Something New
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Pelham Grenville Wodehouse >> Something New
"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 as 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 moment Mr. Peters brought to the collecting of scarabs
the same furious energy which had given him so many dollars and
so much indigestion. He went after scarabs like a dog after rats.
He scooped in scarabs from the four corners of the earth, until
at the end of a year he found himself possessed of what, purely
as regarded quantity, was a record collection.
This marked the end of the first phase of--so to speak--the
scarabaean side of his life. Collecting had become a habit with
him, but he was not yet a real enthusiast. It occurred to him
that the time had arrived for a certain amount of pruning and
elimination. He called in an expert and bade him go through the
collection and weed out what he felicitously termed the "dead
ones." The expert did his job thoroughly. When he had finished,
the collection was reduced to a mere dozen specimens.
"The rest," he explained, "are practically valueless. If you are
thinking of making a collection that will have any value in the
eyes of archeologists I should advise you to throw them away. The
remaining twelve are good."
"How do you mean--good? Why is one of these things valuable and
another so much punk? They all look alike to me."
And then the expert talked to Mr. Peters for nearly two hours
about the New Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, Osiris, Ammon, Mut,
Bubastis, dynasties, Cheops, the Hyksos kings, cylinders, bezels,
Amenophis III, Queen Taia, the Princess Gilukhipa of Mitanni, the
lake of Zarukhe, Naucratis, and the Book of the Dead. He did it
with a relish. He liked to do it.
When he had finished, Mr. Peters thanked him and went to the
bathroom, where he bathed his temples with eau de Cologne.
That talk changed J. Preston Peters from a supercilious
scooper-up of random scarabs to what might be called a genuine
scarab fan. It does not matter what a man collects; if Nature has
given him the collector's mind he will become a fanatic on the
subject of whatever collection he sets out to make. Mr. Peters
had collected dollars; he began to collect scarabs with precisely
the same enthusiasm. He would have become just as enthusiastic
about butterflies or old china if he had turned his thoughts to
them; but it chanced that what he had taken up was the collecting
of the scarab, and it gripped him more and more as the years went
on.
Gradually he came to love his scarabs with that love, surpassing
the love of women, which only collectors know. He became an
expert on those curious relics of a dead civilization. For a time
they ran neck and neck in his thoughts with business. When he
retired from business he was free to make them the master passion
of his life. He treasured each individual scarab in his
collection as a miser treasures gold.
Collecting, as Mr. Peters did it, resembles the drink habit. It
begins as an amusement and ends as an obsession. He was gloating
over his treasures when the maid announced Lord Emsworth.
A curious species of mutual toleration--it could hardly be
dignified by the title of friendship--had sprung up between these
two men, so opposite in practically every respect. Each regarded
the other with that feeling of perpetual amazement with which we
encounter those whose whole viewpoint and mode of life is foreign
to our own.
The American's force and nervous energy fascinated Lord Emsworth.
As for Mr. Peters, nothing like the earl had ever happened to him
before in a long and varied life. Each, in fact, was to the other
a perpetual freak show, with no charge for admission. And if
anything had been needed to cement the alliance it would have
been supplied by the fact that they were both collectors.
They differed in collecting as they did in everything else. Mr.
Peters' collecting, as has been shown, was keen, furious,
concentrated; Lord Emsworth's had the amiable doggeringness that
marked every branch of his life. In the museum at Blandings
Castle you could find every manner of valuable and valueless
curio. There was no central motive; the place was simply an