went out into the corridor. And, as he did so, Percy Pilbeam came out of the room opposite.

II

Pilbeam had dressed for dinner with considerable care. Owing to the fact that Lord Emsworth, in his woollen-headed way, had completely forgotten to inform him of the exodus to Matchingham Hall, he was expecting to meet a gay and glittering company at the meal, and had prepared himself accordingly. Looking at the result in the mirror, he had felt a glow of contentment. This glow was still warming him as he passed into the corridor. As his eyes fell on Ronnie, it faded abruptly.

In the days of his editorship of
Society Spice,
that frank and fearless journal, P. Frobisher Pilbeam had once or twice had personal encounters with people having no cause to wish him well. They had not appealed to him. He was a man who found no pleasure in physical violence. And that physical violence threatened now was only too sickeningly plain. It was foreshadowed in the very manner in which this small but sturdy young man confronting him had begun to creep forward. Pilbeam, who was an F.R.Z.S, had seen leopards at the Zoo creep just like that.

Years of conducting a weekly scandal-sheet, followed by a long period of activity as a private enquiry agent, undoubtedly train a man well for the exhibition of presence-of-mind in sudden emergencies. One finds it difficult in the present instance to over-praise Percy Pilbeam’s ready resource. Had a great military strategist been present, he would have nodded approval. With the grim menace of Ronnie Fish coming closer and closer, Percy Pilbeam did exactly what Napoleon, Hannibal, or the great Duke of Marlborough would have done. Reaching behind him for the handle and twisting it sharply, he slipped through the door of his bedroom, banged it, and was gone. Many an eel has disappeared into the mud with less smoothness and celerity.

If the leopard which he resembled had seen its prey vanish into the undergrowth just before dinner-time, it would probably have expressed its feelings in exactly the same kind of short, rasping cry as proceeded from Ronnie Fish, witnessing this masterly withdrawal.

For an instant he was completely taken aback. Then he plunged for the door and plunged into the room.

He stood, baffled. Pilbeam had vanished. To Ronnie’s astonished eyes the apartment appeared entirely free from detectives in any shape or form whatsoever. There was the bed. There were the chairs. There were the carpet, the dressing-table, and the book-shelf But of private enquiry agents there was a complete shortage.

How long this miracle would have continued to afflict him one cannot say. His mind was still dealing dazedly with it, when there came to his ears a sharp click, as of a key being turned in the lock. It seemed to proceed from a hanging-cupboard at the other side of the room.