Nothing Serious (22 page)

“Oh,
Sidney!” she sobbed.

“There,
there,” said Sidney McMurdo.

He
folded her in his embrace, and they walked off together. From her passionate
gestures, I could gather that she was explaining what had occurred and was
urging him to plunge into the undergrowth and break Smallwood Bessemer’s neck,
and the apologetic way in which he waved his hands told me that he was making
clear his obligations to the Jersey City and All Points West Mutual and
Co-operative Life and Accident Insurance Co.

Presently,
they were lost in the gathering dusk, and I called to Bessemer and informed him
that the All Clear had been blown.

“She’s
gone?” he said.

“She
has been gone some moments.”

“Are
you sure?”

“Quite
sure.”

There
was a silence.

“No,”
said Bessemer. “It may be a trap. I think I’ll stick on here a while.”

I
shrugged my shoulder and left him.

The
shades of night were falling fast before Smallwood Bessemer, weighing the pro’s
and con’s, felt justified in emerging from his lair. As he started to cross the
bridge that spans the water, it was almost dark. He leaned on the rail, giving
himself up to thought.

The
sweet was mingled with the bitter in his meditations. He could see that the
future held much that must inevitably be distasteful to a man who liked a quiet
life. As long as he remained in the neighbourhood, he would be compelled to
exercise ceaseless vigilance and would have to hold himself in readiness,
should the occasion arise, to pick up his feet and run like a rabbit.

This
was not so good. On the other hand, it seemed reasonable to infer from Agnes
Flack’s manner during the recent episode that their engagement was at an end. A
substantial bit of velvet.

Against
this, however, must be set the fact that he had lost Celia Todd. There was no
getting away from that, and it was this thought that caused him to moan softly
as he gazed at the dark water beneath him. And he was still moaning, when there
came to his ears the sound of a footstep. A woman’s form loomed up in the dusk.
She was crossing the bridge towards him. And then suddenly a cry rent the air.

Smallwood
Bessemer was to discover shortly that he had placed an erroneous interpretation
upon this cry, which had really been one of agitation and alarm. To his
sensitive ear it had sounded like the animal yowl of an angry woman sighting
her prey, and he had concluded that this must be Agnes Flack, returned to the
chase. Acting upon this assumption, he stood not on the order of going but
immediately sored over the rail and plunged into the water below. Rising
quickly to the surface and clutching out for support, he found himself grasping
something wet and furry.

For an instant,
he was at a loss to decide what this could be. It had some of the properties of
a sponge and some of a damp hearthrug. Then it bit him in the fleshy part of
the thumb and he identified it as Celia Todd’s Pekinese, Pirbright. In happier
days he had been bitten from once to three times a week by this animal, and he
recognized its technique.

The
discovery removed a great weight from his mind. If Pirbright came, he reasoned,
could Celia Todd be far behind. He saw that it must be she, and not Agnes Flack,
who stood on the bridge. Greatly relieved, he sloshed to the shore,
endeavouring as best he might to elude the creature’s snapping jaws.

In this
he was not wholly successful. Twice more he had to endure nips, and juicy ones.
But the physical anguish soon passed away as he came to land and found himself
gazing into Celia’s eyes. They were large and round, and shone with an adoring
light.

“Oh,
Smallwood!” she cried. “Thank heaven you were there! If you had not acted so
promptly, the poor little mite would have been drowned.”

“It was
nothing,” protested Bessemer modestly.

“Nothing?
To have the reckless courage to plunge in like that? It was the sort of thing
people get expensive medals for.”

“Just
presence of mind,” said Bessemer. “Some fellows have it, some haven’t. How did
it happen?”

She
caught her breath.

“It was
Sidney McMurdo’s doing.”

“Sidney
McMurdo’s?”

“Yes.
Pirbright was not well to-day, and I told him to fetch the vet. And he talked
me into trying some sort of tonic port, which he said was highly recommended.
We gave Pirbright a saucer full, and he seemed to enjoy it. And then he
suddenly uttered a piercing bark and ran up the side of the wall. Finally he
dashed out of the house. When he returned, his manner was lethargic, and I
thought a walk would do him good. And as he came on to the bridge, he staggered
and fell. He must have had some form of vertigo.”

Smallwood
Bessemer scrutinized the animal. The visibility was not good, but he was able
to discern in its bearing all the symptoms of an advanced hangover.

“Well,
I broke off the engagement right away,” proceeded Celia Todd. “I can respect a
practical joker. I can admire a man who is cruel to animals. But I cannot pass
as fit for human consumption a blend of the two. The mixture is too rich.”

Bessemer
started.

“You
are not going to marry Sidney McMurdo?”

“I am
not.”

“What
an extraordinary coincidence. I am not going to marry Agnes Flack.”

“You
aren’t?”

“No. So
it almost looks—”

“Yes,
doesn’t it?”

“I
mean, both of us being at a loose end, as it were…”

“Exactly.”

“Celia!”

“Smallwood!”

Hand in
hand they made their way across the bridge. Celia uttered a sudden cry causing
the dog Pirbright to wince as if somebody had driven a red hot spike into his
head.

“I
haven’t told you the worst,” she said. “He had the effrontery to assert that
you had advised the tonic port.”

“The
low blister!”

“I knew
it could not be true. Your advice is always so good. You remember telling me I
ought to have let Pirbright fight Agnes Flack’s wolfhound? Well, you were quite
right. He met it when he dashed out of the house after drinking that tonic
port, and cleaned it up in under a minute. They are now the best of friends.
After this, I shall always take your advice and ask for more.”

Smallwood
Bessemer mused. Once again he was weighing the pro’s and con’s. It was his
habit of giving advice that had freed him from, Agnes Flack. On the other hand,
if it had not been for his habit of giving advice, Agnes Flack would never, so
to speak, have arisen.

“Do you
know,” he said, “I doubt if I shall be doing much advising from now on. I think
I shall ask the paper to release me from my columnist contract. I have a
feeling that I shall be happier doing something like the Society News or the
Children’s Corner.”

CHAPTER
VIII

Birth of a Salesman

THE day was so fair, the
breeze so gentle, the sky so blue and the sun so sunny, that Lord Emsworth that
vague and woollen-headed peer, who liked fine weather, should have been gay
and carefree, especially as he was looking at flowers, a thing which always
gave him pleasure. But on his face, as he poked it over the hedge beyond which
the flowers lay, a close observer would have noted a peevish frown. He was
thinking of his younger son Freddie.

Coming
to America to attend the wedding of one of his nieces to a local millionaire of
the name of Tipton Plimsoll, Lord Emsworth had found himself, in the matter of
board and lodging, confronted with a difficult choice. The British Government,
notoriously slow men with a dollar, having refused to allow him to take out of
England a sum sufficient to enable him to live in a New York hotel, he could
become the guest of the bridegroom’s aunt, who was acting as M.C. of the
nuptials, or he could dig in with Freddie in the Long Island suburb where the
latter had made his home. Warned by his spies that Miss Plimsoll maintained in
her establishment no fewer than six Pekinese dogs, a breed of animal which
always made straight for his ankles, he had decided on Freddie and was
conscious now of having done the wrong thing. Pekes chew the body, but Freddie
seared the soul.

The
flowers grew in the garden of a large white house at the end of the road, and
Lord Emsworth had been goggling at them for some forty minutes, for he was a
man who liked to take his time over these things, when his reverie was
interrupted by the tooting of a horn and the sound of a discordant voice
singing “Buttons and Bows”. Freddie’s car drew up, with Freddie at the wheel.

“Oh,
there you are, guv’nor,” said Freddie.

“Yes,”
said Lord Emsworth, who was. “I was looking at the flowers. A nice display. An
attractive garden.”

“Where
every prospect pleases and only man is vile,” said Freddie austerely. “Keep
away from the owner of that joint, guv’nor. He lowers the tone of the
neighbourhood.”

“Indeed?
Why is that?”

“Not
one of the better element. His wife’s away, and he throws parties. I’ve
forgotten his name… Griggs or Follansbee or something… but we call him the
Timber Wolf. He’s something in the lumber business.”

“And he
throws parties?”

“Repeatedly.
You might say incessantly. Entertains blondes in droves. All wrong. My wife’s
away, but do you find me festooned in blondes? No. I pine for her return. Well,
I must be oozing along. I’m late.”

“You
are off somewhere?”

Freddie
clicked his tongue.

“I told
you yesterday, guv’nor, and I told you twice this morning, that I was giving a
prospect lunch to-day at the golf club. I explained that I couldn’t ask you to
join us at the trough, because I shall be handing this bird a sales talk
throughout the meal. You’ll find your rations laid out on a tray. A cold
collation today, because it’s Thursday and on Thursdays the domestic staff
downs tools.”

He
drove on, all briskness and efficiency, and Lord Emsworth tut-tutted an
irritable tut-tut.

There,
he was telling himself, you had in a nutshell what made Freddie such a
nerve-rasping companion. He threw his weight about. He behaved as if he were
the Spirit of Modem Commerce. He was like something out of one of those
advertisements which show the employee who has taken the correspondence course
in Confidence and Self-Reliance looking his boss in the eye and making him
wilt.

Freddie
worked for Donaldson’s Inc., dealers in dog biscuits of Long Island City, and
had been doing so now for three years. And in those three years some miracle
had transformed him from a vapid young London lizard into a go-getter, a live
wire and a man who thought on his feet and did it now. Every night since Lord
Emsworth had come to enjoy his hospitality, if enjoy is the word, he had spoken
lyrically and at length of his success in promoting the interests of Donaldson’s
Dog Joy (“Get Your Dog Thinking The Donaldson Way”), making no secret of his
view that it had been a lucky day for the dear old firm when it had put him on
the payroll. As a salesman he was good, a fellow who cooked with gas and did
not spare himself, and he admitted it.

All of
which might have been music to Lord Emsworth’s ears, for a younger son earning
his living in America is unquestionably a vast improvement on a younger son
messing about and getting into debt in England, had it not been for one
circumstance. He could not rid himself of a growing conviction that after years
of regarding this child of his as a drone and a wastrel, the child was now
regarding him as one. A world’s worker himself, Freddie eyed with scorn one
who, like Lord Emsworth, neither toiled nor spun. He patronized Lord Emsworth.
He had never actually called Lord Emsworth a spiv, but he made it plain that it
was in this category that he had mentally pencilled in the author of his being.
And if there is one thing that pierces the armour of an English father of the
upper classes, it is to be looked down on by his younger son. Little wonder
that Lord Emsworth, as he toddled along the road, was gritting his teeth. A
weaker man would have gnashed them.

His
gloom was not lightened by the sight of the cold collation which leered at him
on his return to the house. There was the tray of which Freddie had spoken, and
on it a plate on which, like corpses after a baffle, lay a slice of vermilion
ham, a slice of sepia corned beef, a circle of mauve liverwirst and, of all
revolting things, a large green pickle. It seemed to Lord Emsworth that Freddie’s
domestic staff was temperamentally incapable of distinguishing between the
needs of an old gentleman who had to be careful what he ate and those of a
flock of buzzards taking pot luck in the Florida Everglades.

For
some moments he stood gaping at this unpleasant picture in still life; then
there stole into his mind the thought that there might be eggs in the ice-box.
He went thither and tested his theory and it was proved correct.