Nothing Serious (24 page)

She was
giving a second encore when her performance was interrupted by a shrill yapping
from without, and the blonde who had sat beside her knitted her brow in
motherly concern.

“Somebody’s
teasing Eisenhower,” she said.

“Probably
found a cat,” said the timber wolf. “Tell me more. What sort of a character was
this character?”

“Tall,”
said a blonde.

“Old,”
said another blonde.

“Skinny,”
said a third blonde.

And a
fourth blonde added that he had worn pince-nez.

A
sudden gravity fell upon the timber wolf. He was remembering that on several
occasions these last few days he had seen just such a man peering over his
hedge in a furtive and menacing manner, like Sherlock Holmes on the trail. This
very morning he had seen him. He had been standing there outside the hedge,
motionless … watching … watching …

The fly
in the ointment of men who throw parties for blondes when their wives are away,
the thing that acts as a skeleton at the feast and induces goose pimples when
the revelry is at its height, is the fact that they can never wholly dismiss
the possibility that these wives, though they ought to be ashamed of themselves
for entertaining unworthy suspicions, may have engaged firms of private
detectives to detect them privately and report on their activities. It was this
thought that now came whistling like an east wind through the mind of the
timber wolf, whose name, just to keep the record straight, was not Griggs or
Follansbee but Spenlow (George).

And as
he quivered beneath its impact, one of his guests, who had hitherto taken no
part in the conversation, spoke as follows:

“Oo,
look! Eisenhower’s got him up a tree!”

And
George Spenlow, following her pointing finger, saw that she was correct. There
the fellow was, roosting in the branches and adjusting his pince-nez as if the
better to view the scene within. He quivered like a jelly and stared at Lord
Emsworth. Lord Emsworth stared at him. Their eyes met.

Much
has been written of the language of the eyes, but except between lovers it is
never a very satisfactory medium of communication. George Spenlow, trying to
read the message in Lord Emsworth’s, completely missed the gist.

What
Lord Emsworth was trying to convey with the language of the eye was an apology
for behaviour which at first sight, he admitted, might seem a little odd. He
had rapped on the door, he was endeavouring to explain, but, unable to attract
attention to his presence, had worked his way round the house to where he heard
voices, not a thought on his mind except a passionate desire to sell richly
bound encyclopædias of Sport, and suddenly something had exploded like a land
mine on the ground beside him and, looking down, he had perceived a Pekinese
dog advancing on him with bared teeth. This had left him no option but to climb
the tree to avoid its slavering jaws. “Oh, for the wings of a dove!” he had
said to himself, and had got moving. He concluded his remarks by smiling a
conciliatory smile.

It
pierced George Spenlow like a dagger. It seemed to him that this private
investigator, elated at having caught him with the goods, was gloating evilly.

He
gulped.

“You
girls stay here,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll go talk to this fellow.”

He
climbed through the window, scooped up the Pekinese, restored it to its
proprietress and addressed Lord Emsworth in a quavering voice.

“Now
listen,” he said.

These
men high up in the lumber business are quick thinkers. George Spenlow had seen
the way.

“Now
listen,” said George Spenlow.

He had
taken Lord Emsworth affectionately by the arm and was walking him up and down
the lawn. He was a stout, pink, globular man, so like Lord Emsworth’s pig,
Empress of Blandings, in appearance that the latter felt a wave of homesickness.

“Now
listen,” said George Spenlow. “I think you and I can get together.”

Lord
Emsworth, to show that his heart was in the right place, smiled another
conciliatory smile.

“Yes,
yes, I know,” said George Spenlow, wincing. “But I think we can. I’ll put my
cards on the table. I know all about it. My wife. She gets ideas into her head.
She imagines things.”

Lord
Emsworth, though fogged was able to understand this.

“My
late wife was like that” he said.

“All
women are like that” said George Spenlow. “It’s something to do with the bone
structure of their heads. They let their imagination run away with them. They
entertain unworthy suspicions.”

Here
again Lord Emsworth was able to follow him. He said he had noticed the same
thing in his sister Constance, and George Spenlow began to feel encouraged.

“Sure.
Sisters, wives, late wives … they’re all the same, and it doesn’t do to let
them get away with it. So here’s what. What you tell her is that you found me
enjoying a quiet home afternoon with a few old college friends … Wait, wait,”
said George Spenlow urgently. “Wait while I finish.”

He had
observed his guest shake his head. This was because a mosquito had just bitten
Lord Emsworth on the ear, but he had no means of divining this. Shakes of the
head are as hard to interpret as the language of the eyes.

“Wait
while I finish,” said George Spenlow. “Hear what I was going to say. You’re a
man of the world. You want to take the broad, sensible outlook. You want to
study the situation from every angle and find out what there is in it for you.
Now then how much?”

“You
mean how many?”

“Eh?”

“How
many would you like?”

“How
many what?”

“Richly
bound encyclopædias of Sport.”

“Oh
yes, yes, yes,” said George Spenlow, enlightened “Oh, sure sure, sure, sure,
sure. I didn’t get you for a moment. About how many would you suggest? Fifty?”

Lord
Emsworth shook his head again—petulantly, it seemed to George Spenlow. The
mosquito had returned.

“Well,
naturally,” proceeded George Spenlow, “when I said fifty, I meant a hundred. I
think that’s a nice round number.”

“Very
nice,” agreed Lord Emsworth. “Or would you care for a gross?”

“A
gross might be better.”

“You
can give them to you friends.”

“That’s
right. On their birthdays.”

“Or at Christmas.”

“Of
course. So difficult to think of a suitable Christmas present.”

“Extraordinarily
difficult.”

“Shall
we say five hundred dollars on account?”

“That
would be capital.”

“And
remember,” said George Spenlow, with all the emphasis at his disposal. “Old
college friends.”

A
passer-by, watching Lord Emsworth as he returned some twenty minutes later to
Freddie’s dream house down the road, would have said to himself that there went
an old gentleman who had found the blue bird, and he would have been right.
Lord Emsworth, as he fingered the crisp roll of bills in his trouser pocket,
was not actually saying “Whooppee!” but, it was a very near thing. He was
feeling as if a great burden had been removed from his shoulders.

The
girl was asleep when he reached the house. Gently, without disturbing her
slumbers, Lord Emsworth reached for her bag and deposited the five hundred
dollars in it. Then he tiptoed out and set a course for the golf club. He
wanted to find his son Freddie.

“Ah,”
Frederick,” he would say. “So you sell dog biscuits do you? Pooh! Anyone can
sell dog biscuits. Give me something tougher, like richly bound encyclopædias
of Sport. Now, I strolled out just now and sold a gross at the first house I
visited. So don’t talk to me about dog biscuits. In fact, don’t talk to me at
all, because I am sick of the sound of your voice. And STOP THAT SINGING!!”

Yes,
when Freddie began singing “Buttons and Bows,” that would be the moment to
strike.

CHAPTER
IX

How’s That, Umpire?

THE story of Conky Biddle’s
great love begins at about six-forty-five on an evening in June in the
Marylebone district of London. He had spent the day at Lord’s cricket ground
watching a cricket match, and driving away at close of play had been held up in
a traffic jam. And held up alongside his taxi was a car with a girl at the wheel.
And he had just lit a cigarette and was thinking of this and that, when he
heard her say:

“Cricket
is not a game. It is a mere shallow excuse for walking in your sleep.”

It was
at this point that love wound its silken fetters about Conky. He leaped like a
jumping bean and the cigarette fell from his nerveless fingers. If a girl who
talked like that was not his dream girl, he didn’t know a dream girl when he
heard one.

You couldn’t
exactly say that he fell in love at first sight, for owing to the fact that in
between him and her, obscuring the visibility, there was sitting a robust
blighter in blue flannel with a pin stripe, he couldn’t see her. All he had to
go on was her voice, but that was ample. It was a charming voice with an
American intonation. She was probably, he thought, an American angel who had
stepped down from Heaven for a short breather in London.

“If I
see another cricket game five thousand years from now,” she said, “that’ll be
soon enough.”

Her
companion plainly disapproved of these cracks. He said in a stiff, sniffy sort
of way that she had not seen cricket at its best that afternoon, play having
been greatly interfered with by rain.

“A
merciful dispensation,” said the girl. “Cricket with hardly any cricket going
on is a lot better than cricket where the nuisance persists uninterrupted. In
my opinion the ideal contest would be one where it rained all day and the rival
teams stayed home doing their crossword puzzles.”

The
traffic jam then broke up and the car shot forward like a B.29, leaving the
taxi nowhere.

The
reason why this girl’s words had made so deep an impression on the young
Biddle was that of all things in existence, with the possible exception of
slugs and his uncle Everard, Lord Plumpton, he disliked cricket most. As a boy
he had been compelled to play it, and grown to man’s estate he was compelled to
watch it. And if there was one spectacle that saddened him more than another in
a world where the man of sensibility is always being saddened by spectacles, it
was that of human beings, the heirs of the ages, waddling about in pads and
shouting “How’s that, umpire?”

He had
to watch cricket because Lord Plumpton told him to, and he was dependent on the
other for his three squares a day. Lord Plumpton was a man who knew the batting
averages of every first-class cricketer back to the days when they used to play
in top hats and whiskers, and recited them to Conky after dinner. He liked to
show Conky with the assistance of an apple (or, in winter, of an orange) how
Bodger of Kent got the fingerspin which enabled him to make the ball dip and
turn late on a sticky wicket. And frequently when Conky was walking along the
street with him and working up to touching him for a tenner, he would break off
the conversation at its most crucial point in order to demonstrate with his
umbrella how Codger of Sussex made his late cut through the slips.

It was
to the home of this outstanding louse, where he had a small bedroom on an upper
floor, that Conky was now on his way. Arriving at journey’s end, he found a
good deal of stir and bustle going on, with doctors coming downstairs with
black bags and parlourmaids going upstairs with basins of gruel, and learned
from the butler that Lord Plumpton had sprained his ankle.

“No,
really?” said Conky, well pleased, for if his uncle had possessed as many
ankles as a centipede he would thoroughly have approved of him spraining them
all. “I suppose I had better go up and view the remains.”

He
proceeded to the star bedroom and found his uncle propped up with pillows,
throwing gruel at the parlourmaid. It was plain that he was in no elfin mood.
He was looking like a mass murderer, though his face lacked the genial
expression which you often see in mass murderers, and he glared at Conky with
the sort of wild regret which sweeps over an irritable man when he sees a loved
one approaching his sick bed and realizes that he has used up all the gruel.

“What
ho, Uncle Everard,” said Conky. “The story going the round of the clubs is that
you have bust a joint of sorts. What happened?”

Lord
Plumpton scowled darkly. He looked now like a mass murderer whose stomach
ulcers are paining him.

“I’ll
tell you what happened. You remember I had to leave you at Lord’s to attend a
committee meeting at my club. Well, as I was walking back from the club, there
were some children playing cricket in the street and one of them skied the ball
towards extra cover, so naturally I ran out into the road to catch it. I judged
it to a nicety and had just caught it when a homicidal lunatic of a girl came blinding
along at ninety miles an hour in her car and knocked me base over apex. One of
these days,” said Lord Plumpton, licking his lips, “I hope to meet that girl
again, preferably down a dark alley. I shall skin her very slowly with a blunt
knife, dip her in boiling oil, sever her limb from limb, assemble those limbs
on the pavement and dance on them.”