A Pelican at Blandings Read Online Free PDF Page A

run to marriage?'
    'I'm all right as far as money's concerned. I've got a nest egg . Do you know the Bender gallery?'
    'Shooting gallery?'
    'Picture gallery.'
    'Never heard of it.'
    'It's in Bond Street. Not one of the big ones, but doing all
right, and I'm a kind of sleeping partner. Joe Bender does all
the running of it. He's a man I knew at Oxford, and he took
over the gallery from his father. He needed more capital and I
had just been left quite a bit by an aunt of mine, so I put it in.'
    'All you'd got?'
    'Most of it.'
    'A rash move.'
    'Not rash at all. Joe's a very live wire, all tortoiseshell-rimmed
spectacles and zip. We'll make our fortunes.'
    'Says who?'
    'I read it in the crystal ball. Joe's just pulled off a big deal.
Ever heard of Robichaux?'
    'No.'
    'French painter. One of the Barbizon group.'
    'What about him?'
    'He's suddenly started getting hot. That's always happening
with these old French artists, Joe tells me. They jog along all
their lives hardly able to give their stuff away, and then they die
and suddenly the sky's the limit. There was a time when you
could buy a Renoir for a few francs, and now look at him. If
you want a Renoir today, you have to sell the family jewels. It's
getting to be the same with this bloke Robichaux. A year or
two ago nobody would touch him, but now a regular boom has
started, and what I was going to say was that Joe sold a
Robichaux the other day for a sum that made me gasp. I
wouldn't have thought it possible.'
    'Anything's possible with the world as full of mugs as it is.
Who was this cloth-headed purchaser?'
    'I was saving that up for the big surprise at the end. None
other than my future uncle-by-marriage.'
    Gally snorted incredulously.
    'Dunstable?'
    'Yes, Uncle Alaric.'
    'I don't believe it.'
    'Why not?'
    'Dunstable never bought a picture in his life. A comic
seaside postcard would be more his form.'
    'Perhaps he mistook it for a comic seaside postcard.
Anyway, he bought it. You can ask Joe.'
    'Amazing. Was he tight?'
    'Not having been there when the deal went through, I
couldn't tell you. I'll enquire if you like.'
    'Don't bother. We'll just take it as read that he must have
been. There's a boom, you say, in this Robichaux chap's work?'
    'Price going up all the time, I believe.'
    Gally shook his head.
    'It still doesn't explain Dunstable's departure from the form
book. With any ordinary man one would assume that he
bought the thing on spec, hoping to sell at a profit, but not
your Uncle Alaric. He wouldn't risk a bob on the deadest of
certs. No, we fall back on our original theory, that he must
have been stewed to the gills. Now who would that be?' said
Gally, as the telephone rang. He went out into the hall, where
the instrument was, and John was at liberty to devote his
thoughts to the girl he loved.
    His had been a long and cautious courtship, culminating
with unforeseen suddenness in an abruptly blurted out
proposal in the cab in which he was taking her home from a
cocktail party, and his elation at the happy outcome of that
proposal had been marred by the fact that there had been no
time for anything in the nature of extended conversation. He
was looking forward to going into the matter in what is called
depth at their next meeting.
    He was just thinking how infinitely superior Linda Gilpin
was to any of the poor female fishes of whom in the last few
years he had mistakenly supposed himself to be enamoured,
and was thanking his guardian angel for his excellent staffwork
in not allowing him to become really involved with any of
them, when Gally returned.
    He seemed amused.
    'Odd coincidence,' he said, 'that we should have been
talking about Dunstable. That was my brother Clarence, and
he was talking about him, too. It seems that hell has broken
loose at Blandings. My sister Connie has blown in from
America with a female friend, which alone would have been
enough to shake Clarence to his foundations, and on top of
that Dunstable is arriving with his niece on the early