Free Galahad at Blandings by P.G. Wodehouse Page B

cords in mid—season form again,
she expressed her concern and agitation with an EEEEEEEEEEEE!! which probably
made itself heard and excited interest in many a distant parish.
    It
certainly interested Beach and Constable Evans, chuckling over the sergeant’s
story some dozen yards away. Her voice came to them like a bugle call to a
couple of war horses. They had seen Sam emerge and start running along the
road, but had thought nothing of it, attributing his mobility to an appointment
suddenly remembered. When, however they realised that his departure had been
the cause of Marlene Wellbeloved going EEEEEEEEEEEE!!, reason told them that
there was something sinister afoot. Level-headed girls like Marlene do not go
EEEEEEEEEEEE!! without solid grounds for doing so. With one accord they ran
towards her the constable in the lead, Beach, who was not built for speed, lying
a length or two behind.
    ‘Smatter?’
asked PC. Evans, always a man of few words. A trained observer he noticed that
Marlene was wringing her hands, and he found the gesture significant. Coming on
top of that EEEEEEEEEEEE!!, it seemed to PC. Evans that it meant something.
    ‘Oh, Mr
Beach! Oh, Mr Beach!’
    ‘What
is it, Miss Wellbeloved?’
    ‘That
feller’s gone off with your watch!’ cried Marlene, her hands continuing to
gyrate. ‘He put it in his pocket and ran off with it!’
    The
effect of these words on the two men differed substantially. They froze Beach
into a statue of dismay, for his watch was very dear to him and the bereavement
made him feel like one of those nineteenth-century poets who were always losing
dear gazelles. He had not experienced such a sense of desolation and horror
since the night when a dinner guest at the castle had asked for a little water
to put in his claret. It made him wonder what the world was coming to.
    Constable
Evans, on the other hand, had found in her statement all the uplifting
properties of some widely advertised tonic. Where Beach mourned, he rejoiced.
The cross which all English country policemen have to bear is the lack of
spirit and initiative in the local criminal classes. A man like New York’s
Officer Garroway has always more dope pushers and heist guys and fiends with
hatchet slaying six at his disposal than he knows what to do with, but in
Market Blandings you were lucky if you got an occasional dog without a collar
or Saturday-night drunk and disorderly. It was months since Constable Evans had
made a decent pinch, and this sudden outbreak of crime brought out all the best
in him. To leap on his machine and begin pedalling like a contestant in a
six-day bicycle race was with him the work of an instant. He did not even stop
to say ‘Ho’, his customary comment on the unusual.
    It was
not long before he sighted the man wanted by the police. Sam had soon given up
the chase, realising the futility of trying to overtake on foot a cyclist who
had had fifty yards’ start. He was standing now in the middle of the road, his
lips moving in a silent soliloquy which, if audible, would have had no chance
of passing the censors even in these free—speaking days.
    The
sunny mood in which he had begun the day had changed completely. Five minutes
before, he had been the little friend of all the world and could have stepped
straight into a Dickens’ novel and no questions asked, but now he viewed the
human race with a jaundiced eye and could see no future for it. When Constable
Evans came riding up, he thought he had never beheld a police officer he liked
the looks of less. The man seemed to him to have not a single quality to
recommend him to critical approval.
    Nor did
the constable appear to be liking him. It would have taken a very poor
physiognomist to have read into his glance anything even remotely resembling
affection. He had a face that seemed to have been carved from some durable
substance like granite, and it was with a baleful glitter in his eye that he
lowered his bicycle to the ground. As he advanced