Something New, P. G. Wodehouse [the little red hen ebook .TXT] 📗

seemed, were acting in much the same capacity as the attaches of royalty. One was there to conduct Joan to the presence of Mrs. Twemlow, the housekeeper; the other to lead Ashe to where Beach, the butler, waited to do honor to the valet of the castle's most important guest.

After a short walk down a stone-flagged passage Joan and her escort turned to the right. Ashe's objective appeared to be located to the left. He parted from Joan with regret. Her moral support would have been welcome.

Presently his scullery maid stopped at a door and tapped thereon. A fruity voice, like old tawny port made audible, said: "Come in!" Ashe's guide opened the door.

"The gentleman, Mr. Beach," said she, and scuttled away to the less rarefied atmosphere of the kitchen.

Ashe's first impression of Beach, the butler, was one of tension. Other people, confronted for the first time with Beach, had felt the same. He had that strained air of being on the very point of bursting that one sees in bullfrogs and toy balloons. Nervous and imaginative men, meeting Beach, braced themselves involuntarily, stiffening their muscles for the explosion. Those who had the pleasure of more intimate acquaintance with him soon passed this stage, just as people whose homes are on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius become immune to fear of eruptions.

As far back as they could remember Beach had always looked as though an apoplectic fit were a matter of minutes; but he never had apoplexy and in time they came to ignore the possibility of it. Ashe, however, approaching him with a fresh eye, had the feeling that this strain could not possibly continue and that within a very short space of time the worst must happen. The prospect of this did much to rouse him from the coma into which he had been frozen by the rigors of the journey.

Butlers as a class seem to grow less and less like anything human in proportion to the magnificence of their surroundings. There is a type of butler employed in the comparatively modest homes of small country gentlemen who is practically a man and a brother; who hobnobs with the local tradesmen, sings a good comic song at the village inn, and in times of crisis will even turn to and work the pump when the water supply suddenly fails.

The greater the house the more does the butler diverge from this type. Blandings Castle was one of the more important of England's show places, and Beach accordingly had acquired a dignified inertia that almost qualified him for inclusion in the vegetable kingdom. He moved—when he moved at all—slowly. He distilled speech with the air of one measuring out drops of some precious drug. His heavy-lidded eyes had the fixed expression of a statue's.

With an almost imperceptible wave of a fat white hand, he conveyed to Ashe that he desired him to sit down. With a stately movement of his other hand, he picked up a kettle, which simmered on the hob. With an inclination of his head, he called Ashe's attention to a decanter on the table.

In another moment Ashe was sipping a whisky toddy, with the feeling that he had been privileged to assist at some mystic rite. Mr. Beach, posting himself before the fire and placing his hands behind his back, permitted speech to drip from him.

"I have not the advantage of your name, Mr.——"

Ashe introduced himself. Beach acknowledged the information with a half bow.

"You must have had a cold ride, Mr. Marson. The wind is in the east."

Ashe said yes; the ride had been cold.

"When the wind is in the east," continued Mr. Beach, letting each syllable escape with apparent reluctance, "I suffer from my feet."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I suffer from my feet," repeated the butler, measuring out the drops. "You are a young man, Mr. Marson. Probably you do not know what it is to suffer from your feet." He surveyed Ashe, his whisky toddy and the wall beyond him, with heavy-lidded inscrutability. "Corns!" he said.

Ashe said he was sorry.

"I suffer extremely from my feet—not only corns. I have but recently recovered from an ingrowing toenail. I suffered greatly from my ingrowing toenail. I suffer from swollen joints."

Ashe regarded this martyr with increasing disfavor. It is the flaw in the character of many excessively healthy young men that, though kind-hearted enough in most respects, they listen with a regrettable feeling of impatience to the confessions of those less happily situated as regards the ills of the flesh. Rightly or wrongly, they hold that these statements should be reserved for the ear of the medical profession, and other and more general topics selected for conversation with laymen.

"I'm sorry," he said hastily. "You must have had a bad time. Is there a large house party here just now?"

"We are expecting," said Mr. Beach, "a number of guests. We shall in all probability sit down thirty or more to dinner."

"A responsibility for you," said Ashe ingratiatingly, well pleased to be quit of the feet topic.

Mr. Beach nodded.

"You are right, Mr. Marson. Few persons realize the responsibilities of a man in my position. Sometimes, I can assure you, it preys on my mind, and I suffer from nervous headaches."

Ashe began to feel like a man trying to put out a fire which, as fast as he checks it at one point, breaks out at another.

"Sometimes when I come off duty everything gets blurred. The outlines of objects grow indistinct and misty. I have to sit down in a chair. The pain is excruciating."

"But it helps you to forget the pain in your feet."

"No, no. I suffer from my feet simultaneously."

Ashe gave up the struggle.

"Tell me all about your feet," he said.

And Mr. Beach told him all about his feet.

The pleasantest functions must come to an end, and the moment arrived when the final word on the subject of swollen joints was spoken. Ashe, who had resigned himself to a permanent contemplation of the subject, could hardly believe he heard correctly when, at the end of some ten minutes, his companion changed the conversation.

"You have been with Mr. Peters some time, Mr. Marson?"

"Eh? Oh! Oh, no only since last Wednesday."

"Indeed! Might I inquire whom you assisted before that?"

For a moment Ashe did what he would not have believed himself capable of doing—regretted that the topic of feet was no longer under discussion. The question placed him in an awkward position. If he lied and credited himself with a lengthy experience as a valet, he risked exposing himself. If he told the truth and confessed that this was his maiden effort in the capacity of gentleman's gentleman, what would the butler think? There were objections to each course, but to tell the truth was the easier of the two; so he told it.

"Your first situation?" said Mr. Beach. "Indeed!"

"I was—er—doing something else before I met Mr. Peters," said
Ashe.

Mr. Beach was too well-bred to be inquisitive, but his eyebrows were not.

"Ah!" he said. "?" cried his eyebrows. "?—?—?"

Ashe ignored the eyebrows.

"Something different," he said.

There was an awkward silence. Ashe appreciated its awkwardness. He was conscious of a grievance against Mr. Peters. Why could not Mr. Peters have brought him down here as his secretary? To be sure, he had advanced some objection to that course in their conversation at the offices of Mainprice, Mainprice & Boole; but merely a silly, far-fetched objection. He wished he had had the sense to fight the point while there was time; but at the moment when they were arranging plans he had been rather tickled by the thought of becoming a valet. The notion had a pleasing musical-comedy touch about it. Why had he not foreseen the complications that must ensue? He could tell by the look on his face that this confounded butler was waiting for him to give a full explanation. What would he think if he withheld it? He would probably suppose that Ashe had been in prison.

Well, there was nothing to be done about it. If Beach was suspicious, he must remain suspicious. Fortunately the suspicions of a butler do not matter much.

Mr. Beach's eyebrows were still mutely urging him to reveal all, but Ashe directed his gaze at that portion of the room which Mr. Beach did not fill. He would be hanged if he was going to let himself be hypnotized by a pair of eyebrows into incriminating himself! He glared stolidly at the pattern of the wallpaper, which represented a number of birds of an unknown species seated on a corresponding number of exotic shrubs.

The silence was growing oppressive. Somebody had to break it soon. And as Mr. Beach was still confining himself to the language of the eyebrow and apparently intended to fight it out on that line if it took all Summer, Ashe himself broke it.

It seemed to him as he reconstructed the scene in bed that night that Providence must have suggested the subject to Mr. Peters' indigestion; for the mere mention of his employer's sufferings acted like magic on the butler.

"I might have had better luck while I was looking for a place," said Ashe. "I dare say you know how bad-tempered Mr. Peters is. He is dyspeptic."

"So," responded Mr. Beach, "I have been informed." He brooded for a space. "I, too," he proceeded, "suffer from my stomach. I have a weak stomach. The lining of my stomach is not what I could wish the lining of my stomach to be."

"Tell me," said Ashe gratefully, leaning forward in an attitude of attention, "all about the lining of your stomach."

It was a quarter of an hour later when Mr. Beach was checked in his discourse by the chiming of the little clock on the mantelpiece. He turned round and gazed at it with surprise not unmixed with displeasure.

"So late?" he said. "I shall have to be going about my duties. And you, also, Mr. Marson, if I may make the suggestion. No doubt Mr. Peters will be wishing to have your assistance in preparing for dinner. If you go along the passage outside you will come to the door that separates our portion of the house from the other. I must beg you to excuse me. I have to go to the cellar."

Following his directions Ashe came after a walk of a few yards to a green-baize door, which, swinging at his push, gave him a view of what he correctly took to be the main hall of the castle—a wide, comfortable space, ringed with settees and warmed by a log fire burning in a mammoth fireplace. On the right a broad staircase led to the upper regions.

It was at this point that Ashe realized the incompleteness of Mr. Beach's directions. Doubtless, the broad staircase would take him to the floor on which were the bedrooms; but how was he to ascertain, without the tedious process of knocking and inquiring at each door, which was the one assigned to Mr. Peters? It was too late to go back and ask the butler for further guidance; already he was on his way to the cellar in quest of the evening's wine.

As he stood irresolute a door across the hall opened and a man of his own age came out. Through the doorway, which the young man held open for an instant while he answered a question from somebody within, Ashe had a glimpse of glass-topped cases.

Could this be the museum—his goal? The next moment the door, opening a few inches more, revealed the outlying portions of an Egyptian mummy and brought certainty. It flashed across Ashe's mind that the sooner he explored the museum and located Mr. Peters' scarab, the better. He decided to ask Beach to take him there as soon as he had leisure.

Meantime the young man had closed the museum door and was crossing the hall. He was a wiry-haired, severe-looking young man, with a sharp nose and eyes that gleamed through rimless spectacles—none other, in fact than Lord Emsworth's private secretary, the Efficient Baxter. Ashe hailed him:

"I say, old man, would you mind telling me how I get to Mr.
Peters' room? I've lost my bearings."

He did not reflect that this was hardly the way in which valets in the best society addressed their superiors. That is the worst of adopting what might be called a character part. One can manage the business well enough; it is the dialogue that provides the pitfalls.

Mr. Baxter would have accorded a hearty agreement to the statement that this was not the way in which a valet should have spoken to him; but