Service with a Smile (2 page)

‘Oh?’
said Myra.

‘Linseed
meal is the secret. That and potato peelings.’

‘Oh?’
said Myra.

‘I knew
you would be interested,’ said Lord Emsworth. ‘And of course skimmed milk. I’ve
got to go to London for a couple of nights, Wellbeloved. I leave the Empress in
your charge.’

‘Her
welfare shall be my constant concern, m’lord.’

‘Capital,
capital, capital,’ said Lord Emsworth, and would probably have gone on doing so
for some little time, for he was a man who, when he started saying ‘Capital’,
found it hard to stop, but at this moment a new arrival joined their little
group, a tall, haughty young woman who gazed on the world through harlequin
glasses of a peculiarly intimidating kind. She regarded the ninth earl with the
cold eye of a governess of strict views who has found her young charge playing
hooky.

‘Pahdon
me,’ she said.

Her
voice was as cold as her eye. Lavender Briggs disapproved of Lord Emsworth, as
she did of all those who employed her, particularly Lord Tilbury of the Mammoth
Publishing Company, who had been Lord Emsworth’s predecessor. When holding a
secretarial post, she performed her duties faithfully, but it irked her to be a
wage slave. What she wanted was to go into business for herself as the proprietress
of a typewriting bureau. It was the seeming impossibility of ever obtaining the
capital for this venture that interfered with her sleep at night and in the
daytime made her manner more than a little forbidding. Like George Cyril Wellbeloved,
whose views were strongly communistic, which was how he got that broken nose,
she eyed the more wealthy of her circle askance. Idle rich, she sometimes
called them.

Lord Emsworth,
who had been scratching the Empress’s back with the ferrule of his stick, an
attention greatly appreciated by the silver medallist, turned with a start,
much as the Lady of Shalott must have turned when the curse came upon her.
There was always something about his secretary’s voice, when it addressed him
unexpectedly, that gave him the feeling that he was a small boy again and had
been caught by the authorities stealing jam.

‘Eh,
what? Oh, hullo, Miss Briggs. Lovely morning.’

‘Quate.
Lady Constance desiah-ed me to tell you that you should be getting ready to
start, Lord Emsworth.’

‘What?
What? I’ve plenty of time.’

‘Lady
Constance thinks othahwise.’

‘I’m
all packed, aren’t I?’

‘Quate.’

‘Well,
then.’

‘The
car is at the door, and Lady Constance desiah-ed me to tell you —’

‘Oh,
all right, all right,’ said Lord Emsworth peevishly, adding a third ‘All right’
for good measure. ‘Always something, always something,’ he muttered, and told
himself once again that, of all the secretarial assistants he had had, none,
not even the Efficient Baxter of evil memory, could compare in the art of
taking the joy out of life with this repellent female whom Connie in her
arbitrary way had insisted on engaging against his strongly expressed wishes.
Always after him, always harrying him, always popping up out of a trap and
wanting him to
do
things. What with Lavender Briggs, Connie, the Duke
and those beastly boys screaming and yelling beside the lake, life at Blandings
Castle was becoming insupportable.

Gloomily
he took one last, lingering look at the Empress and pottered off, thinking, as
so many others had thought before him, that the ideal way of opening Parliament
would be to put a bomb under it and press the button.

2

The Duke of Dunstable,
having read all he wanted to read in
The Times
and given up a
half-hearted attempt to solve the crossword puzzle, had left the terrace and
was making his way to Lady Constance’s sitting-room. He was looking for someone
to talk to, and Connie, though in his opinion potty, like all women, would be
better than nothing.

He was
a large, stout, bald-headed man with a jutting nose, prominent eyes and a bushy
white moustache of the type favoured by regimental sergeant majors and
walruses. In Wiltshire, where he resided when not inviting himself for long
visits to the homes of others, he was far from popular, his standing among his
neighbours being roughly that of a shark at a bathing resort — something, that
is to say, to be avoided on all occasions as nimbly as possible. A peremptory
manner and an autocratic disposition combined to prevent him winning friends
and influencing people.

He
reached his destination, went in without knocking, found Lady Constance busy at
her desk, and shouted ‘Hoy!’

The
monosyllable, uttered in her immediate rear in a tone of voice usually confined
to the hog-calling industry of western America, made Lady Constance leap like a
rising trout. But she was a hostess. Concealing her annoyance, not that that
was necessary, for her visitor since early boyhood had never noticed when he
was annoying anyone, she laid down her pen and achieved a reasonably bright
smile.

‘Good
morning, Alaric.’

‘What do
you mean, good morning, as if you hadn’t seen me before today?’ said the Duke,
his low opinion of the woman’s intelligence confirmed. ‘We met at breakfast,
didn’t we? Potty thing to say. No sense to it. What you doing?’

‘Writing
a letter.’

‘Who
to?’ said the Duke, never one to allow the conventions to .interfere with his
thirst for knowledge.

‘James Schoonmaker.’

‘Who?’

‘Myra’s
father.’

‘Oh,
yes, the Yank I met with you in London one day,’ said the Duke, remembering a
tête-à-tête luncheon at the Ritz which he had joined uninvited. ‘Fellow with a
head like a pumpkin.’

Lady
Constance flushed warmly. She was a strikingly handsome woman, and the flush
became her. Anybody but the Duke would have seen that she resented this loose
talk of pumpkins. James Schoonmaker was a very dear friend of hers, and she had
sometimes allowed herself to think that, had they not been sundered by the
seas, he might one day have become something more. She spoke sharply.

‘He has
not got a head like a pumpkin!’

‘More
like a Spanish onion, you think?’ said the Duke, having weighed this. ‘Perhaps
you’re right. Silly ass, anyway.’

Lady
Constance’s flush deepened. Not for the first time in an association which had
lasted some forty years, starting in the days when she had worn pigtails and he
had risked mob violence by going about in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, she
was wishing that her breeding did not prohibit her from bouncing something
solid on this man’s bald head. There was a paper-weight at her elbow which
would have fitted her needs to a nicety. Debarred from physical self-expression
by a careful upbringing at the hands of a series of ladylike governesses, she
fell back on hauteur.

‘Was
there something you wanted, Alaric?’ she asked in the cold voice which had so
often intimidated her brother Clarence.

The
Duke was less susceptible to chill than Lord Emsworth. Coldness in other people’s
voices never bothered him. Whatever else he had been called in the course of
his long life, no one had ever described him as a sensitive plant.

‘Wanted
someone to talk to. Seems impossible to find anyone to talk to in this blasted
place. Not at all sure I shall come here again. I tried Emsworth just now, and
he just yawped at me like a half-wit.’

‘He
probably didn’t hear you. You know how dreamy and absent-minded Clarence is.

‘Dreamy
and absent-minded be blowed! He’s potty!’

‘He is
not!’

‘Of
course he is. Do you think I don’t know pottiness when I see it? My old father
was potty. So was my brother Rupert. So are both my nephews. Look at Ricky. Writes
poetry and sells onion soup. Look at Archie. An artist. And Emsworth’s worse
than any of them. I tell you he just yawped at me without uttering, and then
he went off with that girl Clarissa Stick-in-the-mud.’

‘Myra Schoonmaker.’

‘Same
thing. She’s potty, too.’

‘You
seem to think everybody potty.’

‘So
they are. Very rare to meet anyone these days with the intelligence of a
cockroach.’

Lady
Constance sighed wearily.

‘You
may be right. I know so few cockroaches. What makes you think that Myra is
mentally deficient?’

‘Can’t
get a word out of her. Just yawps.’

Lady
Constance frowned. She had not intended to confide her young guest’s private
affairs to a man who would probably spread them far and near, but she felt that
the girl’s reputation for sanity should be protected.

‘Myra
is rather depressed just now. She has had an unfortunate love affair.’

This
interested the Duke. He had always been as inquisitive as a cat. He blew his
moustache up against his nose and allowed his eyes to protrude.

‘What
happened? Feller walk out on her?’

‘No.’

‘She walk
out on him?’

‘No.’

‘Well,
somebody must have walked out on someone.’

Lady
Constance felt that having said so much she might as well tell all. The
alternative was to have the man stand there asking questions for the rest of
the morning, and she wanted to finish her letter.

‘I put
a stop to the thing,’ she said curtly.

The
Duke gave his moustache a puff.

‘You
did? Why? None of your ruddy business, was it?’

‘Of
course it was. When James Schoonmaker went back to America, he left her in my
charge. I was responsible for her. So when I found that she had become involved
with this man, there was only one thing to do, take her away to Blandings, out
of his reach. He has no money, no prospects, nothing. James would never forgive
me if she married him.’

‘Ever
seen the chap?’

‘No.
And I don’t want to.’

‘Probably
a frightful bounder who drops his aitches and has ‘cocoa and bloaters for
supper.’

‘No,
according to Myra, he was at Harrow and Oxford.’

‘That
damns him,’ said the Duke, who had been at Eton and Cambridge. ‘All Harrovians
are the scum of the earth, and Oxonians are even worse. Very wise of you to
remove her from his clutches.’

‘So I
thought.’

‘That’s
why she slinks about the place like a funeral mute, is it? You ought to divert
her mind from the fellow, get her interested in somebody else.’

‘The
same idea occurred to me. I’ve invited Archie to the castle.’

‘Archie
who?’

‘Your
nephew Archie.’

‘Oh, my
God! That poop?’

‘He is
not a poop at all. He’s very good-looking and very charming.’

‘Who
did he ever charm? Not me.’

‘Well,
I am hoping he will charm her. I’m a great believer in propinquity.’

The
Duke was not at his best with long words, but he thought he saw what she was
driving at.

‘You
mean if he digs in here, he may cut this bloater-eating blighter out? Girl’s
father’s a millionaire, isn’t he?’

‘Several
times over, I believe.’

‘Then
tell young Archie to get after the wench with all speed,’ said the Duke
enthusiastically. His nephew was employed by the Mammoth Publishing Company,
that vast concern which supplies the more fatheaded of England’s millions with
their daily, weekly and monthly reading matter, but in so minor a capacity that
he, the Duke, was still obliged to supplement his salary with an allowance.
And if there was one thing that parsimonious man disliked, it was supplementing
people’s salaries with allowances. The prospect of getting the boy off his
payroll was a glittering one, and his eyes bulged brightly as he envisaged it. ‘Tell
him to spare no effort,’ he urged. ‘Tell him to pull up his socks and leave no
stone unturned. Tell him —Oh, hell! Come in, curse you.’

There
had been a knock at the door. Lavender Briggs’ entered, all spectacles and
efficiency.

‘I
found Lord Emsworth, Lady Constance, and told him the car was in readiness.’

‘Oh,
thank you, Miss Briggs. Where was he?’

‘Down
at the sty. Would there be anything furthah?’

‘No
thank you, Miss Briggs.’

As the
door closed, the Duke exploded with a loud report. ‘Down at the sty!’ he cried.
‘Wouldn’t you have known it! Whenever you want him, he’s down at the sty,
gazing at that pig of his, absorbed, like somebody watching a strip-tease act. It’s
a not wholesome for a man to worship a pig the way he does. Isn’t there
something in the Bible about the Israelites worshipping a pig? No, it was a
golden calf, but the principle’s the same. I tell you …’

He
broke off. The door had opened again. Lord Emsworth stood on the threshold, his
mild face agitated.

Connie,
I can’t find my umbrella.’

Oh, Clarence!’
said Lady Constance with the exasperation the head of the family so often
aroused in her, and hustled him out towards the cupboard in the hall where, as
he should have known perfectly well, his umbrella had its home.