by David Miller
LORD EMSWORTH AND
THE GIRL FRIEND
P.G. Wodehouse
One of the most-loved, successful and prolific authors, P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) is known for his novels, stories, plays, poems, song lyrics and journalism. The best known of his works are the Blandings novels and stories, the Psmith stories and the Jeeves and Wooster novels and stories. He became an American citizen in 1955, was knighted in 1975, and died a few weeks later on Valentine’s Day. Only he could have admitted: “I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”
THE day was so warm, so fair, so magically a thing of sunshine and blue skies and bird-song that anyone acquainted with Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, and aware of his liking for fine weather, would have pictured him going about the place on this summer morning with a beaming smile and an uplifted heart. Instead of which, humped over the breakfast-table, he was directing at a blameless kippered herring a look of such intense bitterness that the fish seemed to sizzle beneath it. For it was August Bank Holiday, and Blandings Castle on August Bank Holiday became, in his lordship’s opinion, a miniature Inferno.
This was the day when his park and grounds broke out into a noisome rash of swings, roundabouts, marquees, toy balloons and paper bags; when a tidal wave of the peasantry and its squealing young engulfed those haunts of immemorial peace. On August Bank Holiday he was not allowed to potter pleasantly about his gardens in an old coat: forces beyond his control shoved him into a stiff collar and a top hat and told him to go out and be genial. And in the cool of the quiet evenfall they put him on a platform and made him make a speech. To a man with a day like that in front of him fine weather was a mockery.
His sister, Lady Constance Keeble, looked brightly at him over the coffee-pot.
“What a lovely morning!” she said.
Lord Emsworth’s gloom deepened. He chafed at being called upon – by this woman of all others – to behave as if everything was for the jolliest in the jolliest of all possible worlds. But for his sister Constance and her hawk-like vigilance, he might, he thought, have been able at least to dodge the top-hat.
“Have you got your speech ready?”
“Yes.”
“Well, mind you learn it by heart this time and don’t stammer and dodder as you did last year.”
Lord Emsworth pushed plate and kipper away. He had lost his desire for food.
“And don’t forget you have to go to the village this morning to judge the cottage gardens.”
“All right, all right, all right,” said his lordship testily. “I’ve not forgotten.”
“I think I will come to the village with you. There are a number of those Fresh Air London children staying there now, and I must warn them to behave properly when they come to the Fête this afternoon. You know what London children are. McAllister says he found one of them in the gardens the other day, picking his flowers.”
At any other time the news of this outrage would, no doubt, have affected Lord Emsworth profoundly. But now, so intense was his self-pity, he did not even shudder. He drank coffee with the air of a man who regretted that it was not hemlock.
“By the way, McAllister was speaking to me again last night about that gravel path through the yew alley. He seems very keen on it.”
“Glug!” said Lord Emsworth – which, as any philologist will tell you, is the sound which peers of the realm make when stricken to the soul while drinking coffee.
Concerning Glasgow, that great commercial and manufacturing city in the county of Lanarkshire in Scotland, much has been written. So lyrically does the Encyclopædia Britannica deal with the place that it covers twenty-seven pages before it can tear itself away and go on to Glass, Glastonbury, Glatz and Glauber. The only aspect of it, however, which immediately concerns the present historian is the fact that the citizens it breeds are apt to be grim, dour, persevering, tenacious men; men with red whiskers who know what they want and mean to get it. Such a one was Angus McAllister, head-gardener at Blandings Castle.
For years Angus McAllister had set before himself as his earthly goal the construction of a gravel path through the Castle’s famous yew alley. For years he had been bringing the project to the notice of his employer, though in anyone less whiskered the latter’s unconcealed loathing would have caused embarrassment. And now, it seemed, he was at it again.
“Gravel path!” Lord Emsworth stiffened through the whole length of his stringy body. Nature, he had always maintained, intended a yew alley to be carpeted with a mossy growth. And, whatever Nature felt about it, he personally was dashed if he was going to have men with Clydeside accents and faces like dissipated potatoes coming along and mutilating that lovely expanse of green velvet. “Gravel path, indeed! Why not asphalt? Why not a few hoardings with advertisements of liver pills and a filling-station? That’s what the man would really like.”
Lord Emsworth felt bitter, and when he felt bitter he could be terribly sarcastic.
“Well, I think it is a very good idea,” said his sister. “One could walk there in wet weather then. Damp moss is ruinous to shoes.”
Lord Emsworth rose. He could bear no more of this. He left the table, the room and the house and, reaching the yew alley some minutes later, was revolted to find it infested by Angus McAllister in person. The head-gardener was standing gazing at the moss like a high priest of some ancient religion about to stick the gaff into the human sacrifice.
“Morning, McAllister,” said Lord Emsworth coldly.
“Good morrrrning, your lorrudsheep.”
There was a pause. Angus McAllister, extending a foot that looked like a violin-case, pressed it on the moss. The meaning of the gesture was plain. It expressed contempt, dislike, a generally anti-moss spirit: and Lord Emsworth, wincing, surveyed the man unpleasantly through his pince-nez. Though not often given to theological speculation, he was wondering why Providence, if obliged to make head-gardeners, had found it necessary to make them so Scotch. In the case of Angus McAllister, why, going a step farther, have made him a human being at all? All the ingredients of a first-class mule simply thrown away. He felt that he might have liked Angus McAllister if he had been a mule.
“I was speaking to her leddyship yesterday.”
“Oh?”
“About the gravel path I was speaking to her leddyship.”
“Oh?”
“Her leddyship likes the notion fine.”
“Indeed! Well …”
Lord Emsworth’s face had turned a lively pink, and he was about to release the blistering words which were forming themselves in his mind when suddenly he caught the head-gardener’s eye and paused. Angus McAllister was looking at him in a peculiar manner, and he knew what that look meant. Just one crack, his eye was saying – in Scotch, of course – just one crack out of you and I tender my resignation. And with a sickening shock it came home to Lord Emsworth how completely he was in this man’s clutches.
He shuffled miserably. Yes, he was helpless. Except for that kink about gravel paths, Angus McAllister was a head-gardener in a thousand, and he needed him. He could not do without him. That, unfortunately, had been proved by experiment. Once before, at the time when they were grooming for the Agricultural Show that pumpkin which had subsequently romped home so gallant a winner, he had dared to flout Angus McAllister. And Angus had resigned, and he had been forced to plead – yes, plead – with him to come back. An employer cannot hope to do this sort of thing and still rule with an iron hand. Filled with the coward rage that dares to burn but does not dare to blaze, Lord Emsworth coughed a cough that was undisguisedly a bronchial white flag.
“I’ll – er – I’ll think it over, McAllister.”
“Mphm.”
“I have to go to the village now. I will see you later.”
“Mphm.”
“Meanwhile, I will – er – think it over.”
“Mphm.”
The task of judging the floral displays in the cottage
gardens of the little village of Blandings Parva was one to which Lord Emsworth had looked forward with pleasurable anticipation. It was the sort of job he liked. But now, even though he had managed to give his sister Constance the slip and was free from her threatened society, he approached the task with a downcast spirit. It is always unpleasant for a proud man to realize that he is no longer captain of his soul; that he is to all intents and purposes ground beneath the number twelve heel of a Glaswegian head-gardener; and, brooding on this, he judged the cottage gardens with a distrait eye. It was only when he came to the last on his list that anything like animation crept into his demeanour.
This, he perceived, peering over its rickety fence, was not at all a bad little garden. It demanded closer inspection. He unlatched the gate and pottered in. And a dog, dozing behind a water-butt, opened one eye and looked at him. It was one of those hairy, non-descript dogs, and its gaze was cold, wary and suspicious, like that of a stockbroker who thinks someone is going to play the confidence trick on him.
Lord Emsworth did not observe the animal. He had pottered to a bed of wallflowers and now, stooping, he took a sniff at them.
As sniffs go, it was an innocent sniff, but the dog for some reason appeared to read into it criminality of a high order. All the indignant householder in him woke in a flash. The next moment the world had become full of hideous noises, and Lord Emsworth’s preoccupation was swept away in a passionate desire to save his ankles from harm.
As these chronicles of Blandings Castle have already shown, he was not at his best with strange dogs. Beyond saying “Go away, sir!” and leaping to and fro with an agility surprising in one of his years, he had accomplished little in the direction of a reasoned plan of defence when the cottage door opened and a girl came out.
“Hoy!” cried the girl.
And on the instant, at the mere sound of her voice, the mongrel, suspending hostilities, bounded at the new-comer and writhed on his back at her feet with all four legs in the air. The spectacle reminded Lord Emsworth irresistibly of his own behaviour when in the presence of Angus McAllister.
He blinked at his preserver. She was a small girl, of uncertain age – possibly twelve or thirteen, though a combination of London fogs and early cares had given her face a sort of wizened motherliness which in some odd way caused his lordship from the first to look on her as belonging to his own generation. She was the type of girl you see in back streets carrying a baby nearly as large as herself and still retaining sufficient energy to lead one little brother by the hand and shout recrimination at another in the distance. Her cheeks shone from recent soaping, and she was dressed in a velveteen frock which was obviously the pick of her wardrobe. Her hair, in defiance of the prevailing mode, she wore drawn tightly back into a short pigtail.
“Er – thank you,” said Lord Emsworth.
“Thank you, sir,” said the girl.
For what she was thanking him, his lordship was not able to gather. Later, as their acquaintance ripened, he was to discover that this strange gratitude was a habit with his new friend. She thanked everybody for everything. At the moment, the mannerism surprised him. He continued to blink at her through his pince-nez.
Lack of practice had rendered Lord Emsworth a little rusty in the art of making conversation to members of the other sex. He sought in his mind for topics.
“Fine day.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Are you” – Lord Emsworth furtively consulted his list – “are you the daughter of – ah – Ebenezer Sprockett?” he asked, thinking, as he had often thought before, what ghastly names some of his tenantry possessed.
“No, sir. I’m from London, sir.”
“Ah? London, eh? Pretty warm it must be there.” He paused. Then, remembering a formula of his youth: “Er – been out much this Season?”
“No, sir.”
“Everybody out of town now, I suppose? What part of London?”
“Drury Line, sir.”
“What’s your name? Eh, what?”
“Gladys, sir. Thank you, sir. This is Ern.”
A small boy had wandered out of the cottage, a rather hard-boiled specimen with freckles, bearing surprisingly in his hand a large and beautiful bunch of flowers. Lord Emsworth bowed courteously and with the addition of this third party to the tête-à-tête felt more at his ease.
“How do you do,” he said. “What pretty flowers.”
With her brother’s advent, Gladys, also, had lost diffidence and gained conversational aplomb.
“A treat, ain’t they?” she agreed eagerly. “I got ’em for ’im up at the big ’ahse. Coo! The old josser the plice belongs to didn’t arf chase me. ’E found me picking ’em and ’e sharted somefin at me and come runnin’ after me, but I copped ’im on the shin wiv a stone and ’e stopped to rub it and I come away.”
Lord Emsworth might have corrected her impression that Blandings Castle and its gardens belonged to Angus McAllister, but his mind was so filled with admiration and gratitude that he refrained from doing so. He looked at the girl almost reverently. Not content with controlling savage dogs with a mere word, this super-woman actually threw stones at Angus McAllister – a thing which he had never been able to nerve himself to do in an association which had lasted nine years – and, what was more, copped him on the shin with them. What nonsense, Lord Emsworth felt, the papers talked about the Modern Girl. If this was a specimen, the Modern Girl was the highest point the sex had yet reached.
“Ern,” said Gladys, changing the subject, “is wearin’ ’air-oil todiy.”
Lord Emsworth had already observed this and had, indeed, been moving to windward as she spoke.
“For the Feet,” explained Gladys.
“For the feet?” It seemed unusual.
“For the Feet in the pork this afternoon.”
“Oh, you are going to the Fête?”
“Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”
For the first time, Lord Emsworth found himself regarding that grisly social event with something approaching favour.
“We must look out for one another there,” he said cordially. “You will remember me again? I shall be wearing” – he gulped – “a top hat.”
“Ern’s going to wear a stror penamaw that’s been give ’im.”
Lord Emsworth regarded the lucky young devil with frank envy. He rather fancied he knew that panama. It had been his constant companion for some six years and then had been torn from him by his sister Constance and handed over to the vicar’s wife for her rummage-sale.
He sighed.
“Well, good-bye.”
“Good-bye, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Lord Emsworth walked pensively out of the garden and, turning into the little street, encountered Lady Constance.
“Oh, there you are, Clarence.”
“Yes,” said Lord Emsworth, for such was the case.
“Have you finished judging the gardens?”
“Yes.”
“I am just going into this end cottage here. The vicar tells me there is a little girl from London staying there. I want to warn her to behave this afternoon. I have spoken to the others.”
Lord Emsworth drew himself up. His pince-nez were slightly askew, but despite this his gaze was commanding and impressive.
“Well, mind what you say,” he said authoritatively. “None of your district-visiting stuff, Constance.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. I have the greatest respect for the young lady to whom you refer. She behaved on a certain recent occasion – on two recent occasions – with notable gallantry and resource, and I won’t have her ballyragged. Understand that!”
The technical title of the orgy which broke out annually on the first Monday in August in the park of Blandings Castle was the Blandings Parva School Treat, and it seemed to Lord Emsworth, wanly watching the proceedings from under the shadow of his top hat, that if this was the sort of thing schools looked on as pleasure he and they were m
entally poles apart. A function like the Blandings Parva School Treat blurred his conception of Man as Nature’s Final Word.
The decent sheep and cattle to whom this park normally belonged had been hustled away into regions unknown, leaving the smooth expanse of turf to children whose vivacity scared Lord Emsworth and adults who appeared to him to have cast aside all dignity and every other noble quality which goes to make a one hundred per cent British citizen. Look at Mrs Rossiter over there, for instance, the wife of Jno. Rossiter, Provisions, Groceries and Home-Made Jams. On any other day of the year, when you met her, Mrs Rossiter was a nice, quiet, docile woman who gave at the knees respectfully as you passed. To-day, flushed in the face and with her bonnet on one side, she seemed to have gone completely native. She was wandering to and fro drinking lemonade out of a bottle and employing her mouth, when not so occupied, to make a devastating noise with what he believed was termed a squeaker.
The injustice of the thing stung Lord Emsworth. This park was his own private park. What right had people to come and blow squeakers in it? How would Mrs Rossiter like it if one afternoon he suddenly invaded her neat little garden in the High Street and rushed about over her lawn, blowing a squeaker?
And it was always on these occasions so infernally hot. July might have ended in a flurry of snow, but directly the first Monday in August arrived and he had to put on a stiff collar out came the sun, blazing with tropic fury.
Of course, admitted Lord Emsworth, for he was a fair-minded man, this cut both ways. The hotter the day, the more quickly his collar lost its starch and ceased to spike him like a javelin. This afternoon, for instance, it had resolved itself almost immediately into something which felt like a wet compress. Severe as were his sufferings, he was compelled to recognize that he was that much ahead of the game.
A masterful figure loomed at his side.
“Clarence!”