Leave it to Psmith (13 page)

§ 1

T
HE
five o’clock train, having given itself a spasmodic jerk, began to move slowly out of Paddington Station. The platform past which it was gliding was crowded with a number of the fauna always to be seen at railway stations at such moments, but in their ranks there was no sign of Mr Ralston McTodd: and Psmith, as he sat opposite Lord Emsworth in a corner seat of a first-class compartment, felt that genial glow of satisfaction which comes to the man who has successfully taken a chance. Until now, he had been half afraid that McTodd, having changed his mind, might suddenly appear with bag and baggage – an event which must necessarily have caused confusion and discomfort. His mind was now tranquil. Concerning the future he declined to worry. It would, no doubt, contain its little difficulties, but he was prepared to meet them in the right spirit; and his only trouble in the world now was the difficulty he was experiencing in avoiding his lordship’s legs, which showed a disposition to pervade the compartment like the tentacles of an octopus. Lord Emsworth rather ran to leg, and his practice of reclining when at ease on the base of his spine was causing him to straddle, like Apollyon in Pilgrim’s Progress, ‘right across the way’. It became manifest that in a journey lasting several hours his society was likely to prove irksome. For the time being, however, he endured it, and listened with polite attention to his host’s remarks on the subject of the Blandings gardens. Lord Emsworth, in a train moving in the direction of home, was behaving like a horse heading for his stable. He snorted eagerly, and spoke at length and with emotion of roses and herbaceous borders.

‘It will be dark, I suppose, by the time we arrive,’ he said regretfully, ‘but the first thing to-morrow, my dear fellow, I must take you round and show you my gardens.’

‘I shall look forward to it keenly,’ said Psmith. ‘They are, I can readily imagine, distinctly oojah-cum-spiff.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Lord Emsworth with a start.

‘Not at all,’ said Psmith graciously.

‘Er – what did you say?’ asked his lordship after a slight pause.

‘I was saying that, from all reports, you must have a very nifty display of garden-produce at your rural seat.’

‘Oh, yes. Oh, most,’ said his lordship, looking puzzled. He examined Psmith across the compartment with something of the peering curiosity which he would have bestowed upon a new and unclassified shrub. ‘Most extraordinary!’ he murmured. ‘I trust, my dear fellow, you will not think me personal, but, do you know, nobody would imagine that you were a poet. You don’t look like a poet, and, dash it, you don’t talk like a poet.’

‘How should a poet talk?’

‘Well . . .’ Lord Emsworth considered the point. ‘Well, Miss Peavey . . . But of course you don’t know Miss Peavey . . . Miss Peavey is a poetess, and she waylaid me the other morning while I was having a most important conference with McAllister on the subject of bulbs and asked me if I didn’t think that it was fairies’ tear-drops that made the dew. Did you ever hear such dashed nonsense?’

‘Evidently an aggravated case. Is Miss Peavey staying at the castle?’

‘My dear fellow, you couldn’t shift her with blasting-powder. Really this craze of my sister Constance for filling the house with these infernal literary people is getting on my nerves. I can’t stand these poets and what not. Never could.’

‘We must always remember, however,’ said Psmith gravely, ‘that poets are also God’s creatures.’

‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed his lordship, aghast. ‘I had forgotten that you were one. What will you think of me, my dear fellow! But, of course, as I said a moment ago, you are different. I admit that when Constance told me that she had invited you to the house I was not cheered, but, now that I have had the pleasure of meeting you . . .’

The conversation had worked round to the very point to which Psmith had been wishing to direct it. He was keenly desirous of finding out why Mr McTodd had been invited to Blandings and – a still more vital matter – of ascertaining whether, on his arrival there as Mr McTodd’s understudy, he was going to meet people who knew the poet by sight. On this latter point, it seemed to him, hung the question of whether he was about to enjoy a delightful visit to a historic country house in the society of Eve Halliday – or leave the train at the next stop and omit to return to it.

‘It was extremely kind of Lady Constance,’ he hazarded, ‘to invite a perfect stranger to Blandings.’

‘Oh, she’s always doing that sort ofthing,’ said his lordship. ‘It didn’t matter to her that she’d never seen you in her life. She had read your books, you know, and liked them: and when she heard that you were coming to England, she wrote to you.’

‘I see,’ said Psmith, relieved.

‘Of course, it is all right as it has turned out,’ said Lord Emsworth handsomely. ‘As I say, you’re different. And how you came to write that . . . that . . .’

‘Bilge?’ suggested Psmith.

‘The very word I was about to employ, my dear fellow. . . . No, no, I don’t mean that. . . . I – 1 . . . Capital stuff, no doubt, capital stuff . . . but . . .’

‘I understand.’

‘Constance tried to make me read the things, but I couldn’t. I fell asleep over them.’

‘I hope you rested well.’

‘I – er – the fact is, I suppose they were beyond me. I couldn’t see any sense in the things.’

‘If you would care to have another pop at them,’ said Psmith agreeably, ‘I have a complete set in my bag.’

‘No, no, my dear fellow, thank you very much, thank you a thousand times. I – er – find that reading in the train tries my eyes.’

‘Ah! You would prefer that I read them aloud?’

‘No, no.’ A look of hunted alarm came into his lordship’s speaking countenance at the suggestion. As a matter of fact, I generally take a short nap at the beginning of a railway journey. I find it refreshing and – er – in short, refreshing. You will excuse me?’

‘If you think you can get to sleep all right without the aid of my poems, certainly.’

‘You won’t think me rude?’

‘Not at all, not at all. By the way, am I likely to meet any old friends at Blandings?’

‘Eh? Oh no. There will be nobody but ourselves. Except my sister and Miss Peavey, of course. You said you had not met Miss Peavey, I think?’

‘I have not had that pleasure. I am, of course, looking forward to it with the utmost keenness.’

Lord Emsworth eyed him for a moment, astonished: then concluded the conversation by closing his eyes defensively. Psmith was left to his reflections, which a few minutes later were interrupted by a smart kick on the shin, as Lord Emsworth, a jumpy sleeper, began to throw his long legs about. Psmith moved to the other end of the seat, and, taking his bag down from the rack, extracted a slim volume bound in squashy mauve. After gazing at this in an unfriendly manner for a moment, he opened it at random and began to read. His first move on leaving Lord Emsworth at the florist’s had been to spend a portion of his slender capital on the works of Ralston McTodd in order not to be taken at a disadvantage in the event of questions about them at Blandings: but he speedily realised, as he dipped into the poems, that anything in the nature of a prolonged study of them was likely to spoil his little holiday. They were not light summer reading.

A gurgling snort from the other end of the compartment abruptly detached his mind from its struggle with this mystic line. He perceived that his host had slipped even further down on to his spine and was now lying with open mouth in an attitude suggestive of dislocation. And as he looked, there was a whistling sound, and another snore proceeded from the back of his lordship’s throat.

Psmith rose and took his book of poems out into the corridor with the purpose of roaming along the train until he should find an empty compartment in which to read in peace.

With the two adjoining compartments he had no luck. One was occupied by an elderly man with a retriever, while the presence of a baby in the other ruled it out of consideration. The third, however, looked more promising. It was not actually empty, but there was only one occupant, and he was asleep. He was lying back in the far corner with a large silk handkerchief draped over his face and his feet propped up on the seat opposite. His society did not seem likely to act as a bar to the study of Mr McTodd’s masterpieces. Psmith sat down and resumed his reading.

Psmith knitted his brow. It was just the sort of line which was likely to have puzzled his patroness, Lady Constance, and he anticipated that she would come to him directly he arrived and ask for an explanation. It would obviously be a poor start for his visit to confess that he had no theory as to its meaning himself. He tried it again.

A sound like two or three pigs feeding rather noisily in the middle of a thunderstorm interrupted his meditations. Psmith laid his book down and gazed in a pained way across the compartment. There came to him a sense of being unfairly put upon, as towards the end of his troubles it might have come upon Job. This, he felt, was too much. He was being harried.

The man in the corner went on snoring.

∗∗∗∗∗

There is always away. Almost immediately Psmith saw what Napoleon would have done in this crisis. On the seat beside the sleeper was lying a compact little suit-case with hard, sharp edges. Rising softly, Psmith edged along the compartment and secured this. Then, having balanced it carefully on the rack above the sleeper’s stomach, he returned to his seat to await developments.

These were not long in coming. The train, now flying at its best speed through open country, was shaking itself at intervals in a vigorous way as it raced along. A few seconds later it apparently passed over some points, and shivered briskly down its whole length. The suit-case wobbled insecurely, hesitated, and fell chunkily in the exact middle of its owner’s waistcoat. There was a smothered gulp beneath the handkerchief. The sleeper sat up with a jerk. The handkerchief fell off. And there was revealed to Psmith’s interested gaze the face of the Hon. Freddie Threepwood.

§ 2

‘Goo!’ observed Freddie. He removed the bag from his midriff and began to massage the stricken spot. Then suddenly perceiving that he was not alone he looked up and saw Psmith.

‘Goo!’ said Freddie, and sat staring wildly.

Nobody is more alive than we are to the fact that the dialogue of Frederick Threepwood, recorded above, is not bright. Nevertheless, those were his opening remarks, and the excuse must be that he had passed through a trying time and had just received two shocks, one after the other. From the first of these, the physical impact of the suit-case, he was recovering; but the second had simply paralysed him. When, the mists of sleep having cleared away, he saw sitting but a few feet away from him on the train that was carrying him home the very man with whom he had plotted in the lobby of the Piccadilly Palace Hotel, a cold fear gripped Freddie’s very vitals.

Freddie’s troubles had begun when he just missed the twelve-fifty train. This disaster had perturbed him greatly, for he could not forget his father’s stern injunctions on the subject. But what had really upset him was the fact that he had come within an ace of missing the five o’clock train as well. He had spent the afternoon in a motion-picture palace, and the fascination of the film had caused him to lose all sense of time, so that only the slow fade-out on the embrace and the words ‘The End’ reminded him to look at his watch. A mad rush had got him to Paddington just as the five o’clock express was leaving the station. Exhausted, he had fallen into a troubled sleep, from which he had been aroused by a violent blow in the waistcoat and the nightmare vision of Psmith in the seat across the compartment. One cannot wonder in these circumstances that Freddie did not immediately soar to the heights of eloquence.

The picture which the Hon. Frederick Threepwood had selected for his patronage that afternoon was the well-known super-super-film, ‘Fangs of the Past’, featuring Bertha Blevitch and Maurice Heddlestone – which, as everybody knows, is all about blackmail. Green-walled by primeval hills, bathed in the golden sunshine of peace and happiness, the village of Honeydean slumbered in the clear morning air. But off the train from the city stepped A Stranger – (The Stranger – Maxwell Bannister). He inquired of a passing rustic – (The Passing Rustic – Claude Hepworth) – the way to the great house where Myrtle Dale, the Lady Bountiful of the village . . . well, anyway, it is all about blackmail, and it had affected Freddie profoundly. It still coloured his imagination, and the conclusion to which he came the moment he saw Psmith was that the latter had shadowed him and was following him home with the purpose of extracting hush-money.

While he was still gurgling wordlessly, Psmith opened the conversation.

‘A delightful and unexpected pleasure, comrade. I thought you had left the Metropolis some hours since.’

As Freddie sat looking like a cornered dormouse a voice from the corridor spoke.

Ah, there you are, my dear fellow!’

Lord Emsworth was beaming in the doorway. His slumbers, like those of Freddie, had not lasted long. He had been aroused only a few minutes after Psmith’s departure by the arrival of the retriever from the next compartment, which, bored by the society of its owner, had strolled off on a tour of investigation and, finding next door an old acquaintance in the person of his lordship, had jumped on the seat and licked his face with such hearty good will that further sleep was out of the question. Being awake, Lord Emsworth, as always when he was awake, had begun to potter.

When he saw Freddie his amiability suffered a shock.

‘Frederick! I thought I told you to be sure to return on the twelve-fifty train!’