‘If you don’t mind. You see, I had a letter by the second post from a great friend of mine, saying that she will be in Market Blandings this afternoon and asking me to meet her there. I must see her, Mr Baxter, please. You’ve no notion how important it is.’
Eve’s manner was excited, and her eyes as they met Baxter’s sparkled in a fashion that might have disturbed a man made of less stern stuff. If it had been the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, for instance, who had been gazing into their blue depths, that impulsive youth would have tied himself into knots and yapped like a dog. Baxter, the superman, felt no urge towards any such display. He reviewed her request calmly and judicially, and decided that it was a reasonable one.
‘Very well, Miss Halliday.’
‘Thank you ever so much. I’ll make up for it by working twice as hard to-morrow.’
Eve flitted to the door, pausing there to bestow a grateful smile upon him before going out; and Baxter returned to his reading. For a moment he was conscious of a feeling of regret that this quite attractive and uniformly respectful girl should be the partner in crime of a man of whom he disapproved even more than he disapproved of most malefactors. Then he crushed down the weak emotion and was himself again.
Eve trotted downstairs, humming happily to herself. She had expected a longer and more strenuous struggle before she obtained her order of release, and told herself that, despite a manner which seldom deviated from the forbidding, Baxter was really quite nice. In short, it seemed to her that nothing could possibly occur to mar the joyfulness of this admirable afternoon; and it was only when a voice hailed her as she was going through the hall a few minutes later that she realised that she was mistaken. The voice, which trembled throatily, was that of the Hon. Freddie; and her first look at him told Eve, an expert diagnostician, that he was going to propose to her again.
‘Well, Freddie?’ said Eve resignedly.
The Hon. Frederick Threepwood was a young man who was used to hearing people say ‘Well, Freddie?’ resignedly when he appeared. His father said it; his Aunt Constance said it; all his other aunts and uncles said it. Widely differing personalities in every other respect, they all said ‘Well, Freddie?’ resignedly directly they caught sight of him. Eve’s words, therefore, and the tone in which they were spoken, did not damp him as they might have damped another. His only feeling was one of solemn gladness at the thought that at last he had managed to get her alone for half a minute.
The fact that this was the first time he had been able to get her alone since her arrival at the castle had caused Freddie a good deal of sorrow. Bad luck was what he attributed it to, thereby giving the object of his affections less credit than was her due for a masterly policy of evasion. He sidled up, looking like a well-dressed sheep.
‘Going anywhere?’ he inquired.
‘Yes. I’m going to Market Blandings. Isn’t it a lovely afternoon? I suppose you are busy all the time now that the house is full? Good-bye,’ said Eve.
‘Eh?’ said Freddie, blinking.
‘Good-bye. I must be hurrying.’
‘Where did you say you were going?’
‘Market Blandings.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘No, I want to be alone. I’ve got to meet someone there.’
‘Come with you as far as the gates,’ said Freddie, the human limpet.
The afternoon sun seemed to Eve to be shining a little less brightly as they started down the drive. She was a kind-hearted girl, and it irked her to have to be continually acting as a black frost in Freddie’s garden of dreams. There appeared, however, to be but two ways out of the thing: either she must accept him or he must stop proposing. The first of these alternatives she resolutely declined to consider, and, as far as was ascertainable from his actions, Freddie declined just as resolutely to consider the second. The result was that solitary interviews between them were seldom wholly free from embarrassing developments.
They walked for a while in silence. Then:
‘You’re dashed hard on a fellow,’ said Freddie.
‘How’s your putting coming on?’ asked Eve.
‘Eh?’
‘Your putting. You told me you had so much trouble with it.’
She was not looking at him, for she had developed a habit of not looking at him on these occasions; but she assumed that the odd sound which greeted her remark was a hollow, mirthless laugh.
‘My putting!’
‘Well, you told me yourself it’s the most important part of golf.’
‘Golf! Do you think I have time to worry about golf these days?’
‘Oh, how splendid, Freddie! Are you really doing some work of some kind? It’s quite time, you know. Think how pleased your father will be.’
‘I say,’ said Freddie, ‘I do think you might marry a chap.’
‘I suppose I shall some day,’ said Eve, ‘if I meet the right one.’
‘No, no!’ said Freddie despairingly. She was not usually so dense as this. He had always looked on her as a dashed clever girl. ‘I mean me.’
Eve sighed. She had hoped to avert the inevitable.
‘Oh, Freddie!’ she exclaimed, exasperated. She was still sorry for him, but she could not help being irritated. It was such a splendid afternoon and she had been feeling so happy. And now he had spoiled everything. It always took her at least half an hour to get over the nervous strain of refusing his proposals.
‘I love you, dash it!’ said Freddie.
‘Well, do stop loving me,’ said Eve. ‘I’m an awful girl, really. I’d make you miserable.’
‘Happiest man in the world,’ corrected Freddie devoutly.
‘I’ve got a frightful temper.’
‘You’re an angel.’
Eve’s exasperation increased. She always had a curious fear that one of these days, if he went on proposing, she might say ‘Yes’ by mistake. She wished that there was some way known to science of stopping him once and for all. And in her desperation she thought of a line of argument which she had not yet employed.
‘It’s so absurd, Freddie,’ she said. ‘Really, it is. Apart from the fact that I don’t want to marry you, how can you marry anyone – anyone, I mean, who hasn’t plenty of money?’
‘Wouldn’t dream of marrying for money.’
‘No, of course not, but . . .’
‘Cupid,’ said Freddie woodenly, ‘pines and sickens in a gilded cage.’
Eve had not expected to be surprised by anything her companion might say, it being her experience that he possessed a vocabulary of about forty-three words and a sum-total of ideas that hardly ran into two figures; but this poetic remark took her back.
‘What!’
Freddie repeated the observation. When it had been flashed on the screen as a spoken sub-title in the six-reel wonder film, ‘Love or Mammon’ (Beatrice Comely and Brian Fraser), he had approved and made a note of it.
‘Oh!’ said Eve, and was silent. As Miss Peavey would have put it, it held her for a while. ‘What I meant,’ she went on after a moment, ‘was that you can’t possibly marry a girl without money unless you’ve some money of your own.’
‘I say, dash it!’ A strange note of jubilation had come into the wooer’s voice. ‘I say, is that really all that stands between us? Because . . .’
‘No, it isn’t!’
‘Because, look here, I’m going to have quite a good deal of money at any moment. It’s more or less of a secret, you know – in fact a pretty deadish secret – so keep it dark, but Uncle Joe is going to give me a couple of thousand quid. He promised me. Two thousand of the crispest. Absolutely!’
‘Uncle Joe?’
‘You know. Old Keeble. He’s going to give me a couple of thousand quid, and then I’m going to buy a partnership in a bookie’s business and simply coin money. Stands to reason, I mean. You can’t help making your bally fortune. Look at all the mugs who are losing money all the time at the races. It’s the bookies that get the stuff. A pal of mine who was up at Oxford wi
th me is in a bookie’s office, and they’re going to let me in if I . . .’
The momentous nature of his information had caused Eve to deviate now from her policy of keeping her eyes off Freddie when in emotional vein. And, if she had desired to check his lecture on finance, she could have chosen no better method than to look at him; for, meeting her gaze, Freddie immediately lost the thread of his discourse and stood yammering. A direct hit from Eve’s eyes always affected him in this way.
‘Mr Keeble is going to give you two thousand pounds!’
A wave of mortification swept over Eve. If there was one thing on which she prided herself, it was the belief that she was a loyal friend, a staunch pal; and now for the first time she found herself facing the unpleasant truth that she had been neglecting Phyllis Jackson’s interests in the most abominable way ever since she had come to Blandings. She had definitely promised Phyllis that she would tackle this stepfather of hers and shame him with burning words into yielding up the three thousand pounds which Phyllis needed so desperately for her Lincolnshire farm. And what had she done? Nothing.
Eve was honest to the core, even in her dealings with herself. A less conscientious girl might have argued that she had had no opportunity of a private interview with Mr Keeble. She scorned to soothe herself with this specious plea. If she had given her mind to it she could have brought about a dozen private interviews, and she knew it. No. She had allowed the pleasant persistence of Psmith to take up her time, and Phyllis and her troubles had been thrust into the background. She confessed, despising herself, that she had hardly given Phyllis a thought.
And all the while this Mr Keeble had been in a position to scatter largess, thousands of pounds of it, to undeserving people like Freddie. Why, a word from her about Phyllis would have . . .
‘Two thousand pounds?’ she repeated dizzily. ‘Mr Keeble!’
Absolutely!’ cried Freddie radiantly. The first shock of looking into her eyes had passed, and he was now revelling in that occupation.
‘What for?’
Freddie’s rapt gaze flickered. Love, he perceived, had nearly caused him to be indiscreet.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he mumbled. ‘He’s just giving it me, you know, don’t you know.’
‘Did you simply go to him and ask him for it?’
‘Well – er – well, yes. That was about the strength of it.’
‘And he didn’t object?’
‘No. He seemed rather pleased.’
‘Pleased!’ Eve found breathing difficult. She was feeling rather like a man who suddenly discovers that the hole in his back yard which he has been passing nonchalantly for months is a goldmine. If the operation of extracting money from Mr Keeble was not only easy but also agreeable to the victim . . . She became aware of a sudden imperative need for Freddie’s absence. She wanted to think this thing over.
‘Well, then,’ said Freddie, ‘coming back to it, will you?’
‘What?’ said Eve, distrait.
‘Marry me, you know. What I mean to say is, I worship the very ground you walk on, and all that sort of rot . . . I mean, and all that. And now that you realise that I’m going to get this couple of thousand . . . and the bookie’s business . . . and what not, I mean to say . . .’
‘Freddie,’ said Eve tensely, expressing her harassed nerves in a voice that came hotly through clenched teeth, ‘go away!’
‘Eh?’
‘I don’t want to marry you, and I’m sick of having to keep on telling you so. Will you please go away and leave me alone?’ She stopped. Her sense of fairness told her that she was working off on her hapless suitor venom which should have been expended on herself. ‘I’m sorry, Freddie,’ she said, softening; ‘I didn’t mean to be such a beast as that. I know you’re awfully fond of me, but really, really I can’t marry you. You don’t want to marry a girl who doesn’t love you, do you?’
‘Yes, I do,’ said Freddie stoutly. ‘If it’s you, I mean. Love is a tiny seed that coldness can wither, but if tended and nurtured in the fostering warmth of an honest heart . . .’
‘But, Freddie.’
‘Blossoms into a flower,’ concluded Freddie rapidly. ‘What I mean to say is, love would come after marriage.’
‘Nonsense!’
‘Well, that’s the way it happened in “A Society Mating”.’
‘Freddie,’ said Eve, ‘I really don’t want to talk any more. Will you be a dear and just go away? I’ve got a lot of thinking to do.’
‘Oh, thinking?’ said Freddie, impressed. ‘Right ho!’
‘Thank you so much.’
‘Oh – er – not at all. Well, pip-pip.’
‘Good-bye.’
‘See you later, what?’
‘Of course, of course.’
‘Fine! Well, toodle-oo!’
And the Hon. Freddie, not ill-pleased – for it seemed to him that at long last he detected signs of melting in the party of the second part – swivelled round on his long legs and started for home.
§ 3
The little town of Market Blandings was a peaceful sight as it slept in the sun. For the first time since Freddie had left her, Eve became conscious of a certain tranquillity as she entered the old grey High Street, which was the centre of the place’s life and thought. Market Blandings had a comforting air of having been exactly the same for centuries. Troubles might vex the generations it housed, but they did not worry that lichened church with its sturdy four-square tower, nor those red-roofed shops, nor the age-old inns whose second storeys bulged so comfortably out over the pavements. As Eve walked in slow meditation towards the ‘Emsworth Arms’, the intensely respectable hostelry which was her objective, archways met her gaze, opening with a picturesque unexpectedness to show heartening glimpses of ancient nooks all cool and green. There was about the High Street of Market Blandings a suggestion of a slumbering cathedral close. Nothing was modern in it except the moving-picture house – and even that called itself an Electric Theatre, and was ivy-covered and surmounted by stone gables.
On second thoughts, that statement is too sweeping. There was one other modern building in the High Street – Jno. Banks, Hairdresser, to wit, and Eve was just coming abreast of Mr Banks’s emporium now.
In any ordinary surroundings these premises would have been a tolerably attractive sight, but in Market Blandings they were almost an eyesore; and Eve, finding herself at the door, was jarred out of her reverie as if she had heard a false note in a solemn anthem. She was on the point of hurrying past, when the door opened and a short, solid figure came out. And at the sight of this short, solid figure Eve stopped abruptly.
It was with the object of getting his grizzled locks clipped in preparation for the County Ball that Joseph Keeble had come to Mr Banks’s shop as soon as he had finished lunch. As he emerged now into the High Street he was wondering why he had permitted Mr Banks to finish off the job with a heliotrope-scented hair-wash. It seemed to Mr Keeble that the air was heavy with heliotrope, and it came to him suddenly that heliotrope was a scent which he always found particularly objectionable.
Ordinarily Joseph Keeble was accustomed to show an iron front to hairdressers who tried to inflict lotions upon him; and the reason his vigilance had relaxed under the ministrations of Jno. Banks was that the second post, which arrived at the castle at the luncheon hour, had brought him a plaintive letter from his stepdaughter Phyllis – the second he had had from her since the one which had caused him to tackle his masterful wife in the smoking-room. Immediately after the conclusion of his business deal with the Hon. Freddie, he had written to Phyllis in a vein of optimism rendered glowing by Freddie’s promises, assuring her that at any moment he would be in a position to send her the three thousand pounds which she required to clinch the purchase of that dream-farm in Lincolnshire. To this she had replied with thanks. And after that there had been a lapse of days and still he had not made good. Phyllis was becoming worried, and said so in six closely-written pages.
Mr Keeble, as he sa
t in the barber’s chair going over this letter in his mind, had groaned in spirit, while Jno. Banks with gleaming eyes did practically what he liked with the heliotrope bottle. Not for the first time since the formation of their partnership, Joseph Keeble was tormented with doubts as to his wisdom in entrusting a commission so delicate as the purloining of his wife’s diamond necklace to one of his nephew Freddie’s known feebleness of intellect. Here, he told himself unhappily, was a job of work which would have tested the combined abilities of a syndicate consisting of Charles Peace and the James Brothers, and he had put it in the hands of a young man who in all his life had only once shown genuine inspiration and initiative – on the occasion when he had parted his hair in the middle at a time when all the other members of the Bachelors’ Club were brushing it straight back. The more Mr Keeble thought of Freddie’s chances, the slimmer they appeared. By the time Jno. Banks had released him from the spotted apron he was thoroughly pessimistic, and as he passed out of the door, ‘so perfumed that the winds were love-sick with him’, his estimate of his colleague’s abilities was reduced to a point where he began to doubt whether the stealing of a mere milk-can was not beyond his scope. So deeply immersed was he in these gloomy thoughts that Eve had to call his name twice before he came out of them.
‘Miss Halliday?’ he said apologetically. ‘I beg your pardon. I was thinking.’
Eve, though they had hardly exchanged a word since her arrival at the castle, had taken a liking to Mr Keeble; and she felt in consequence none of the embarrassment which might have handicapped her in the discussion of an extremely delicate matter with another man. By nature direct and straightforward, she came to the point at once.
‘Can you spare me a moment or two, Mr Keeble?’ she said. She glanced at the clock on the church tower and saw that she had ample time before her own appointment. ‘I want to talk to you about Phyllis.’
Mr Keeble jerked his head back in astonishment, and the world became noisome with heliotrope. It was as if the Voice of Conscience had suddenly addressed him.
‘Phyllis!’ he gasped, and the letter crackled in his breastpocket.