Leave It to Psmith, P. G. Wodehouse [novels to read .txt] 📗

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 jackrabbit, 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 cloakroom 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.

V

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 wholeheartedly 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