 Chapter 3, Part 2 of Something New This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Something New by PG Woodhouse. Chapter 3, Part 2 Listen, Aileen, let us get this thing straight. I have been in love with you since I wore Knickerbockers. I propose to you what your first dance. Very clumsily. But sincerely, last year when I found that you had gone to England, I came on after you as soon as the firm could spare me. And I found you engaged to this Freddie Expressance. I like the way you stand up for Freddie. So many men in your position might say horrid things about him. Oh, I have nothing against Freddie. He is practically an imbecile and I don't like his face. Outside of that, he's all right. But you will be glad later that you did not marry him. You are much too real a person. What a wife you will make for a hard-working man. What does Freddie work hard at? I am alluding at the moment, not to Freddie, but to myself. I shall come home tired out. Maybe things will have gone wrong downtown. I shall be fagged, disheartened, and then you will come with your cool white hands and placing them gently on my forehead. Aileen shook her head. No good, George. Really, you had better realize it. I'm very fond of you, but we are not suited. Why not? You are too overwhelming. Too much like a bomb. I think you must be one of the Superman one reads about. You would want your own way and nothing but your own way. Now, Freddie will roll through hoops and sham dead, and we shall be the happiest pair in the world. I am much too placid and mild to make you happy. You want somebody who would stand up to you. Somebody like Joan Valentine. That's the second time you have mentioned this Joan Valentine. Who is she? She is a girl who was at school with me. We were the greatest chums. At least I worshipped her and would have done anything for her, and I think she liked me. Then we lost touch with one another and didn't meet for years. I met her on the street yesterday, and she is just the same. She has been through the most awful times. Her father was quite rich. He died suddenly while he and Joan were in Paris, and she found that he hadn't left a cent. He had been living right up to his income all the time. His life wasn't even insured. She came to London, and so far as I could make out from the short talk we had, she has done pretty nearly everything since we last met. She worked in a shop and went on the stage and all sorts of things. Isn't it awful, George? Pretty tough, said Emerson. He was but faintly interested in Miss Valentine. She is so plucky and full of life she would stand up to you. Thanks. My idea of marriage is not a perpetual scrap. My notion of a wife is something cozy and sympathetic and soothing. That is why I love you. We shall be the happiest. Aileen laughed. Dear old George, now pay the check and get me a taxi. I've endless things to do at home. If Freddie is in town, I suppose he will be calling to see me. Who is Freddie, do you ask? Freddie is my fiancée, George, my betrothed, my steady. The young man I'm going to marry. Emerson shook his head resignedly. Curious how you cling to that Freddie idea. Never mind. I'll come down to Blandings on Friday and we shall see what happens. Bear in mind the broad fact that you and I are going to be married and that nothing on earth is going to stop us. It was Aileen Peters who had to bear the brunt of her father's mental agony when he discovered, shortly after Lord Emsworth had left him, that the gem of his collection of scarabs had done the same. It is always the innocent bystander who suffers. That darned old sneak thief, said Mr. Peters, father. Don't sit there saying father. What's the use of saying father? Do you think it is going to help you're saying father? I'd rather the old pirate had taken the house and the lot than that scarab. He knows what's what. Trust him to walk off with the pick of the whole bunch. I did think I could leave the father of the man who's going to marry my daughter for a second alone with the things. There's no morality among collectors, none. I'd trust the syndicate of Jesse James, Captain Kidd and Dick Turpin sooner than I would a collector. My chips of the fourth dynasty. I wouldn't have lost it for five thousand dollars. But father, couldn't you write him a letter asking for it back? He's such a nice old man. I'm sure he didn't mean to steal the scarab. Mr. Peters overwrought, sold, blew off steam in the shape of a passionate snort. Didn't mean to steal it. What do you think he meant to do? Take it away and keep it safe for me? For fear I should lose it? Didn't mean to steal it. Bet you he's well known in society as a kleptomaniac. Bet you that when his name is announced his friends pick up their spoons and send in a hurry call to police headquarters for a squad to come and see that he doesn't sneak the front door. Of course he meant to steal it. He has a museum of his own down in the country. My chips is going to lend tone to that. I'd give five thousand dollars to get it back. If there's a man in this country with the spirit to break into that castle and steal that scarab and hand it back to me, there's five thousand waiting for him right here. And if he wants to he can knock that old safe blower on the head with a jimmy into the bargain. But father, why can't you simply go to him and say it's yours and that you must have it back? And have him come back at me by calling off this engagement of yours? Not if I know it. You can't go about the place charging a man with theft and ask him to go on being willing to have his son marry your daughter, can you? The slightest suggestion that I thought he had stolen this scarab and he would do the proud old English aristocrat and end everything. He's in the strongest position a thief has ever been in. You can't get at him. I didn't think of that. You don't think at all. That's the trouble with you, said Mr. Peters. Years of indigestion had made Mr. Peters temper even when in a normal mood perfectly impossible. In a crisis like this it ran amok. He vented it on Aileen because he had always vented his irritabilities on Aileen because the fact of her sweet gentle disposition combined with the fact of their relationship made her the ideal person to receive the overflow of his black moods. While his wife had lived he had bullied her. On her death Aileen had stepped into the vacant position. Aileen did not cry because she was not a girl who was given to tears but for all her placid good temper she was wounded. She was a girl who liked everything in the world to run smoothly and easily and these scenes with her father always depressed her. She took advantage of a lull in Mr. Peters' flow of words and slipped from the room. Her cheerfulness had received a shock. She wanted sympathy. She wanted comforting. For a moment she considered George Emerson in the role of Comforter but there were objections to George in this character. Aileen was accustomed to tease and chat with George but at heart she was a little afraid of him and instinct told her that as Comforter he would be too volcanic and supermanly for a girl who was engaged to marry another man in June. George as Comforter would be far too prone to trust to action rather than to the soothing power of the spoken word. George's idea of healing the wound, she felt, would be to push her into a cab and drive to the nearest registrars. No, she would not go to George. To whom then? The vision of Joan Valentine came to her. Of Joan as she had seen her yesterday strong, cheerful, self-reliant, bearing herself in spite of adversity with a valiant jauntiness. Yes, she would go and see Joan. She put on her hat and stole from the house. Curiously enough, only a quarter of an hour before our Jones had set out with exactly the same object in view. At almost exactly the hour when Aileen Peters set off to visit her friend Miss Valentine three men sat in the cozy smoking room of Blanding's castle. They were variously occupied. In the big chair nearest the door, the Honorable Frederick Threepwood, Freddie to pals, was reading. Next to him said a young man whose eyes, glittering through rimless spectacles, were concentrated on the upturned faces of several neat rows of playing cards. Rupert Baxter. Lord Emsworth's invaluable secretary had no vices, but he sometimes relaxed his busy brain with a game of solitaire. Beyond Baxter, a cigar in his mouth and a weak eyeball at his side, the Earl of Emsworth took his ease. The book the Honorable Freddie was reading was a small paper-covered book. Its cover was decorated with a color scheme in red, black, and yellow, depicting a tense moment in the lives of a man with a black beard, a man with a yellow beard, a man without any beard at all, and a young woman who at first sight appeared to be all eyes and hair. The man with a black beard, to gain some private end, had tied this young woman with ropes to a complicated system of machinery, mostly wheels and pulleys. The man with the yellow beard was in the act of pushing or pulling a lever. The beardless man protruding through a trapdoor in the floor was pointing a large revolver at the parties of the second part. Beneath this picture were the words, Hands up, you scoundrels! Above it, in a meandering scroll across the page, was Gridley Quayle, investigator, The Adventure of the Secret Six, by Felix Clawley. The Honorable Freddie did not so much read as gulp the adventure of the Secret Six. His face was crimson with excitement. His hair was rumbled. His eyes bulged. He was absorbed. This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if we do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers. Grave and earnest men, and eaten and elsewhere, had tried Freddie Threepwood with Greek, with Latin, and with English, and the sheep-like stilidity with which he declined to be interested in the masterpieces of all three tongues had left them with a conviction that he would never read anything. And then, years afterward, he had suddenly blossomed out as a student. Only, it is true, a student of the adventures of Gridley Quayle, but still a student. His was a dull life, and Gridley Quayle was the only person who brought romance into it. Existence for the Honorable Freddie was simply a sort of desert punctuated with monthly oases in the shape of new Quayle adventures. It was his ambition to meet the man who wrote them. Lord Emsworth sat and smoked, and sipped and smoked again at peace with all the world. His mind was as nearly a blank as it is possible for the human mind to be. The hand that had not the task of holding the cigar was at rest in his trousers pocket. The fingers of it fumbled idly with a small hard object. Gradually it filtered into his lordship's mind that this small hard object was not familiar. It was something new, something that was neither his keys nor his pencil, nor was it his small change. He yielded to a growing curiosity and drew it out. He examined it. It was a little something, rather like a fossilized beetle. It touched no chord in him. He looked at it with amiable distaste. Now, how in the world did that get there, he said? The Honorable Freddie paid no attention to the remark. He was now at the very crest of his story when every line intensified the thrill. Incident was succeeding incident. The secret six were here, there, and everywhere like so many malignant June bugs. Annabelle, the heroine, was having a perfectly rotten time. Kidnapped and imprisoned every few minutes. Gridley Quayle, hot on the scent, was covering somebody or other with his revolver almost continuously. Freddie Threepwood had no time for chatting with his father. Not so, Rupert Baxter. Chatting with Lord Emsworth was one of the things for which he received his salary. He looked up from his cards. Lord Emsworth? I have found a curious object in my pocket, Baxter. I was wondering how it got there. He handed the thing to his secretary. Rupert Baxter's eyes lit up with sudden enthusiasm. He gasped. Magnificent, he cried. Superb! Lord Emsworth looked at him inquiringly. It is a scare of Lord Emsworth, and unless I am mistaken, and I think I may claim to be something of an expert, a Cheops of the Fourth Dynasty. A wonderful addition to your museum. Is it? By Gad you don't say so, Baxter. It is indeed. If it is not a rude question, how much did you give for it, Lord Emsworth? It must have been the gem of somebody's collection. Was there a sale at Christie's this afternoon? Lord Emsworth shook his head. I did not get it at Christie's, but I recollect that I had an important engagement which prevented my going to Christie's, to be sure. Yes, I had promised to call on Mr. Peters and examine his collection of... I wonder what it was that Mr. Peters said he collected. Mr. Peters is one of the best known living collectors of scarabs. Scarabs, you are quite right, Baxter. Now that I recall the episode, this is a scarab, and Mr. Peters gave it to me. Gave it to you, Lord Emsworth? Yes, the whole scene comes back to me. Mr. Peters, after telling me a great many exceedingly interesting things about scarabs, which I regret to say I cannot remember, gave me this. And do you say it is really valuable, Baxter? It is from a collector's point of view of extraordinary value. Bless my soul, Lord Emsworth beamed. This is extremely interesting, Baxter. One has heard so much of the princely hospitality of Americans. How exceedingly kind of Mr. Peters. I shall certainly treasure it, though I must confess that from a purely spectacular standpoint, it leaves me a little cold. However, I must not look a gift horse in the mouth, eh, Baxter? From afar came the silver booming of a gong. Lord Emsworth rose. Time to dress for dinner? I had no idea it was so late. Baxter, you will be going past the museum door. Will you be a good fellow in place this among the exhibits? You will know what to do with it better than I. I always think of you as the curator of my little collection, Baxter. Mind how you step when you are in the museum. I was painting a chair there yesterday and I think I left the paint pot on the floor. He cast a less amiable glance at his studious son. Get up, Frederick, and go and dress for dinner. What is that trash you are reading? Lord Boffretty came out of his book much as a sleepwalker wakes with a sense of having been violently assaulted. He looked up with a kind of stunned plaintiveness. Eh, Governor? Make haste. Beech rang the gong five minutes ago. What is that you are reading? Oh, nothing, Governor, just a book. I wonder you can waste your time on such trash. Make haste. He turned to the door and the benevolent expression once more wandered to thwart his face. Extremely kind of, Mr. Peters, he said. Really, there is something almost oriental in the lavish generosity of our American cousins. It had taken our Jones just six hours to discover Joan Valentine's address. That it had not taken him longer is the proof of his energy and of the excellence of his system of obtaining information. But our Jones, when he considered it worth his while, could be extremely energetic and he was a past master at the art of finding out things. He poured himself out of his cab and rang the bell of number seven. A disheveled maid answered the ring. Miss Valentine in? Yes, sir. Our Jones produced his card. An important business. Tell her. Half a minute, I'll write it. He wrote the words on the card and devoted the brief period of waiting to a careful scrutiny of his surroundings. He looked out into the court and he looked as far as he could down the dingy passage. And the conclusions he drew from what he saw were complementary to Miss Valentine. If this girl is the sort of girl who would hold up Freddie's letters he mused, she wouldn't be living in a place like this. If she were on the make, she would have more money that she evidently possesses. Therefore she is not on the make and I am prepared to bet that she destroyed the letters as fast as she got them. Those were roughly the thoughts of our Jones as he stood in the doorway of number seven and they were important thoughts in as much as they determined his attitude toward Jones in the approaching interview. He perceived that this matter must be handled delicately, that he must be very much the gentleman. It would be a strain, but he must do it. The maid returned and directed him to Jones' room with a brief word and a sweeping gesture. A, said our Jones, first floor, front, said the maid. Our Jones trudged laboriously up the short flight of stairs. It was very dark on the stairs and he stumbled. Eventually, however, light came to him through an open door. Looking in, he saw a girl standing at the table. She had an air of expectation, so he deduced that he had reached his journey's end. Miss Valentine? Please come in. Our Jones waddled in. Not much light on your stairs? No. Will you take a seat? Thanks. One glance at the girl convinced our Jones that he had been right. Circumstances had made him a rapid judge of character. For in the profession of living by one's wits in a large city, the first principle of offense and defense is to sum people up at first sight. This girl was not on the make. Joan Valentine was a tall girl with wheat, gold hair, and eyes as brightly blue as a November sky shining on a frosty world. There was in them a little of November's cold glitter, too, for Joan had been through much in the last few years and experience, even though it does not harden, erects a defensive barrier between its children and the world. Her eyes were eyes that looked straight and challenged. They could thaw out of the satin blue of the Mediterranean Sea where it purrs about the little villages of southern France, she looked what she was a girl of action, a girl whom life had made both reckless and wary, wary of friendly advances reckless when there was a venture afoot. Her eyes, as they met our Jones now, were cold and challenging. She, too, had learned the trick of swift diagnosis of character and what she saw of our Jones in that first glance did not impress her favorably. You wish to see me on business? Yes, said our Jones. Yes, Ms. Valentine, may I begin by begging you to realize that I have no intention of insulting you? Jones' eyebrows rose. For an instant she did her visit of the injustice of suspecting that he had been dining too well. I don't understand. Let me explain. I have come here, our Jones went on, getting more gentlemanly every moment on a very just tasteful errand to oblige a friend. I bear in mind that whatever I say is said entirely on his behalf. By this time, Jones had abandoned the idea that this stout person was a life insurance tout and was inclining to the view that he was collecting funds for a charity. I came here at the request of the honorable Frederick Threepwood. I don't quite understand. You never met him, Ms. Valentine, but when you were in the chorus at the Piccadilly Theater, I believe he wrote you some very foolish letters. Possibly, you have forgotten them. I certainly have. You have probably destroyed them, eh? Certainly, I never keep letters. Why do you ask? Well, you see, Ms. Valentine, the honorable Frederick Threepwood is about to be married, and he thought that possibly on the whole it would be better that the letters and poetry, which he wrote, you were non-existent. Not all our Jones' gentlemanliness and dirtiness and Jones' gentlemanliness and during this speech, he diffused it like a powerful scent and waves about him could hide the unpleasant meaning of the words. He was afraid I might try to blackmail him, said Jones with formidable calm. Our Jones raised and waved a fat hand deprecatingly. My dear Ms. Valentine, Joan Rose and our Jones followed her example. The interview was plainly at an end. Please tell Mr. Threepwood to make his mind quite easy. He is in no danger. Exactly, exactly, precisely. I assured Threepwood that my visit here would be a mere formality. I was quite sure you had no intention whatever of worrying him. I may tell him definitely, then, that you have destroyed the letters. Yes, good evening. Good evening, Ms. Valentine. The closing of the door behind him left him in total darkness, but he hardly liked to return and asked Joan to reopen it in order to light him on his way. He was glad to be out of her presence. He was used to being looked at in an unfriendly way by his fellows, but there had been something in Jones' eyes that had curiously discomfited him. Our Jones groped his way down, relieved that all was over and had ended well. He believed what she had told him and he could conscientiously assure Freddie that the prospect of his sharing of the fate of poor old Percy was non-existent. It is true that he proposed to add in his report that the destruction of the letters had been purchased with difficulty at a cost of just five hundred pounds, but that was a mere business formality. He had almost reached the last step when there was a ring at the front door. With what he was afterward won't to call an inspiration, he retreated with unusual nimbleness until he had almost reached Jones' door again. Then he leaned over the banister and listened. The disheveled maid opened the door. A girl's voice spoke. Is Ms. Valentine in? She's in, but she's engaged. I wish she would go up and tell her that I want to see her. Say it's Ms. Peters, Ms. Aileen Peters. The banister shook beneath our Jones' sudden clutch. For a moment he felt almost faint. He began to think swiftly. A great light had dawned on him and the thought outstanding in his mind was that never again would he trust a man or woman on the evidence of his senses. He could have sworn that this Valentine girl was on the level. He had been perfectly satisfied with her statement that she had destroyed the letters. And all the while she had been playing as deep a game as he had come across in the whole course of his professional career. He almost admired her making him in. It was obvious now what her game was. Previous to his visit she had arranged a meeting with Freddie's fiance with the view of opening negotiations for the sale of the letters. She had held him, Jones, at arm's length because she was going to sell the letters to whoever would pay the best price. But for the accident of his happening to be here when Ms. Peters arrived Freddie and his fiance were at each other's price. He had worked the same game himself a dozen times and he resented the entry of female competition into what he regarded as essentially a male field of enterprise. As the maid stumped up the stairs he continued his retreat. He heard Jones' door open and the stream of light showed him the disheveled maid standing in the doorway. Ow, I thought there was a gentleman with you, Miss. He left a moment ago, why? He wants to see you. Miss Peters, her name is. Will you ask her to come up? The disheveled maid was no polished mistress of ceremonies. She leaned down into the void and hailed Aileen. She says, will you come up? Aileen's feet became audible on the staircase. There were greetings. Whatever brings you here, Aileen? Am I interrupting you, Joan dear? No, do come in. The maid calls at this hour. Is anything wrong? Come in. The door closed. The maid retired to the depths and our Jones stole cautiously down again. He was feeling absolutely bewildered. Apparently his deductions, his second thoughts, had been all wrong and Joan was, after all, the honest person he had imagined at first sight. Those two girls had talked to each other as though they were old friends in their lives. That was the thing which perplexed our Jones. With the tread of a red Indian he approached the door and put his ear to it. He found he could hear quite comfortably. Aileen, meantime, inside the room had begun to draw comfort from Joan's very appearance. She looked so capable. Joan's eyes had changed the expression they had contained during the recent interview. They were soft now and very self-contemptuous. It is the compensation which life gives to those whom it has handled roughly in order that they shall be able to regard with a certain contempt the small troubles of the sheltered. Joan remembered Aileen of old and knew her for a perennial victim of small troubles. Even in their school days she had always needed to be looked after and comforted. Her sweet temper had seemed to invite inspired protectiveness in a certain type of her fellow human beings. It was this quality in her that kept George Emerson awake at night and had appealed to Joan now. Joan, for whom life was a constant struggle to keep the wolf within a reasonable distance from the door and who counted that day happy on which she saw her way clear to paying her weekly rent and possibly having a trifle over for some coveted hat or pair of shoes could not help feeling, as she looked at Aileen that her own troubles were as nothing and that the immediate need of the moment was to pet and comfort her friend. Her knowledge of Aileen told her the probable tragedy was that she had lost a brooch or had been spoken to crossly by somebody but it also told her that such tragedies bulked very large on Aileen's horizon. Trouble, after all, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder and Aileen was far less able to endure with fortitude the loss of a brooch than she herself to bear the loss of a position the emoluments of which meant the difference between having just enough to eat and starving. You're worried about something, she said, sit down and tell me all about it. Aileen sat down and looked about her at the shabby room by that curious process of the human mind which makes the spectacle of another's misfortune a palliative for one's own. She was feeling oddly comforted already. Her thoughts were not definite and she could not analyze them but what they amounted to was that though it was an unpleasant thing to be bullied by a dyspeptic father the world manifestly held worse tribulations which her father's other outstanding quality besides dyspepsia, wealth to wit, enabled her to avoid. It was at this point that the dim beginnings of philosophy began to invade her mind. The thing resolved itself almost into an equation. If father had not had indigestion he would not have bullied her. But if father had not made a fortune he would not have had indigestion. Therefore, if father had not made a fortune he would not have bullied her. Practically in fact if father did not bully her he would not be rich. And if he were not rich she took in the faded carpet the stained wallpaper with a comprehensive glance it certainly cut both ways. She began to be a little ashamed of her misery. It's nothing at all really she said I think I've been making rather a fuss about very little. Joan was relieved. The struggling life breeds moods of depression and such a mood had come to her just before Eileen's arrival. Life at that moment had seemed to stretch before her like a dusty, weary road without hope. When she was sick of fighting she wanted money and ease and a surcease from this perpetual race with the weekly bills. The mood had been the outcome partly of our Joan's gentlemanly veiled insinuations but still more though she did not realize it of her yesterday's meeting with Eileen. Mr. Peters might be unguarded in his speech when conversing with his daughter. He might play the tyrant toward her in many ways but he did not stint her in this allowance. And on the occasion when she met Joan Eileen had been wearing so Parisian a hat and a tailor-made suit of such obviously expensive simplicity that green-eyed envy had almost spoiled Joan's pleasure at meeting this friend of her opulent days. She had suppressed the envy and it had revenged itself by assaulting her afresh in the form of the worst fit of the blues she had had in two years. She had to sink her depression in order to alleviate Eileen's but it was a distinct relief to find that the feat would not be necessary. Never mind, she said, tell me what the very little thing was. It was only Father, said Eileen simply. Joan cast her mind back to the days of school and placed Father as a rather irritable person vaguely reputed to be something of an ogre in his home circle. Was he angry with you about something? Not exactly angry with me, but while I was there. Joan's depression lifted slightly. She had forgotten in the stunning anguish of the sudden spectacle of that hat and that tailor-made suit that Paris hats in $120 suits not infrequently had but the vulgar term a string attached to them. After all, she was independent. She might have to murder her beauty with hats and frocks that had never been nearer Paris than the Tottenham Court Road but at least no one bullied her because she happened to be at hand when tempers were short. What a shame, she said. Tell me all about it. With a prefatory remark that it was all so ridiculous, really, Eileen embarked on the narrative of the afternoon's events. Joan heard her out checking a strong disposition to giggle. Her viewpoint was that of the average person and the average person cannot see the importance of the scarab in the scheme of things. The opinion she formed of Mr. Peters was of his being an eccentric old gentleman making a great to-do about nothing at all. Losses had to have a concrete value before they could impress Joan. It was beyond her to grasp that Mr. Peters would sooner have lost a diamond necklace if he had happened to possess one than his chiops of the Fourth Dynasty. It was not until Eileen, having concluded her tale, added one more strand to it that she found herself treating the matter seriously. Father says he would give $5,000 to anyone who would get it back for him. What? The whole story took on a different complexion for Joan. Money talks. Mr. Peters' words might have been merely the rhetorical outburst of a heated moment, that even discounting them there seemed to be a certain exciting substratum. A man who shouts that he will give $5,000 for a thing may very well mean he will give $500, and Joan's finances were perpetually in a condition which makes $500 a sum to be gasped at. He wasn't serious, surely. I think he was, said Eileen, but $5,000? It isn't really very much to Father, you know. He gave away $100,000 to the university. But for a grubby little scarab? You don't understand how Father loves his scarabs. Since he retired from business, he has been simply wrapped up in them. You know collectors are like that. You read in the papers about men giving all sorts of money for funny things. Outside the door, our Jones, his ear close to the panel, drank in all these things greedily. He would have been willing to remain in that attitude indefinitely with this kind of special information. But just as Eileen said these words, a door opened on the floor above and somebody came out whistling and began to descend the stairs. Our Jones stood not on the order of his going. He was down in the hall and fumbling with the handle of the front door with an agility of which few casual observers of his dimensions would have deemed him capable. The next moment he was out in the street walking calmly toward Leicester Square pondering over what he had heard. Much of our Jones' substantial annual income was derived from pondering over what he had heard. In the room, Jones was looking at Eileen with the distended eyes of one who sees visions or has inspirations. She got up. There are occasions when one must speak standing. Then you mean to say that your father would really give $5,000 to anyone who got this thing back for him? I'm sure he would, but who could do it? I could, said Jones, and what is more I'm going to. Eileen stared at her helplessly. In their school days Jones had always swept her off her feet. Then she had always had the feeling that with Jones nothing was impossible. Heroin worship like hero worship dies hard. She looked at Jones now with the stricken sensation of one who has inadvertently set powerful machinery in motion. It was all she could say. My dear child, it's perfectly simple. This Earl of yours has taken the thing off to his castle like a brigand. You say you are going down there on Friday for a visit. All you have to do is to take me along with you and sit back and watch me get busy. But Jones, where is the difficulty? I don't see how I could take you down very well. Why not? I don't know. Well, don't you see, if you went down there as a friend of mine and were caught stealing the scarab, there would be just the trouble father wants to avoid about my engagement, you see, and so on. It was an aspect of the matter that had escaped Jones. She frowned thoughtfully. I see. Yes, there is that. But there must be a way. You mustn't, Jones, really. Don't think any more about it. Not think any more about it. Do you realize what $5,000 or a quarter of $5,000 means to me? I would do anything for it, anything. And there's the fun of it. I don't suppose you can realize that, either. I want a change. I've been grubbing away here on nothing a week for years and it's time I had a vacation. There must be a way by which you could get me down. Why, of course. Why didn't I think of it before? You shall take me on Friday as your lady's maid. I couldn't. Why not? I couldn't. Why not? Oh, well. Jones advanced on her where she sat and grasped her firmly by the shoulders. Her face was inflexible. Aileen, my pet, it's no good arguing. You might just as well argue with a wolf on the trail of a fat Russian peasant. I need that money. I need it in my business. I need it worse than anybody has ever needed anything. I have it. From now on, until further notice, I am your lady's maid. You can give your present one a holiday. Aileen met her eyes waveringly. The spirit of the old school days when nothing was impossible where Jones was concerned had her in its grip. Moreover, the excitement of the scheme began to attract her. But Jones, she said, you know, it's simply ridiculous. You could never pass as a lady's maid. I expect there are all sorts of things a lady's maid has got to do and not do. Now, dear Aileen, I know them all. You can't stump me on below stairs etiquette. I've been a lady's maid. Jones, it's quite true. Three years ago, when I was more than usually impunious, the wolf was glued to the door like a postage stamp. So I answered an advertisement and became a lady's maid. You seem to have done everything. It's all right for you idle rich Aileen. You can sit still and contemplate life. But we poor working girls have got to hustle. Aileen laughed. You know, you always could make me do anything you wanted in the old days, Jones. I suppose I have got to look on this. It's quite settled now. Absolutely settled. Oh, Aileen, there's one thing you must remember. Don't call me Jones when I'm down at the castle. You must call me Valentine. She paused. The recollection of the Honorable Freddie had come to her. No, Valentine would not do. No, not Valentine. She went on. It's too jaunty. I used it once years ago, but it never sounded just right. I want something more respectable, more suited to my position. Can't you suggest something? Aileen pondered. Simpson. It's exactly right. Simpson. Say it kindly and yet distantly as though I were a worm, but a worm for whom you felt a mild liking rolled it around your tongue. Simpson. Splendid. Now, once again, a little more haughtily. Simpson. Simpson. Jones regarded her with affectionate approval. That's wonderful, she said. You might have been doing it all your life. What are you laughing at, asked Aileen? There's a young man who lives on the floor above this, and I was lecturing him yesterday on Enterprise. I told him to go and find something exciting to do. I wonder what he would say if he knew how thoroughly I am going to practice what I preach. End of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 of Something New. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Something New by PG Woodhouse. Chapter 4. In the morning following Aileen's visit to Joan Valentine, Ash sat in his room the morning post on the table before him. The heady influence of Joan had not yet ceased to work within him, and he proposed in pursuance of his promise to her to go carefully through the columns of advertisements, however pessimistic he might feel concerning the utility of that action. His first glance assured him that the vast fortunes of the philanthropists whose acquaintance he had already made in print were not yet exhausted. Brian McNeil still dangled his gold before the public. So did Angus Bruce. So did Duncan McFarland and Wallace McIntosh and Donald McNeab. They still had the money and they still wanted to give it away. But he was reading listlessly down the column when, from the massive advertisements, one of an unusual sort detached itself. Wanted, young man of good appearance who was poor and reckless to undertake a delicate and dangerous enterprise, good pay for the right man applied between the hours of 10 and 12 at offices of Main Price, Main Price and Bool 3 Denver Street Strand. And as he read it, half past 10 struck on the little clock on his mantelpiece. It was probably this fact that decided Ash. If he had been compelled to postpone his visit to the offices of Messrs. Main Price, Main Price and Bool until the afternoon, it is possible that barriers of laziness might have reared themselves in the path of adventure. For Ash, an adventurer at heart was also uncommonly lazy. As it was, however, he could make an immediate start. Pausing but to put on his shoes and having satisfied himself by a glance in the mirror that his appearance was reasonably good, he seized his hat, shot out of the narrow mouth of Arundel Street like a shell, and scrambled into a taxi cab with the feeling that, short of murder, they could not make it too delicate and dangerous for him. He was conscious of strange thrills. This, he told himself, was the only possible mode of life he had always been partial to those historical novels in which the characters are perpetually vaulting on chargers and riding across country on perilous errands. This leaping into taxi cabs to answer stimulating advertisements in the morning post was very much the same sort of thing. It was with fine fervor animating him that he entered the gloomy offices of Main Price, Main Price and Bool. His brain was a fire thing. I have come anance, he began to the diminutive office boy who seemed to be the nearest thing visible to a Main Price or a Bool. Sit down, gotta take your turn, said the office boy, and for the first time, Ash perceived that the enter room in which he stood was crowded to overflowing. This, in the circumstances, was something of a damper. He had pictured himself during his ride in the cab, striding into the office and saying, the delicate and dangerous enterprise lead me to it. He had not realized until now that he was not the only man in London who read the advertisement columns of the morning post and for an instant his heart sank at the sight of all this competition. A second and more comprehensive glance at his rivals gave him confidence. The wanted column of the morning paper is a sort of dredger which churns up strange creatures in London's underworld. Only in response to the dredger's operations do they come to the surface in such numbers as to be noticeable. For as a rule, they are of a solitary habit and shun company. But when they do come, they bring with them something of the horror of the depths. It is the saddest spectacle in the world, that of the crowd collected by a wanted advertisement. They are so palpably not wanted by anyone for any purpose whatsoever. At this time, they gather together with a sort of hopeful hopelessness. What they were originally, the units of these collections, heaven knows. Fate has battered out of them every trace of individuality. Each now is exactly like his neighbor. No worse, no better. Ash, as he sat and watched them, was filled with conflicting emotions. One half of him thrilled with the glamour of adventure was chafing at the delay and resentful of these poor creatures as of so many obstacles to the beginning of all the brisk and exciting things that lay behind the mysterious brevity of the advertisement. The other, pitifully alive to the tragedy of the occasion, was grateful for the delay. On the whole, he was glad to feel that if one of these derelicts did not secure the good pay for the right man, it would not be his fault. He had been the last to arrive and he would be the last to pass which was the gateway of adventure. The door with Mr. Bool inscribed on its ground glass behind which sat the author of the mysterious request for assistance interviewing applicants. It would be through their own shortcomings not because of his superior attractions. They failed to please that unseen arbiter. That they were so failing was plain. Scarcely had one scarred victim of London's unkindness pass through the ring. The office boy who, in the intervals of frowning sternly on the throng as much as to say that he would stand no nonsense, would cry next and another dull-eyed wreck would drift through to be followed a moment later by yet another. The one fact at present ascertainable concerning the unknown searcher for reckless young men of good appearance was that he appeared to be possessed of considerable decision of character, and he seemed to be frightened. He was rejecting applicants now at the rate of two a minute. Expeditious though he was he kept ash waiting for a considerable time. It was not until the hands of the fat clock over the door pointed to twenty minutes past eleven that the office boy's next found him the only survivor. He gave his clothes a hasty smack with the palm of his hand and his hair a fleeting dab to accentuate his good appearance The room assigned by the firm to their Mr. Bool for his personal use was a small and dingy compartment redolent of that atmosphere of desolation which lawyers alone know how to achieve. It gave the impression of not having been swept since the foundation of the firm in the year seventeen eighty-six. There was one small window covered with grime. It was one of those windows you see only in lawyers' offices possibly some reckless main price or harebrained bull had opened it in a fit of mad excitement induced by the news of the battle of Waterloo in eighteen fifteen and had been instantly expelled from the firm. Since then no one had dared to tamper with it. Gazing through this window or rather gazing at it for x-rays could hardly have succeeded in actually penetrating the alluvial deposits on the glass was a little man. When he entered he turned and looked at him as though he hurt him rather badly in some tender spot. Ash was obliged to own to himself that he felt a little nervous. It is not every day that a young man of good appearance who has led a quiet life meets face to face one who is prepared to pay him well for doing something delicate and dangerous. To Ash the sensation was entirely novel. The most delicate and dangerous act he had performed to date was the enastication of Mrs. Bell's breakfast included in the rent. Yes he had to admit it he was nervous and the fact that he was nervous made him hot and uncomfortable. To judge him by his appearance the man at the window was also hot and uncomfortable. He was a little truculent looking man and his face at present was red with a flush that sat unnaturally on a normally lead colored face. His eyes looked out from under thick gray eyebrows with an almost tortured expression. This was partly owing to the strain of interviewing Ash's preposterous predecessors but principally to the fact that the little man had suddenly been seized with acute indigestion malady to which he was peculiarly subject. He removed from his mouth the black cigar he was smoking inserted a digestive tabloid and replaced the cigar. Then he concentrated his attention on Ash. As he did so the hostile expression of his face became modified. He looked surprised and grudgingly pleased. Well what do you want he said I came in answer to in answer to my advertisement I had given up hope of seeing anything part human. I thought you must be one of the clerks. You're certainly more like what I advertised for of all the seedy bunches of deadbeats I ever struck The aggregation I've just been interviewing was the seediest. When I spend good money in advertising for a young man of good appearance I want a young man of good appearance not a tramp of 55. Ash was sorry for his predecessors but he was bound to admit that they certainly had corresponded somewhat faithfully to the description just given. The comparative cordiality of his own reception removed the slight nervousness that had been troubling him. He began to feel confident almost jaunty I'm through said the little man weirdly I've had enough of interviewing applicants you're the last one I'll see are there any more hobos outside not when I came in then we'll get down to business I'll tell you what I want done and if you are willing you can do it if you are not willing you can leave it and go to the devil sit down Ash sat down he resented the little man's tone but this was not the moment for saying so his companion scrutinized him narrowly so far as appearance goes he said you are what I want Ash felt inclined to bow whoever takes on this job has got to act as my valet and you look like a valet Ash felt less inclined to bow you're tall and thin and ordinary looking yes so far as appearance goes it seemed to Ash that it was time to correct an impression the little man appeared to have formed I am afraid he said if all you want is a valet you will have to look elsewhere I got the idea from your advertisement that something rather more exciting was in the air I can commend you to several good employment agencies if you wish he rose he would have liked to fling the massive pewter inkwell this little creature who had so keenly disappointed him sit down snapped the other Ash resumed his seat the hope of adventure dies hard on a spring morning when one is 26 and he had the feeling that there was more to come don't be a damn fool said the little man of course I'm not asking you to be a valet and nothing else you would want me to do some cooking and plain sewing on the side perhaps their eyes met hostile glare the flush on the little man's face deepened are you trying to get fresh with me he demanded dangerously yes, said Ash the answer seemed to disconcert his adversary he was silent for a moment well, he said at last maybe it's all for the best if you weren't full of gall probably you wouldn't have come here at all and whoever takes on this job of mine has got to have gall if he has nothing else I think we shall suit each other what is the job the little man's face showed doubt and perplexity it's awkward if I'm to make the thing clear to you I've got to trust you and I don't know a thing about you I wish I had thought of that before I inserted the advertisement Ash appreciated the difficulty couldn't you make an A-B case out of it maybe I could if I knew what an A-B case was call the people mixed up in it A and B and forget halfway through who was which no, I guess I'll have to trust you I'll play square the little man fastened his eyes on Ash's in a piercing stare Ash met them smilingly his spirits always fairly cheerful had risen high by now there was something about the little man in spite of his brustness and ill temper which made him feel flippant pure white, said Ash A, my soul and this he thumped the left section of his waistcoat solid gold you may fire when ready gridly proceed professor I don't know where to begin without presuming to dictate why not at the beginning it's also darned complicated that I don't rightly know which is the beginning well I'll see here I collect scarabs I'm crazy about scarabs if I quit business you might say that I have practically lived for scarabs so it sounds like an unkind thing to say of anyone said Ash incidentally what are scarabs he held up his hand wait it all comes back to me expensive classical education now bearing belated fruit scarabias, latin now nominative, a beetle scarabi vocative, oh you beetle scarabi am scarabi of the beetle scarabio two or four the beetle I remember now Egypt, ramsies, pyramids, sacred scarabs right well I guess I've gotten together the best collection of scarabs outside the British Museum and some of them are worth what you like to me I don't reckon money when it comes to a question of my scarabs do you understand sure Mike said the little man's face my name is not Mike I used the word figuratively as it were well don't do it again my name is Jay Preston Peters and Mr. Peters will do as well as anything else when you want to attract my attention mine is Marston you were saying Mr. Peters well it's this way Shakespeare and Pope have both emphasized the tediousness of a twice told tale the episode of the stolen scarab need not be repeated at this point though it must be admitted that Mr. Peters version of it differed considerably from the calm, dispassionate description the author in his capacity of official historian has given earlier in the story in Mr. Peters version the Earl of Emsworth appeared as a smooth and purposeful robber a sort of elderly raffles worming his way into the homes of the innocent and only sparing that portion of their property which was too heavy for him to carry away Mr. Peters indeed specifically described the Earl of Emsworth as an oily old second story man it took Ash some little time to get a thorough grasp of the tangled situation but he did it at last only one point perplexed him you want to hire somebody to go to this castle and get this scarab back for you I follow that but why must he go as your valet that's simple enough you don't think I'm asking him to buy a black mask and break in do you I'm making it as easy for him as possible I can't take a secretary down to the castle for everybody knows that now I've retired I haven't got a secretary and if I engaged a new one and he was caught trying to steal my scarab from the Earl's collection it would look suspicious but a valet is different anyone can get fooled by a cook valet with bogus references I see there's just one other point suppose your accomplice does get caught what then that said Mr. Peters is the catch and it's just because of that I am offering good pay to my man we'll suppose for the sake of argument that you accept the contract and get caught well if that happens you've got to look after yourself I couldn't say a word if I did it would all come out and so far as the breaking off was concerned it would be just as bad as though I had tried to get the thing back myself you've got to bear that in mind you've got to remember it if you forget everything else I don't appear in this business in any way whatsoever if you get caught you take what's coming to you without a word you can't turn around and say I am innocent Mr. Peters will explain all because Mr. Peters certainly won't Mr. Peters won't utter a syllable of protest if they want to hang you no if you go into this young man you go into it with your eyes open you go into it with a full understanding of the risks because you think the reward if you are successful makes the taking of those risks worthwhile you and I know that what you are doing isn't really stealing it's simply a tactful way of getting back my own property but the judge and jury will have different views I am beginning to understand said Ash thoughtfully why you called the job delicate and dangerous certainly it had been no overstatement as a writer of detective stories for the British office boy he had imagined in his time many undertakings that might be so described but feud which the description was more admirably suited it is said Mr. Peters and that is why I am offering good pay whoever carries this job through gets one thousand pounds Ash started one thousand pounds five thousand dollars five thousand when do I begin you'll do it for five thousand dollars I certainly will with your eyes open wide open a look of positive genealogy illuminated Mr. Peters pinched features he even went so far as to pat Ash on the shoulder good boy he said meet me at Paddington station at four o'clock on Friday and if there is anything more you want to know come round to this address there remained the telling of Joan Valentine for it was obviously impossible not to tell her when you have revolutionized your life at the bidding of another you cannot well conceal the fact as though nothing had happened Ash had not the slightest desire to conceal the fact on the contrary he was glad to have such a capital excuse for renewing the acquaintance he could not tell her of course the secret details of the thing naturally those must remain hidden no he would just go early in and say you know what you told me about doing something new well I just got a job as a valet so he went early in and said it to whom said Joan to a man named Peters an American women are trained from infancy up to conceal their feelings Joan did not start or otherwise express emotion not Mr. J. Preston Peters yes do you know him what a remarkable thing his daughter said Joan has just engaged me as a lady's maid what it will not be quite the same thing as three years ago Joan explained it is just a cheap way of getting a holiday I used to know Miss Peters very well you see it will be more like traveling as her guest but but Ash should not yet overcome his amazement yes but what an extraordinary coincidence yes by the way how did you get the situation and what put it into your head to be a valet at all it seems such a curious thing for you to think of doing Ash was embarrassed I I well you see the experience will be useful to me of course in my writing oh are you thinking of taking up my line of work Dukes no no not exactly that it seems so odd how did you happen to get in touch with Mr. Peters oh I answered an advertisement I see Ash was becoming conscious of an undercurrent of something not altogether agreeable in the conversation it lacked the gay ease of their first interview he was not apprehensive lest you might have guessed his secret there was he felt no possible means by which she could have done that yet the fact remained that those keen blue eyes of hers were looking at him in a pure and penetrating manner he felt damped it will be nice being together he said feebly very said Joan there was a pause I thought I would come and tell you quite so there was another pause it seems so funny that you should be going out as a ladies made yes but of course you have done it before yes the really extraordinary thing is that we should be going to the same people yes it's remarkable isn't it yes Ash reflected no he did not appear to have any further remarks to make goodbye for the present he said goodbye Ash drifted out he was conscious of a wish that he understood girls girls in his opinion were odd when he had gone Joan Valentine hurried to the door and having opened at an inch stood listening when the sound of his door closing came to her she ran down the stairs and out into a rondo street she went to the hotel Mathis I wonder she said to the sad eyed waiter if you have a copy of the morning post the waiter a child of romantic Italy was only too anxious to oblige youth and beauty he disappeared and presently returned with a crumpled copy Joan thanked him with a bright smile back in her room she turned to the advertisement pages she knew that life was full of what the unthinking call coincidences but the miracle of Ash having selected by chance the father of Aileen Peters as an employer was too much of a coincidence for her suspicion furrowed her brow it did not take her long to discover the advertisement that had sent Ash hurrying in a taxi cab to the offices of Messers main price main price and full she had been looking for something of the kind she read it through twice and smiled everything was very clear to her she looked at the ceiling above her and shook her head you are quite a nice young man Mr. Marston she said softly but you must not try to jump my claim I dare say you need that money too but I am afraid you must go without I am going to have it and nobody else End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Part 1 of Something New This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Something New by P.G. Woodhouse Chapter 5 Part 1 The 415 Express slid softly out of Paddington Station and Ash Marston settled himself in the corner seat of his second class compartment Opposite him, Joan Valentine had begun to read a magazine Along the corridor in a first class smoking compartment Mr. Peters was lighting a big black cigar still farther along the corridor in a first class non-smoking compartment Eileen Peters looked through the window and thought of many things In English trains the tipping classes travel first ladies maids, footmen, nurses and head still room maids second and house maids, grooms and minor and inferior still room maids third but for these social distinctions the whole fabric of society would collapse and anarchy stock naked through the land as in the United States Ash was feeling remarkably light hearted he wished he had not bought Joan that magazine and thus temporarily of the pleasure of her conversation but that was the only flaw in his happiness with the starting of the train which might be considered the formal and official beginning of the delicate and dangerous enterprise on which he had embarked he had definitely come to the conclusion that the life adventurous was the life for him he had frequently suspected this to be the case but it had required the actual experiment to bring certainty and courage the ideal adventurer needs a certain lively inquisitiveness the quality of not being content to mind his own affairs and in ash this quality was highly developed from boyhood up he had always been interested in things that were none of his business and it is just that attribute which the modern young man as a rule so sadly lacks the modern young man may do adventurous things if they are thrust on him but left to himself may uncomfortably and look in the other direction when the goddess of adventure smiles at him training and tradition alike pluck at his sleeve and urge him not to risk making himself ridiculous and from sheer horror of laying himself open to the charge of not minding his own business he falls into a stolid disregard of all that is out of the ordinary and exciting he tells himself that the shriek from the lonely house he passed just now had some amateur songstress and that the maiden in distress whom he saw pursued by the ruffian with a knife was merely earning the salary paid her by some motion picture firm and he proceeds on his way looking neither to left nor right ash had none of this degenerate coiness toward adventure though born with an easy distance of Boston and deposited by circumstances in London he possessed nevertheless to a remarkable degree that quality so essentially the property of the New Yorker the quality known for one of a more polished word as rubber it is true that it had needed the eloquence of Joan Valentine to stir him from his groove but that was because he was also lazy he loved new sights and new experiences yes he was happy the rattle of the train shaped itself into a lively march he told himself that he had found occupation for a young man in the spring Joan meantime entrenched behind her magazine was also busy with her thought she was not reading the magazine she held it before her as a protection knowing that if she laid it down ash would begin to talk and just at present she had no desire for conversation she like ash was contemplating the immediate future but unlike him was not doing so with much pleasure dreading heartily that she had not resisted the temptation to uplift this young man and wishing that she had left him to wallow in the slothful peace in which she had found him it is curious how frequently in this world our attempts to stimulate and uplift swoop back on us and smite us like boomerangs ash's presence was the direct outcome of her lecture on enterprise and it added a complication to an already complicated venture she did her best to be fair to ash it was not his fault that he was about to try to deprive her of five thousand dollars which she looked on as her personal property but illogically she found herself feeling a little hostile she glanced furtively at him over the magazine choosing by ill chance a moment when he had just directed his gaze at her their eyes met and there was nothing for it but to talk so she tucked away her hostility in her mind where she could find it again when she wanted it and prepared for the time being to be friendly after all except for the fact that he was her rival this was a pleasant and amusing young man and one for whom until he made the announcement that had changed her whole attitude toward him she had entertained a distinct feeling of friendship nothing warmer there was something about him that made her feel that she would have liked to stroke his hair in a motherly way in his tie and have cozy chats with him in darkened rooms by the light of open fires and make him tell her his inmost thoughts and stimulate him to do something really worthwhile with his life but this she held was merely the instinct of a generous nature to be kind and helpful even to a comparative stranger well Mr. Marston she said here we are exactly what I was thinking said Ash he was conscious of a marked increase in the exhilaration the starting of the expedition had brought to him at the back of his mind he realized there had been all along a kind of wistful resentment at the change in this girls manner toward him during the brief conversation when he had told her of his having secured his present situation and later only a few minutes back on the platform of Paddington station he had sensed a coldness a certain hostility so different from her pleasant friendliness at their first meeting she had returned now to her earlier manner and he was surprised at the difference it made he felt somehow younger more alive the lilt of the train's rattle changed to a gay ragtime this was curious because Joan was nothing more than a friend he was not in love with her one does not fall in love with a girl whom one has met only three times one is attracted yes one falls in love a moment's reflection enabled him to diagnose his sensations correctly this odd impulse to leap across the compartment and kiss Joan was not love it was merely the natural desire of a good hearted young man to be decently chummy with his species well what do you think of it all Mr. Marson said Joan are you sorry or glad that you let me persuade you to do this perfectly mad thing if it had not been for me you would have been comfortably in a rundell street writing your wand of death I'm glad you don't feel any misgivings now that you are actually committed to domestic service not one Joan against her will smiled approval on this uncompromising attitude this young man might be her rival but his demeanor on the eve of perilous times appealed to her that was the spirit she liked and admired that reckless acceptance of whatever might come it was the spirit in which she herself had gone into the affair and she was pleased to find that it animated ash also though to be sure it had its drawbacks and made his rivalry the more dangerous this reflection injected a touch of the old hostility into her manner I wonder whether you will continue to feel so brave what do you mean Joan perceived that she was in danger of going too far she had no wish to unmask ash at the expense of revealing her own secret she must resist the temptation to hint that she had discovered his I meant, she said quickly that from what I have seen of him Mr. Peters seems likely to be a rather trying man to work for Ash's face cleared for a moment he had almost suspected that she had guessed his errand yes I imagine he will be he is what you might call quick tempered he has dyspepsia you know I know what he wants is plenty of fresh air and no cigars in a regular course of those Larson exercises that amused you so much Joan laughed are you going to try and persuade Mr. Peters to twist himself about like that do let me see it if you do I wish I could do suggest it to him don't you think he would resent it from a valet I keep forgetting that you are a valet you look so unlike one old Peters didn't think so he rather complimented me on my appearance he said I was ordinary looking I shouldn't have called you that you look so very strong and fit surely there are muscular valets well yes I suppose there are Ash looked at her he was thinking that never in his life had he seen a girl so amazingly pretty what it was that she had done to herself was beyond him but something some trick of dress had given her a touch of the demure that made her irresistible she was dressed in sober black the ideal background for her fairness while on the subject he said I suppose you know you don't look in the least like a ladies made you look like a disguised princess she laughed that's very nice of you Mr. Marson but you're quite wrong anyone could tell it was a ladies made a mile away you aren't criticizing the dress surely the dress is all right it's the general effect I don't think your expression is right it's there's too much attack in it you aren't meek enough Jones eyes opened wide meek have you ever seen an English ladies made Mr. Marson I know now that I come to think of it I don't believe I have well let me tell you that meekness is her last quality why should she be meek doesn't she go in after the groom of the chambers go in go in where into dinner she smiled at the sight of his bewildered face I'm afraid you don't know much about the etiquette of the new world you have entered so rashly didn't you know that the rules of precedence among the servants of a big house in England are more rigid and complicated than an English society you're joking I'm not joking you try going into dinner out of your proper place when we get to blandings and see what happens a public rebuke from the butler is the least you could expect a bead of perspiration appeared on Ash's forehead heavens he whispered if a butler publicly rebuke me I think I should commit suicide I couldn't survive it he stared with fallen jaw into the abyss of horror into which he had leaped heartedly the servant problem on this large scale had been non-existent for him until now in the days of his youth at hailing massachusetts his needs had been ministered to by a muscular swede later at Oxford there had been his scout and his bed maker harmless persons both provided you locked up your whiskey and in London his last phase a succession of servitors of the type of the dish have made at number seven had tended him that doubted about the land of his adoption there were houses in which larger staffs of domestics were maintained he had been vaguely aware indeed in gridley quail investigator the adventure of the missing marquee number four of the series he had drawn a picture of the home life of the Duke in which a butler and two powdered footmen had played their parts but he had had no idea that rigid and complicated rules of etiquette private lives of these individuals if he had given the matter of thought he had supposed that when the dinner hour arrived the butler and the two footmen would troop into the kitchen and squash in at the table wherever they found room tell me he said tell me all you know I feel as though I had escaped a frightful disaster you probably have I don't suppose there is anything so terrible as a snub from a butler if there is I can't think of it when I was at Oxford I used to go and stay with a friend of mine who had a butler that looked like a Roman emperor in swallow tails he terrified me I used to grovel to the man please give me all the pointers you can well as Mr. Peters valet I suppose you will be rather a big man I shan't feel it however large the house party is Mr. Peters is sure to be the principal guest so your standing will be correspondingly magnificent you come after the butler the housekeeper the groom of the chambers Lord Emsworth's valet Lady Ann Warblington's lady's maid who is she Lady Ann? Lord Emsworth's sister she has lived with him since his wife died what was I saying oh yes after them come the honorable Frederick Threepwood's valet and myself and then you I'm not so high up then after all yes you are there's a whole crowd who come after you it all depends on how many other guests there are besides Mr. Peters I suppose I charge in at the head of a drove of house maids and scullery maids my dear Mr. Marson if a house maid or a scullery maid tried to get into the stewards room and have her meals with us she would be rebuked by the butler lynched I should think kitchen maids and scullery maids eat in the kitchen loafers footmen under butler pantry boys hall boy odd man and stewards room footmen take their meals in the servants hall waited on by the hall boy the still room maids have breakfast and tea in the still room and dinner and supper in the hall the house maids and nursery maids have breakfast and tea in the house maids sitting room and dinner and supper in the hall the head house maid ranks next to the head still room maid the laundry maids have a place for their own near the laundry and the head laundry maid ranks above the head house maid the chef has his meals in a room of his own near the kitchen is there anything else I can tell you Mr. Marson ash was staring at her with vacant eyes he shook his head dumbly we stop at Swindon in half an hour said Joan softly don't you think you would be wise to get out there and go straight back to London Mr. Marson think of all you would avoid ash found speech it's a nightmare you would be far happier in Arundel street why don't you get out at Swindon and go back ash shook his head I can't there's there's a reason Joan picked up her magazine again hostility had come out from the corner into which she had tucked it away and was once more filling her mind she knew it was illogical but she could not help it in the revelations of servants etiquette she had allowed herself to hope that she had frightened her rival out of the field and the disappointment made her feel irritable she buried herself in a short story encountered ash's attempts at renewing the conversation with cold monosyllables until he ceased his efforts and fell into a moody silence he was feeling hurt and angry her sudden coldness following on the friendliness with which she had talked so long he felt so troubled and infuriated him he felt as though he had been snubbed and for no reason he resented the defensive magazine though he had bought it for her himself he resented her attitude of having ceased to recognize his existence a sadness a filmy melancholy crept over him he brooded on the unutterable silliness of humanity especially the female portion of it interacting artificial barriers to friendship unreasonable at their first meeting when she might have been excused for showing defensiveness she had treated him with unaffected ease when that meeting had ended there was a tacit understanding between them that all the preliminary awkwardnesses of the first stages of acquaintanceship were to be considered as having been past and that when they met again if they ever did it would be his friends and here she was luring him on to herself as though he had presumed a rebellious spirit took possession of him he didn't care let her be cold and distant he would show her that she had no monopoly of those qualities he would not speak to her until she spoke to him and when she spoke to him he would freeze her with his courteous but bleakly aloof indifference the train rattled on Joan read her magazine silence reigned in the second class compartment swindon was reached and passed darkness fell on the land the journey began to seem interminable to ash but presently there came a creaking of breaks and the train jerked itself to another stop a voice on the platform made itself heard calling market blandings market blandings station the village of market blandings is one of those sleepy english hamlets that modern progress has failed to touch except by the addition of a railroad station and a room over the grocery shop where moving pictures are on view on tuesdays and fridays the church is norman and the intelligence of the majority of the natives paleozoic to a light at market blandings station in the dusk of a rather chilly spring day when the southwest wind has shifted to due east and the thrifty inhabitants have not yet let their windows is to be smitten with the feeling that one is at the edge of the world with no friends near ash as he stood beside mr. peter's baggage and raked the unsympathetic darkness with a dreary eye gave himself up to melancholy above him an oil lamp shed a meager light along the platform a small but sturdy porter was juggling with a milk can the east wind explored ash's system with chilly fingers somewhere out in the darkness into which mr. peter's and aileen had already vanished in a large automobile lay the castle with its butler and its fearful coat of etiquette soon the cart that was to convey him in the trunk's thither would be arriving he shivered out of the gloom and into the feeble rays of the oil lamp came jones valentine she had been away tucking aileen into the car she looked warm and cheerful she was smiling in the old friendly way if girls realized the responsibilities they would be so careful when they smiled that they would probably abandon the practice altogether there are moments in a man's life when a girl's smile can have as important results as an explosion of dynamite in the course of their brief acquaintance jones had smiled at ash many times but the conditions governing those occasions had not been such as to permit him to be seriously affected he had been pleased on such occasions he had admired her smile in a detached and critical spirit but he had not been overwhelmed by it the frame of mind necessary for that result had been lacking now however after five minutes of solitude on the depressing platform of market-blanding station he was what the spiritualists call a sensitive subject he had reached that depth of gloom and bodily discomfort when a sudden smile has all the effect of a strong liquor and good news administered simultaneously warming the blood and comforting the soul and generally turning the world from a bleak desert into a land flowing with milk and honey it is not too much to say that he reeled before jones smile it was so entirely unexpected he clutched mr. peter's steamer trunk in his emotion all his resolutions to be cold and distant were swept away he had the feeling that in a friendless universe here was somebody who was fond of him and glad to see him a smile of such importance demands analysis and in this case repays it for many things lay behind this smile of jones valentine's on the platform of market-blanding station in the first place she had had another of her swift changes of mood and had once again tucked away hostility into its corner she had thought it over and had come to the conclusion that as she had no logical grievance against ash for anything he had done to be distant to him was the behavior of a cat consequently she resolved when they should meet again to resume her attitude of good fellowship that in itself would have been enough to make her smile there was another reason however which had nothing to do with ash while she had been tucking aileen into the automobile and had perceived a curious look in it a look of amazement and sheer terror a moment later when aileen called the driver freddy she had understood no wonder the honorable freddy had looked as though he had seen a ghost it would be a relief to the poor fellow when as he undoubtedly would do in the course of the drive he inquired of aileen the name of her maid and was told that it was simpson he would mutter something about the signs me of a girl I used to know and would brood on the remarkable way in which nature produces doubles but he had a bad moment and it was partly at the recollection of his face that jones smiled a third reason was because the sight of the honorable freddy had reminded her that our jones had said he had written her poetry that thought too had contributed toward the smile which so dazzled ash ash not being miraculously intuitive to the easier explanation that she smiled because she was glad to be in his company and this thought coming on top of his mood of despair and general dissatisfaction with everything mundane acted on him like some powerful chemical in every man's life there is generally one moment to which in later years he can look back and say in this moment I fell in love such a moment came to ash now betwixt the stirrup in the ground mercy I asked mercy I found so sings the poet and so it was with ash in the almost incredibly brief time it took the small but sturdy porter to roll a milk can across the platform and hump it with a clang against other milk cans similarly treated a moment before ash fell in love the word is so loosely used to cover a thousand varying shades of emotion from the frantic passion of an Anthony for a Cleopatra to the tepid preference of a grocers assistant for the Irish maid at the second house on Main Street as opposed to the Norwegian maid at the first house past the post office the mere statement that ash fell in love is not a sufficient description of his feelings as he stood grasping Mr. Peter's steamer trunk analysis is required from his fourteenth year onward ash had been in love many times his sensations in the case of Joan were neither the terrific upheavals that had caused him in his fifteenth year to collect twenty-eight photographs of the heroine of the road opera of a musical comedy which had visited the Hailing Opera House nor the milder flame that had caused him when at college to give up smoking for a week and try to read the complete works of Ella Wheeler Wilcox his love was something that lay between these two poles he did not wish the station platform of market blandings to become suddenly congested with red Indians so that he might save Joan's life and he did not wish to give up anything at all but he was conscious to the very depths of his being that a future in which Joan did not figure would be so insupportable as not to bear considering and in the immediate present he very strongly favored the idea of clasping Joan in his arms and kissing her until further notice mingled with these feelings was an excited gratitude to her for coming to him like this with that electric smile on her face a stunned realization that she was a thousand times prettier than he had ever imagined and the humility that threatened to make him lose his clutch on the steamer trunk and roll about at her feet yapping like a dog gratitude so far as he could dissect his tangled emotion was the predominating ingredient of his mood only once in his life he felt so passionately grateful to any human being on that occasion too the object of his gratitude had been feminine years before when a boy in his father's home in distant Hailing, Massachusetts those in authority had commanded that he in his 11th year and as shy as one can be only at that interesting age should rise in the presence of a room full of strangers, adult guests and recite the Wreck of the Hesperus he had risen, he had blushed he had stammered he had contrived to whisper it was the Schooner Hesperus and then in a corner of the room a little girl for no properly explained reason had burst out crying she had yelled, she had bellowed and would not be comforted and in the ensuing confusion Ash had escaped to the wood pile of the garden saved by a miracle all his life he had remembered the gratitude he had felt for that little timely girl and never until now had he experienced any other similar spasm but as he looked at Joan he found himself renewing that emotion of 15 years ago she was about to speak in a sort of trance he watched her lips part he waded almost reverently for the first words she should speak to him a new role of the only authentic goddess isn't it a shame she said I've just put a penny in the chocolate slot machine and it's empty I have a good mind to write to the company Ash felt as though he were listening to the strains of some grand sweet anthem the small but sturdy porter weary of his work among the milk cans or perhaps let us not do him an injustice even in thought having finished it approached them the cart from the castles here in the gloom beyond him there gleamed a light which had not been there before the meditative snort of a horse supported his statement he began to deal as authoritatively with Mr. Peter's steamer trunk as he had dealt with the milk cans at last said Joan I hope it's a covered cart I'm frozen let's go and see Ash followed her with the gate of an automaton cold is the ogre that drives all beautiful things into hiding below the surface of a frostbound garden there lurk hidden bulbs which are only biting their time to burst forth in a riot of laughing color but shivering nature dare not put forth her flowers until the ogre has gone not otherwise does cold suppress love a man in an open cart on an English spring night may continue to be in love but love is not the emotion most in his bosom it shrinks within him and waits for better times the cart was not a covered cart it was open to the four winds of heaven of which the one at present active proceeded from the bleak east to this fact may be attributed Ash's swift recovery from the exalted mood into which Joan's smile had thrown him his almost instant emergence from the trance deep down in him he was aware that each word Joan had not changed but his conscious self was too fully occupied with the almost hopeless task of keeping his blood circulating to permit of thoughts of love before the cart had traveled 20 yards he was a mere chunk of frozen misery after an eternity of winding roads darkened cottages in black fields and hedges the cart turned in at a massive iron gate which stood open from the entrance to a smooth gravel drive here the way ran for nearly a mile through an open park of great trees and was then swallowed in the darkness of dense shrubberies presently to the left appeared lights at first in ones and twos shining out and vanishing again then as the shrubberies ended in the smooth lawns and terraces began blazing down on the travelers from a score of windows with the effect of fires on a winter night against the pale grey sky Blanding's castle stood out like a mountain it was a noble pile of early Tudor building its history is recorded in England's history books and Violet Le Duc has written of its architecture it dominated the surrounding country the feature of it which impressed Ash most at this moment however was the fact that it looked warm the first time since the drive began he found himself in a mood that approximated cheerfulness it was a little early to begin feeling cheerful he discovered for the journey was by no means over arrived within sight of the castle the cart began a detour which ten minutes later brought it under an arch and over cobblestones to the rear of the building where it eventually pulled up in front of a great door Ash descended painfully and beat his feet against the cobbles he helped Joan to climb down Joan was apparently in a gentle glow women seemed impervious to cold the door opened warm kitcheny scents came through it strong men hurried out to take down the trunks while fair women in the shape of two nervous scullery maids approached Joan and Ash and bobbed curtsies this under more normal conditions he left to unmanned Ash but in his frozen state a mere curtsying scullery maid expended herself harmlessly on him he even acknowledged the greeting with a kindly nod the scullery maids it seemed were acting in much the same capacity as the attachés of royalty one was there to conduct Joan to the presence of mrs. Twemelow the housekeeper the other to lead Ash to where beach the butler waited to do the castle's most important guest after a short walk down a stone flagged passage Joan and her escort turned to the right Ash's objective appeared to be located to the left he parted from Joan with regret her moral support would have been welcome presently his scullery maid stopped at a door and tapped there on a fruity voice like old tawny port maid audible said come in Ash's guide opened the door the gentleman Mr. Beach said she and scuttled away to the less rarefied atmosphere of the kitchen Ash's first impression of beach the butler was one of tension other people confronted for the first time with Beach had felt the same he had that strained air of being on the very point of bursting that one sees in bullfrogs and toy balloons nervous and imaginative men meeting Beach braced themselves involuntarily stiffening their muscles for the explosion those who had the pleasure of more intimate acquaintance with him soon passed this stage just as people whose homes are on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius become immune to fear of eruptions as far back as they could remember Beach had always looked as though an apoplectic fit were a matter of minutes but he never had apoplexy and in time they came to ignore the possibility of it Ash however approaching him with a fresh eye had the feeling that this strain could not possibly continue and that within a very short space of time the worst must happen the prospect of this did much to rouse him from the coma into which he had been frozen by the rigors of the journey End of chapter 5 part 1