CONTENTS
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Sir P.G. Wodehouse
Praise
Title Page
Epigraph
PROBLEMS WITH DRINK (GALAHAD AT BLANDINGS)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Join the P.G. Wodehouse community
Copyright
Also by Sir P.G. Wodehouse
Fiction
Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen
The Adventures of Sally
Bachelors Anonymous
Barmy in Wonderland
Big Money
Bill the Conqueror
Blandings Castle and Elsewhere
Carry On, Jeeves
The Clicking of Cuthbert
Cocktail Time
The Code of the Woosters
The Coming of Bill
Company for Henry
A Damsel in Distress
Do Butlers Burgle Banks
Doctor Sally
Eggs, Beans and Crumpets
A Few Quick Ones
French Leave
Frozen Assets
Full Moon
Galahad at Blandings
A Gentleman of Leisure
The Girl in Blue
The Girl on the Boat
The Gold Bat
The Head of Kay’s
The Heart of a Goof
Heavy Weather
Hot Water
Ice in the Bedroom
If I Were You
Indiscretions of Archie
The Inimitable Jeeves
Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit
Jeeves in the Offing
Jill the Reckless
Joy in the Morning
Laughing Gas
Leave it to Psmith
The Little Nugget
Lord Emsworth and Others
Louder and Funnier
Love Among the Chickens
The Luck of Bodkins
The Man Upstairs
The Man with Two Left Feet
The Mating Season
Meet Mr Mulliner
Mike and Psmith
Mike at Wrykyn
Money for Nothing
Money in the Bank
Mr Mulliner Speaking
Much Obliged, Jeeves
Mulliner Nights
Not George Washington
Nothing Serious
The Old Reliable
Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin
A Pelican at Blandings
Piccadilly Jim
Pigs Have Wings
Plum Pie
The Pothunters
A Prefect’s Uncle
The Prince and Betty
Psmith, Journalist
Psmith in the City
Quick Service
Right Ho, Jeeves
Ring for Jeeves
Sam me Sudden
Service with a Smile
The Small Bachelor
Something Fishy
Something Fresh
Spring Fever
Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves
Summer Lightning
Summer Moonshine
Sunset at Blandings
The Swoop
Tales of St Austin’s
Thank You, Jeeves
Ukridge
Uncle Dynamite
Uncle Fred in the Springtime
Uneasy Money
Very Good, Jeeves
The White Feather
William Tell Told Again
Young Men in Spats
Omnibuses
The World of Blandings
The World of Jeeves
The World of Mr Mulliner
The World of Psmith
The World of Ukridge
The World of Uncle Fred
Wodehouse Nuggets (edited by Richard Usborne)
The World of Wodehouse Clergy
The Hollywood Omnibus
Weekend Wodehouse
Paperback Omnibuses
The Golf Omnibus
The Aunts Omnibus
The Drones Omnibus
The Jeeves Omnibus 1
The Jeeves Omnibus 3
Poems
The Parrot and Other Poems
Autobiographical
Wodehouse on Wodehouse (comprising Bring on the Girls, Over Seventy, Performing Flea)
Letters
Yours, Plum
‘You don’t analyse such sunlit
PERFECTION
you just bask in its warmth and splendour’
Stephen Fry
‘Wodehouse is the
GREATEST
comic writer’
Douglas Adams
‘SUBLIME
comic genius … light as a feather, but fabulous’
Ben Elton
‘The
FUNNIEST
writer ever to put words on paper’
Hugh Laurie
‘P.G. Wodehouse wrote
THE BEST
english comic novels of the century’
Sebastian Faulks
‘WITTY
and effortlessly fluid. His books are laugh-out-loud funny’
Arabella Weir
‘THE HEAD
of my profession’
Hilaire Belloc
‘Wodehouse was quite simply
THE BEE’S KNEES.
And then some’
Joseph Connolly
‘Mr Wodehouse’s
IDYLLIC WORLD CAN NEVER STALE.
He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in’
Evelyn Waugh
‘THE ULTIMATE IN COMFORT READING
because nothing bad ever happens in P.G. Wodehouse land. Or even if it does, it’s always sorted out by the end of the book. For as long as I’m immersed in a P.G. Wodehouse book, it’s possible to keep the real world at bay and live in a far, far nicer, funnier one where happy endings are the order of the day’
Marian Keyes
‘You should read Wodehouse when you’re well and when you’re poorly; when you’re travelling, and when you’re not; when you’re feeling clever, and when you’re feeling utterly dim. Wodehouse
ALWAYS LIFTS YOUR SPIRITS,
no matter how high they happen to be already’
Lynne Truss
‘P. G. Wodehouse remains the greatest chronicler of
A CERTAIN KIND OF ENGLISHNESS,
that no one else has ever captured quite so sharply, or with quite as much wit and affection’
Julian Fellowes
‘Not only the funniest English novelist who ever wrote but one of our finest stylists. His world is PERFECT, his stories are PERFECT, his writing is PERFECT. What more is there to be said?’
Susan Hill
‘One of my (few) proud boasts is that I once spent a day interviewing P. G. Wodehouse at his home in America. He was exactly as I’d expected: a lovely, modest man. He could have walked out of one of his own novels. It’s dangerous to use the word
GENIUS
to describe a writer, but I’ll risk it with him’
John Humphrys
‘The
INCOMPARABLE AND TIMELESS
genius – perfect for readers of all ages, shapes and sizes!’
Kate Mosse
‘COMPULSORY READING
for anyone who has a pig, an aunt – or a sense of humour!’
Lindsey Davis
‘A genius …
ELUSIVE, DELICATE BUT LASTING.
He created such a credible world that, sadly, I suppose, never really existed but what a delight it always is to enter it and the temptation to linger there is sometimes almost overwhelming’
Alan Ayckbourn
‘I’ve recorded all the Jeeves books, and I can tell you this: it’s like singing Mozart. The perfection of the phrasing is
A PHYSICAL PLEASURE.
I doubt if any singer in the English language has more perfect music’
Simon Callow
‘I constantly find myself drooling with admiration at the
SUBLIME
way Wodehouse plays with the English language’
Simon Brett
‘To pick up a Wodehouse novel is to find oneself in the presence of genius – no writer has ever given me so much
PURE ENJOYMENT’
John Julius Norwich
‘P. G. Wodehouse is
THE GOLD STANDARD OF ENGLISH WIT’
Christopher Hitchens
‘Wodehouse is so
UTTERLY, PROPERLY, SIMPLY FUNNY’
Adele Parks
‘To dive into a Wodehouse novel is to swim in some of the most
ELEGANTLY TURNED PHRASES
in the english language’
Ben Schott
‘P.G. Wodehouse should be prescribed to treat depression. Cheaper, more effective than valium and far, far more
ADDICTIVE’
Olivia Williams
‘My only problem with Wodehouse is deciding which of his
ENCHANTING
books to take to my desert island’
Ruth Dudley Edwards
‘Quite simply,
THE MASTER OF COMIC WRITING
at work’
Jane Moore
About the Book
EPISODE 6 IN A MAJOR BBC DRAMA STARRING TIMOTHY SPALL, DAVID WALLIAMS AND JENNIFER SAUNDERS.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS GALAHAD AT BLANDINGS
With the arrival of sophisticated widow, Daphne, and her spoiled brat Huxley, Connie once again forces Clarence to look presentable.
However, when Daphne flirts with Clarence and takes an interest in his pig, Beach and Connie become suspicious of Daphne’s motives.
Freddie, though, has foresworn all involvement in love affairs – only to find an irresistible beauty, Monica, working in the pig-sty.
About the Author
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (always known as ‘Plum’) wrote more than ninety novels and some three hundred short stories over 73 years. He is widely recognised as the greatest 20th century writer of humour in the English language.
Wodehouse mixed the high culture of his classical education with the popular slang of the suburbs in both England and America, becoming a ‘cartoonist of words’. Drawing on the antics of a near-contemporary world, he placed his Drones, Earls, Ladies (including draconian aunts and eligible girls) and Valets, in a recently vanished society, whose reality is transformed by his remarkable imagination into something timeless and enduring.
Perhaps best known for the escapades of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, Wodehouse also created the world of Blandings Castle, home to Lord Emsworth and his cherished pig, the Empress of Blandings. His stories include gems concerning the irrepressible and disreputable Ukridge; Psmith, the elegant socialist; the ever-so-slightly-unscrupulous Fifth Earl of Ickenham, better known as Uncle Fred; and those related by Mr Mulliner, the charming raconteur of The Angler’s Rest, and the Oldest Member at the Golf Club.
Wodehouse collaborated with a variety of partners on straight plays and worked principally alongside Guy Bolton on providing the lyrics and script for musical comedies with such composers as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. He liked to say that the royalties for ‘Just My Bill’, which Jerome Kern incorporated into Showboat, were enough to keep him in tobacco and whisky for the rest of his life.
In 1936 he was awarded The Mark Twain Medal for ‘having made an outstanding and lasting contribution to the happiness of the world’. He was made a Doctor of Letters by Oxford University in 1939 and in 1975, aged 93, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He died shortly afterwards, on St Valentine’s Day.
To have created so many characters that require no introduction places him in a very select group of writers, lead by Shakespeare and Dickens.
P.G. WODEHOUSE’S
PROBLEMS WITH DRINK
(GALAHAD AT BLANDINGS)
What a very, very
LUCKY
person you are.
Spread out before you are the
FINEST and FUNNIEST
words from the finest and funniest writer
the past century ever knew.
Stephen Fry
PROBLEMS WITH DRINK (GALAHAD AT BLANDINGS)
I
OF THE TWO young men sharing a cell in one of New York’s popular police stations Tipton Plimsoll, the tall thin one, was the first to recover, if only gradually, from the effect of the potations which had led to his sojourn in the coop. The other, Wilfred Allsop, pint-size and fragile and rather like the poet Shelley in appearance, was still asleep.
For some time after life had returned to the rigid limbs Tipton sat with his head between his hands, the better to prevent it floating away from the parent neck. He was still far from feeling at the peak of his form and would have given much for a cake of ice against which to rest his forehead, but he was deriving a certain solace from the thought that his betrothed, Veronica, only daughter of Colonel and Lady Hermione Wedge of Rutland Gate, London S.W.7, was three thousand miles away and would never learn of his doings this summer night. He was also reviewing the past, trying to piece together the events that had led up to the tragedy, and little by little they began to come back to him.
The party in the Greenwich Village studio. Quite a good party, with sculptors, avant garde playwrights and other local fauna dotted around, busy with their bohemian revels. There had occurred that morning on the New York Stock Exchange one of those slumps or crashes which periodically spoil the day for Stock Exchanges, but it had not touched the lives of residents in the Washington Square neighbourhood, where intellect reigns and little interest is taken in the fluctuations of the money market. Unmoved by the news in the evening papers that Amalgamated Cheese had closed twenty points off and Consolidated Hamburgers fifteen, the members of the party, most of whom would not have known a stock certificate from a greeting card, were all cutting up and having a good time, and so was Tipton. The large fortune he had recently inherited from a deceased uncle was invested in the shares of Tipton’s Stores, which never varied more than a point or two, no matter what financial earth-quakes might be happening elsewhere.
Over in a corner of this Greenwich Village studio he had perceived a pint-size character at the piano, tickling the ivories with a skill that commanded admiration. His compliments to this pint-size bozo on his virtuosity. The ‘Oh, thanks awfully’ which betrayed the other’s English origin. The subsequent fraternisation. The exchange of names. The quick start of surprise on the bozo’s part. Plimsoll, did you say? Not Tipton Plimsoll? Sure. Are you the chap who’s engaged to Veronica Wedge? That’s right. Do you know her? She’s my cousin. She’s what? My cousin. You mean you’re Vee’s cousin? Have been for years. Well, fry me for an oyster, I think this calls for a drink, don’t you?
And that was how it had all begun. Circumstances, it came out in the course of conversation, had rendered Wilfred Allsop low-spirited, and when he sees a friend low-spirited, especially a friend linked by ties of blood to the girl he loves, the man of sensibility spares no effort or expense to alleviate his depression and bring the roses back to his cheeks. One beaker had led to another, the lessons learned at mother’s knee had been temporarily forgotten, and here they were, behind bars.
Tipton had been nursing his throbbing head for perhaps a quarter of an hour and had just assured himself by delicate experiment that it was not, as he had at one time feared, going to explode like a high-powered shell, when a soft moan in his rear caused him to turn. Wilfred Allsop was sitting up, his face pale, his eyes glassy, his hair disordered. He looked like the poet Shelley after a big night out with Lord Byron.
‘What’s this place?’ he asked in a faint whisper. ‘Is it a jug of some description?’
‘That’s just about what it is, Willie. We call them hoosegows over here, but the general effect is the same. How’s the boy?’
‘What boy?’
‘You.’
‘Oh, me? I’m dying.’
‘Of course you’re not.’
‘Yes, I am,’ said Wilfred with some asperity. A man is entitled to know whether he is dying or not. ‘And before I pass on there’s something I want you to promise you’ll do for me. If you’re engaged to Vee, I take it you’ve visited Blandings Castle?’
‘Sure. It was there I met her.’
‘Well, did you happen, while there, to run into a girl called Monica Simmons?’
‘The name doesn’t ring a bell. Who is she?’
‘She looks after Empress of Blandings, that pig of my Uncle Clarence’s.’
‘Ah, then I’ve seen her. Old Emsworth took me to the sty a couple of times and she was there, ladling out the bran mash. Girl who looks like an all-in wrestler.’
Wilfred’s asperity became more marked. Their evening together had filled him with a deep affection for Tipton Plimsoll, but even from a great friend he could not countenance loose talk of this sort.
‘I am sorry you think she looks like an all-in wrestler,’ he said stiffly. ‘To me she seems to resemble one of those Norse goddesses. However, be that as it may, I love her, Tippy. I fell in love with her at first sight.’
Recalling the picture of Miss Simmons in smock and trousers with a good deal of mud on her face, Tipton found this difficult to believe, but he was sympathetic.
‘Good for you. Peach of a girl, I should imagine. Did you tell her so?’
‘I couldn’t do it. I hadn’t the nerve. She’s so majestic, and I’m such a little squirt. You agree that I’m a little squirt, Tippy?’
‘Well, I don’t know I’d put it just that way, but I guess one’s got to face it, there are taller guys around.’
‘All I’ve done so far is look at her and talk about the weather.’
‘Not much percentage in that.’
‘No, the whole thing’s quite hopeless. But here’s what I was starting to say. I want you, when I am gone, to see that she gets my cigarette case. It’s all I have to leave. Can I trust you to do this when I have passed beyond the veil?’
‘You aren’t going to pass beyond the veil.’
‘I am going to pass beyond the veil,’ said Wilfred petulantly. ‘You’ve made a note of what I was saying. Cigarette case. To be given to Monica Simmons after my decease.’
‘Does she smoke?’
‘Of course she smokes.’
‘She’ll be able to blow smoke rings at the pig.’
Wilfred stiffened.
‘There is no need to be flippant about it, Plimsoll. I am asking you as a friend to perform this small act of kindness for me. Can I rely on you?’
‘Sure. I’ll attend to it.’
‘Tell her my last thoughts were of her and I expired with her name on my lips.’
‘Okay.’
‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ said Wilfred, and went to sleep again.
II
Deprived of human companionship, Tipton felt sad and lonely. He was a gregarious soul and it always made him uneasy when he had no one to talk to. Throughout these exchanges with Wilfred Allsop he had been aware of a policeman pacing up and down the corridor on the other side of the bars, and policemen, while often not ideal as conversationalists, being inclined to confine themselves to monosyllables and those spoken out of the side of their mouths, are better than nothing. He went to the bars and, peering through them like some rare specimen in a zoo, uttered a husky ‘Hey, officer.’
The policeman was a long, stringy policeman, who flowed out of his uniform at odd spots. His face was gnarled, his wrists knobbly and of a geranium hue, and he had those three or four extra inches of neck which disqualify a man for high honours in a beauty competition. But beneath this forbidding exterior there lay a kindly heart and he could make allowances for the indiscretions of youth. Muggers, stick-up men and hoodlums in general he disliked, but towards the Tipton type of malefactor he was able to be indulgent. So where to one of his ordinary clientele he would have replied with a brusque ‘Pipe down, youse,’ he now said ‘Hi’ in a not uncordial voice and joined Tipton at the bars, through which they proceeded to converse like a modern Pyramus and Thisbe.
‘How’s it coming?’ he asked.
Tipton replied that he had a headache, and the policeman said that that occasioned him no surprise.
‘You certainly earned it, Mac.’
‘I guess I was kind of high.’
‘You sure were,’ said the policeman. ‘The boys were saying it took three of them to get you into the paddy wagon.’
His manner had not been censorious and his voice had contained admiration rather than reproof, but nevertheless Tipton felt it incumbent on him to justify himself.
‘You mustn’t think I do this sort of thing often,’ he said. ‘At one time, yes, but not since I became engaged. I promised my fiancée I’d go easy on the nights of wine and roses. But this was a special case. I was trying to cheer up my friend over there and bring a little sunshine into his life.’
‘Feeling low, was he?’
‘In the depths, officer, and with reason. He was telling me the whole story. He’s a musician. Plays the piano and composes things. He came here from England some months ago hoping to crash Tin Pan Alley or get taken on by one of the bands, but couldn’t make the grade. Ran out of money and had to cable home for supplies.’
‘And the folks wouldn’t send him none?’
‘Oh sure, they sent him enough to buy his passage to England. He leaves the day after tomorrow. But his Aunt Hermione said it was high time he stopped fooling around and settled down to a regular job, and she’d found one for him. And do you know what that job is? Teaching music in a girls’ school. And that’s not all. The woman who runs the school is a rabid Dry and won’t let her staff so much as look at a snifter. It means that poor old Willie won’t be able to take aboard the simplest highball except in vacation time.’
‘What he had tonight ought to last him quite a while.’
‘Don’t mock, officer, don’t scoff,’ said Tipton, frowning. ‘The thing’s a tragedy. It has absolutely shattered Willie, and I don’t wonder. There was a guy at the Drones Club in London, of which I am a member, who once got roped in to make a speech to a girls’ school, and he never really recovered from the experience. To this day he trembles like a leaf if he sees anything in a straw hat and a blazer, with pigtails down its back. Teaching a bunch of girls music will be ten times worse. They’ll put their heads together and whisper. They’ll nudge each other and giggle. They’ll probably throw spitballs at him. And nothing to strengthen him for the ordeal but lemonade and sarsaparilla. But I notice you’re yawning. I’m not keeping you up, am I?’
The policeman said he was not. He was, he explained, on all-night duty and was glad of a chat to while the time away.
‘Fine,’ said Tipton, reassured. ‘Yes, I can imagine you must find it pretty dull without anyone to shoot the breeze with. It can’t be all jam being a cop.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘Still, you have compensations.’
‘Name three.’
‘Well, you meet such interesting people – bandits, porch climbers, dope pushers, sex fiends and what not. The whole boiling from deadbeats to millionaires.’
‘We don’t get a lot of millionaires.’
‘You don’t?’
‘Never seen one myself.’
‘Is that so? Well, you’re seeing one now. Take a gander.’
The policeman stared.
‘You?’
‘Me.’
‘No kidding?’
‘None whatever. You know Tipton’s Stores?’
‘Sure. The wife does her marketing there.’
‘Well, tell her when you get home that you were host tonight to the guy who owns the controlling interest in them. My Uncle Chet founded Tipton’s Stores. He checked out not long ago and I inherited his block of shares, practically all there are. I’m rolling.’
‘Then why don’t you pay your ten bucks and get out of here?’
‘What ten bucks?’
‘For bail. I’d do it if it was me.’
A bitter laugh escaped Tipton, the sort of laugh a toad beneath the harrow might have uttered if some passer-by had asked it why it did not move from beneath the harrow, where conditions must be far from comfortable.
‘I dare say you would,’ he said, ‘and so would I if I had the dough. But I’ve no funds of any description. Oh, I don’t mean I’ve been wiped out in this Stock Exchange crash they’ve been having – I may be a chump, but I’m not chump enough to play the market – but I don’t have a nickel on me at the moment. At some point in this evening’s proceedings some child of unmarried parents got away with my entire wad, leaving me without a cent. I own a controlling interest in the country’s largest supermarket, with branches in every town in the United States. I own a ranch out west. I own an apartment house on Park Avenue. I even own a music publishing business in London. But I can’t get out of this darned dungeon because I haven’t ten dollars in my kick. Can you beat that for irony?’
The policeman said he was unable to, but seemed to see no cause for despair.
‘You got friends, ain’t you?’
‘Lashings of them.’
‘Well, why don’t you phone one of them and get him to help you out?’
Tipton was surprised.
‘Do they let you phone from here?’
‘You’re allowed one call.’
‘Is that the law?’
‘That’s the law.’
‘Then … Oh, finished your little nap, Willie?’
Wilfred Allsop had risen, blinked his eyes several times, groaned, shuddered from head to foot and was now joining the party. He seemed in slightly better shape than on the occasion of his previous resurrection. His resemblance to a corpse that had been in the water several days was still pronounced, but it had become a cheerier corpse, one that had begun to look on the bright side.
‘Oh, Tippy,’ he said, ‘I thought you would be interested to know that I’m not going to die. I’m feeling a little better.’
‘That’s the spirit.’
‘Not much better, but a little. So never mind about the cigarette case. Who’s that you’re talking to? I can’t see him very distinctly, but isn’t he a policeman?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Do you think he could tell us how to get out of here?’
‘The very point I was discussing with him when you came to the surface. He says the hellhounds of the system will release us if we slip them ten bucks apiece.’
Wilfred’s mind was still clouded, but he was capable of formulating an idea.
‘Let’s slip them ten bucks apiece,’ he suggested.
‘How? You haven’t any dough, have you?’
‘None.’
‘Nor have I. Somebody swiped my roll. But this gentleman, Mr – ?’
‘Garroway.’
‘Mr Garroway here says I can phone a friend for some.’
Again Wilfred Allsop had a constructive proposal to put forward.
‘Go and phone a friend for some.’
Tipton shook his head, and uttered a sharp howl. There are times when shaking the head creates the illusion that one has met Jael the wife of Heber, incurred her displeasure and started her going into her celebrated routine.
‘It isn’t as simple as all that. There’s a catch. One’s only allowed one call.’
‘I don’t get your point.’
‘Then you must be still stewed. You get it, don’t you, Mr Garroway?’
‘Sure. Your buddy mightn’t be there. Then you’ll have used up your call and got nowheres.’
‘Exactly. It’s the middle of August and all the guys I know are out of town. They’ll be coming back after Labour Day, but it won’t be Labour Day for another three weeks, and we don’t want to have to wait till then. Gosh, I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ said Tipton, wincing.
He was alluding to a sudden sharp barking sound which had proceeded from his fellow prisoner’s lips. It had affected his head unpleasantly, creating the passing impression that someone had touched off a stick or two of dynamite inside it.
‘Sorry,’ said Wilfred. ‘I was thinking of Uncle Clarence.’
The statement did nothing to mollify Tipton. He said with a good deal of bitterness that that did credit to a nephew’s heart. It was nice of him, he said, to think of his Uncle Clarence.
‘He’s in New York. He’s at the Plaza. He came over here for my Aunt Constance’s wedding. She was marrying a Yank called Schoonmaker.’
Tipton saw that he had judged his friend too hastily. What he had taken for an idle changing of the subject had been in reality most pertinent to the issue.
‘That’s right,’ he exclaimed. ‘I read about it in the papers. This begins to look good. You’re sure he’s at the Plaza?’
‘Certain. Aunt Hermione told me to go and look him up there.’
‘But can I wake him at this time of night?’
‘If you explain that it’s an emergency. You’ll have to make it quite clear that your need is urgent. You know what a muddle-headed old ass he is.’
This was perfectly true. Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, that vague and dreamy peer, was not one of England’s keenest brains. The life he led made for slowness of the thinking processes. Except when he was attending sisters’ weddings in America, he spent his time pottering about the gardens and messuages of Blandings Castle, his rural seat, his thoughts, such as they were, concentrated on his prize sow, Empress of Blandings. When indoors you could generally find him in his study engrossed in a book of porcine interest, most frequently that monumental work On The Care Of The Pig by Augustus Whipple (Popgood and Grooly, thirty-five shillings), of which he never wearied.
Tipton’s first enthusiasm had begun to wane. Like Hamlet, he had become irresolute. He chewed his lower lip dubiously.
‘It’s taking a big chance. Suppose he’s out on a toot somewhere?’
‘Is it likely that a staid old bird like Uncle Clarence would go on toots?’
‘You never know.’
‘If it was my Uncle Galahad, I wouldn’t say, but surely not Uncle Clarence.’
‘It’s a possibility that has to be taken into consideration. The most respectable of Limeys get it up their noses and start stepping out when they come to New York. It’s the air here. Very heady. What would you do in a case like this, Mr Garroway?’
The policeman fingered a chin modelled on the ram of a battleship. There was a rasping sound as he scratched it.
‘Lemme get it straight. You want to make sure the guy’s in?’
‘The whole enterprise depends on that.’
‘Well, how about me calling him first? If he answers, it’ll mean he’s there and I’ll hang up. Then you give him a buzz.’
Tipton eyed him reverently. A Daniel come to judgment, he was feeling. If this was the normal level of intelligence in New York’s police force, it was not to be wondered at that they were known as The Finest.
‘God bless you, Garroway,’ he said emotionally, ‘you’ve solved the whole problem. Tell Mrs Garroway next time she shops at Tipton’s Stores to mention my name and say I said she was to have anything she wants on the house, from certified butter to prime rib of beef and chicken noodle soup.’
‘Very kind of you, sir. She’ll be tickled pink. The Plaza I think you said, and your buddy’s name is Clarence?’
‘Emsworth.’
‘My mistake.’
‘Ask for the Earl of Emsworth. He’s a lord.’
‘Oh, one of those? Right.’
III
The officer hurried off, and Tipton gazed after him, awed.
‘What malarkey people talk about the New York police being brutal,’ he said. ‘Brutal, my left eyeball. I never met a sweeter guy, did you?’
‘Never.’
‘You can hear the milk of human kindness sloshing about inside him.’
‘Distinctly.’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me to find he’d started life as a Boy Scout.’
‘Nor me.’
‘It shows how silly it is to go by people’s looks. It’s not his fault that he’s no oil painting.’
‘Of course not.’
‘And what is beauty, after all?’
‘Exactly. Skin deep, I often say.’
‘So do I, frequently.’
‘It’s the heart that counts.’
‘Every time. And his is as big as the Yankee Stadium. Ah, Garroway. What’s the score?’
‘He’s there.’
‘Three – no, make it four – rousing cheers. How did he seem?’
‘Sleepy.’
‘I mean in what sort of mood? Amiable? Docile? Friendly? A likely prospect for the touch, did you feel?’
‘Sure.’
‘Then stand out of my way and let me get at that telephone,’ said Tipton.
As he went, his head was still aching, but his heart was light. He was about to embark on a course of action which would fill the bosoms of several of his fellow creatures, notably Colonel and Lady Hermione Wedge, with alarm and despondency, but he did not know this. He was not clairvoyant.
CHAPTER 2
I
THE BLANDINGS CASTLE of which mention was made in the previous chapter of this chronicle stands on a knoll of rising ground at the southern end of the Vale of Blandings in the county of Shropshire. It came into existence towards the middle of the fifteenth century at a time when the landed gentry of England, who never knew when a besieging army might not be coming along, particularly if they lived close to the Welsh border, believed in building their little nests solid. Huge and grey and majestic, adorned with turrets and battlements in great profusion, it unquestionably takes the eye. Even Tipton Plimsoll, though not as a rule given to poetic rhapsodies, had become lyrical on first beholding it, making a noise with his tongue like the popping of a cork and saying ‘Some joint!’ The illustrated weeklies often print articles about it accompanied by photographs showing the park, the gardens, the yew alley and its other attractions. In these its proprietor, Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, sometimes appears, looking like an absentminded member of the Jukes family, for he has always been a careless dresser and when in front of a camera is inclined to let his mouth hang open in rather a noticeable way.
On a fine morning a few days after the hand of the law had fallen on Tipton and his fiancée’s cousin Wilfred Allsop the beauty of the noble building was enhanced by the presence outside it of Sebastian Beach, the castle butler. He was standing beside a luggage-laden car which was drawn up at the front door, waiting to give an official send-off to Lord Emsworth’s younger brother Galahad, who, with his niece Veronica Wedge, was about to drive to London to pick up the ninth Earl on his return from America.
As is so often the case with butlers, there was a good deal of Beach. Julius Caesar, who liked to have men about him that were fat, would have taken to him at once. He was a man who had made two chins grow where only one had been before, and his waistcoat swelled like the sail of a racing yacht. You would never have thought, to look at him, that forty years ago he had come in first in a choir boys’ bicycle race, open to those whose voices had not broken by the first Sunday in Epiphany, and that only two days before the start of this story he had won the Market Blandings Darts Tournament, outshooting such seasoned experts as Jno. Robinson, who ran the station taxi cab, and Percy Bulstrode, the local chemist.
He had been standing there for some minutes, when a brisk, dapper little gentleman in the early fifties appeared in the doorway and came down the steps. This was the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, a man disapproved of by his numerous sisters but considered in the Servants’ Hall to shed lustre on Blandings Castle.
Gally Threepwood was the only genuinely distinguished member of the family of which Lord Emsworth was the head. Lord Emsworth himself had once won a first prize for pumpkins at the Shropshire Agricultural Show and his pig, Empress of Blandings, had three times been awarded the silver medal for fatness at that annual festival, but you could not say that he had really risen to eminence in the public life of England. Gally, on the other hand, had made a name for himself. The passage of the years had put him more or less in retirement now, but in his youth he had been one of the lights of London, one of the great figures at whom the world of the stage, the racecourse and the rowdier restaurants had pointed with pride. There were men in London – bookmakers, skittle sharps, jellied eel sellers at race meetings and the like – who would have been puzzled to know whom you were referring to if you had spoken of Einstein, but they were all familiar with Gally.
He was soberly dressed now for his visit to London, but even in this decorous costume he seemed to bring with him a whiff of the paddock and the American bar. He still gave the impression that he was wearing a checked coat, tight trousers and a grey bowler hat and that there were race glasses bumping against his left hip. His bright eyes, one of them adorned with a black-rimmed monocle, seemed to be watching horses rounding into the straight, his neatly shod foot to be pawing in search of a brass rail.
He greeted Beach with the easy cordiality of a friend of long standing. There had existed between them a perfect rapport since they had both been slips of boys of forty. Each respected and admired the other for his many gifts.
‘Hullo, Beach. Lovely morning.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Gally looked at him sharply. The sombreness of his voice had surprised him. Scanning his face, he could see that it was a dull purple colour and that the lower of his two chins was quivering.
‘Something the matter, Beach? You have the air of a man whose soul is not at rest. What’s wrong?’
From anyone else the butler would have hidden his secret sorrow, but everybody confided in Gally. Barmaids poured out their troubles to him, and the humblest racecourse tout knew that he could rely on him for sympathy and understanding.
‘I have been grossly insulted, Mr Galahad.’
‘You have? Who by? Or by whom, as the case may be?’
‘The young gentleman.’
‘You don’t mean Wilfred Allsop?’
‘No, sir. Master Winkworth.’