'We can do better than that and take our custom elsewhere said Glodstone and stalked out of the pub. 'That's the trouble wit the damned world today, people don't know their place any more In my father's day, that fellow would have lost his licence and no mistake. Anyway, with a manner like that, the beer was probably flat.'
They drove on to the next village and stopped again. This time Glodstone lowered his voice and they were served. As they sat on bench outside admiring their reflections in the shining waxed coachwork of the great car and basking in the comments it caused Glodstone cheered up.
'You can say what you like but there's nothing to touch a pint of the best British bitter,' he said.
'Yes,' said Peregrine, who had hardly touched his beer and didn't much like it anyway.
'That's something you won't find in any other country. The Hun swills lager by the gallon and the Dutch have their own brew which isn't bad but it's got no body to it. Same with the Belgians, but it's all bottled beer. Mind you, it's better than the Frog muck. Charge the earth for the stuff too but that's the French all over. Dashed odd, when you come to think of it, that the wine-drinking countries have never been a match for the beer ones when it comes to a good scrap. Probably something in the saying they've got no guts and no stomach for a fight.'
Peregrine drank some more beer to mark his allegiance while Glodstone spouted his prejudices and the world shrank until there was only one decent place to be, and that was sitting in the summer twilight in an English village drinking English beer and gazing at one's reflection in the coachwork of an English car that had been made in 1927. But as they drove back to the school, Glodstone's melancholy returned. 'I'm going to miss you,' he said. 'You're my sort of chap. Dependable. So if there's anything I can ever do for you, you've only to ask.'
'That's jolly good of you, sir,' said Peregrine.
'And another thing. We can forget the 'sir' bit from now on. I mean, it's the end of term and all that. All the same, I think you'd better hop out when we get to the school gates. No need to give the Head any reason to complain, eh?'
So Peregrine walked back up the avenue of beeches to the school while Glodstone parked the Bentley and morosely considered his future. 'You and I are out of place here, old girl,' he murmured, patting the Bentley's headlight affectionately, 'we were born in a different world.'
He went up to his room and poured himself a whisky and sat in the darkening twilight wondering what the devil he was going to do with himself during the holidays. If only he'd been younger, he'd be inclined to join Major Fetherington's walkabout in Wales. But no, he'd look damned silly now and anyway the Major didn't like anyone poaching on his own private ground. It was a fairly desperate Glodstone who finally took himself off to bed and spent half an hour reading The Thirty-Nine Steps again. 'Why the hell can't something challenging come my way for once?' he thought as he switched out the light.
A week later it did. As the last coach left for the station and the cars departed, Slymne struck. The School Secretary's office was conveniently empty when he tucked the envelope addressed to G. P. Glodstone, Esq., into the pigeonhole already jammed with Glodstone's uncollected mail. Slymne's timing was nicely calculated. Glodstone was notorious for not bothering with letters until the pigeonhole was full. 'A load of bumpf,' he had once declared. 'Anyone would think I was a pen-pusher and not a schoolmaster.' But with the end of term, he would be forced to deal with his correspondence. Even so, he would leave it until the last moment. It was in fact three days before Glodstone took the bundle of letters up to his room and shuffled through them and came to the envelope with the familiar crest, an eagle evidently tearing the entrails from a sheep. For a moment Glodstone gazed almost rapturously at the crest before splitting the envelope open with a paper-knife. Again he hesitated. Letters from parents were too often lists of complaints about the treatment of their sons. Glodstone held his breath as he took it out and laid it flat on the desk. But his fears were unfounded.
