Pigs Have Wings (12 page)

There is a type of short, sharp, bitter laugh which is like a yelp of agony and does no good to man or beast. Lady Constance sometimes employed it when she heard someone say what a charming man her brother Galahad was. It was a laugh of this kind that now proceeded from Penny Donaldson, and for the first time there began to steal over Jerry a suspicion that he had been mistaken in supposing this the maddest merriest day of all the glad new year and the world in which he moved the best of all possible worlds.

‘Please don’t bother, Gally,’ she said. ‘I have not the slightest wish to dive into Mr Vail’s arms. I wonder if you would care to hear a little story?’

‘Story? Of course, of course. Go ahead. But what’s all this “Mr Vail” stuff?’

‘You remember me telling you that I was to have had dinner last night with Mr Vail?’

‘Certainly. But –’

Penny went on, still speaking in a strange metallic voice that reminded Jerry of Gloria Salt fulfilling and expressing herself on the subject of Lord Vosper.

‘We had arranged to meet at the Savoy at eight. I had a fitting in the afternoon, and when I came home at about six I found a telephone message waiting for me. It said that Mr Vail regretted that he would be unable to dine tonight as an important business matter had come up. I was naturally disappointed –’

She choked, and a tear stole down her cheek. Jerry, seeing it, writhed with remorse. He realized how a good-hearted executioner at an Oriental court must feel after strangling an odalisque with a bowstring.

‘But, Penny –’

‘Please!’ She gave him a fleeting look, the sort of look a good woman gives a caterpillar on finding it in her salad, and turned back to Gally. ‘I was naturally disappointed, of course, because I had been looking forward very much to seeing him, but I quite understood that these things happen –’

Gally nodded.

‘Sent to try us.’

‘I quite understood that these things happen –’

‘Probably meant to make us more spiritual.’

‘I say I quite understood that these things happen,’ proceeded Penny, raising her voice and giving Gally a look similar in quality to the one she had just given Jerry, ‘and I said to myself that naturally, if Mr Vail had important business, he couldn’t be expected to neglect it just for me.’

‘But, Penny –’

‘So, when Lord Vosper, who was there, suggested that he should give me dinner, I thought it would be a nice way of passing the evening. Lord Vosper, it seems, is very fond of a restaurant called Mario’s. He took me there.’

She paused again, this time because Jerry, his eyes leaping from their sockets, had uttered a sound not unlike the howl of a trapped timber wolf.

‘We didn’t dress,’ she resumed, ‘so they put us up in the balcony. Do you know Mario’s, Gally?’

‘Since my time.’

‘It’s quite nice up in the balcony there. You get a good view of the main floor. And one of the first things I saw on that main floor was Mr Vail attending to his important business. It consisted of dining with a girl who looked like a snake with hips and from time to time having his face patted by her.’

Gally’s monocle came swinging round at Jerry like the eye of a fire-breathing dragon. His face was hard and set.

‘You abysmal young wart-hog!’

‘Oh, you mustn’t say that, Gally,’ said Penny, gently rebuking. ‘I’m sure Mr Vail has a perfectly satisfactory explanation. Probably the girl was the editor of some magazine, discussing a series of stories with him. I believe editors always pat contributor’s faces. It creates a friendly atmosphere.’

It cost Jerry an effort to raise his chin and square his shoulders, but he did it. The consciousness of being a good man unjustly accused always helps to stiffen the spinal vertebrae.

‘I can explain everything.’

‘Why is it,’ inquired Penny – she seemed to be addressing a passing butterfly, ‘that men always say that?’

‘I say it,’ said Jerry stoutly, ‘because it’s true. The girl you saw me dining with was Gloria Salt.’

‘Pretty name. A friend of yours?’

‘A very dear friend of mine.’

‘I thought you seemed on good terms.’

‘She patted my face twice.’

‘I should have said oftener. Of course, I hadn’t a score card with me.’

‘Twice,’ repeated Jerry firmly. ‘And I’ll tell you why. Let us take these pats in their order. Pat One was a congratulatory pat when I told her how much I loved you. Pat Two occurred when I was thanking her for having suggested a way by which I might be able to raise that two thousand pounds which I need in order to marry you. So much for your face patting! And if,’ Jerry went on, addressing the Hon. Galahad, ‘you call me an abysmal young wart-hog again, I shall forget the respect due to your grey hairs and haul off and let you have one right on the maxillary bone. Abysmal young wart-hog, indeed! My motives were pure to the last drop. Gloria Salt rang me up in the afternoon to say she wanted me to give her dinner, promising over the meal to spill this scheme of hers for connecting with the cash, because it was too long, she said, to tell me on the phone. Reluctantly, for it made me feel as if my soul were being passed through a wringer, I broke our date. I dined with her at Mario’s. She told me her scheme. I thanked her brokenly, and she patted my face. I may mention that when she patted it, it was as though a kindly sister had patted the face of a blameless brother. So I should be much obliged if you would stop looking at me as if you had caught me stealing pennies from a blind man.’

Penny had already done so. Her lips parted, and she was gazing at him, wide-eyed. There was no suggestion in her expression that she had found him enriching himself at the expense of the blind.

‘Furthermore,’ said Jerry, now thundering, ‘if additional proof is required to drive into your nut the fact that the last thing in the minds of either of us was anything in the nature of funny business, I may mention that Miss Salt – besides being, like myself, pure to the last drop, if not further – is engaged to be married. She is shortly to become the bride of a certain Sir Gregory Parsloe, who, I believe, resides in this vicinity.’

Gally’s monocle flew from his eye.

‘Parsloe!’

‘Parsloe.’

Gally recovered his monocle. But as he replaced it, his hand was trembling. He was a man who prided himself on his British fortitude. Come the three corners of the world in arms and we shall shock them, he had said in effect to Beach and Penny when speaking of the Binstead-Simmons threat, and he had been quite prepared to cope gallantly with a pig girl in the Parsloe pay and a Parsloe minion who went about buying bottles of anti-fat, the large economy size. But add to that pig girl and that minion a Parsloe fiancée, and it seemed to him that things were becoming too hot. No wonder, he felt, that Beach just now had looked careworn. The faithful fellow, possibly listening at some key-hole whilst this Salt girl traded confidences with Lady Constance, must just have had the bad news.

‘Oh Lord and butter!’ he exclaimed, moved to his depths, and without further speech hastened off in the direction of the butler’s pantry. It was obvious to him that the crisis called for another of those staff conferences.

‘So there you are,’ said Jerry. He stepped forward masterfully. ‘I shall now kiss you.’

‘Oh, heavens, what a mess!’ wailed Penny.

Jerry paused.

‘Mess? You believe what I was saying?’

‘Of course I believe it.’

‘You love me?’

‘Of course I love you.’

‘All right, then. What are we waiting for? Let’s go.’

Penny stepped back.

‘Jerry darling, I’m afraid things are more complicated than you think. You see, when I saw that girl pat your face –’

‘In a sisterly manner.’

‘Yes, but the point is that it didn’t
look
sisterly, and I got the wrong angle. So when, just as we were finishing dinner, Orlo Vosper asked me to marry him —’

‘Oh, my God!’

‘Yes,’ said Penny in a small voice. ‘He asked me to marry him, and I said I would.’

BUT WHAT, MEANWHILE
, it will be asked, of George Cyril Wellbeloved, whom we left with his tongue hanging out, the future stretching bleakly before him like some grim Sahara? Why is it, we seem to hear a million indignant voices demanding, that no further mention has been made of that reluctant teetotaller?

The matter is susceptible of a ready explanation. It is one of the chief drawbacks to the lot of the conscientious historian that in pursuance of his duties he is compelled to leave in obscurity many of those to whom he would greatly prefer to give star billing. His task being to present a panoramic picture of the actions of a number of protagonists, he is not at liberty to concentrate his attention on any one individual, however much the latter’s hard case may touch him personally. When Edward Gibbon, half-way through his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, complained to Doctor Johnson one night in a mood of discouragement that it – meaning the lot of the conscientious historian – shouldn’t happen to a dog, it was to this aspect of it that he was referring.

In this macedoine of tragic happenings in and around Blandings Castle, designed to purge the souls of a discriminating public with pity and terror, it has been necessary to devote so much space to Jerry Vail, Penny Donaldson, Lord Emsworth and the rest of them that George Cyril Wellbeloved, we are fully aware, has been neglected almost entirely. Except for one brief appearance early in the proceedings, he might as well, for all practical purposes, have been painted on the back drop.

It is with genuine satisfaction that the minstrel, tuning his harp, now prepares to sing of this stricken pig man.

There is no agony like the agony of the man who wants a couple of quick ones and cannot get them and in the days that followed his interview with Sir Gregory Parsloe, George Cyril Wellbeloved may be said to have plumbed the depths. It would, however, be inaccurate to describe him as running the gamut of the emotions, for he had had but one emotion, a dull despair as there crept slowly upon him the realization of the completeness with which his overlord had blocked all avenues to a peaceful settlement. He was in the distressing position of finding himself foiled at every point.

Although nobody who had met him would have been likely to get George Cyril Wellbeloved confused with the poet Keats, it was extraordinary on what similar lines the two men’s minds worked. ‘Oh, for a beaker full of the warm South, full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene!’ sang Keats, licking his lips, and ‘Oh, for a mug of beer with, if possible, a spot of gin in it!’ sighed George Cyril Wellbeloved, licking his; and in quest of the elixir he had visited in turn the Emsworth Arms, the Wheatsheaf, the Waggoner’s Rest, the Beetle and Wedge, the Stitch in Time, the Jolly Cricketers and all the other hostelries at which Market Blandings pointed with so much pride.

But everywhere the story was the same. Barmaids had been given their instructions, pot boys warned to be on the alert. They had placed at his disposal gingerbeer, ginger ale, sarsaparilla, lime juice and on one occasion milk, but his request for the cup that clears today of past regrets and future fears was met with a firm
nolle prosequi
. Staunch and incorruptible, the barmaids and the pot boys refused to serve him with anything that would have interested Omar Khayam, and he had come away parched and saddened.

But it has been well said of pig men as a class that though crushed to earth, they will rise again. You plot and plan and think you have baffled a pig man, but all the while his quick brain had been working, and it has shown him the way out. It was so with George Cyril Wellbeloved. Just when the thought of the Hon. Galahad Threepwood came stealing into his mind, he could not have said, but it did so steal, and it was as though a light had shone upon his darkness. That dull despair gave way to a flaming hope. Glimmering in the distance, he seemed to see the happy ending.

Although during his term of office at Blandings Castle his opportunities of meeting Gally socially had been rather limited, George Cyril knew all about him. Gally, he was aware, was a man with a feeling heart, a man who could be relied upon to look indulgently on such of his fellow men as wanted a gargle and wanted it quick. According to those who knew him best, his whole life since reaching years of what may loosely be called discretion had been devoted to seeing that the other chap did not die of thirst. Would such a man turn his back on even a comparative stranger, if the comparative stranger were in a position to prove by ocular demonstration that his tongue was blackening at the roots? Most unlikely, thought George Cyril Wellbeloved, and if there was even a sporting chance of securing the services of this human drinking fountain, it was his duty, he felt, not to neglect it.

With pig men, to think is to act. Dinner over and his employer safely in his study with his coffee and cigar, he got out his bicycle and started pedalling through the scented summer night.

The welcome he received at the back door of Blandings Castle could in no sense have been termed a gushing one. Beach, informed that there was a gentleman asking for him and finding that the person thus described was a pig man whom he had never liked and who in his opinion smelled to heaven, was at his most formal. He might have been a prominent Christian receiving an unexpected call from one of the troops of Midian.

George Cyril, in sharp contradistinction, was all bounce and breeziness. Unlike most of those who met that godlike man, he stood in no awe of Beach. He held the view, and had voiced it fearlessly many a time in the tap room of the Emsworth Arms, that Beach was an old stuffed shirt.

‘Hoy, cocky,’ he said, incredible as such a mode of address might seem. ‘Where’s Mr Galahad?’

Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes.

‘Mr Galahad is in the amber drawing-room with the rest of the household,’ he replied austerely.

‘Then go and hoik him out of it,’ said George Cyril Wellbeloved, his splendid spirit unsubdued. ‘I want to see him. Tell him it’s important.’

In stating that Gally was in the amber drawing-room with the rest of the household, Beach had spoken with an imperfect knowledge of the facts. He had been in the amber drawing-room, but he was now just outside it, seated on the terrace with his friend Maudie, and an observer, had one been present, would have received the impression that both he and his companion had much on their minds. In a situation where it might have been expected that reminiscences of the old days would have been flashing merrily to and fro, they had fallen into a silence, busy with their thoughts.