Leave it to Psmith (11 page)

With the quiet dignity which atoned for his lack in years in this stronghold of mellow worth, Psmith mounted the steps, passed through the doors which were obligingly flung open for him by two uniformed dignitaries, and made his way to the coffee-room. Here, having selected a table in the middle of the room and ordered a simple and appetising lunch, he gave himself up to thoughts of Eve Halliday. As he had confessed to his young friend Mr Walderwick, she had made a powerful impression upon him. He was tearing himself from his daydreams in order to wrestle with a mutton chop, when a foreign body shot into his orbit and blundered heavily against the table. Looking up, he perceived a long, thin, elderly gentleman of pleasantly vague aspect, who immediately began to apologise.

‘My dear sir, I am extremely sorry. I trust I have caused no damage.’

‘None whatever,’ replied Psmith courteously.

‘The fact is, I have mislaid my glasses. Blind as a bat without them. Can’t see where I’m going.’

A gloomy-looking young man with long and disordered hair, who stood at the elderly gentleman’s elbow, coughed suggestively. He was shuffling restlessly, and appeared to be anxious to close the episode and move on. A young man, evidently, of highly-strung temperament. He had a sullen air.

The elderly gentleman started vaguely at the sound of the cough.

‘Eh?’ he said, as if in answer to some spoken remark. ‘Oh, yes, quite so, quite so, my dear fellow. Mustn’t stop here chatting, eh? Had to apologise, though. Nearly upset this gentleman’s table. Can’t see where I’m going without my glasses. Blind as a bat. Eh? What? Quite so, quite so.’

He ambled off, doddering cheerfully, while his companion still preserved his look of sulky aloofness. Psmith gazed after them with interest.

‘Can you tell me,’ he asked of the waiter, who was rallying round with the potatoes, ‘who that was?’

The waiter followed his glance.

‘Don’t know who the young gentleman is, sir. Guest here, I fancy. The old gentleman is the Earl of Emsworth. Lives in the country and doesn’t often come to the club. Very absent-minded gentleman, they tell me. Potatoes, sir?’

‘Thank you,’said Psmith.

The waiter drifted away, and returned.

‘I have been looking at the guest-book, sir. The name of the gentleman lunching with Lord Emsworth is Mr Ralston McTodd.’

‘Thank you very much. I am sorry you had the trouble.’

‘No trouble, sir.’

Psmith resumed his meal.

§ 4

The sullen demeanour of the young man who had accompanied Lord Emsworth through the coffee-room accurately reflected the emotions which were vexing his troubled soul. Ralston McTodd, the powerful young singer of Saskatoon (‘Plumbs the depths of human emotion and strikes a new note’ –
Montreal Star.
‘Very readable’ –
Ipsilanti Herald),
had not enjoyed his lunch. The pleasing sense of importance induced by the fact that for the first time in his life he was hob-nobbing with a genuine earl had given way after ten minutes of his host’s society to a mingled despair and irritation which had grown steadily deeper as the meal proceeded. It is not too much to say that by the time the fish course arrived it would have been a relief to Mr McTodd’s feelings if he could have taken up the butter-dish and banged it down, butter and all, on his lordship’s bald head.

A temperamental young man was Ralston McTodd. He liked to be the centre of the picture, to do the talking, to air his views, to be listened to respectfully and with interest by a submissive audience. At the meal which had just concluded none of these reasonable demands had been permitted to him. From the very beginning, Lord Emsworth had collared the conversation and held it with a gentle, bleating persistency against all assaults. Five times had Mr McTodd almost succeeded in launching one of his best epigrams, only to see it swept away on the tossing flood of a lecture on hollyhocks. At the sixth attempt he had managed to get it out, complete and sparkling, and the old ass opposite him had taken it in his stride like a hurdle and gone galloping off about the mental and moral defects of a creature named Angus McAllister, who appeared to be his head gardener or something of the kind. The luncheon, though he was a hearty feeder and as a rule appreciative of good cooking, had turned to ashes in Mr McTodd’s mouth, and it was a soured and chafing Singer of Saskatoon who dropped scowlingly into an arm-chair by the window of the lower smoking-room a few moments later. We introduce Ralston McTodd to the reader, in short, at a moment when he is very near the breaking-point. A little more provocation, and goodness knows what he may not do. For the time being, he is merely leaning back in his chair and scowling. He has a faint hope, however, that a cigar may bring some sort of relief, and he is waiting for one to be ordered for him.

The Earl of Emsworth did not see the scowl. He had not really seen Mr McTodd at all from the moment of his arrival at the club, when somebody, who sounded like the head porter, had informed him that a gentleman was waiting to see him and had led him up to a shapeless blur which had introduced itself as his expected guest. The loss of his glasses had had its usual effect on Lord Emsworth, making the world a misty place in which indefinite objects swam dimly like fish in muddy water. Not that this mattered much, seeing that he was in London, for in London there was never anything worth looking at. Beyond a vague feeling that it would be more comfortable on the whole if he had his glasses – a feeling just strong enough to have made him send off a messenger boy to his hotel to hunt for them – Lord Emsworth had not allowed lack of vision to interfere with his enjoyment of the proceedings.

And, unlike Mr McTodd, he had been enjoying himself very much. A good listener, this young man, he felt. Very soothing, the way he had constituted himself a willing audience, never interrupting or thrusting himself forward, as is so often the deplorable tendency of the modern young man. Lord Emsworth was bound to admit that, much as he had disliked the idea of going to London to pick up this poet or whatever he was, the thing had turned out better than he had expected. He liked Mr McTodd’s silent but obvious interest in flowers, his tacit but warm-hearted sympathy in the matter of Angus McAllister. He was glad he was coming to Blandings. It would be agreeable to conduct him personally through the gardens, to introduce him to Angus McAllister and allow him to plumb for himself the black abysses of that outcast’s mental processes.

Meanwhile, he had forgotten all about ordering that cigar . . .

‘In large gardens where ample space permits,’ said Lord Emsworth, dropping cosily into his chair and taking up the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, ‘nothing is more desirable than that there should be some places, or one at least, of quiet greenery alone, without any flowers whatever. I see that you agree with me.’

Mr McTodd had not agreed with him. The grunt which Lord Emsworth had taken for an exclamation of rapturous adhesion to his sentiments had been merely a sort of bubble of sound rising from the tortured depths of Mr McTodd’s suffering soul – the cry, as the poet beautifully puts it, ‘of some strong smoker in his agony’. The desire to smoke had now gripped Mr McTodd’s very vitals; but, as some lingering remains of the social sense kept him from asking point-blank for the cigar for which he yearned, he sought in his mind for a way of approaching the subject obliquely.

‘In no other way,’ proceeded Lord Emsworth, ‘can the brilliancy of flowers be so keenly enjoyed as by . . .’

‘Talking of flowers,’ said Mr McTodd, ‘it is a fact, I believe, that tobacco smoke is good for roses.’

‘ . . . as by pacing for a time,’ said Lord Emsworth, ‘in some cool, green alley, and then passing on to the flowery places. It is partly, no doubt, the unconscious working out of some optical law, the explanation of which in everyday language is that the eye . . .’

‘Some people say that smoking is bad for the eyes. I don’t agree with them,’ said Mr McTodd warmly.

‘ . . . being, as it were, saturated with the green colour, is the more attuned to receive the others, especially the reds. It was probably some such consideration that influenced the designers of the many old gardens of England in devoting so much attention to the cult of the yew tree. When you come to Blandings, my dear fellow, I will show you our celebrated yew alley. And, when you see it, you will agree that I was right in taking the stand I did against Angus McAllister’s pernicious views.’

‘I was lunching in a club yesterday,’ said Mr McTodd, with the splendid McTodd doggedness, ‘where they had no matches on the tables in the smoking-room. Only spills. It made it very inconvenient . . .’

‘Angus McAllister,’ said Lord Emsworth, ‘is a professional gardener. I need say no more. You know as well as I do, my dear fellow, what professional gardeners are like when it is a question of moss . . .’

‘What it meant was that, when you wanted to light your after-luncheon cigar, you had to get up and go to a gas-burner on a bracket at the other end of the room . . .’

‘Moss, for some obscure reason, appears to infuriate them. It rouses their basest passions. Nature intended a yew alley to be carpeted with a mossy growth. The mossy path in the yew alley at Blandings is in true relation for colour to the trees and grassy edges yet will you credit it that that soulless disgrace to Scotland actually wished to grub it all up and have a rolled gravel path staring up from beneath those immemorial trees! I have already told you how I was compelled to give in to him in the matter of the hollyhocks – head gardeners of any ability at all are rare in these days and one has to make concessions – but this was too much. I was perfectly friendly and civil about it. “Certainly, McAllister,” I said, “you may have your gravel path if you wish it. I make but one proviso, that you construct it over my dead body. Only when I am weltering in my blood on the threshold of that yew alley shall you disturb one inch of my beautiful moss. Try to remember, McAllister,” I said, still quite cordially, “that you are not laying out a recreation ground in a Glasgow suburb – you are proposing to make an eyesore of what is possibly the most beautiful nook in one of the finest and oldest gardens in the United Kingdom.” He made some repulsive Scotch noise at the back of his throat, and there the matter rests. . . . Let me, my dear fellow,’ said Lord Emsworth, writhing down into the depths of his chair like an aristocratic snake until his spine rested snugly against the leather, ‘let me describe for you the Yew Alley at Blandings. Entering from the west . . .’

Mr McTodd gave up the struggle and sank back, filled with black and deleterious thoughts, into a tobacco-less hell. The smoking-room was full now, and on all sides fragrant blue clouds arose from the little groups of serious thinkers who were discussing what Gladstone had said in ’78. Mr McTodd, as he watched them, had something of the emotions of the Peri excluded from Paradise. So reduced was he by this time that he would have accepted gratefully the meanest straight-cut cigarette in place of the Corona of his dreams. But even this poor substitute for smoking was denied him.

Lord Emsworth droned on. Having approached from the west, he was now well inside the yew alley.

‘Many of the yews, no doubt, have taken forms other than those that were originally designed. Some are like turned chessmen; some might be taken for adaptations of human figures, for one can trace here and there a hat-covered head or a spreading petticoat. Some rise in solid blocks with rounded roof and stemless mushroom finial. These have for the most part arched recesses, forming arbours. One of the tallest . . . Eh? What?’

Lord Emsworth blinked vaguely at the waiter who had sidled up. A moment before he had been a hundred odd miles away, and it was not easy to adjust his mind immediately to the fact that he was in the smoking-room of the Senior Conservative Club.

‘Eh? What?’

‘A messenger boy has just arrived with these, your lordship.’

Lord Emsworth peered in a dazed and woolly manner at the proffered spectacle-case. Intelligence returned to him.

‘Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. My glasses. Capital! Thank you, thank you, thank you.’

He removed the glasses from their case and placed them on his nose: and instantly the world sprang into being before his eyes, sharp and well-defined. It was like coming out of a fog.

‘Dear me!’ he said in a self-congratulatory voice.

Then abruptly he sat up, transfixed. The lower smoking-room at the Senior Conservative Club is on the street level, and Lord Emsworth’s chair faced the large window. Through this, as he raised his now spectacled face, he perceived for the first time that among the row of shops on the opposite side of the road was a jaunty new florist’s. It had not been there at his last visit to the metropolis, and he stared at it raptly, as a small boy would stare at a saucer of ice-cream if such a thing had suddenly descended from heaven immediately in front of him. And, like a small boy in such a situation, he had eyes for nothing else. He did not look at his guest. Indeed, in the ecstasy of his discovery, he had completely forgotten that he had a guest.

Any flower shop, however small, was a magnet to the Earl of Emsworth. And this was a particularly spacious and arresting flower shop. Its window was gay with summer blooms. And Lord Emsworth, slowly rising from his chair, ‘pointed’ like a dog that sees a pheasant.

‘Bless my soul!’ he murmured.

If the reader has followed with the closeness which it deserves the extremely entertaining conversation of his lordship recorded in the last few paragraphs, he will have noted a reference to hollyhocks. Lord Emsworth had ventilated the hollyhock question at some little length while seated at the luncheon table. But, as we had not the good fortune to be present at that enjoyable meal, a brief resume of the situation must now be given and the intelligent public allowed to judge between his lordship and the uncompromising McAllister.

Briefly, the position was this. Many head gardeners are apt to favour in the hollyhock forms that one cannot but think have for their aim an ideal that is a false and unworthy one. Angus McAllister, clinging to the head-gardeneresque standard of beauty and correct form, would not sanction the wide outer petal. The flower, so Angus held, must be very tight and very round, like the uniform of a major-general. Lord Emsworth, on the other hand, considered this view narrow, and claimed the liberty to try for the very highest and truest beauty in hollyhocks. The loosely-folded inner petals of the hollyhock, he considered, invited a wonderful play and brilliancy of colour; while the wide outer petal, with its slightly waved surface and gently frilled edge . . . well, anyway, Lord Emsworth liked his hollyhocks floppy and Angus McAllister liked them tight, and bitter warfare had resulted, in which, as we have seen, his lordship had been compelled to give way. He had been brooding on this defeat ever since, and in the florist opposite he saw a possible sympathiser, a potential ally, an intelligent chum with whom he could get together and thoroughly damn Angus McAllister’s Glaswegian obstinacy.