Service with a Smile by PG Wodehouse

Author:PG Wodehouse [Wodehouse, PG]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humour, Classics
ISBN: 9780393345964
Goodreads: 16241198
Publisher: Canongate CSA Audio
Published: 1961-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

2

There was a contented smile on Lord Ickenham’s face as he settled himself in his hammock after leaving Lord Emsworth. It gratified him to feel that he had allayed the latter’s fears and eased his mind. Nothing like a pep talk, he was thinking, and he was deep in a pleasant reverie when a voice spoke his name and he perceived Lord Emsworth at his side, drooping like a tired lily. Except when he had something to prop himself against, there was always a suggestion of the drooping floweret about the master of Blandings Castle. He seemed to work on a hinge somewhere in the small of his back, and people searching for something nice to say of him sometimes described him as having a scholarly stoop. Lord Ickenham had become accustomed to this bonelessness and no longer expected his friend to give any evidence of possessing vertebrae, but the look of anguish on his face was new, and it shocked him. He rose from the hammock with lissom leap, full of sympathy and concern.

‘Good heavens, Emsworth! What’s the matter? Is something wrong?’

For some moments it seemed as though speech would prove beyond the ninth earl’s powers and that he would continue indefinitely to give his rather vivid impersonation of a paralysed deaf mute. But eventually he spoke.

‘I’ve just seen Dunstable,’ he said.

Lord Ickenham remained perplexed. The situation did not appear to him to have been clarified. He, personally, would always prefer not to see the Duke, a preference shared by the latter’s many acquaintances in Wiltshire and elsewhere, but it did not disturb him unduly when he had to, and he found it strange that his companion should be of less stern stuff.

‘Unavoidable, don’t you think when he’s staying in the house?’ he said. ‘There he is, I mean to say, and you can’t very well help running into him from time to time. But perhaps he said something to upset you?’

The anguished look in Lord Emsworth’s eyes became more anguished. It was as if the question had touched an exposed nerve. He gulped for a moment, reminding Lord Ickenham of a dog to which he was greatly attached, which made a similar sound when about to give up its all after a too busy day among the fleshpots.

‘He said he wanted the Empress.’

‘Who wouldn’t?’

‘And I’ve got to give her to him.’

‘You’ve what?’

‘The alternative was too terrible to contemplate. He threatened, if I refused, to tell Constance that it was I who cut those tent ropes.’

Lord Ickenham began to feel a little impatient. He had already told this man, in words adapted to the meanest intelligence, what course to pursue, should suspicion fall upon him.

‘My dear fellow, don’t you remember what I said to you in the library? Stick to stout denial.’

‘But he has proof.’

‘Proof?’

‘Eh? Yes, proof. It seems that my grandson George took photographs of me with his camera, and Dunstable now has the film in his possession. And I gave George that camera for his birthday! “This will keep you out of mischief, George, my boy,” I remember saying.

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