A Damsel in Distress
P.G.Wodehouse (Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse)
CHAPTER 6. Page 2
"Will you listen to me for a moment?" shouted Percy. He began to speak rapidly, as one conscious of the necessity of saying his say while the saying was good. "The facts are these. I was walking along Piccadilly on my way to lunch at the club, when, near Burlington Arcade, I was amazed to see Maud."
Lady Caroline uttered an exclamation.
"Maud? But Maud was here."
"I can't understand it," went on Lord Marshmoreton, pursuing his remarks. Righteous indignation had, he felt, gone well. It might be judicious to continue in that vein, though privately he held the opinion that nothing in Percy's life so became him as this assault on the Force. Lord Marshmoreton, who in his time had committed all the follies of youth, had come to look on his blameless son as scarcely human. "It's not as if you were wild. You've never got into any scrapes at Oxford. You've spent your time collecting old china and prayer rugs. You wear flannel next your skin . . ."
"Will you please be quiet," said Lady Caroline impatiently. "Go on, Percy."
"Oh, very well," said Lord Marshmoreton. "I only spoke. I merely made a remark."
"You say you saw Maud in Piccadilly, Percy?"
"Precisely. I was on the point of putting it down to an extraordinary resemblance, when suddenly she got into a cab. Then I knew."
Lord Marshmoreton could not permit this to pass in silence. He was a fair-minded man.
"She didn't take a cab."
"You just said she did," said Lord Marshmoreton cleverly.
"I said she got into a cab. There was somebody else already in the cab. A man. Aunt Caroline, it was the man."
"Good gracious," ejaculated Lady Caroline, falling into a chair as if she had been hamstrung.
"I am absolutely convinced of it," proceeded Lord Belpher solemnly. "His behaviour was enough to confirm my suspicions. The cab had stopped in a block of the traffic, and I went up and requested him in a perfectly civil manner to allow me to look at the lady who had just got in. He denied that there was a lady in the cab. And I had seen her jump in with my own eyes. Throughout the conversation he was leaning out of the window with the obvious intention of screening whoever was inside from my view. I followed him along Piccadilly in another cab, and tracked him to the Carlton. When I arrived there he was standing on the pavement outside. There were no signs of Maud. I demanded that he tell me her whereabouts. . ."
"I am. I am," said Lord Marshmoreton hastily. "The maid replied: 'They're at the wash.' Of course I am. Go on, Percy. Good God, boy, don't take all day telling us your story."
"At that moment the fool of a policeman came up and wanted to know what the matter was. I lost my head. I admit it freely. The policeman grasped my shoulder, and I struck him."
"Where?" asked Lord Marshmoreton, a stickler for detail.
"What does that matter?" demanded Lady Caroline. "You did quite right, Percy. These insolent jacks in office ought not to be allowed to manhandle people. Tell me, what this man was like?"
"Extremely ordinary-looking. In fact, all I can remember about him was that he was clean-shaven. I cannot understand how Maud could have come to lose her head over such a man. He seemed to me to have no attraction whatever," said Lord Belpher, a little unreasonably, for Apollo himself would hardly appear attractive when knocking one's best hat off.
"Precisely. If we wanted further proof, he was an American. You recollect that we heard that the man in Wales was American."
was a portentous silence. Percy stared at the floor. Lady Caroline breathed deeply. Lord Marshmoreton, feeling that something was expected of him, said "Good Gad!" and gazed seriously at a stuffed owl on a bracket. Maud and Reggie Byng came in.
"What ho, what ho, what ho!" said Reggie breezily. He always believed in starting a conversation well, and putting people at their ease. "What ho! What ho!"
Maud braced herself for the encounter.
"Hullo, Percy, dear," she said, meeting brother's accusing eye with the perfect composure that comes only from a thoroughly guilty conscience. "What's all this I hear about your being the Scourge of London? Reggie says that policemen dive down manholes when they see you coming."
The chill in the air would have daunted a less courageous girl. Lady Caroline had risen, and was staring sternly. Percy was pulling the puffs of an overwrought soul. Lord Marshmoreton, whose thoughts had wandered off to the rose garden, pulled himself together and tried to look menacing. Maud went on without waiting for a reply. She was all bubbling gaiety and insouciance, a charming picture of young English girlhood that nearly made her brother foam at the mouth.
"Father dear," she said, attaching herself affectionately to his buttonhole, "I went round the links in eighty-three this morning. I did the long hole in four. One under par, a thing I've never done before in my life." ("Bless my soul," said Lord Marshmoreton weakly, as, with an apprehensive eye on his sister, he patted his daughter's shoulder.) "First, I sent a screecher of a drive right down the middle of the fairway. Then I took my brassey and put the ball just on the edge of the green. A hundred and eighty yards it was an inch. My approach putt--"
Lady Caroline, who was no devotee of the royal and ancient game, interrupted the recital.
"Never mind what you did this morning. What did you do yesterday afternoon?"
"Yes," said Lord Belpher. "Where were you yesterday afternoon?"
"Whatever do you mean?"
"Piccadilly? The place where Percy fights policemen? I don't understand."
Lady Caroline was no sportsman. She put one of those direct questions, capable of being answered only by "Yes" or "No", which ought not to be allowed in controversy. They are the verbal equivalent of shooting a sitting bird.
"Did you or did you not go to London yesterday, Maud?"
The monstrous unfairness of this method of attack pained Maud. From childhood up she had held the customary feminine views upon the Lie Direct. As long as it was a question of suppression of the true or suggestion of the false she had no scruples. But she had a distaste for deliberate falsehood. Faced now with a choice between two evils, she chose the one which would at least leave her self-respect.
Lady Caroline looked at Lord Belpher. Lord Belpher looked at Lady Caroline.
"You went to meet that American of yours?"
Reggie Byng slid softly from the room. He felt that he would be happier elsewhere. He had been an acutely embarrassed spectator of this distressing scene, and had been passing the time by shuffling his feet, playing with his coat buttons and perspiring.
"Don't go, Reggie," said Lord Belpher.
"Well, what I mean to say is--family row and what not--if you see what I mean--I've one or two things I ought to do--"
He vanished. Lord Belpher frowned a sombre frown. "Then it was that man who knocked my hat off?"
"What do you mean?" said Lady Caroline. "Knocked your hat off? You never told me he knocked your hat off."
"It was when I was asking him to let me look inside the cab. I had grasped the handle of the door, when he suddenly struck my hat, causing it to fly off. And, while I was picking it up, he drove away."
"C'k," exploded Lord Marshmoreton. "C'k, c'k, c'k." He twisted his face by a supreme exertion of will power into a mask of indignation. "You ought to have had the scoundrel arrested," he said vehemently. "It was a technical assault."
"The man who knocked your hat off, Percy," said Maud, "was not . . . He was a different man altogether. A stranger."
"As if you would be in a cab with a stranger," said Lady Caroline caustically. "There are limits, I hope, to even your indiscretions."
Lord Marshmoreton cleared his throat. He was sorry for Maud, whom he loved.
"Now, looking at the matter broadly--"
"Be quiet," said Lady Caroline.
Lord Marshmoreton subsided.
"I wanted to avoid you," said Maud, "so I jumped into the first cab I saw."
"I don't believe it," said Percy.
"It's the truth."
"You are simply trying to put us off the scent."
Lady Caroline turned to Maud. Her manner was plaintive. She looked like a martyr at the stake who deprecatingly lodges a timid complaint, fearful the while lest she may be hurting the feelings of her persecutors by appearing even for a moment out of sympathy with their activities.
"My dear child, why will you not be reasonable in this matter? Why will you not let yourself be guided by those who are older and wiser than you?"
"Exactly," said Lord Belpher.
"The whole thing is too absurd."
"Precisely," said Lord Belpher.
"Please do not interrupt, Percy. Now, you've made me forget what I was going to say."
"To my mind," said Lord Marshmoreton, coming to the surface once more, "the proper attitude to adopt on occasions like the present--"
"Please," said Lady Caroline.
Lord Marshmoreton stopped, and resumed his silent communion with the stuffed bird.
"You can't stop yourself being in love, Aunt Caroline," said Maud.
Lord Marshmoreton tore himself away from the bird.
"Why, when I was at Oxford in the year '87," he said chattily, "I fancied myself in love with the female assistant at a tobacconist shop. Desperately in love, dammit. Wanted to marry her. I recollect my poor father took me away from Oxford and kept me here at Belpher under lock and key. Lock and key, dammit. I was deucedly upset at the time, I remember." His mind wandered off into the glorious past. "I wonder what that girl's name was. Odd one can't remember names. She had chestnut hair and a mole on the side of her chin. I used to kiss it, I recollect--"
Lady Caroline, usually such an advocate of her brother's researches into the family history, cut the reminiscences short.
"Never mind that now."
"I don't. I got over it. That's the moral."
"Well," said Lady Caroline, "at any rate poor father acted with great good sense on that occasion. There seems nothing to do but to treat Maud in just the same way. You shall not stir a step from the castle till you have got over this dreadful infatuation. You will be watched."
"I shall watch you," said Lord Belpher solemnly, "I shall watch your every movement."
A dreamy look came into Maud's brown eyes.
"Stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage," she said softly.
"That wasn't your experience, Percy, my boy," said Lord Marshmoreton.
"They make a very good imitation," said Lady Caroline coldly, ignoring the interruption.
Maud faced her defiantly. She looked like a princess in captivity facing her gaolers.
"I don't care. I love him, and I always shall love him, and nothing is ever going to stop me loving him--because I love him," she concluded a little lamely.
"Nonsense," said Lady Caroline. "In a year from now you will have forgotten his name. Don't you agree with me, Percy?"
"Quite," said Lord Belpher.
"Deuced hard things to remember, names," said Lord Marshmoreton. "If I've tried once to remember that tobacconist girl's name, I've tried a hundred times. I have an idea it began with an 'L.' Muriel or Hilda or something."
"Within a year," said Lady Caroline, "you will be wondering how you ever came to be so foolish. Don't you think so, Percy?"
"Quite," said Lord Belpher.
Lord Marshmoreton turned on him irritably.
"Good God, boy, can't you answer a simple question with a plain affirmative? What do you mean--quite? If somebody came to me and pointed you out and said, 'Is that your son?' do you suppose I should say 'Quite?' I wish the devil you didn't collect prayer rugs. It's sapped your brain."
"They say prison life often weakens the intellect, father," said Maud. She moved towards the door and turned the handle. Albert, the page boy, who had been courting earache by listening at the keyhole, straightened his small body and scuttled away. "Well, is that all, Aunt Caroline? May I go now?"
"Certainly. I have said all I wished to say."
"Very well. I'm sorry to disobey you, but I can't help it."
"You'll find you can help it after you've been cooped up here for a few more months," said Percy.
"Love laughs at locksmiths," she murmured softly, and passed from the room.
Lord Belpher wandered moodily to the window and looked out into the gathering darkness.
"And this has to happen," he said bitterly, "on the eve of my twenty-first birthday."