Dear Me! by PG Wodehouse
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 résumé 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[p. 103] intelligent chum with whom he could get together and thoroughly damn Angus McAllister’s Glaswegian obstinacy.
You would not have suspected Lord Emsworth, from a casual glance, of having within him the ability to move rapidly; but it is a fact that he was out of the smoking-room and skimming down the front steps of the club before Mr. McTodd’s jaw, which had fallen at the spectacle of his host bounding out of his horizon of vision like a jack-rabbit, had time to hitch itself up again. A moment later, Mr. McTodd, happening to direct his gaze out of the window, saw him whiz across the road and vanish into the florist’s shop.
It was at this juncture that Psmith, having finished his lunch, came downstairs to enjoy a quiet cup of coffee. The room was rather crowded, and the chair which Lord Emsworth had vacated offered a wide invitation. He made his way to it.
“Is this chair occupied?” he inquired politely. So politely that Mr. McTodd’s reply sounded by contrast even more violent than it might otherwise have done.
“No, it isn’t!” snapped Mr. McTodd.
Psmith seated himself. He was feeling agreeably disposed to conversation.
“Lord Emsworth has left you then?” he said.
“Is he a friend of yours?” inquired Mr. McTodd in a voice that suggested that he was perfectly willing to accept a proxy as a target for his wrath.
“I know him by sight. Nothing more.”
“Blast him!” muttered Mr. McTodd with indescribable virulence.
Psmith eyed him inquiringly.
“Correct me if I am wrong,” he said, “but I seem to detect in your manner a certain half-veiled annoyance. Is anything the matter?”
Mr. McTodd barked bitterly.
“Oh, no. Nothing’s the matter. Nothing whatever, except that that old beaver—”—here he wronged Lord Emsworth, who, whatever his faults, was not a bearded man—“that old beaver invited me to lunch, talked all the time about his infernal flowers, never let me get a word in edgeways, hadn’t the common civility to offer me a cigar, and now has gone off without a word of apology and buried himself in that shop over the way. I’ve never been so insulted in my life!” raved Mr. McTodd.
“Scarcely the perfect host,” admitted Psmith.
“And if he thinks,” said Mr. McTodd, rising, “that I’m going to go and stay with him at his beastly castle after this, he’s mistaken. I’m supposed to go down there with him this evening. And perhaps the old fossil thinks I will! After this!” A horrid laugh rolled up from Mr. McTodd’s interior. “Likely! I see myself! After being insulted like this . . . Would you?” he demanded.
Psmith gave the matter thought.
“I am inclined to think no.”
“And so am I damned well inclined to think no!” cried Mr. McTodd. “I’m going away now, this very minute. And if that old total loss ever comes back, you can tell him he’s seen the last of me.”
And Ralston McTodd, his blood boiling with justifiable indignation and pique to a degree dangerous on such a warm day, stalked off towards the door with a hard, set face. Through the door he stalked to the cloak-room for his hat and cane; then, his lips moving silently, he stalked through the hall, stalked down the steps, and passed from the scene, stalking furiously round the corner in quest of a tobacconist’s. At the moment of his disappearance, the Earl of Emsworth had just begun to give the sympathetic florist a limpid character-sketch of Angus McAllister.
* * * * *
Psmith shook his head sadly. These clashings of human temperament were very lamentable. They disturbed the after-luncheon repose of the man of sensibility. He ordered coffee, and endeavoured to forget the painful scene by thinking of Eve Halliday.
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