Free Service with a Smile by P.G. Wodehouse Page A

camp, he had been mixed up in that sort of thing. Then he had
been on the receiving, not the giving, end. Some young desperadoes from a
school allergic to Eton had cut the ropes of the guard tent in which he was
reposing, and he could recall vividly his emotions on suddenly finding himself
entangled in a cocoon of canvas. His whole life — some fifteen years at that
time — had passed before him, and in suggesting a similar experience for these
Church Lads Ickenham, he realized, had shown his usual practical good sense.
    For a
moment his mild face glowed. Then the light died out of it. Would it, he was
asking himself, be altogether prudent to embark on an enterprise of which
Connie must inevitably disapprove? Connie had an uncanny knack of finding out
things, and if she were to trace this righteous act of vengeance to him…
    ‘I’ll
turn it over in my mind,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much for the suggestion.’
    ‘Not at
all,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘Ponder on it at your leisure.’

 
     
    Chapter
Five
     
     
     
    1
     
    The Duke’s walk took him
to the Empress’s sty, and he lit a cigar and stood leaning on the rail, gazing
at her as she made a late breakfast.
    Except
for a certain fullness of figure, the Duke of Dunstable and Empress of Blandings
had little in common. There was no fusion between their souls. The next ten
minutes accordingly saw nothing in the nature of an exchange of ideas. The Duke
smoked his cigar in silence, the Empress in her single-minded way devoted
herself to the consumption of her daily nourishment amounting to fifty-seven
thousand five hundred calories.
    Lord Emsworth
would not have believed such a thing possible, but the spectacle of this
supreme pig was plunging the Duke in gloom. It was not with admiration that he
gazed upon her, but with a growing fury. There, he was saying to himself, golloped
a Berkshire sow which, if conveyed to his Wiltshire home, would mean a cool two
thousand pounds added to his bank balance, and no hope of conveying her. The
thought was like a dagger in his heart.
    His
cigar having reached the point where, if persevered with, it would burn his
moustache, he threw it away, straightened himself with a peevish grunt and was
about to leave the noble animal to her proteids and carbohydrates, when a voice
said ‘Pahdon me’, and turning he perceived the pie-faced female whom he had so
recently put in her place.
    ‘Get
out of here!’ he said in his polished way, ‘I’m busy.’
    Where a
lesser woman would have quailed and beaten an apologetic retreat, Lavender
Briggs stood firm, her dignified calm unruffled. No man, however bald his head
or white his moustache, could intimidate a girl who had served under the banner
of Lord Tilbury of the Mammoth Publishing Company.
    ‘I
would like a word with Your Grace,’ she said in the quiet, level voice which only
an upbringing in Kensington followed by years of secretarial college can
produce. ‘It is with refahrence,’ she went on, ignoring the purple flush which
had crept over her companion’s face, ‘to this pig of Lord Emsworth’s. I chanced
to overhear what you were saying to Lady Constance just now.’
    A
cascade of hair dashed itself against the Duke’s Wellingtonian nose.
    ‘Eavesdropping,
eh? Listening at keyholes, what?’
    ‘Quate,’
said Lavender Briggs, unmoved by the acidity of his tone. In her time she had
bean spoken acidly to by experts. ‘You were urging Lady Constance to pay
somebody to purloin the animal. To which her reply’ — she consulted a shorthand
note in her notebook — ‘was “My dear Alaric! “, indicating that she was not
prepare-ahed to consid-ah the idea-h. Had you made the suggestion to me, you
would not have received such a dusty answer.’
    ‘Such a
what?’
    A
contemptuous light flickered for an instant behind the harlequin glasses.
Lavender Briggs moved in circles where literary allusions were grabbed off the bat,
and the other’s failure to get his hands to