ALMOST ENTIRELY ABOUT FLOWER-POTS
§ 1
The Efficient Baxter prowled feverishly up and down the yielding carpet
of the big drawing-room. His eyes gleamed behind their spectacles, his
dome-like brow was corrugated. Except for himself, the room was empty.
As far as the scene of the disaster was concerned, the tumult and the
shouting had died. It was going on vigorously in practically every
other part of the house, but in the drawing-room there was stillness,
if not peace.
Baxter paused, came to a decision, went to the wall and pressed the
bell.
“Thomas,” he said when that footman presented himself a few moments
later.
“Sir?”
“Send Susan to me.”
“Susan, sir?”
“Yes, Susan,” snapped the Efficient One, who had always a short
way with the domestic staff. “Susan, Susan, Susan. . . . The new
parlourmaid.”
“Oh, yes, sir. Very good, sir.”
Thomas withdrew, outwardly all grave respectfulness, inwardly piqued,
as was his wont, at the airy manner in which the secretary flung his
orders about at the castle. The domestic staff at Blandings lived in a
perpetual state of smouldering discontent under Baxter’s rule.
“Susan,” said Thomas when he arrived in the lower regions, “you’re to
go up to the drawing-room. Nosey Parker wants you.”
The pleasant-faced young woman whom he addressed laid down her knitting.
“Who?” she asked.
“Mister Blooming Baxter. When you’ve been here a little longer you’ll
know that he’s the feller that owns the place. How he got it I don’t
know. Found it,” said Thomas satirically, “in his Christmas stocking, I
expect. Anyhow, you’re to go up.”
Thomas’s fellow-footman, Stokes, a serious-looking man with a bald
forehead, shook that forehead solemnly.
“Something’s the matter,” he asserted. “You can’t tell me that wasn’t a
scream we heard when them lights was out. Or,” he added weightily, for
he was a man who looked at every side of a question, “a shriek. It was
a shriek or scream. I said so at the time. ‘There,’ I said, ‘listen!’ I
said. ‘That’s somebody screaming,’ I said. ‘Or shrieking.’ Something’s
up.”
“Well, Baxter hasn’t been murdered, worse luck,” said Thomas. “He’s up
there screaming or shrieking for Susan. ‘Send Susan to me!’” proceeded
Thomas, giving an always popular imitation. “‘Susan, Susan, Susan.’ So
you’d best go, my girl, and see what he wants.”
“Very well.”
“And, Susan,” said Thomas, a tender note creeping into his voice, for
already, brief as had been her sojourn at Blandings, he had found the
new parlourmaid making a deep impression on him, “if it’s a row of any
kind . . .”
“Or description,” interjected Stokes.
“Or description,” continued Thomas, accepting the word, “if ’e’s ’arsh
with you for some reason or other, you come right back to me and sob
out your troubles on my chest, see? Lay your little ’ead on my shoulder
and tell me all about it.”
The new parlourmaid, primly declining to reply to this alluring
invitation, started on her journey upstairs; and Thomas, with a not
unmanly sigh, resumed his interrupted game of halfpenny nap with
colleague Stokes.
* * * * *
The Efficient Baxter had gone to the open window and was gazing out
into the night when Susan entered the drawing-room.
“You wished to see me, Mr. Baxter?”
The secretary spun round. So softly had she opened the door, and
so noiselessly had she moved when inside the room, that it was not
until she spoke that he had become aware of her arrival. It was a
characteristic of this girl Susan that she was always apt to be among
those present some time before the latter became cognisant of the fact.
“Oh, good evening, Miss Simmons. You came in very quietly.”
“Habit,” said the parlourmaid.
“You gave me quite a start.”
“I’m sorry. What was it,” she asked, dismissing in a positively
unfeeling manner the subject of her companion’s jarred nerves, “that
you wished to see me about?”
“Shut that door.”
“I have. I always shut doors.”
“Please sit down.”
“No, thank you, Mr. Baxter. It might look odd if anyone should come
in.”
“Of course. You think of everything.”
“I always do.”
Baxter stood for a moment, frowning.
“Miss Simmons,” he said, “when I thought it expedient to install a
private detective in this house, I insisted on Wragge’s sending you. We
had worked together before . . .”
“Sixteenth of December, 1918, to January twelve, 1919, when you were
secretary to Mr. Horace Jevons, the American millionaire,” said Miss
Simmons as promptly as if he had touched a spring. It was her hobby to
remember dates with precision.
“Exactly. I insisted upon your being sent because I knew from
experience that you were reliable. At that time I looked on your
presence here merely as a precautionary measure. Now, I am sorry to
say . . .”
“Did someone steal Lady Constance’s necklace to-night?”
“Yes!”
“When the lights went out just now?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, why couldn’t you say so at once? Good gracious, man, you don’t
have to break the thing gently to me.”
The Efficient Baxter, though he strongly objected to being addressed as
“man,” decided to overlook the solecism.
“The lights suddenly went out,” he said. “There was a certain amount of
laughter and confusion. Then a piercing shriek . . .”
“I heard it.”
“And immediately after Lady Constance’s voice crying that her jewels
had been snatched from her neck.”
“Then what happened?”
“Still greater confusion, which lasted until one of the maids arrived
with a candle. Eventually the lights went on again, but of the necklace
there was no sign whatever.”
“Well? Were you expecting the thief to wear it as a watch-chain or hang
it from his teeth?”
Baxter was finding his companion’s manner more trying every minute, but
he preserved his calm.
“Naturally the doors were barred and a complete search instituted.
And extremely embarrassing it was. With the single exception of the
scoundrel who has been palming himself off as McTodd, all those present
were well-known members of Society.”
“Well-known members of Society might not object to getting hold of
a twenty-thousand pound necklace. But still, with the McTodd fellow
there, you oughtn’t to have had far to look. What had he to say about
it?”
“He was among the first to empty his pockets.”
“Well, then, he must have hidden the thing somewhere.”
“Not in this room. I have searched assiduously.”
“H’m.”
There was a silence.
“It is baffling,” said Baxter, “baffling.”
“It is nothing of the kind,” replied Miss Simmons tartly. “This wasn’t
a one-man job. How could it have been? I should be inclined to call
it a three-man job. One to switch off the lights, one to snatch the
necklace, and one to--was that window open all the time? I thought
so--and one to pick up the necklace when the second fellow threw it out
on to the terrace.”
“Terrace!”
The word shot from Baxter’s lips with explosive force. Miss Simmons
looked at him curiously.
“Thought of something?”
“Miss Simmons,” said the Efficient One impressively, “everybody
was assembled in here waiting for the reading to begin, but the
pseudo-McTodd was nowhere to be found. I discovered him eventually on
the terrace in close talk with the Halliday girl.”
“His partner,” said Miss Simmons, nodding. “We thought so all along.
And let me add my little bit. There’s a fellow down in the servants’
hall that calls himself a valet, and I’ll bet he didn’t know what a
valet was till he came here. I thought he was a crook the moment I set
eyes on him. I can tell ’em in the dark. Now, do you know whose valet
he is? This McTodd fellow’s!”
Baxter bounded to and fro like a caged tiger.
“And with my own ears,” he cried excitedly, “I heard the Halliday girl
refuse to come to the drawing-room to listen to the reading. She was
out on the terrace throughout the whole affair. Miss Simmons, we must
act! We must act!”
“Yes, but not like idiots,” replied the detective frostily.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you can’t charge out, as you looked as if you wanted to just
then, and denounce these crooks where they sit. We’ve got to go
carefully.”
“But meanwhile they will smuggle the necklace away!”
“They won’t smuggle any necklace away, not while I’m around.
Suspicion’s no good. We’ve made out a nice little case against the
three of them, but it’s no use unless we catch them with the goods.
The first thing we have to do is to find out where they’ve hidden the
stuff. And that’ll take patience. I’ll start by searching that girl’s
room. Then I’ll search the valet fellow’s room. And if the stuff isn’t
there, it’ll mean they’ve hidden it out in the open somewhere.”
“But this McTodd fellow. This fellow who poses as McTodd. He may have
it all the while.”
“No. I’ll search his room, too, but the stuff won’t be there. He’s the
fellow who’s going to get it in the end, because he’s got that place
out in the woods to hide it in. But they wouldn’t have had time to slip
it to him yet. That necklace is somewhere right here. And if,” said
Miss Simmons with grim facetiousness, “they can hide it from me, they
may keep it as a birthday present.”
§ 2
How wonderful, if we pause to examine it, is Nature’s inexorable law of
compensation. Instead of wasting time in envy of our mental superiors,
we would do well to reflect that these gifts of theirs which excite our
wistful jealousy are ever attended by corresponding penalties. To take
an example that lies to hand, it was the very fact that he possessed a
brain like a buzz-saw that rendered the Efficient Baxter a bad sleeper.
Just as he would be dropping off, bing! would go that brain of his,
melting the mists of sleep like snow in a furnace.
This was so even when life was running calmly for him and without
excitement. To-night, his mind, bearing the load it did, firmly
declined even to consider the question of slumber. The hour of two,
chiming from the clock over the stables, found him as wide awake as
ever he was at high noon.
Lying in bed in the darkness, he reviewed the situation as far as he
had the data. Shortly before he retired, Miss Simmons had made her
report about the bedrooms. Though subjected to the severest scrutiny,
neither Psmith’s boudoir nor Cootes’s attic nor Eve’s little nook on
the third floor had yielded up treasure of any description. And this,
Miss Simmons held, confirmed her original view that the necklace must
be lying concealed in what might almost be called a public spot--on
some window-ledge, maybe, or somewhere in the hall. . . .
Baxter lay considering this theory. It did appear to be the only
tenable one; but it offended him by giving the search a frivolous
suggestion of being some sort of round game like Hunt the Slipper or
Find the Thimble. As a child he had held austerely aloof from these
silly pastimes, and he resented being compelled to play them now.
Still . . .
He sat up, thinking. He had heard a noise.
* * * * *
The attitude of the majority of people towards noises in the night is
one of cautious non-interference. But Rupert Baxter was made of sterner
stuff. The sound had seemed to come from downstairs somewhere--perhaps
from that very hall where, according to Miss Simmons, the stolen
necklace might even now be lying hid. Whatever it was, it must
certainly not be ignored. He reached for the spectacles which lay
ever ready to his hand on the table beside him: then climbed out of
bed, and, having put on a pair of slippers and opened the door, crept
forth into the darkness. As far as he could ascertain by holding his
breath and straining his ears, all was still from cellar to roof; but
nevertheless he was not satisfied. He continued to listen. His room
was on the second floor, one of a series that ran along a balcony
overlooking the hall; and he stood, leaning over the balcony rail, a
silent statue of Vigilance.
* * * * *
The noise which had acted so electrically upon the Efficient Baxter
had been a particularly noisy noise; and only the intervening distance
and the fact that his door was closed had prevented it sounding to him
like an explosion. It had been caused by the crashing downfall of a
small table containing a vase, a jar of potpourri, an Indian sandalwood
box of curious workmanship, and a cabinet-size photograph of the Earl
of Emsworth’s eldest son, Lord Bosham; and the table had fallen because
Eve, _en route_ across the hall in quest of her precious flower-pot,
had collided with it while making for the front door. Of all indoor
sports--and Eve, as she stood pallidly among the ruins, would have been
the first to endorse this dictum--the one which offers the minimum
of pleasure to the participant is that of roaming in pitch darkness
through the hall of a country-house. Easily navigable in the daytime,
these places become at night mere traps for the unwary.
Eve paused breathlessly. So terrific had the noise sounded to her
guilty ears that every moment she was expecting doors to open all over
the castle, belching forth shouting men with pistols. But as nothing
happened, courage returned to her, and she resumed her journey. She
found the great door, ran her fingers along its surface, and drew the
chain. The shooting back of the bolts occupied but another instant, and
then she was out on the terrace running her hardest towards the row of
flower-pots.
Up on his balcony, meanwhile, the Efficient Baxter was stopping,
looking, and listening. The looking brought no results, for all below
was black as pitch; but the listening proved more fruitful. Faintly
from down in the well of the hall there floated up to him a peculiar
sound like something rustling in the darkness. Had he reached the
balcony a moment earlier, he would have heard the rattle of the chain
and the click of the bolts; but these noises had occurred just before
he came out of his room. Now all that was audible was this rustling.
He could not analyse the sound, but the fact that there was any sound
at all in such a place at such an hour increased his suspicions that
dark doings were toward which would pay for investigation. With
stealthy steps he crept to the head of the stairs and descended.
One uses the verb “descend” advisedly, for what is required is some
word suggesting instantaneous activity. About Baxter’s progress from
the second floor to the first there was nothing halting or hesitating.
He, so to speak, did it now. Planting his foot firmly on a golf-ball
which the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, who had been practising putting in
the corridor before retiring to bed, had left in his casual fashion
just where the steps began, he took the entire staircase in one
majestic, volplaning sweep. There were eleven stairs in all separating
his landing from the landing below, and the only ones he hit were the
third and tenth. He came to rest with a squattering thud on the lower
landing, and for a moment or two the fever of the chase left him.
The fact that many writers in their time have commented at some length
on the mysterious manner in which Fate is apt to perform its work must
not deter us now from a brief survey of this latest manifestation of
its ingenious methods. Had not his interview with Eve that afternoon so
stimulated the Hon. Freddie as to revive in him a faint yet definite
desire to putt, there would have been no golf-ball waiting for Baxter
on the stairs. And had he been permitted to negotiate the stairs in a
less impetuous manner, Baxter would not at this juncture have switched
on the light.
It had not been his original intention to illuminate the theatre of
action, but after that Lucifer-like descent from the second floor to
the first he was taking no more chances. “Safety First” was Baxter’s
slogan. As soon, therefore, as he had shaken off a dazed sensation of
mental and moral collapse, akin to that which comes to the man who
steps on the teeth of a rake and is smitten on the forehead by the
handle, he rose with infinite caution to his feet and, feeling his way
down by the banisters, groped for the switch and pressed it. And so it
came about that Eve, heading for home with her precious flower-pot in
her arms, was stopped when at the very door by a sudden warning flood
of light. Another instant, and she would have been across the threshold
of disaster.
For a moment paralysis gripped her. The light had affected her like
someone shouting loudly and unexpectedly in her ear. Her heart gave
one convulsive bound, and she stood frozen. Then, filled with a blind
desire for flight, she dashed like a hunted rabbit into the friendly
shelter of a clump of bushes.
* * * * *
Baxter stood blinking. Gradually his eyes adjusted themselves to the
light, and immediately they had done so he was seized by a fresh frenzy
of zeal. Now that all things were made visible to him he could see that
that faint rustling sound had been caused by a curtain flapping in the
breeze, and that the breeze which made the curtain flap was coming in
through the open front door.
Baxter wasted no time in abstract thought. He acted swiftly and with
decision. Straightening his spectacles on his nose, he girded up his
pyjamas and galloped out into the night.
* * * * *
The smooth terrace slept under the stars. To a more poetic man than
Baxter it would have seemed to wear that faintly reproachful air which
a garden always assumes when invaded at unseemly hours by people who
ought to be in bed. Baxter, never fanciful, was blind to this. He was
thinking, thinking. That shaking-up on the stairs had churned into
activity the very depths of his brain and he was at the fever-point
of his reasoning powers. A thought had come like a full-blown rose,
flushing his brow. Miss Simmons, arguing plausibly, had suggested that
the stolen necklace might be concealed in the hall. Baxter, inspired,
fancied not. Whoever it was that had been at work in the hall just now
had been making for the garden. It was not the desire to escape which
had led him--or her--to open the front door, for the opening had been
done before he, Baxter, had come out on to the balcony--otherwise he
must have heard the shooting of the bolts. No. The enemy’s objective
had been the garden. In other words, the terrace. And why? Because
somewhere on the terrace was the stolen necklace.
Standing there in the starlight, the Efficient Baxter endeavoured to
reconstruct the scene, and did so with remarkable accuracy. He saw the
jewels flashing down. He saw them picked up. But there he stopped. Try
as he might, he could not see them hidden. And yet that they had been
hidden--and that within a few feet of where he was now standing--he
felt convinced.
He moved from his position near the door and began to roam restlessly.
His slippered feet padded over the soft turf.
* * * * *
Eve peered out from her clump of bushes. It was not easy to see any
great distance, but Fate, her friend, was still with her. There had
been a moment that night when Baxter, disrobing for bed, had wavered
absently between his brown and his lemon-coloured pyjamas, little
recking of what hung upon the choice. Fate had directed his hand to the
lemon-coloured, and he had put them on; with the result that he shone
now in the dim light like the white plume of Navarre. Eve could follow
his movements perfectly, and, when he was far enough away from his base
to make the enterprise prudent, she slipped out and raced for home and
safety. Baxter at the moment was leaning on the terrace wall, thinking,
thinking, thinking.
* * * * *
It was possibly the cool air, playing about his bare ankles, that at
last chilled the secretary’s dashing mood and brought the disquieting
thought that he was doing something distinctly dangerous in remaining
out here in the open like this. A gang of thieves are ugly customers,
likely to stick at little when a valuable necklace is at stake, and
it came to the Efficient Baxter that in his light pyjamas he must
be offering a tempting mark for any marauder lurking--say in those
bushes. And at the thought, the summer night, though pleasantly mild,
grew suddenly chilly. With an almost convulsive rapidity he turned to
re-enter the house. Zeal was well enough, but it was silly to be rash.
He covered the last few yards of his journey at a rare burst of speed.
It was at this point that he discovered that the lights in the hall had
been switched off and that the front door was closed and bolted.
§ 3
It is the opinion of most thoughtful students of life that happiness
in this world depends chiefly on the ability to take things as they
come. An instance of one who may be said to have perfected this
attitude is to be found in the writings of a certain eminent Arabian
author who tells of a traveller who, sinking to sleep one afternoon
upon a patch of turf containing an acorn, discovered when he woke that
the warmth of his body had caused the acorn to germinate and that he
was now some sixty feet above the ground in the upper branches of a
massive oak. Unable to descend, he faced the situation equably. “I
cannot,” he observed, “adapt circumstances to my will: therefore I
shall adapt my will to circumstances. I decide to remain here.” Which
he did.
Rupert Baxter, as he stood before the barred door of Blandings Castle,
was very far from imitating this admirable philosopher. To find oneself
locked out of a country-house at half-past two in the morning in
lemon-coloured pyjamas can never be an unmixedly agreeable experience,
and Baxter was a man less fitted by nature to endure it with equanimity
than most men. His was a fiery and an arrogant soul, and he seethed in
furious rebellion against the intolerable position into which Fate had
manœuvred him. He even went so far as to give the front door a petulant
kick. Finding, however, that this hurt his toes and accomplished no
useful end, he addressed himself to the task of ascertaining whether
there was any way of getting in--short of banging the knocker and
rousing the house, a line of action which did not commend itself to
him. He made a practice of avoiding as far as possible the ribald type
of young man of which the castle was now full, and he had no desire to
meet them at this hour in his present costume. He left the front door
and proceeded to make a circuit of the castle walls; and his spirits
sank even lower. In the Middle Ages, during that stormy period of
England’s history when walls were built six feet thick and a window was
not so much a window as a handy place for pouring molten lead on the
heads of visitors, Blandings had been an impregnable fortress. But in
all its career it can seldom have looked more of a fortress to anyone
than it did now to the Efficient Baxter.
One of the disadvantages of being a man of action, impervious to the
softer emotions, is that in moments of trial the beauties of Nature are
powerless to soothe the anguished heart. Had Baxter been of a dreamy
and poetic temperament he might now have been drawing all sorts of
balm from the loveliness of his surroundings. The air was full of the
scent of growing things; strange, shy creatures came and went about him
as he walked; down in the woods a nightingale had begun to sing; and
there was something grandly majestic in the huge bulk of the castle
as it towered against the sky. But Baxter had temporarily lost his
sense of smell; he feared and disliked the strange, shy creatures; the
nightingale left him cold; and the only thought the towering castle
inspired in him was that it looked as if a fellow would need half a ton
of dynamite to get into it.
Baxter paused. He was back now near the spot from which he had
started, having completed two laps without finding any solution of his
difficulties. The idea in his mind had been to stand under somebody’s
window and attract the sleeper’s attention with soft, significant
whistles. But the first whistle he emitted had sounded to him in the
stillness of early morn so like a steam syren that thereafter he had
merely uttered timid, mouse-like sounds which the breezes had carried
away the moment they crept out. He proposed now to halt for awhile
and rest his lips before making another attempt. He proceeded to the
terrace wall and sat down. The clock over the stables struck three.
To the restless type of thinker like Rupert Baxter, the act of sitting
down is nearly always the signal for the brain to begin working with
even more than its customary energy. The relaxed body seems to invite
thought. And Baxter, having suspended for the moment his physical
activities--and glad to do so, for his slippers hurt him--gave himself
up to tense speculation as to the hiding-place of Lady Constance
Keeble’s necklace. From the spot where he now sat he was probably, he
reflected, actually in a position to see that hiding-place--if only,
when he saw it, he were able to recognise it for what it was. Somewhere
out here--in yonder bushes or in some unsuspected hole in yonder
tree--the jewels must have been placed. Or . . .
Something seemed to go off inside Baxter like a touched spring. One
moment, he was sitting limply, keenly conscious of a blister on the
sole of his left foot; the next, regardless of the blister, he was
off the wall and racing madly along the terrace in a flurry of flying
slippers. Inspiration had come to him.
Day dawns early in the summer months, and already a sort of unhealthy
pallor had begun to manifest itself in the sky. It was still far from
light, but objects hitherto hidden in the gloom had begun to take
on uncertain shape. And among these there had come into the line of
Baxter’s vision a row of fifteen flower-pots.
There they stood, side by side, round and inviting, each with a
geranium in its bed of mould. Fifteen flower-pots. There had originally
been sixteen, but Baxter knew nothing of that. All he knew was that he
was on the trail.
The quest for buried treasure is one which right through the ages
has exercised an irresistible spell over humanity. Confronted with a
spot where buried treasure may lurk, men do not stand upon the order
of their digging; they go at it with both hands. No solicitude for his
employer’s geraniums came to hamper Rupert Baxter’s researches. To
grasp the first flower-pot and tilt out its contents was with him the
work of a moment. He scrabbled his fingers through the little pile of
mould . . .
Nothing.
A second geranium lay broken on the ground . . .
Nothing.
A third . . .
* * * * *
The Efficient Baxter straightened himself painfully. He was unused to
stooping, and his back ached. But physical discomfort was forgotten in
the agony of hope frustrated. As he stood there, wiping his forehead
with an earth-stained hand, fifteen geranium corpses gazed up at him in
the growing light, it seemed with reproach. But Baxter felt no remorse.
He included all geraniums, all thieves, and most of the human race in
one comprehensive black hatred.
All that Rupert Baxter wanted in this world now was bed. The clock over
the stables had just struck four, and he was aware of an overpowering
fatigue. Somehow or other, if he had to dig through the walls with his
bare hands, he must get into the house. He dragged himself painfully
from the scene of carnage and blinked up at the row of silent windows
above him. He was past whistling now. He stooped for a pebble, and
tossed it up at the nearest window.
Nothing happened. Whoever was sleeping up there continued to sleep. The
sky had turned pink, birds were twittering in the ivy, other birds had
begun to sing in the bushes. All Nature, in short, was waking--except
the unseen sluggard up in that room.
He threw another pebble . . .
* * * * *
It seemed to Rupert Baxter that he had been standing there throwing
pebbles through a nightmare eternity. The whole universe had now become
concentrated in his efforts to rouse that log-like sleeper; and for a
brief instant fatigue left him, driven away by a sort of Berserk fury.
And there floated into his mind, as if from some previous existence,
a memory of somebody once standing near where he was standing now and
throwing a flower-pot in at a window at someone. Who it was that had
thrown the thing at whom, he could not at the moment recall; but the
outstanding point on which his mind focused itself was the fact that
the man had had the right idea. This was no time for pebbles. Pebbles
were feeble and inadequate. With one voice the birds, the breezes, the
grasshoppers, the whole chorus of Nature waking to another day seemed
to shout to him, “Say it with flower-pots!”
§ 4
The ability to sleep soundly and deeply is the prerogative, as has been
pointed out earlier in this straightforward narrative of the simple
home-life of the English upper classes, of those who do not think
quickly. The Earl of Emsworth, who had not thought quickly since the
occasion in the summer of 1874 when he had heard his father’s footsteps
approaching the stable-loft in which he, a lad of fifteen, sat smoking
his first cigar, was an excellent sleeper. He started early and
finished late. It was his gentle boast that for more than twenty years
he had never missed his full eight hours. Generally he managed to get
something nearer ten.
But then, as a rule, people did not fling flower-pots through his
window at four in the morning.
Even under this unusual handicap, however, he struggled bravely to
preserve his record. The first of Baxter’s missiles, falling on a
settee, produced no change in his regular breathing. The second, which
struck the carpet, caused him to stir. It was the third, colliding
sharply with his humped back, that definitely woke him. He sat up in
bed and stared at the thing.
In the first moment of his waking, relief was, oddly enough, his chief
emotion. The blow had roused him from a disquieting dream in which he
had been arguing with Angus McAllister about early spring bulbs, and
McAllister, worsted verbally, had hit him in the ribs with a spud. Even
in his dream Lord Emsworth had been perplexed as to what his next move
ought to be; and when he found himself awake and in his bedroom he
was at first merely thankful that the necessity for making a decision
had at any rate been postponed. Angus McAllister might on some future
occasion smite him with a spud, but he had not done it yet.
There followed a period of vague bewilderment. He looked at the
flower-pot. It held no message for him. He had not put it there. He
never took flower-pots to bed. Once, as a child, he had taken a dead
pet rabbit, but never a flower-pot. The whole affair was completely
inscrutable; and his lordship, unable to solve the mystery, was on the
point of taking the statesmanlike course of going to sleep again, when
something large and solid whizzed through the open window and crashed
against the wall, where it broke, but not into such small fragments
that he could not perceive that in its prime it, too, had been a
flower-pot. And at this moment his eyes fell on the carpet and then on
the settee; and the affair passed still farther into the realm of the
inexplicable. The Hon. Freddie Threepwood, who had a poor singing-voice
but was a game trier, had been annoying his father of late by crooning
a ballad ending in the words:
“_It is not raining rain at all:_
_It’s raining vi-o-lets._”
It seemed to Lord Emsworth now that matters had gone a step farther. It
was raining flower-pots.
The customary attitude of the Earl of Emsworth towards all mundane
affairs was one of vague detachment; but this phenomenon was so
remarkable that he found himself stirred to quite a little flutter
of excitement and interest. His brain still refused to cope with the
problem of why anybody should be throwing flower-pots into his room at
this hour--or, indeed, at any hour; but it seemed a good idea to go and
ascertain who this peculiar person was.
He put on his glasses and hopped out of bed and trotted to the window.
And it was while he was on his way there that memory stirred in him, as
some minutes ago it had stirred in the Efficient Baxter. He recalled
that odd episode of a few days back, when that delightful girl, Miss
What’s-her-name, had informed him that his secretary had been throwing
flower-pots at that poet fellow, McTodd. He had been annoyed, he
remembered, that Baxter should so far have forgotten himself. Now,
he found himself more frightened than annoyed. Just as every dog is
permitted one bite without having its sanity questioned, so, if you
consider it in a broad-minded way, may every man be allowed to throw
one flower-pot. But let the thing become a habit, and we look askance.
This strange hobby of his appeared to be growing on Baxter like a
drug, and Lord Emsworth did not like it at all. He had never before
suspected his secretary of an unbalanced mind, but now he mused, as
he tiptoed cautiously to the window, that the Baxter sort of man, the
energetic restless type, was just the kind that does go off his head.
Just some such calamity as this, his lordship felt, he might have
foreseen. Day in, day out, Rupert Baxter had been exercising his brain
ever since he had come to the castle--and now he had gone and sprained
it. Lord Emsworth peeped timidly out from behind a curtain.
His worst fears were realised. It was Baxter, sure enough; and a
tousled, wild-eyed Baxter incredibly clad in lemon-coloured pyjamas.
* * * * *
Lord Emsworth stepped back from the window. He had seen sufficient. The
pyjamas had in some curious way set the coping-stone on his dismay,
and he was now in a condition approximating to panic. That Baxter
should be so irresistibly impelled by his strange mania as actually
to omit to attire himself decently before going out on one of these
flower-pot-hurling expeditions of his seemed to make it all so sad and
hopeless. The dreamy peer was no poltroon, but he was past his first
youth, and it came to him very forcibly that the interviewing and
pacifying of secretaries who ran amok was young man’s work. He stole
across the room and opened the door. It was his purpose to put this
matter into the hands of an agent. And so it came about that Psmith was
aroused some few minutes later from slumber by a touch on the arm and
sat up to find his host’s pale face peering at him in the weird light
of early morning.
“My dear fellow,” quavered Lord Emsworth.
Psmith, like Baxter, was a light sleeper; and it was only a moment
before he was wide awake and exerting himself to do the courtesies.
“Good morning,” he said pleasantly. “Will you take a seat.”
“I am extremely sorry to be obliged to wake you, my dear fellow,” said
his lordship, “but the fact of the matter is, my secretary, Baxter, has
gone off his head.”
“Much?” inquired Psmith, interested.
“He is out in the garden in his pyjamas, throwing flower-pots through
my window.”
“Flower-pots?”
“Flower-pots!”
“Oh, flower-pots!” said Psmith, frowning thoughtfully, as if he had
expected it would be something else. “And what steps are you proposing
to take? That is to say,” he went on, “unless you wish him to continue
throwing flower-pots.”
“My dear fellow . . . !”
“Some people like it,” explained Psmith. “But you do not? Quite so,
quite so. I understand perfectly. We all have our likes and dislikes.
Well, what would you suggest?”
“I was hoping that you might consent to go down--er--having possibly
armed yourself with a good stout stick--and induce him to desist and
return to bed.”
“A sound suggestion in which I can see no flaw,” said Psmith
approvingly. “If you will make yourself at home in here--pardon me for
issuing invitations to you in your own house--I will see what can be
done. I have always found Comrade Baxter a reasonable man, ready to
welcome suggestions from outside sources, and I have no doubt that we
shall easily be able to reach some arrangement.”
He got out of bed, and, having put on his slippers, and his monocle,
paused before the mirror to brush his hair.
“For,” he explained, “one must be natty when entering the presence of a
Baxter.”
He went to the closet and took from among a number of hats a neat
Homburg. Then, having selected from a bowl of flowers on the
mantelpiece a simple white rose, he pinned it in the coat of his
pyjama-suit and announced himself ready.
§ 5
The sudden freshet of vicious energy which had spurred the Efficient
Baxter on to his recent exhibition of marksmanship had not lasted.
Lethargy was creeping back on him even as he stooped to pick up the
flower-pot which had found its billet on Lord Emsworth’s spine. And, as
he stood there after hurling that final missile, he had realised that
that was his last shot. If that produced no results, he was finished.
And, as far as he could gather, it had produced no results whatever.
No head had popped inquiringly out of the window. No sound of anybody
stirring had reached his ears. The place was as still as if he had been
throwing marsh-mallows. A weary sigh escaped from Baxter’s lips. And
a moment later he was reclining on the ground with his head propped
against the terrace wall, a beaten man.
His eyes closed. Sleep, which he had been denying to himself for so
long, would be denied no more. When Psmith arrived, daintily swinging
the Hon. Freddie Threepwood’s niblick like a clouded cane, he had just
begun to snore.
* * * * *
Psmith was a kindly soul. He did not like Rupert Baxter, but that was
no reason why he should allow him to continue lying on turf wet with
the morning dew, thus courting lumbago and sciatica. He prodded Baxter
in the stomach with the niblick, and the secretary sat up, blinking.
And with returning consciousness came a burning sense of grievance.
“Well, you’ve been long enough,” he growled. Then, as he rubbed his
red-rimmed eyes and was able to see more clearly, he perceived who it
was that had come to his rescue. The spectacle of Psmith of all people
beaming benignly down at him was an added offence. “Oh, it’s you?” he
said morosely.
“I in person,” said Psmith genially. “Awake, beloved! Awake, for
morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to
flight; and lo! the hunter of the East has caught the Sultan’s turret
in a noose of light. The Sultan himself,” he added, “you will find
behind yonder window, speculating idly on your motives for bunging
flower-pots at him. Why, if I may venture the question, _did_ you?”
Baxter was in no confiding mood. Without replying, he rose to his feet
and started to trudge wearily along the terrace to the front door.
Psmith fell into step beside him.
“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 off in 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 sill 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.