the information, authoritatively conveyed to him during breakfast by lady constance, that he was scheduled that night to read select passages from ralston mctodd’s songs of squalor to the entire house-party assembled in the big drawing-room, had come as a complete surprise to psmith, and to his fellow-guests—such of them as were young and of the soulless sex—as a shock from which they found it hard to rally. true, they had before now gathered in a vague sort of way that he was one of those literary fellows, but so normal and engaging had they found his whole manner and appearance that it had never occurred to them that he concealed anything up his sleeve as lethal as songs of squalor. among these members of the younger set the consensus of opinion was that it was a bit thick, and that at such a price even the lavish hospitality of blandings was scarcely worth having. only those who had visited the castle before during the era of her ladyship’s flirtation with art could have been described as resigned. these stout hearts argued that while this latest blister was probably going to be pretty bad, he could hardly be worse than the chappie who had lectured on theosophy last november, and must almost of necessity be better than the bird who during the shifley race-week had attempted in a two-hour discourse to convert them to vegetarianism.
psmith himself regarded the coming ordeal with equanimity. he was not one of those whom the[p. 228] prospect of speaking in public afflicts with nervous horror. he liked the sound of his own voice, and night, when it came, found him calmly cheerful. he listened contentedly to the murmur of the drawing-room filling up as he strolled on the star-lit terrace, smoking a last cigarette before duty called him elsewhere. and when, some few yards away, seated on the terrace wall gazing out into the velvet darkness, he perceived eve halliday, his sense of well-being became acute.
all day he had been conscious of a growing desire for another of those cosy chats with eve which had done so much to make life agreeable for him during his stay at blandings. her prejudice—which he deplored—in favour of doing a certain amount of work to justify her salary, had kept him during the morning away from the little room off the library where she was wont to sit cataloguing books; and when he had gone there after lunch he had found it empty. as he approached her now, he was thinking pleasantly of all those delightful walks, those excellent driftings on the lake, and those cheery conversations which had gone to cement his conviction that of all possible girls she was the only possible one. it seemed to him that in addition to being beautiful she brought out all that was best in him of intellect and soul. that is to say, she let him talk oftener and longer than any girl he had ever known.
it struck him as a little curious that she made no move to greet him. she remained apparently unaware of his approach. and yet the summer night was not of such density as to hide him from view—and, even if she could not see him, she must undoubtedly have heard him; for only a moment before he had tripped with some violence over a large flower-pot, one of a row of sixteen which angus mcallister, doubtless for some good purpose, had placed in the fairway that afternoon.
[p. 229]“a pleasant night,” he said, seating himself gracefully beside her on the wall.
she turned her head for a brief instant, and, having turned it, looked away again.
“yes,” she said.
her manner was not effusive, but psmith persevered.
“the stars,” he proceeded, indicating them with a kindly yet not patronising wave of the hand. “bright, twinkling, and—if i may say so—rather neatly arranged. when i was a mere lad, someone whose name i cannot recollect taught me which was orion. also mars, venus, and jupiter. this thoroughly useless chunk of knowledge has, i am happy to say, long since passed from my mind. however, i am in a position to state that that wiggly thing up there a little to the right is king charles’s wain.”
“yes?”
“yes, indeed, i assure you.” it struck psmith that astronomy was not gripping his audience, so he tried travel. “i hear,” he said, “you went to market blandings this afternoon.”
“yes.”
“an attractive settlement.”
“yes.”
there was a pause. psmith removed his monocle and polished it thoughtfully. the summer night seemed to him to have taken on a touch of chill.
“what i like about the english rural districts,” he went on, “is that when the authorities have finished building a place they stop. somewhere about the reign of henry the eighth, i imagine that the master-mason gave the final house a pat with his trowel and said, ‘well, boys, that’s market blandings.’ to which his assistants no doubt assented with many a hearty ‘grammercy!’ and ‘i’fackins!’ these being expletives to which they were much addicted. and they went[p. 230] away and left it, and nobody has touched it since. and i, for one, thoroughly approve. i think it makes the place soothing. don’t you?”
“yes.”
as far as the darkness would permit, psmith subjected eve to an inquiring glance through his monocle. this was a strange new mood in which he had found her. hitherto, though she had always endeared herself to him by permitting him the major portion of the dialogue, they had usually split conversations on at least a seventy-five—twenty-five basis. and though it gratified psmith to be allowed to deliver a monologue when talking with most people, he found eve more companionable when in a slightly chattier vein.
“are you coming in to hear me read?” he asked.
“no.”
it was a change from “yes,” but that was the best that could be said of it. a good deal of discouragement was always required to damp psmith, but he could not help feeling a slight diminution of buoyancy. however, he kept on trying.
“you show your usual sterling good sense,” he said approvingly. “a scalier method of passing the scented summer night could hardly be hit upon.” he abandoned the topic of the reading. it did not grip. that was manifest. it lacked appeal. “i went to market blandings this afternoon, too,” he said. “comrade baxter informed me that you had gone thither, so i went after you. not being able to find you, i turned in for half an hour at the local moving-picture palace. they were showing episode eleven of a serial. it concluded with the heroine, kidnapped by indians, stretched on the sacrificial altar with the high-priest making passes at her with a knife. the hero meanwhile had started to climb a rather nasty precipice on his way to the rescue.[p. 231] the final picture was a close-up of his fingers slipping slowly off a rock. episode twelve next week.”
eve looked out into the night without speaking.
“i’m afraid it won’t end happily,” said psmith with a sigh. “i think he’ll save her.”
eve turned on him with a menacing abruptness.
“shall i tell you why i went to market blandings this afternoon?” she said.
“do,” said psmith cordially. “it is not for me to criticise, but as a matter of fact i was rather wondering when you were going to begin telling me all about your adventures. i have been monopolising the conversation.”
“i went to meet cynthia.”
psmith’s monocle fell out of his eye and swung jerkily on its cord. he was not easily disconcerted, but this unexpected piece of information, coming on top of her peculiar manner, undoubtedly jarred him. he foresaw difficulties, and once again found himself thinking hard thoughts of this confounded female who kept bobbing up when least expected. how simple life would have been, he mused wistfully, had ralston mctodd only had the good sense to remain a bachelor.
“oh, cynthia?” he said.
“yes, cynthia,” said eve. the inconvenient mrs. mctodd possessed a christian name admirably adapted for being hissed between clenched teeth, and eve hissed it in this fashion now. it became evident to psmith that the dear girl was in a condition of hardly suppressed fury and that trouble was coming his way. he braced himself to meet it.
“directly after we had that talk on the lake, the day i arrived,” continued eve tersely, “i wrote to cynthia, telling her to come here at once and meet me at the ‘emsworth arms’ . . .”
[p. 232]“in the high street,” said psmith. “i know it. good beer.”
“what!”
“i said they sell good beer . . .”
“never mind about the beer,” cried eve.
“no, no. i merely mentioned it in passing.”
“at lunch to-day i got a letter from her saying that she would be there this afternoon. so i hurried off. i wanted——” eve laughed a hollow, mirthless laugh of a calibre which even the hon. freddie threepwood would have found beyond his powers, and he was a specialist—“i wanted to try to bring you two together. i thought that if i could see her and have a talk with her that you might become reconciled.”
psmith, though obsessed with a disquieting feeling that he was fighting in the last ditch, pulled himself together sufficiently to pat her hand as it lay beside him on the wall like some white and fragile flower.
“that was like you,” he murmured. “that was an act worthy of your great heart. but i fear that the rift between cynthia and myself has reached such dimensions . . .”
eve drew her hand away. she swung round, and the battery of her indignant gaze raked him furiously.
“i saw cynthia,” she said, “and she told me that her husband was in paris.”
“now, how in the world,” said psmith, struggling bravely but with a growing sense that they were coming over the plate a bit too fast for him, “how in the world did she get an idea like that?”
“do you really want to know?”
“i do, indeed.”
“then i’ll tell you. she got the idea because she had had a letter from him, begging her to join him there. she had just finished telling me this, when i caught sight of you from the inn window, walking[p. 233] along the high street. i pointed you out to cynthia, and she said she had never seen you before in her life.”
“women soon forget,” sighed psmith.
“the only excuse i can find for you,” stormed eve in a vibrant undertone necessitated by the fact that somebody had just emerged from the castle door and they no longer had the terrace to themselves, “is that you’re mad. when i think of all you said to me about poor cynthia on the lake that afternoon, when i think of all the sympathy i wasted on you . . .”
“not wasted,” corrected psmith firmly. “it was by no means wasted. it made me love you—if possible—even more.”
eve had supposed that she had embarked on a tirade which would last until she had worked off her indignation and felt composed again, but this extraordinary remark scattered the thread of her harangue so hopelessly that all she could do was to stare at him in amazed silence.
“womanly intuition,” proceeded psmith gravely, “will have told you long ere this that i love you with a fervour which with my poor vocabulary i cannot hope to express. true, as you are about to say, we have known each other but a short time, as time is measured. but what of that?”
eve raised her eyebrows. her voice was cold and hostile.
“after what has happened,” she said, “i suppose i ought not to be surprised at finding you capable of anything, but—are you really choosing this moment to—to propose to me?”
“to employ a favourite word of your own—yes.”
“and you expect me to take you seriously?”
“assuredly not. i look upon the present disclosure purely as a sighting shot. you may regard it, if you will, as a kind of formal proclamation. i wish simply to go on record as an aspirant to your hand. i want you, if you will be so good, to make a note of my words[p. 234] and give them a thought from time to time. as comrade cootes—a young friend of mine whom you have not yet met—would say, ‘chew on them.’”
“i . . .”
“it is possible,” continued psmith, “that black moments will come to you—for they come to all of us, even the sunniest—when you will find yourself saying, ‘nobody loves me!’ on such occasions i should like you to add, ‘no, i am wrong. there is somebody who loves me.’ at first, it may be, that reflection will bring but scant balm. gradually, however, as the days go by and we are constantly together and my nature unfolds itself before you like the petals of some timid flower beneath the rays of the sun . . .”
eve’s eyes opened wider. she had supposed herself incapable of further astonishment, but she saw that she had been mistaken.
“you surely aren’t dreaming of staying on here now?” she gasped.
“most decidedly. why not?”
“but—but what is to prevent me telling everybody that you are not mr. mctodd?”
“your sweet, generous nature,” said psmith. “your big heart. your angelic forbearance.”
“oh!”
“considering that i only came here as mctodd—and if you had seen him you would realise that he is not a person for whom the man of sensibility and refinement would lightly allow himself to be mistaken—i say considering that i only took on the job of understudy so as to get to the castle and be near you, i hardly think that you will be able to bring yourself to get me slung out. you must try to understand what happened. when lord emsworth started chatting with me under the impression that i was comrade mctodd, i[p. 235] encouraged the mistake purely with the kindly intention of putting him at his ease. even when he informed me that he was expecting me to come down to blandings with him on the five o’clock train, it never occurred to me to do so. it was only when i saw you talking to him in the street and he revealed the fact that you were about to enjoy his hospitality that i decided that there was no other course open to the man of spirit. consider! twice that day you had passed out of my life—may i say taking the sunshine with you?—and i began to fear you might pass out of it for ever. so, loath though i was to commit the solecism of planting myself in this happy home under false pretences, i could see no other way. and here i am!”
“you must be mad!”
“well, as i was saying, the days will go by, you will have ample opportunity of studying my personality, and it is quite possible that in due season the love of an honest heart may impress you as worth having. i may add that i have loved you since the moment when i saw you sheltering from the rain under that awning in dover street, and i recall saying as much to comrade walderwick when he was chatting with me some short time later on the subject of his umbrella. i do not press you for an answer now . . .”
“i should hope not!”
“i merely say ‘think it over.’ it is nothing to cause you mental distress. other men love you. freddie threepwood loves you. just add me to the list. that is all i ask. muse on me from time to time. reflect that i may be an acquired taste. you probably did not like olives the first time you tasted them. now you probably do. give me the same chance you would an olive. consider, also, how little you actually have against me. what, indeed, does it amount to, when[p. 236] you come to examine it narrowly? all you have against me is the fact that i am not ralston mctodd. think how comparatively few people are ralston mctodd. let your meditations proceed along these lines and . . .”
he broke off, for at this moment the individual who had come out of the front door a short while back loomed beside them, and the glint of starlight on glass revealed him as the efficient baxter.
“everybody is waiting, mr. mctodd,” said the efficient baxter. he spoke the name, as always, with a certain sardonic emphasis.
“of course,” said psmith affably, “of course. i was forgetting. i will get to work at once. you are quite sure you do not wish to hear a scuttleful of modern poetry, miss halliday?”
“quite sure.”
“and yet even now, so our genial friend here informs us, a bevy of youth and beauty is crowding the drawing-room, agog for the treat. well, well! it is these strange clashings of personal taste which constitute what we call life. i think i will write a poem about it some day. come, comrade baxter, let us be up and doing. i must not disappoint my public.”
for some moments after the two had left her—baxter silent and chilly, psmith, all debonair chumminess, kneading the other’s arm and pointing out as they went objects of interest by the wayside—eve remained on the terrace wall, thinking. she was laughing now, but behind her amusement there was another feeling, and one that perplexed her. a good many men had proposed to her in the course of her career, but none of them had ever left her with this odd feeling of exhilaration. psmith was different from any other man who had come her way, and difference was a quality which eve esteemed. . . .
[p. 237]she had just reached the conclusion that life for whatever girl might eventually decide to risk it in psmith’s company would never be dull, when strange doings in her immediate neighbourhood roused her from her meditations.
the thing happened as she rose from her seat on the wall and started to cross the terrace on her way to the front door. she had stopped for an instant beneath the huge open window of the drawing-room to listen to what was going on inside. faintly, with something of the quality of a far-off phonograph, the sound of psmith reading came to her; and even at this distance there was a composed blandness about his voice which brought a smile to her lips.
and then, with a startling abruptness, the lighted window was dark. and she was aware that all the lighted windows on that side of the castle had suddenly become dark. the lamp that shone over the great door ceased to shine. and above the hubbub of voices in the drawing-room she heard psmith’s patient drawl.
“ladies and gentlemen, i think the lights have gone out.”
the night air was rent by a single piercing scream. something flashed like a shooting star and fell at her feet; and, stooping, eve found in her hands lady constance keeble’s diamond necklace.
