Blandings Castle and Elsewhere by P. G. Wodehouse Page A

Beach.'
    'Good evening, sir. Happy to see you once more.'
    'Thanks. I'm spending a few days at the Vicarage with my
father. I got down here by the five-five.'
    Lord Emsworth cut peevishly in upon these civilities.
    'Young man,' he said, 'what do you mean by telling me
that my pig would respond to that cry? It does nothing of the
kind.'
    'You can't have done it right.'
    'I did it precisely as you instructed me. I have had, moreover,
the assistance of Beach here and my niece Angela—'
    'Let's hear a sample.'
    Lord Emsworth cleared his throat.
    'Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey!'
    James Belford shook his head.
    'Nothing like it,' he said. 'You want to begin the "Hoo" in a
low minor of two quarter notes in four-four time. From this
build gradually to a higher note, until at last the voice is soaring
in full crescendo, reaching F sharp on the natural scale and
dwelling for two retarded half-notes, then breaking into a
shower of accidental grace-notes.'
    'God bless my soul!' said Lord Emsworth, appalled. 'I shall
never be able to do it.'
    'Jimmy will do it for you,' said Angela. 'Now that he's engaged
to me, he'll be one of the family and always popping about here.
He can do it every day till the show is over.'
    James Belford nodded.
    'I think that would be the wisest plan. It is doubtful if an
amateur could ever produce real results. You need a voice that
has been trained on the open prairie and that has gathered
richness and strength from competing with tornadoes. You
need a manly, sunburned, wind-scorched voice with a suggestion
in it of the crackling of corn husks and the whisper of evening
breezes in the fodder. Like this!'
    Resting his hands on the rail before him, James Belford
swelled before their eyes like a young balloon. The muscles on
his cheekbones stood out, his forehead became corrugated, his
ears seemed to shimmer. Then, at the very height of the tension,
he let it go like, as the poet beautifully puts it, the sound of a
great Amen.
    'Pig-HOOOOO-OOO-OOO-O-O-ey!'
    They looked at him, awed. Slowly, fading off across hill and
dale, the vast bellow died away. And suddenly, as it died,
another, softer sound succeeded it. A sort of gulpy, gurgly,
plobby, squishy, wofflesome sound, like a thousand eager men
drinking soup in a foreign restaurant. And, as he heard it, Lord
Emsworth uttered a cry of rapture.
    The Empress was feeding.

4 COMPANY FOR GERTRUDE
    T HE Hon. Freddie Threepwood, married to the charming
daughter of Donaldson's Dog-Biscuits of Long Island City,
N.Y., and sent home by his father-in-law to stimulate the sale
of the firm's products in England, naturally thought right
away of his aunt Georgiana. There, he reasoned, was a woman
who positively ate dog-biscuits. She had owned, when he was
last in the country, a matter of four Pekes, two Poms, a Yorkshire
terrier, five Sealyhams, a Borzoi and an Airedale: and if that
didn't constitute a promising market for Donaldson's Dog-Joy
('Get your dog thinking the Donaldson way'), he would like to
know what did. The Alcester connection ought, he considered,
to be good for at least ten of the half-crown cellophane-sealed
packets a week.
    A day or so after his arrival, accordingly, he hastened round to
Upper Brook Street to make a sales-talk: and it was as he was
coming rather pensively out of the house at the conclusion of the
interview that he ran into Beefy Bingham, who had been up at
Oxford with him. Several years had passed since the other, then
a third year Blood and Trial Eights man, had bicycled along
tow-paths saying rude things through a megaphone about Freddie's
stomach, but he recognized him instantly. And this in spite
of the fact that the passage of time appeared to have turned old
Beefers into a clergyman. For the colossal frame of this Bingham
was now clad in sober black, and he was wearing one of those
collars which are kept in position without studs, purely by the
exercise of will-power.
    'Beefers!' cried Freddie, his slight gloom vanishing in the
pleasure of this happy