LEAVE IT TO PSMITH (19)
By:
May 21, 2019
Leave It to Psmith (1923) is the last and most rewarding of four novels featuring the dandy, wit, and would-be adventurer Ronald Eustace Psmith, one of P.G. Wodehouse‘s most popular characters. (“One can date exactly,” Evelyn Waugh claimed, in reference to Psmith’s debut in the 1909 novel Mike, “the first moment when Wodehouse was touched by the sacred flame.”) Leave It to Psmith‘s copyright enters the public domain in 2019; HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize this terrific book here at HILOBROW. Enjoy!
‘No, no, my dear fellow, thank you very much, thank you a thousand times. I — er — find that reading in the train tries my eyes.’
‘Ah! You would prefer that I read them aloud?’
‘No, no.’ A look of hunted alarm came into his lordship’s speaking countenance at the suggestion. ‘As a matter of fact, I generally take a short nap at the beginning of a railway journey. I find it refreshing and — er — in short, refreshing. You will excuse me?’
‘If you think you can get to sleep all right without the aid of my poems, certainly.’
‘You won’t think me rude?’
‘Not at all, not at all. By the way, am I likely to meet any old friends at Blandings?’
‘Eh? Oh, no. There will be nobody but ourselves. Except my sister and Miss Peavey, of course. You said you had not met Miss Peavey, I think?’
‘I have not had that pleasure. I am, of course, looking forward to it with the utmost keenness.’
Lord Emsworth eyed him for a moment, astonished; then concluded the conversation by closing his eyes defensively. Psmith was left to his reflections, which a few minutes later were interrupted by a smart kick on the shin as Lord Emsworth, a jumpy sleeper, began to throw his long legs about. Psmith moved to the other end of the seat and, taking his bag down from the rack, extracted a slim volume bound in squashy mauve.
After gazing at this in an unfriendly manner for a moment, he opened it at random and began to read. His first move on leaving Lord Emsworth at the florist’s had been to spend a portion of his slender capital on the works of Ralston McTodd in order not to be taken at a disadvantage in the event of questions about them at Blandings; but he speedily realized, as he dipped into the poems, that anything in the nature of a prolonged study of them was likely to spoil his little holiday. They were not light summer reading.
‘Across the pale parabola of Joy…’
A gurgling snort from the other end of the compartment abruptly detached his mind from its struggle with this mystic line. He perceived that his host had slipped even farther down on to his spine and was now lying with open mouth in an attitude suggestive of dislocation. And as he looked, there was a whistling sound, and from the back of his lordship’s throat there proceeded another snore.
Psmith rose and took his book of poems out into the corridor with the purpose of roaming along the train until he should find an empty compartment in which to read in peace.
With the two adjoining compartments he had no luck. One was occupied by an elderly man with a retriever, while the presence of a baby in the other ruled it out of consideration. The third, however, looked more promising. It was not actually empty, but there was only one occupant, and he was asleep. He was lying back in the far corner with a large silk handkerchief draped over his face and his feet propped up on the seat opposite. His society did not seem likely to act as a bar to the study of Mr. McTodd’s masterpieces. Psmith sat down and resumed his reading.
‘Across the pale parabola of Joy…’
Psmith knitted his brow. It was just the sort of line which was likely to have puzzled his patroness, Lady Constance, and he anticipated that she would come to him directly he arrived and ask for an explanation. It would obviously be a poor start for his visit to confess that he had no theory as to its meaning himself. He read it again and tried to evolve one.
‘Across the pale parabola of Joy…’
A sound like two or three pigs feeding rather noisily in the middle of a thunderstorm interrupted his meditations. Psmith laid his book down and gazed in a pained way across the compartment. The silk handkerchief was heaving gently like seaweed on a ground-swell. He felt aggrieved, and there came to him a sense of being unfairly put upon, as towards the end of his troubles it might have come upon Job. This, he felt, was too much. He was being harried.
The man in the corner went on snoring.
There is always a way. Almost immediately Psmith saw what Napoleon would have done in this crisis. On the seat beside the sleeper was lying a compact little suit-case with hard, sharp edges. Rising softly, Psmith edged along the compartment and secured this. Then, having balanced it carefully on the rack above the sleeper’s stomach, he returned to his seat to await developments.
These were not long in coming. The train, now flying at its best speed through open country, was shaking itself at intervals in a vigorous way as it raced along. A few seconds later it apparently passed over some points and shivered briskly down its whole length. The suit-case wobbled insecurely, hesitated, and fell chunkily in the exact middle of its owner’s waistcoat. There was a smothered gulp beneath the handkerchief. The sleeper sat up with a jerk. The handkerchief fell off. And there was revealed to Psmith’s gaze the face of the Hon. Freddie Threepwood.
‘Goo!’ observed Freddie. He removed the bag from his midriff and began to massage the stricken spot. Then suddenly perceiving that he was not alone, he looked up and saw Psmith.
‘Coo!’ said Freddie, and sat staring wildly.
Nobody is more alive than we are to the fact that the dialogue of Frederick Threepwood, recorded above, is not bright. Nevertheless, those were his opening remarks, and the excuse must be that he had passed through a trying time and had just received two shocks, one after the other. From the first of these, the physical impact of the suit-case, he was recovering; but the second had simply paralysed him. When, the mists of sleep having cleared away, he saw, sitting but a few feet away from him on the train that was carrying him home the very man with whom he had plotted in the lobby of the Piccadilly Palace Hotel, a cold fear gripped Freddie’s very vitals.
Freddie’s troubles had begun when he just missed the twelve-fifty train. This disaster had perturbed him greatly, for he could not forget his father’s stern injunctions on the subject. But what had really upset him was the fact that he had come within an ace of missing the five o’clock train as well. He had spent the afternoon in a motion-picture palace, and the fascination of the film had caused him to lose all sense of time, so that only the slow fade-out on the embrace and the words ‘The End’ reminded him to look at his watch.
A mad rush had got him to Paddington just as the five o’clock express was leaving the station. Exhausted, he had fallen into a troubled sleep, from which he had been aroused by a violent blow in the waistcoat and the nightmare vision of Psmith in the seat across the compartment. One cannot wonder in these circumstances that Freddie did not immediately soar to the heights of eloquence.
The picture which the Hon. Frederick Threepwood had selected for his patronage that afternoon was the well-known super-super-film, Fangs of the Past, featuring Bertha Blevitch and Maurice Heddlestone — which, as everybody knows, is all about blackmail. Green-walled by primæval hills, bathed in the golden sunshine of peace and happiness, the village of Honeydean slumbered in the clear morning air. But off the train from the city stepped A Stranger. (The Stranger— — Maxwell Bannister). He inquired of a passing rustic (The Passing Rustic — Claude Hepworth) the way to the great house where Myrtle Dale, the Lady Bountiful of the village… well, anyway, it is all about blackmail, and it had affected Freddie profoundly. It still coloured his imagination, and the conclusion to which he came the moment he saw Psmith was that the latter had shadowed him and was following him home with the purpose of extracting hush-money. And as the vision of Lady Constance rose before his eyes and he remembered how he had asked this man before him to steal her necklace, damp perspiration beaded Freddie’s forehead and he strove in vain for speech.
While he was still gurgling wordlessly, Psmith opened the conversation.
‘A delightful and unexpected encounter, Comrade Threepwood. I thought you had left the metropolis some hours since.’
Freddie looked like a cornered dormouse. The mention of his name had confirmed his worst fears.
‘I was sure, when I saw you at the hotel, that we had met before, but it was only later that I managed to place you. The solution of the mystery is a pleasing and joyful one. We were at Eton together, Comrade Threepwood. Not intimates, alas! for you were some years my junior, and the charm of your personality, now so marked, had not then developed. Still, it is possible that you may remember me?’
At this moment a voice from the corridor spoke.
‘Ah, there you are, my dear fellow!’
Lord Emsworth was beaming in the doorway. His slumbers, like those of Freddie, had not lasted long. He had been aroused only a few minutes after Psmith’s departure by the arrival of the retriever from the next compartment, which, bored by the society of its owner, had strolled off on a tour of investigation and, finding next door an old acquaintance in the person of his lordship, had jumped on the seat and licked his face with such hearty goodwill that further sleep was out of the question. Being awake, Lord Emsworth, as always when he was awake, had begun to potter.
When he saw Freddie, his amiability suffered a shock.
‘Frederick! I thought I told you to be sure to return on the twelve-fifty train!’
‘Missed it, guv’nor,’ mumbled Freddie, thickly. ‘Not my fault.’
‘H’mph!’ His father seemed about to pursue the subject, but the fact that a stranger and one who was his guest was present apparently decided him to avoid anything in the shape of family wrangles. He peered from Freddie to Psmith and back again. ‘Do you two know each other?’ he said.
‘Not yet,’ said Psmith, quickly. ‘We only met a moment ago.’
‘My son Frederick,’ said Lord Emsworth, rather in the voice with which he would have called attention to the presence of a slug among his flowers. ‘Frederick, this is Mr. McTodd, the poet, who is coming to stay at Blandings.’
Freddie started and his mouth opened. But, meeting Psmith’s friendly gaze, he closed the orifice again without speaking. He licked his lips in an overwrought way.
‘You’ll find me next door if you want me,’ said Lord Emsworth to Psmith. ‘Just discovered that George Willard, very old friend of mine, is in there. Never saw him get on the train. His dog came into my compartment and licked my face. One of my neighbours. A remarkable rose-grower. As you are so interested in flowers, I will take you over to his place some time. Why don’t you join us now?’
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague | Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”) | Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt | H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook | Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins | William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land | J.D. Beresford’s Goslings | E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man | Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage | Muriel Jaeger’s The Man With Six Senses | Jack London’s “The Red One” | Philip Francis Nowlan’s Armageddon 2419 A.D. | Homer Eon Flint’s The Devolutionist | W.E.B. DuBois’s “The Comet” | Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Moon Men | Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland | Sax Rohmer’s “The Zayat Kiss” | Eimar O’Duffy’s King Goshawk and the Birds | Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Lost Prince | Morley Roberts’s The Fugitives | Helen MacInnes’s The Unconquerable | Geoffrey Household’s Watcher in the Shadows | William Haggard’s The High Wire | Hammond Innes’s Air Bridge | James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen | John Buchan’s “No Man’s Land” | John Russell’s “The Fourth Man” | E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” | John Buchan’s Huntingtower | Arthur Conan Doyle’s When the World Screamed | Victor Bridges’ A Rogue By Compulsion | Jack London’s The Iron Heel | H. De Vere Stacpoole’s The Man Who Lost Himself | P.G. Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith | Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” | Houdini and Lovecraft’s “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” | Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Sussex Vampire”.
RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HILOBROW’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.
READ GORGEOUS PAPERBACKS: HiLoBooks has reissued the following 10 obscure but amazing Radium Age science fiction novels in beautiful print editions: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.