LEAVE IT TO PSMITH (8)
By:
February 19, 2019
Leave It to Psmith (1923) is the last and most rewarding of four novels featuring the dandy, wit, and would-be adventurer Ronald Eustace Psmith, one of P.G. Wodehouse‘s most popular characters. (“One can date exactly,” Evelyn Waugh claimed, in reference to Psmith’s debut in the 1909 novel Mike, “the first moment when Wodehouse was touched by the sacred flame.”) Leave It to Psmith‘s copyright enters the public domain in 2019; HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize this terrific book here at HILOBROW. Enjoy!
‘What’s Aunt Constance done? And who is Aunt Constance?’
‘Well, I call her that, but she’s really my stepmother — sort of. I suppose she’s really my step-stepmother. My stepfather married again two years ago. It was Aunt Constance who was so furious when I married Mike. She wanted me to marry Rollo. She has never forgiven me, and she won’t let my stepfather do anything to help us.’
‘But the man must be a worm!’ said Eve indignantly. ‘Why doesn’t he insist? You always used tell me how fond he was of you.’
‘He isn’t a worm, Eve. He’s a dear. It’s just that he has let her boss him. She’s rather a terror, vou know. She can be quite nice, and they’re awfully fond of each other, but she is as hard as nails sometimes.’ Phyllis broke off. The front door had opened, and there were footsteps in the hall. ‘Here’s Clarkie. I hope she has brought Cynthia with her. She was to pick her up on her way. Don’t talk about what I’ve been telling you in front of her, Eve, there’s an angel.’
‘Why not?’
‘She’s so motherly about it. It’s sweet of her, but…’
Eve understood.
‘All right. Later on,’
The door opened to admit Miss Clarkson.
The adjective which Phyllis had applied to her late schoolmistress was obviously well chosen. Miss Clarkson exuded motherliness. She was large, wholesome, and soft, and she swooped on Eve like a hen on its chicken almost before the door had closed.
‘Eve! How nice to see you after all this time! My dear, you’re looking perfectly lovely! And so prosperous. What a beautiful hat!’
‘I’ve been envying it ever since you came, Eve,’ said Phyllis. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘Madeleine Shears, in Regent Street.’
Miss Clarkson, having acquired and stirred a cup of tea, started to improve the occasion. Eve had always been a favourite of hers at school. She beamed affectionately upon her.
‘Now doesn’t this show — what I always used to say to you in the dear old days, Eve — that one must never despair, however black the outlook may seem? I remember you at school, dear, as poor as a church mouse, and with no prospects, none whatever. And yet here you are — rich…’
Eve laughed. She got up and kissed Miss Clarkson. She regretted that she was compelled to strike a jarring note, but it had to be done.
‘I’m awfully sorry, Clarkie dear,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid I’ve misled you. I’m just as broke as I ever was. In fact, when Phyllis told me you were running an Employment Agency, I made a note to come and see you and ask if you had some attractive billet to dispose of. Governess to a thoroughly angelic child would do. Or isn’t there some nice cosy author or something who wants his letters answered and his press-clippings pasted in an album?’
‘Oh, my dear!’ Miss Clarkson was deeply concerned. ‘I did hope… That hat…’
‘The hat’s the whole trouble. Of course I had no business even to think of it, but I saw it in the shop-window and coveted it for days, and finally fell. And then, you see, I had to live up to it — buy shoes and a dress to match. I tell you it was a perfect orgy, and I’m thoroughly ashamed of myself now. Too late, as usual.’
‘Oh, dear! You always were such a wild, impetuous child, even at school. I remember how often I used to speak to you about it.’
‘Well, when it was all over and I was sane again, I found I had only a few pounds left, not nearly enough to see me through till the relief expedition arrived. So I thought it over and decided to invest my little all.’
‘I hope you chose something safe?’
‘It ought to have been. The Sporting Express called it “Today’s Safety Bet.” It was Bounding Willie for the two-thirty race at Sandown last Wednesday.’
‘Oh, dear!’
‘That’s what I said when poor old Willie came in sixth. But it’s no good worrying, is it? What it means is that I simply must find something to do that will carry me through till I get my next quarter’s allowance. And that won’t be till September… But don’t let’s talk business here. I’ll come round to your office, Clarkie, to-morrow… Where’s Cynthia? Didn’t you bring her?’
‘Yes, I thought you were going to pick Cynthia up on your way, Clarkie,’ said Phyllis.
If Eve’s information as to her financial affairs had caused Miss Clarkson to mourn, the mention of Cynthia plunged her into the very depths of woe. Her mouth quivered and a tear stole down her cheek. Eve and Phyllis exchanged bewildered glances.
‘I say,’ said Eve after a moment’s pause and a silence broken only by a smothered sob from their late instructress, ‘we aren’t being very cheerful, are we, considering that this is supposed to be a joyous reunion? Is anything wrong with Cynthia?’
So poignant was Miss Clarkson’s anguish that Phyllis, in a flutter of alarm, rose and left the room swiftly in search of the only remedy that suggested itself to her — her smelling-salts.
‘Poor dear Cynthia!’ moaned Miss Clarkson.
‘Why, what’s the matter with her?’ asked Eve. She was not callous to Miss Clarkson’s grief, but she could not help the tiniest of smiles. In a flash she had been transported to her school-days, when the other’s habit of extracting the utmost tragedy out of the slimmest material had been a source of ever-fresh amusement to her. Not for an instant did she expect to hear any worse news of her old friend than that she was in bed with a cold or had twisted her ankle.
‘She’s married, you know,’ said Miss Clarkson.
‘Well, I see no harm in that, Clarkie. If a few more Safety Bets go wrong, I shall probably have to rush out and marry someone myself. Some nice, rich, indulgent man who will spoil me.’
‘Oh, Eve, my dear,’ pleaded Miss Clarkson, bleating with alarm, ‘do please be careful whom you marry. I never hear of one of my girls marrying without feeling that the worst may happen and that, all unknowing, she may be stepping over a grim precipice!’
‘You don’t tell them that, do you? Because I should think it would rather cast a damper on the wedding festivities. Has Cynthia gone stepping over grim precipices? I was just saying to Phyllis that I envied her, marrying a celebrity like Ralston McTodd.’
Miss Clarkson gulped.
‘The man must be a fiend,’ she said brokenly. ‘I have just left poor dear Cynthia in floods of tears at the Cadogan Hotel — she had a very nice quiet room on the fourth floor, though the carpet does not harmonize with the wall-paper…. She was broken-hearted, poor child. I did what I could to console her, but it was useless. She always was so highly strung. I must be getting back to her very soon. I only came on here because I did not want to disappoint you two dear girls…’
‘Why?’ said Eve with quiet intensity. She knew from experience that Miss Clarkson, unless firmly checked, would pirouette round and round the point for minutes without ever touching it.
‘Why?’ echoed Miss Clarkson, blinking as if the word was something solid that had struck her unexpectedly.
‘Why was Cynthia in floods of tears?’
‘But I’m telling you, my dear. That man has left her!’
‘Left her!’
‘They had a quarrel, and he walked straight out of the hotel. That was the day before yesterday, and he has not been back since. This afternoon the curtest note came from him to say that he never intended to return. He had secretly and in a most underhand way arranged for his luggage to be removed from the hotel to a District Messenger office, and from there he has taken it no one knows where. He has completely disappeared.’
Eve stared. She had not been prepared for news of this momentous order.
‘But what did they quarrel about?’
‘Cynthia, poor child, was too overwrought to tell me!’
Eve clenched her teeth.
‘The beast! … Poor old Cynthia… Shall I come round with you?’
‘No, my dear, better let me look after her alone. I will tell her to write and let you know when she can see you. I must be going, Phyllis dear,’ she said, as her hostess re-entered, bearing a small bottle.
‘But you’ve only just come!’ said Phyllis, surprised.
‘Poor old Cynthia’s husband has left her,’ explained Eve briefly. ‘And Clarkie’s going back to look after her. She’s in a pretty bad way, it seems.’
‘Oh, no!’
‘Yes, indeed. And I really must be going at once,’ said Miss Clarkson.
Eve waited in the drawing-room till the front door banged and Phyllis came back to her. Phyllis was more wistful than ever. She had been looking forward to this tea-party, and it had not been the happy occasion she had anticipated. The two girls sat in silence for a moment.
‘What brutes some men are!’ said Eve at length.
‘Mike,’ said Phyllis dreamily, ‘is an angel.’
Eve welcomed the unspoken invitation to return to a more agreeable topic. She felt very deeply for the stricken Cynthia, but she hated aimless talk, and nothing could have been more aimless than for her and Phyllis to sit there exchanging lamentations concerning a tragedy of which neither knew more than the bare outlines. Phyllis had her tragedy, too, and it was one where Eve saw the possibility of doing something practical and helpful. She was a girl of action, and was glad to be able to attack a living issue.
‘Yes, let’s go on talking about you and Mike,’ she said. ‘At present I can’t understand the position at all. When Clarkie came in, you were just telling me about your stepfather and why he wouldn’t help you. And I thought you made out a very poor case for him. Tell me some more. I’ve forgotten his name, by the way.’
‘Keeble.’
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague | Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”) | Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt | H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook | Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins | William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land | J.D. Beresford’s Goslings | E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man | Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage | Muriel Jaeger’s The Man With Six Senses | Jack London’s “The Red One” | Philip Francis Nowlan’s Armageddon 2419 A.D. | Homer Eon Flint’s The Devolutionist | W.E.B. DuBois’s “The Comet” | Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Moon Men | Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland | Sax Rohmer’s “The Zayat Kiss” | Eimar O’Duffy’s King Goshawk and the Birds | Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Lost Prince | Morley Roberts’s The Fugitives | Helen MacInnes’s The Unconquerable | Geoffrey Household’s Watcher in the Shadows | William Haggard’s The High Wire | Hammond Innes’s Air Bridge | James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen | John Buchan’s “No Man’s Land” | John Russell’s “The Fourth Man” | E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” | John Buchan’s Huntingtower | Arthur Conan Doyle’s When the World Screamed | Victor Bridges’ A Rogue By Compulsion | Jack London’s The Iron Heel | H. De Vere Stacpoole’s The Man Who Lost Himself | P.G. Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith | Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” | Houdini and Lovecraft’s “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” | Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Sussex Vampire.”
RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HILOBROW’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.
READ GORGEOUS PAPERBACKS: HiLoBooks has reissued the following 10 obscure but amazing Radium Age science fiction novels in beautiful print editions: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.