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 wid
e 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.
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.
§ 5
The florist who had settled down to ply his trade opposite the Senior Conservative Club was a delightful fellow, thoroughly sound on the hollyhock question and so informative in the matter of delphiniums, achilleas, coreopsis, eryngiums, geums, lupines, bergamot and early phloxes that Lord Emsworth gave himself up whole-heartedly to the feast of reason and the flow of soul; and it was only some fifteen minutes later that he remembered that he had left a guest languishing in the lower smoking-room and that this guest might be thinking him a trifle remiss in the observance of the sacred duties of hospitality.
‘Bless my soul, yes!’ said his lordship, coming out from under the influence with a start.
Even then he could not bring himself to dash abruptly from the shop. Twice he reached the door and twice pottered back to sniff at flowers and say something he had forgotten to mention about the Stronger Growing Clematis. Finally, however, with one last, longing, lingering look behind, he tore himself away and trotted back across the road.
Arrived in the lower smoking-room, he stood in the doorway for a moment, peering. The place had been a blur to him when he had left it, but he remembered that he had been sitting in the middle window and, as there were only two seats by the window, that tall, dark young man in one of them must be the guest he had deserted. That he could be a changeling never occurred to Lord Emsworth. So pleasantly had the time passed in the shop across the way that he had the impression that he had only been gone a couple of minutes or so. He made his way to where the young man sat. A vague idea came into his head that the other had grown a bit in his absence, but it passed.
‘My dear fellow,’ he said genially, as he slid into the other chair, ‘I really must apologise.’
It was plain to Psmith that the other was under a misapprehension, and a really nice-minded young man would no doubt have put the matter right at once. The fact that it never for a single instant occurred to Psmith to do so was due, no doubt, to some innate defect in his character. He was essentially a young man who took life as it came, and the more inconsequently it came the better he liked it. Presently, he reflected, it would become necessary for him to make some excuse and steal quietly out of the other’s life; but meanwhile the situation seemed to him to present entertaining possibilities.
‘Not at all,’ he replied graciously. ‘Not at all.’
‘I was afraid for a moment,’ said Lord Emsworth, ‘that you might – quite naturally – be offended.’
‘Absurd!’
‘Shouldn’t have left you like that. Shocking bad manners. But, my dear fellow, I simply had to pop across the street.’
‘Most decidedly,’ said Psmith. ‘Always pop across streets. It is the secret of a happy and successful life.’
Lord Emsworth looked at him a little perplexedly, and wondered if he had caught the last remark correctly. But his mind had never been designed for the purpose of dwelling closely on problems for any length of time, and he let it go.
‘Beautiful roses that man has,’ he observed. ‘Really an extraordinarily fine display.’
‘Indeed?’ said Psmith.
‘Nothing to touch mine, though. I wish, my dear fellow, you could have been down at Blandings at the beginning of the month. My roses were at their best then. It’s too bad you weren’t there to see them.’
‘The fault no doubt was mine,’ said Psmith.
‘Of course you weren’t in England then.’
‘Ah! That explains it.’
‘Still, I shall have plenty of flowers to show you when you are at Blandings. I expect,’ said Lord Emsworth, at last showing a host-like disposition to give his guest a belated innings, ‘I expect you’ll write one of your poems about my gardens, eh?’
Psmith was conscious of a feeling of distinct gratification. Weeks of toil among the herrings of Billingsgate had left him with a sort of haunting fear that even in private life there clung to him the miasma of the fish market. Yet here was a perfectly unprejudiced observer looking squarely at him and mistaking him f
or a poet – showing that in spite of all he had gone through there must still be something notably spiritual and unfishy about his outward appearance.
‘Very possibly,’ he said. ‘Very possibly.’
‘I suppose you get ideas for your poetry from all sorts of things,’ said Lord Emsworth, nobly resisting the temptation to collar the conversation again. He was feeling extremely friendly towards this poet fellow. It was deuced civil of him not to be put out and huffy at being left alone in the smoking-room.
‘From practically everything,’ said Psmith, ‘except fish.’
‘Fish?’
‘I have never written a poem about fish.’
‘No?’ said Lord Emsworth, again feeling that a pin had worked loose in the machinery of the conversation.
‘I was once offered a princely sum,’ went on Psmith, now floating happily along on the tide of his native exuberance, ‘to write a ballad for the Fishmonger’s Gazette entitled, “Herbert the Turbot”. But I was firm. I declined.’
‘Indeed?’ said Lord Emsworth.
‘One has one’s self-respect,’ said Psmith.
‘Oh, decidedly,’ said Lord Emsworth.
‘It was painful, of course. The editor broke down completely when he realised that my refusal was final. However, I sent him on with a letter of introduction to John Drinkwater, who, I believe, turned him out quite a good little effort on the theme.’
At this moment, when Lord Emsworth was feeling a trifle dizzy, and Psmith, on whom conversation always acted as a mental stimulus, was on the point of plunging even deeper into the agreeable depths of light persiflage, a waiter approached.
‘A lady to see you, your lordship.’
‘Eh? Ah, yes, of course, of course. I was expecting her. It is a Miss—what is the name? Holliday? Halliday. It is a Miss Halli-day,’ he said in explanation to Psmith, ‘who is coming down to Blandings to catalogue the library. My secretary, Baxter, told her to call here and see me. If you will excuse me for a moment, my dear fellow?’
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