Service with a Smile (14 page)

‘What
on earth are you talking about?’

‘I only
put that in to make it sound better. As a matter of fact, it was Grandpapa.’

‘What
do you mean, it was Grandpapa? Who was Grand-papa?’

‘The
miscreant.’

‘Are
you telling me that your grandfather —’

Words
failed the Duke. His opinion of Lord Emsworth’s I.Q. was, as we know, low, but
he was unable to credit him with the supreme pottiness necessary for the
perpetration of an act like the one they were discussing. Then, thinking again,
he felt that there might be something in what the boy said. After all, from
making an exhibition of oneself by maundering over a pig to sneaking out at
daybreak and cutting tent ropes is but a step.

‘What
makes you think that?’ he said, now definitely agog.

George
would have liked to say, ‘You know my methods. Apply them,’ but it would have
wasted time, and lie was anxious to get on with his story.

‘Shall
I tell it you from the beginning, omitting no detail, however slight?’

‘Certainly,
certainly,’ said the Duke, and would have added, ‘I am all ears,’ if the
expression had been familiar to him. He wished the boy had a voice in a rather
lower register, but in consideration of the importance of what he had to
communicate he was willing to be squeaked at.

George
marshalled his thoughts.

‘I was
in the kitchen at five o’clock this morning—’

‘What
were you doing there at such an hour?’

‘Oh,
just looking around,’ said George guardedly. He knew that there was a school of
thought that disapproved of these double breakfasts of his, and nothing to be
gained by imparting information which might be relayed to Lady Constance, the
head of that school. ‘I sort of happened to go in.’

‘Well?’

‘And I
hadn’t been there more than about a couple of ticks when Grandpapa entered. He
had a knife on his person.’

‘A
knife?’

‘A
whacking great scimitar.’

‘How do
you mean, on his person?’

‘Well,
actually he was brandishing it. His manner was strange, and there was a wild
glitter in his eyes. So I said to myself, “Ho! “‘

‘You
said what?’

‘Ho!’

‘Why “Ho!”‘

‘Well,
wouldn’t you have said “Ho!”?’

The
Duke considered the question, and saw that the lad had a point there.

‘No
doubt I should have been surprised,’ he admitted.

‘So was
I. That’s why I said “Ho!”‘

‘To
yourself?’

‘Of
course. You can’t go about saying “Ho!” to people out loud. So when he went
out, I followed him.’

‘Why?’

‘Use
your loaf, big boy,’ pleaded George. ‘You know my methods. Apply them,’ he
said, happy to get it in at last. ‘I wanted to see what he was up to.’

‘Of
course. Yes, quite understandable. And—?’

‘He
headed for the lake. I trickled after him, taking advantage of every inch of
cover, and he made a beeline for that tent and started sawing away at the
ropes.’

A sudden
suspicion darted into the Duke’s mind. He puffed a menacing moustache.

‘If
this is some silly joke of yours, young man —’

‘I
swear it isn’t. I tell you I was watching him the whole time. He didn’t see me
because I was well concealed behind a neighbouring bush, but I was an
eye-witness throughout. Did you ever read
The Hound of the Baskervilles?’

For an
instant the Duke received the impression that the pottiness of Lord Emsworth
had been inherited by his grandson, with an assist from the latter’s father,
the ninth Earl’s elder son, Lord Bosham, whom he knew to be one of England’s
less bright minds. You don’t, he reasoned, read hounds, you gallop after them
on horses, shouting “Yoicks!” or possibly “Tally-ho!” Then it occurred to him
that the lad might be referring to some book or other. He inquired whether this
was so, and received an answer in the affirmative.

‘I was
thinking of the bit where Holmes and Watson are lurking in the mist, waiting
for the bad guy to start things moving. It was rather like that, only there
wasn’t any mist.’

‘So you
saw him clearly?’

‘With
the naked eye.’

‘And he
was cutting the ropes?’

‘With
the naked knife.’

The
Duke relapsed into a gloomy silence. Like many another thinker before him, he
was depressed by the reflection that nothing ever goes just right in this
fat-headed world. Always there is the fatal snag in the path that pulls you up
sharp when the happy ending seems in sight.

A man
of liberal views, he had no objection whatsoever to a little gentlemanly
blackmail, and here, you would have said, the luck of the Dunstables had handed
him the most admirable opportunity for such blackmail. All he had to do was to
go to Lord Emsworth, tell him that his sins had found him out, demand the
Empress as the price of his silence, and the wretched man would have no option
but to meet his terms. The thing was a walkover. In the bag, as he believed the
expression was nowadays.

Such
had been his thoughts as he listened to the boy’s story, but now despondency
had set in. The whole project, he saw, became null and void because of one
small snag — that proof of the crime depended solely on the unsupported word of
the witness George. If Emsworth, as he was bound to do, pleaded not guilty to
the charge, who was going to believe the testimony of a child with ginger hair
and freckles, whose reputation as a teller of truth had never been one to
invite scrutiny? His evidence would be laughed out of court, and he would be
dashed lucky if he were not sent to bed without his supper and deprived of his
pocket money for months and months.

Engrossed
in these sombre thoughts, he was only dimly aware that the squeaky voice was
continuing to squeak. It seemed to be saying something about motion pictures, a
subject in which he had never taken even a tepid interest.

‘Shut
up, boy, and pop off,’ he grunted.

‘But I
thought you’d like to know,’ said George, pained.

‘If you
think I want to hear about a lot of greasy actors grinning on a screen, you are
very much mistaken.’

‘But
this wasn’t a greasy, grinning actor, it was Grandpapa.’

‘What’s
that?’

‘I was
telling you I took pictures of Grandpapa with my camera.’

The
Duke quivered as if he had been the sea monster he rather closely resembled and
a harpoon had penetrated his skin.

‘In the
act of cutting those ropes?’ he gasped.

‘That’s
right. I’ve got the film upstairs in my room. I was going to take it into
Market Blandings this afternoon to have it developed.’

The
Duke quivered again, his emotion such that he could scarcely speak.

‘You
must do nothing of the sort. And you must not say a word of this to anyone.’

Well,
of course, I won’t. I only told you because I thought you’d think it was funny.’

‘It is
very far from funny. It is extremely serious. Do you realize what would happen
when the man developed that film, as you call it, and recognized your
grandfather?’

‘Coo! I
never thought of that. You mean he’d blow the gaff? Spread the story hither and
thither? Squeal on him?’

‘Exactly.
And your grandfather’s name in the county would be—’

‘Mud?’

‘Precisely.
Everyone would think he was potty.’

‘He
is
rather potty.’

‘Not so
potty as he would seem if that film were made public. Dash it, they’d certify
him without blinking an eye.’

‘Who
would?’

‘The
doctors, of course.’

‘You
mean he’d be put in a loony bin?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Coo!’

George
could see now why his companion had said it was serious. He was very fond of
Lord Emsworth, and would have hated to find him winding up in a padded cell. He
felt in his pocket and produced a bag of acid drops, always a great help to
thought. Chewing one of these, he sat pondering in silence. The Duke resumed
his remarks.

‘Do you
understand what I am saying?’

George
nodded.

‘I dig
you, Chief.’

‘Don’t
say “I dig you” and don’t call me “chief”. Bring the thing to me, and I’ll take
care of it. It’s not safe in the hands of a mere child like you.’

‘Okay,
big boy.’

‘And
don’t call me big boy,’ said the Duke.

2

There was a contented
smile on Lord Ickenham’s face as he settled himself in his hammock after
leaving Lord Emsworth. It gratified him to feel that he had allayed the latter’s
fears and eased his mind. Nothing like a pep talk, he was thinking, and he was
deep in a pleasant reverie when a voice spoke his name and he perceived Lord Emsworth
at his side, drooping like a tired lily. Except when he had something to prop
himself against, there was always a suggestion of the drooping floweret about
the master of Blandings Castle. He seemed to work on a hinge somewhere in the
small of his back, and people searching for something nice to say of him sometimes
described him as having a scholarly stoop. Lord Ickenham had become accustomed
to this bonelessness and no longer expected his friend to give any evidence of
possessing vertebrae, but the look of anguish on his face was new, and it
shocked him. He rose from the hammock with lissom leap, full of sympathy and
concern.

‘Good
heavens, Emsworth! What’s the matter? Is something wrong?’

For
some moments it seemed as though speech would prove beyond the ninth earl’s
powers and that he would continue indefinitely to give his rather vivid
impersonation of a paralysed deaf mute. But eventually he spoke.

‘I’ve
just seen Dunstable,’ he said.

Lord
Ickenham remained perplexed. The situation did not appear to him to have been
clarified. He, personally, would always prefer not to see the Duke, a
preference shared by the latter’s many acquaintances in Wiltshire and
elsewhere, but it did not disturb him unduly when he had to, and he found it
strange that his companion should be of less stern stuff.

‘Unavoidable,
don’t you think when he’s staying in the house?’ he said. ‘There he is, I mean
to say, and you can’t very well help running into him from time to time. But
perhaps he said something to upset you?’

The
anguished look in Lord Emsworth’s eyes became more anguished. It was as if the
question had touched an exposed nerve. He gulped for a moment, reminding Lord
Ickenham of a dog to which he was greatly attached, which made a similar sound
when about to give up its all after a too busy day among the fleshpots.

‘He
said he wanted the Empress.’

‘Who
wouldn’t?’

‘And I’ve
got to give her to him.’

‘You’ve
what?’

‘The
alternative was too terrible to contemplate. He threatened, if I refused, to
tell Constance that it was I who cut those tent ropes.’

Lord
Ickenham began to feel a little impatient. He had already told this man, in
words adapted to the meanest intelligence, what course to pursue, should
suspicion fall upon him.

‘My
dear fellow, don’t you remember what I said to you in the library? Stick to
stout denial.’

‘But he
has proof.’

‘Proof?’

‘Eh?
Yes, proof. It seems that my grandson George took photographs of me with his
camera, and Dunstable now has the film in his possession. And I gave George
that camera for his birthday! “This will keep you out of mischief, George, my
boy,” I remember saying. Out of mischief!’ said Lord Emsworth bitterly, his air
that of a grandfather regretting that he had ever been so foolish as to beget a
son who in his turn would beget a son of his own capable of using a camera. There
were, he was feeling, far too many grandsons in the world and far too many
cameras for them to take pictures of grandfathers with. His view of grandsons
was, in short, at the moment jaundiced, and as, having told his tale, he moved
limply away, he was thinking almost as harshly of George as of the Duke of
Dunstable.

Lord
Ickenham returned to his hammock. He always thought more nimbly when in a
recumbent position, and it was plain to him that a considerable amount of
nimble thinking was now called for. Hitherto, his endeavours to spread
sweetness and light and give service with a smile had been uniformly successful,
but a man whose aim in life it is to do the square thing by his fellows is
never content to think with modest pride of past triumphs; it is the present on
which he feels the mind must be fixed, and it was to Lord Emsworth’s problem
that he gave the full force of his powerful intellect.

It was
a problem which undoubtedly presented certain points of interest, and at the
moment he confessed himself unable to see how it was to be solved. Given the
unhappy man’s panic fear of having Lady Constance’s attention drawn to his
recent activities, there seemed no course for Lord Emsworth to pursue but to
meet the Duke’s terms. It was one of those occasions, more frequent in real
life than on the television and motion picture screens, when the bad guy comes
out on top and the good guy gets the loser’s end. The Duke of Dunstable might
not look like a green bay tree, but everything pointed to the probability of
him flourishing like one.