Something New, P. G. Wodehouse [the little red hen ebook .TXT] 📗

built up a substantial reputation as a humorist in his circle by his imitations of certain members of the club; and it was a matter of regret to him that he got so few opportunities nowadays of studying the absent-minded Lord Emsworth. It was rare luck—his lordship coming in to-day, evidently in his best form.

"Adams, who is the gentleman over by the window—the gentleman in the brown suit?"

"That is Mr. Simmonds, your lordship. He joined us last year."

"I never saw a man take such large mouthfuls. Did you ever see a man take such large mouthfuls, Adams?"

Adams refrained from expressing an opinion, but inwardly he was thrilling with artistic fervor. Mr. Simmonds eating, was one of his best imitations, though Mrs. Adams was inclined to object to it on the score that it was a bad example for the children. To be privileged to witness Lord Emsworth watching and criticizing Mr. Simmonds was to collect material for a double-barreled character study that would assuredly make the hit of the evening.

"That man," went on Lord Emsworth, "is digging his grave with his teeth. Digging his grave with his teeth, Adams! Do you take large mouthfuls, Adams?"

"No, your lordship."

"Quite right. Very sensible of you, Adams—very sensible of you.
Very sen—— What was I saying, Adams?"

"About my not taking large mouthfuls, your lordship."

"Quite right—quite right! Never take large mouthfuls, Adams.
Never gobble. Have you any children, Adams?"

"Two, your lordship."

"I hope you teach them not to gobble. They pay for it in later life. Americans gobble when young and ruin their digestions. My American friend, Mr. Peters, suffers terribly from indigestion."

Adams lowered his voice to a confidential murmur: "If you will pardon the liberty, your lordship—I saw it in the paper—"

"About Mr. Peters' indigestion?"

"About Miss Peters, your lordship, and the Honorable Frederick.
May I be permitted to offer my congratulations?"

"Eh, Oh, yes—the engagement. Yes, yes, yes! Yes—to be sure. Yes; very satisfactory in every respect. High time he settled down and got a little sense. I put it to him straight. I cut off his allowance and made him stay at home. That made him think—lazy young devil!"

Lord Emsworth had his lucid moments; and in the one that occurred now it came home to him that he was not talking to himself, as he had imagined, but confiding intimate family secrets to the head steward of his club's dining-room. He checked himself abruptly, and with a slight decrease of amiability fixed his gaze on the bill of fare and ordered cold beef. For an instant he felt resentful against Adams for luring him on to soliloquize; but the next moment his whole mind was gripped by the fascinating spectacle of Mr. Simmonds dealing with a wedge of Stilton cheese, and Adams was forgotten.

The cold beef had the effect of restoring his lordship to complete amiability, and when Adams in the course of his wanderings again found himself at the table he was once more disposed for light conversation.

"So you saw the news of the engagement in the paper, did you,
Adams?"

"Yes, your lordship, in the Mail. It had quite a long piece about it. And the Honorable Frederick's photograph and the young lady's were in the Mirror. Mrs. Adams clipped them out and put them in an album, knowing that your lordship was a member of ours. If I may say so, your lordship—a beautiful young lady."

"Devilish attractive, Adams—and devilish rich. Mr. Peters is a millionaire, Adams."

"So I read in the paper, your lordship."

"Damme! They all seem to be millionaires in America. Wish I knew how they managed it. Honestly, I hope. Mr. Peters is an honest man, but his digestion is bad. He used to bolt his food. You don't bolt your food, I hope, Adams?"

"No, your lordship; I am most careful."

"The late Mr. Gladstone used to chew each mouthful thirty-three times. Deuced good notion if you aren't in a hurry. What cheese would you recommend, Adams?"

"The gentlemen are speaking well of the Gorgonzola."

"All right, bring me some. You know, Adams, what I admire about Americans is their resource. Mr. Peters tells me that as a boy of eleven he earned twenty dollars a week selling mint to saloon keepers, as they call publicans over there. Why they wanted mint I cannot recollect. Mr. Peters explained the reason to me and it seemed highly plausible at the time; but I have forgotten it. Possibly for mint sauce. It impressed me, Adams. Twenty dollars is four pounds. I never earned four pounds a week when I was a boy of eleven; in fact, I don't think I ever earned four pounds a week. His story impressed me, Adams. Every man ought to have an earning capacity. I was so struck with what he told me that I began to paint."

"Landscapes, your lordship?"

"Furniture. It is unlikely that I shall ever be compelled to paint furniture for a living, but it is a consolation to me to feel that I could do so if called on. There is a fascination about painting furniture, Adams. I have painted the whole of my bedroom at Blandings and am now engaged on the museum. You would be surprised at the fascination of it. It suddenly came back to me the other day that I had been inwardly longing to mess about with paints and things since I was a boy. They stopped me when I was a boy. I recollect my old father beating me with a walking stick—Tell me, Adams, have I eaten my cheese?"

"Not yet, your lordship. I was about to send the waiter for it."

"Never mind. Tell him to bring the bill instead. I remember that
I have an appointment. I must not be late."

"Shall I take the fork, your lordship?"

"The fork?"

"Your lordship has inadvertently put a fork in your coat pocket."

Lord Emsworth felt in the pocket indicated, and with the air of an inexpert conjurer whose trick has succeeded contrary to his expectations produced a silver-plated fork. He regarded it with surprise; then he looked wonderingly at Adams.

"Adams, I'm getting absent-minded. Have you ever noticed any traces of absent-mindedness in me before?"

"Oh, no, your lordship."

"Well, it's deuced peculiar! I have no recollection whatsoever of placing that fork in my pocket . . . Adams, I want a taxicab." He glanced round the room, as though expecting to locate one by the fireplace.

"The hall porter will whistle one for you, your lordship."

"So he will, by George!—so he will! Good day, Adams."

"Good day, your lordship."

The Earl of Emsworth ambled benevolently to the door, leaving Adams with the feeling that his day had been well-spent. He gazed almost with reverence after the slow-moving figure.

"What a nut!" said Adams to his immortal soul.

Wafted through the sunlit streets in his taxicab, the Earl of Emsworth smiled benevolently on London's teeming millions. He was as completely happy as only a fluffy-minded old man with excellent health and a large income can be. Other people worried about all sorts of things—strikes, wars, suffragettes, the diminishing birth rate, the growing materialism of the age, a score of similar subjects.

Worrying, indeed, seemed to be the twentieth-century specialty. Lord Emsworth never worried. Nature had equipped him with a mind so admirably constructed for withstanding the disagreeableness of life that if an unpleasant thought entered it, it passed out again a moment later. Except for a few of life's fundamental facts, such as that his check book was in the right-hand top drawer of his desk; that the Honorable Freddie Threepwood was a young idiot who required perpetual restraint; and that when in doubt about anything he had merely to apply to his secretary, Rupert Baxter—except for these basic things, he never remembered anything for more than a few minutes.

At Eton, in the sixties, they had called him Fathead.

His was a life that lacked, perhaps, the sublimer emotions which raise man to the level of the gods; but undeniably it was an extremely happy one. He never experienced the thrill of ambition fulfilled; but, on the other hand, he never knew the agony of ambition frustrated. His name, when he died, would not live forever in England's annals; he was spared the pain of worrying about this by the fact that he had no desire to live forever in England's annals. He was possibly as nearly contented as a human being could be in this century of alarms and excursions.

Indeed, as he bowled along in his cab and reflected that a really charming girl, not in the chorus of any West End theater, a girl with plenty of money and excellent breeding, had—in a moment, doubtless, of mental aberration—become engaged to be married to the Honorable Freddie, he told himself that life at last was absolutely without a crumpled rose leaf.

The cab drew up before a house gay with flowered window boxes. Lord Emsworth paid the driver and stood on the sidewalk looking up at this cheerful house, trying to remember why on earth he had told the man to drive there.

A few moments' steady thought gave him the answer to the riddle. This was Mr. Peters' town house, and he had come to it by invitation to look at Mr. Peters' collection of scarabs. To be sure! He remembered now—his collection of scarabs. Or was it Arabs?

Lord Emsworth smiled. Scarabs, of course. You couldn't collect Arabs. He wondered idly, as he rang the bell, what scarabs might be; but he was interested in a fluffy kind of way in all forms of collecting, and he was very pleased to have the opportunity of examining these objects; whatever they were. He rather thought they were a kind of fish.

There are men in this world who cannot rest; who are so constituted that they can only take their leisure in the shape of a change of work. To this fairly numerous class belonged Mr. J. Preston Peters, father of Freddie's Aline. And to this merit—or defect—is to be attributed his almost maniacal devotion to that rather unattractive species of curio, the Egyptian scarab.

Five years before, a nervous breakdown had sent Mr. Peters to a
New York specialist. The specialist had grown rich on similar
cases and his advice was always the same. He insisted on Mr.
Peters taking up a hobby.

"What sort of a hobby?" inquired Mr. Peters irritably. His digestion had just begun to trouble him at the time, and his temper now was not of the best.

"Now my hobby," said the specialist, "is the collecting of scarabs. Why should you not collect scarabs?"

"Because," said Mr. Peters, "I shouldn't know one if you brought it to me on a plate. What are scarabs?"

"Scarabs," said the specialist, warming to his subject, "the
Egyptian hieroglyphs."

"And what," inquired Mr. Peters, "are Egyptian hieroglyphs?"

The specialist began to wonder whether it would not have been better to advise Mr. Peters to collect postage stamps.

"A scarab," he said—"derived from the Latin scarabeus—is literally a beetle."

"I will not collect beetles!" said Mr. Peters definitely. "They give me the Willies."

"Scarabs are Egyptian symbols in the form of beetles," the specialist hurried on. "The most common form of scarab is in the shape of a ring. Scarabs were used for seals. They were also employed as beads or ornaments. Some scarabaei bear inscriptions having reference to places; as, for instance: 'Memphis is mighty forever.'"

Mr. Peters' scorn changed to active interest.

"Have you got one like that?"

"Like what?"

"A scarab boosting Memphis. It's my home town."

"I think it possible that some other Memphis was alluded to."

"There isn't any other except the one in Tennessee," said Mr.
Peters patriotically.

The specialist owed the fact that he was a nerve doctor instead of a nerve patient to his habit of never arguing with his visitors.

"Perhaps," he said, "you would care to glance at my collection.
It is in the next room."

That was the beginning of Mr. Peters' devotion to scarabs. At first he did his collecting without any love of it, partly because he had to collect something or suffer, but principally because of a remark the specialist made as he was leaving the room.

"How long would it take me to get together that number of the things?" Mr. Peters inquired, when, having looked his fill on the dullest assortment of objects he remembered ever to have seen, he was preparing to take his leave.

The specialist was proud of his collection. "How long? To make a collection as large as mine? Years, Mr. Peters. Oh, many, many years."

"I'll bet you a hundred dollars I'll do it in six months!"

From that