Service with a Smile (9 page)

‘What
steps?’

‘Slip
somebody a couple of quid to smuggle the ghastly animal away somewhere, thus
removing Emsworth from its sphere of influence.’

‘My
dear Alaric!’

‘It’s the
only course to pursue. He won’t sell the creature, though if I’ve asked him
once, I’ve asked him a dozen times. “I’ll give you five hundred pounds cash
down for that bulbous mass of lard and snuffle,” I said to him. “Say the word,”
I said, “and I’ll have the revolting object shipped off right away to my place
in Wiltshire, paying all the expenses of removal.” He refused, and was
offensive about it, too. The man’s besotted.’

‘But
you don’t keep pigs.’

‘I know
I don’t, not such a silly ass, but I’m prepared to pay five hundred pounds for
this one.’

Lady
Constance’s eyes widened.

‘Just
to do Clarence good?’ she said, amazed. She had not credited her guest with
this altruism.

‘Certainly
not,’ said the Duke, offended that he should be supposed capable of any such
motive. ‘I can make a bit of money out of it. I know someone who’ll give me two
thousand for the animal.’

‘Good
gracious! Who … Oh, Clarence!’

Lord Emsworth
had burst into the room, plainly in the grip of some strong emotion. His mild
eyes were gleaming through their pince-nez, and he quivered like a tuning-fork.

‘Connie,’
he cried, and you could see that he had been pushed just so far. ‘You’ve got to
do something about these infernal boys!’

Lady
Constance sighed wearily. This was one of those trying mornings.

‘What
boys? Do you mean the Church Lads?’

‘Eh?
Yes, precisely. They should never have been let into the place. What do you
think I just found one of them doing? He was leaning over the rail of Empress’s
sty, where he had no business to be, and he was dangling a potato on a string
in front of her nose and jerking it away when she snapped at it. Might have
ruined her digestion for days. You’ve got to do something about it, Constance.
The boy must be apprehended and severely punished.’

‘Oh,
Clarence!’

‘I
insist. He must be given a sharp lesson.’

‘Changing
the subject,’ said the Duke, ‘will you sell me that foul pig of yours? I’ll
give you six hundred pounds.’

Lord Emsworth
stared at him, revolted. His eyes glowed hotly behind their pince-nez. Not even
George Cyril Wellbeloved could have disliked dukes more.

‘Of
course I won’t. I’ve told you a dozen times. Nothing would induce me to sell
the Empress.’

‘Six
hundred pounds. That’s a firm offer!’

‘I don’t
want six hundred pounds. I’ve got plenty of money, plenty.’

‘Clarence,’
said Lady Constance, also changing the subject, ‘is it true that you jumped
into the lake this morning with all your clothes on?’

‘Eh?
What? Yes, certainly. I couldn’t wait to take them off. Only it was a log.’

‘What
was a log?’

‘The
boy.’

‘What
boy?’

‘The
log. But I can’t stand here talking,’ said Lord Emsworth impatiently, and
hurried out, turning at the door to repeat to Lady Constance that she must do
something about it.

The
Duke blew his moustache up a few inches.

‘You
see? What did I tell you? Definitely barmy. Reached the gibbering stage, and
may get dangerous at any moment. But I was speaking about this fellow who’ll
give two thousand for the porker. I used to know him years ago when I was a
young man in London. Pyke was his name then. Stinker Pyke we used to call him.
Then he made a packet by running all those papers and magazines and things and
got a peerage. Calls himself Lord Tilbury now. You’ve met him. He says he’s
stayed here.’

‘Yes,
he was here for a short time. My brother Galahad used to know him. Miss Briggs
was his secretary before she came to us.’

‘I’m
not interested in Miss Briggs, blast her spectacles.’

‘I
merely mentioned it.’

‘Well,
don’t mention it again. Now you’ve made me forget what I was going to tell you.
Oh, yes. I ran into Stinker at the club the other day, and we got talking and I
said I was coming to Blandings, and the subject of the pig came up. It appears
that he keeps pigs at his place in Buckinghamshire, just the sort of potty
thing he would do, and he has coveted this ghastly animal of Emsworth’s ever
since he saw it. He specifically told me that he would give me two thousand
pounds to add it to his piggery.’

‘How
extraordinary!’

‘Opportunity
of a lifetime.’

‘Clarence
must be made to see reason.’

‘Who’s
going to make him? I can’t. You heard him just now. And you won’t pinch the
creature. The thing’s an impasse. No co-operation, that’s what’s wrong with
this damned place. Very doubtful if I’ll ever come here again. You’ll miss me,
but that can’t be helped. Only yourself to blame. I’m going for a walk,’ said
the Duke, and proceeded to do so.

3

Lord Emsworth was a man
with little of the aggressor in his spiritual make-up. He believed in living
and letting live. Except for his sister Constance, his secretary Lavender
Briggs, the Duke of Dunstable and his younger son Frederick, now fortunately
residing in America, few things were able to ruffle him. Placid is the word
that springs to the lips.

But the
Church Lads had pierced his armour, and he found resentment growing within him
like some shrub that has been treated with a patent fertilizer. He brooded
bleakly on the injuries he had suffered at the hands of these juvenile delinquents.

The
top-hat incident he could have overlooked, for he knew that when small boys are
confronted with a man wearing that type of headgear and there is a crusty roll
within reach, they are almost bound to lose their calm judgment. The happy
laughter which had greeted him as he emerged from the lake had gashed him like
a knife, but with a powerful effort he might have excused it. But in upsetting
Empress of Blandings’ delicately attuned digestive system by dangling potatoes
before her eyes and jerking them away as she snapped at them they had gone too
far. As Hamlet would have put it, their offence was rank and smelled to heaven.
And if heaven would not mete out retribution to them — and there was not a sign
so far of any activity in the front office — somebody else would have to attend
to it. And that somebody, he was convinced, was Ickenham. He had left Ickenham
pondering on the situation, and who knew that by this time his fertile mind
might not have hit on a suitable method of vengeance.

On
leaving Lady Constance’s boudoir, accordingly, he made his way to the hammock
and bleated his story into the other’s ear. Nor was he disappointed in its
reception. Where a man of coarser fibre might have laughed, Lord Ickenham was
gravity itself. By not so much as a twitch of the lip did he suggest that he
found anything amusing in his host’s narrative.

‘A
potato?’ he said, knitting his brow.

‘A
large potato.’

‘On a
string?’

‘Yes,
on a string.’

‘And
the boy jerked it away?’

‘Repeatedly.
It must have distressed the Empress greatly. She is passionately fond of
potatoes.’

‘And
you wish to retaliate? You think that something in the nature of a counter move
is required?’

‘Eh?
Yes, certainly:’

‘Then
how very fortunate,’ said Lord Ickenham heartily, ‘that I can put you in the
way of making it. I throw it out merely as a suggestion, you understand, but I
know what I would do in your place.’

‘What
is that?’

‘I’d
bide my time and sneak down to the lake in the small hours of the morning and
cut the ropes of their tent, as one used to do at the Public Schools Camp at
Aldershot in the brave days when I was somewhat younger. That, to my mind,
would be the retort courteous.’

‘God
bless my soul!’ said Lord Emsworth.

He
spoke with sudden animation. Forty-six years had rolled away from him, the
forty-six years which had passed since, a junior member of the Eton contingent
at the Aldershot camp, he had been mixed up in that sort of thing. Then he had
been on the receiving, not the giving, end. Some young desperadoes from a
school allergic to Eton had cut the ropes of the guard tent in which he was
reposing, and he could recall vividly his emotions on suddenly finding himself
entangled in a cocoon of canvas. His whole life — some fifteen years at that
time — had passed before him, and in suggesting a similar experience for these
Church Lads Ickenham, he realized, had shown his usual practical good sense.

For a
moment his mild face glowed. Then the light died out of it. Would it, he was
asking himself, be altogether prudent to embark on an enterprise of which
Connie must inevitably disapprove? Connie had an uncanny knack of finding out
things, and if she were to trace this righteous act of vengeance to him…

‘I’ll
turn it over in my mind,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much for the suggestion.’

‘Not at
all,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘Ponder on it at your leisure.’

Chapter
Five

1

The Duke’s walk took him
to the Empress’s sty, and he lit a cigar and stood leaning on the rail, gazing
at her as she made a late breakfast.

Except
for a certain fullness of figure, the Duke of Dunstable and Empress of Blandings
had little in common. There was no fusion between their souls. The next ten
minutes accordingly saw nothing in the nature of an exchange of ideas. The Duke
smoked his cigar in silence, the Empress in her single-minded way devoted
herself to the consumption of her daily nourishment amounting to fifty-seven
thousand five hundred calories.

Lord Emsworth
would not have believed such a thing possible, but the spectacle of this
supreme pig was plunging the Duke in gloom. It was not with admiration that he
gazed upon her, but with a growing fury. There, he was saying to himself, golloped
a Berkshire sow which, if conveyed to his Wiltshire home, would mean a cool two
thousand pounds added to his bank balance, and no hope of conveying her. The
thought was like a dagger in his heart.

His
cigar having reached the point where, if persevered with, it would burn his
moustache, he threw it away, straightened himself with a peevish grunt and was
about to leave the noble animal to her proteids and carbohydrates, when a voice
said ‘Pahdon me’, and turning he perceived the pie-faced female whom he had so
recently put in her place.

‘Get
out of here!’ he said in his polished way, ‘I’m busy.’

Where a
lesser woman would have quailed and beaten an apologetic retreat, Lavender
Briggs stood firm, her dignified calm unruffled. No man, however bald his head
or white his moustache, could intimidate a girl who had served under the banner
of Lord Tilbury of the Mammoth Publishing Company.

‘I
would like a word with Your Grace,’ she said in the quiet, level voice which only
an upbringing in Kensington followed by years of secretarial college can
produce. ‘It is with refahrence,’ she went on, ignoring the purple flush which
had crept over her companion’s face, ‘to this pig of Lord Emsworth’s. I chanced
to overhear what you were saying to Lady Constance just now.’

A
cascade of hair dashed itself against the Duke’s Wellingtonian nose.

‘Eavesdropping,
eh? Listening at keyholes, what?’

‘Quate,’
said Lavender Briggs, unmoved by the acidity of his tone. In her time she had
bean spoken acidly to by experts. ‘You were urging Lady Constance to pay
somebody to purloin the animal. To which her reply’ — she consulted a shorthand
note in her notebook — ‘was “My dear Alaric! “, indicating that she was not
prepare-ahed to consid-ah the idea-h. Had you made the suggestion to me, you
would not have received such a dusty answer.’

‘Such a
what?’

A
contemptuous light flickered for an instant behind the harlequin glasses.
Lavender Briggs moved in circles where literary allusions were grabbed off the bat,
and the other’s failure to get his hands to this one aroused her scorn. She did
not actually call the Duke an ill-read old bohunkus, but this criticism was
implicit in the way she looked at him.

‘A
quotation. “Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for certainties in
this our life.” George Meredith, “Modem Love,” stanza forty-eight.’

The
Duke’s head had begun to swim a little, but with the sensation of slight
giddiness had come an unwilling respect for this goggled girl. Superficially
all that stanza forty-eight stuff might seem merely another indication of the pottiness
which was so marked a feature of the other sex, but there was something in her
manner that suggested that she had more to say and that eventually something would
emerge that made sense. This feeling solidified as she proceeded.