Leave it to Psmith (30 page)

‘If I were you,’ said Psmith, ‘and I offer the suggestion in the most cordial spirit of goodwill, I would use every effort to prevent this passion for flinging flower-pots from growing upon me. I know you will say that you can take it or leave it alone; that just one more pot won’t hurt you; but can you stop at one? Isn’t it just that first insidious flower-pot that does all the mischief? Be a man, Comrade Baxter!’ He laid his hand appealingly on the secretary’s shoulder. ‘The next time the craving comes on you, fight it. Fight it! Are you, the heir of the ages, going to become a slave to a habit? Tush! You know and I know that there is better stuff in you than that. Use your will-power, man, use your will-power.’

Whatever reply Baxter might have intended to make to this powerful harangue – and his attitude as he turned on his companion suggested that he had much to say – was checked by a voice from above.

‘Baxter! My dear fellow!’

The Earl of Emsworth, having observed the secretary’s awakening from the safe observation-post of Psmith’s bedroom, and having noted that he seemed to be exhibiting no signs of violence, had decided to make his presence known. His panic had passed, and he wanted to go into first causes.

Baxter gazed wanly up at the window.

‘I can explain everything, Lord Emsworth.’

‘What?’ said his lordship, leaning farther out.

‘I can explain everything,’ bellowed Baxter.

‘It turns out after all,’ said Psmith pleasantly, ‘to be very simple. He was practising for the Jerking the Geranium event at the next Olympic Games.’

Lord Emsworth adjusted his glasses.

‘Your face is dirty,’ he said, peering down at his dishevelled secretary. ‘Baxter, my dear fellow, your face is dirty.’

‘I was digging,’ replied Baxter sullenly.

‘What?’

‘Digging!’

‘The terrier complex,’ explained Psmith. ‘What,’ he asked kindly, turning to his companion, ‘were you digging for? Forgive me if the question seems an impertinent one, but we are naturally curious.’

Baxter hesitated.

‘What were you digging for?’ asked Lord Emsworth.

‘You see,’ said Psmith. ‘
He
wants to know.’

Not for the first time since they had become associated, a mad feeling of irritation at his employer’s woolly persistence flared up in Rupert Baxter’s bosom. The old ass was always pottering about asking questions. Fury and want of sleep combined to dull the secretary’s normal prudence. Dimly he realised that he was imparting Psmith, the scoundrel who he was convinced was the ringleader of last night’s outrage, valuable information; but anything was better than to have to stand here shouting up at Lord Emsworth. He wanted to get it over and go to bed.

‘I thought Lady Constance’s necklace was in one of the flower-pots,’ he shrilled.

‘What?’

The secretary’s powers of endurance gave out. This maddening inquisition, coming on top of the restless night he had had, was too much for him. With a low moan he made one agonised leap for the front door and passed through it to where beyond these voices there was peace.

Psmith, deprived thus abruptly of his stimulating society, remained for some moments standing near the front door, drinking in with grave approval the fresh scents of the summer morning. It was many years since he had been up and about as early as this, and he had forgotten how delightful the first beginnings of a July day can be. Unlike Baxter, on whose self-centred soul these things had been lost, he revelled in the soft breezes, the singing birds, the growing pinkness of the eastern sky. He awoke at length from his reverie to find that Lord Emsworth had toddled down and was tapping him on the arm.

‘
What
did he say?’ inquired his lordship. He was feeling like a man who has been cut offin the midst of an absorbing telephone conversation.

‘Say?’ said Psmith. ‘Oh, Comrade Baxter? Now, let me think. What
did
he say?’

‘Something about something being in a flower-pot,’ prompted his lordship.

‘Ah, yes. He said he thought that Lady Constance’s necklace was in one of the flower-pots.’

‘What!’

Lord Emsworth, it should be mentioned, was not completely in touch with recent happenings in his home. His habit of going early to bed had caused him to miss the sensational events in the drawing-room: and, as he was a sound sleeper, the subsequent screams – or, as Stokes the footman would have said, shrieks – had not disturbed him. He stared at Psmith, aghast. For a while the apparent placidity of Baxter had lulled his first suspicions, but now they returned with renewed force.

‘Baxter thought my sister’s necklace was in a flower-pot?’ he gasped.

‘So I understood him to say.’

‘But why should my sister keep her necklace in a flower-pot?’

‘Ah, there you take me into deep waters.’

‘The man’s mad,’ cried Lord Emsworth, his last doubts removed. ‘Stark, staring mad! I thought so before, and now I’m convinced of it.’

His lordship was no novice in the symptoms of insanity. Several of his best friends were residing in those palatial establishments set in pleasant parks and surrounded by high walls with broken bottles on them, to which the wealthy and aristocratic are wont to retire when the strain of modern life becomes too great. And one of his uncles by marriage, who believed that he was a loaf of bread, had made his first public statement on the matter in the smoking-room of this very castle. What Lord Emsworth did not know about lunatics was not worth knowing.

‘I must get rid of him,’ he said. And at the thought the fair morning seemed to Lord Emsworth to take on a sudden new beauty. Many a time had he toyed wistfully with the idea of dismissing his efficient but tyrannical secretary, but never before had that sickeningly competent young man given him any reasonable cause to act. Hitherto, moreover, he had feared his sister’s wrath should he take the plunge. But now . . . Surely even Connie, pig-headed as she was, could not blame him for dispensing with the services of a secretary who thought she kept her necklaces in flower-pots, and went out into the garden in the early dawn to hurl them at his bedroom window.

His demeanour took on a sudden buoyancy. He hummed a gay air.

‘Get rid of him,’ he murmured, rolling the blessed words round his tongue. He patted Psmith genially on the shoulder. ‘Well, my dear fellow,’ he said, ‘I suppose we had better be getting back to bed and seeing if we can’t get a little sleep.’

Psmith gave a little start. He had been somewhat deeply immersed in thought.

‘Do not,’ he said courteously, ‘let me keep you from the hay if you wish to retire. To me – you know what we poets are – this lovely morning has brought inspiration. I think I will push off to my little nook in the woods, and write a poem about something.’

He accompanied his host up the silent stairs, and they parted with mutual good will at their respective doors. Psmith, having cleared his brain with a hurried cold bath, began to dress.

As a rule, the donning of his clothes was a solemn ceremony over which he dwelt lovingly; but this morning he abandoned his customary leisurely habit. He climbed into his trousers with animation, and lingered but a moment over the tying of his tie. He was convinced that there was that before him which would pay for haste.

Nothing in this world is sadder than the frequency with which we suspect our fellows without just cause. In the happenings of the night before, Psmith had seen the hand of Edward Cootes. Edward Cootes, he considered, had been indulging in what – in another – he would certainly have described as funny business. Like Miss Simmons, Psmith had quickly arrived at the conclusion that the necklace had been thrown out of the drawing-room window by one of those who made up the audience at his reading: and it was his firm belief that it had been picked up and hidden by Mr Cootes. He had been trying to think ever since where that persevering man could have concealed it, and Baxter had provided the clue. But Psmith saw clearer than Baxter. The secretary, having disembowelled fifteen flower-pots and found nothing, had abandoned his theory. Psmith went further, and suspected the existence of a sixteenth. And he proposed as soon as he was dressed to sally downstairs in search of it.

He put on his shoes, and left the room, buttoning his waistcoat as he went.

§ 6

The hands of the clock over the stables were pointing to half-past five when Eve Halliday, tiptoeing furtively, made another descent of the stairs. Her feelings as she went were very different from those which had caused her to jump at every sound when she had started on this same journey three hours earlier. Then, she had been a prowler in the darkness and, as such, a fitting object of suspicion: now, if she happened to run into anybody, she was merely a girl who, unable to sleep, had risen early to take a stroll in the garden. It was a distinction that made all the difference.

Moreover, it covered the facts. She had not been able to sleep – except for an hour when she had dozed off in a chair by her window; and she certainly proposed to take a stroll in the garden. It was her intention to recover the necklace from the place where she had deposited it, and bury it somewhere where no one could possibly find it. There it could lie until she had a chance of meeting and talking to Mr Keeble, and ascertaining what was the next step he wished taken.

Two reasons had led Eve, after making her panic dash back into the house after lurking in the bushes while Baxter patrolled the terrace, to leave her precious flower-pot on the still of the window beside the front door. She had read in stories of sensation that for purposes of concealment the most open place is the best place: and, secondly, the nearer the front door she put the flower-pot, the less distance would she have to carry it when the time came for its removal. In the present excited condition of the household, with every guest an amateur detective, the spectacle of a girl tripping downstairs with a flower-pot in her arms would excite remark.

Eve felt exhilarated. She was not used to getting only one hour’s sleep in the course of a night, but excitement and the reflection that she had played a difficult game and won it against odds bore her up so strongly that she was not conscious of fatigue: and so uplifted did she feel that as she reached the landing above the hall she abandoned her cautious mode of progress and ran down the remaining stairs. She had the sensation of being in the last few yards of a winning race.

∗∗∗∗∗

The hall was quite light now. Every object in it was plainly visible. There was the huge dinner-gong: there was the long leather settee: there was the table which she had upset in the darkness. And there was the sill of the window by the front door. But the flower-pot which had been on it was gone.

I
N
any community in which a sensational crime has recently been committed, the feelings of the individuals who go to make up that community must of necessity vary somewhat sharply according to the degree in which the personal fortunes of each are affected by the outrage. Vivid in their own way as may be the emotions of one who sees a fellow-citizen sandbagged in a quiet street, they differ in kind from those experienced by the victim himself. And so, though the theft of Lady Constance Keeble’s diamond necklace had stirred Blandings Castle to its depths, it had not affected all those present in quite the same way. It left the house-party divided into two distinct schools of thought – the one finding in the occurrence material for gloom and despondency, the other deriving from it nothing but joyful excitement.

To this latter section belonged those free young spirits who had chafed at the prospect of being herded into the drawing-room on the eventful night to listen to Psmith’s reading of
Songs of Squalor.
It made them tremble now to think of what they would have missed, had Lady Constance’s vigilance relaxed sufficiently to enable them to execute the quiet sneak for the billiard-room of which even at the eleventh hour they had thought so wistfully. As far as the Reggies, Berties, Claudes, and Archies at that moment enjoying Lord Emsworth’s hospitality were concerned the thing was top-hole, priceless, and indisputably what the doctor ordered. They spent a great deal of their time going from one country-house to another, and as a rule found the routine a little monotonous. A happening like that of the previous night gave a splendid zip to rural life. And when they reflected that, right on top of this binge, there was coming the County Ball, it seemed to them that God was in His heaven and all right with the world. They stuck cigarettes in long holders, and collected in groups, chattering like starlings.

The gloomy brigade, those with hearts bowed down, listened to their effervescent babbling with wan distaste. These last were a small body numerically, but very select. Lady Constance might have been described as their head and patroness. Morning found her still in a state bordering on collapse. After breakfast, however, which she took in her room, and which was sweetened by an interview with Mr Joseph Keeble, her husband, she brightened considerably. Mr Keeble, thought Lady Constance, behaved magnificently. She had always loved him dearly, but never so much as when, abstaining from the slightest reproach of her obstinacy in refusing to allow the jewels to be placed in the bank, he spaciously informed her that he would buy her another necklace, just as good and costing every penny as much as the old one. It was at this point that Lady Constance almost seceded from the ranks of gloom. She kissed Mr Keeble gratefully, and attacked with something approaching animation the boiled egg at which she had been pecking when he came in.

But a few minutes later the average of despair was restored by the enrolment of Mr Keeble in the ranks of the despondent. He had gladsomely assumed overnight that one of his agents, either Eve or Freddie, had been responsible for the disappearance of the necklace. The fact that Freddie, interviewed by stealth in his room, gapingly disclaimed any share in the matter had not damped him. He had never expected results from Freddie. But when, after leaving Lady Constance, he encountered Eve and was given a short outline of history, beginning with her acquisition of the necklace, and ending – like a modern novel – on the sombre note of her finding the flower-pot gone, he too sat him down and mourned as deeply as anyone.