Leave it to Psmith (18 page)

‘I have only just found out your name, Mr McTodd,’ she said at length.

Psmith nodded.

‘It is always thus,’ he said. ‘Passing through this life, we meet a fellow-mortal, chat awhile, and part; and the last thing we think of doing is to ask him in a manly and direct way what his label is. There is something oddly furtive and shamefaced in one’s attitude towards people’s names. It is as if we shrank from probing some hideous secret. We say to ourselves “This pleasant stranger may be a Snooks or a Buggins. Better not inquire.” But in my case . . .’

‘It was a great shock to me.’

‘Now there,’ said Psmith, ‘I cannot follow you. I wouldn’t call McTodd a bad name, as names go. Don’t you think there is a sort of Highland strength about it? It sounds to me like something out of “The Lady of the Lake” or “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”. “The stag at eve had drunk its fill adoon the glen beyint the hill, and welcomed with a friendly nod old Scotland’s pride, young Laird McTodd.” You don’t think it has a sort of wild romantic ring?’

‘I ought to tell you, Mr McTodd,’ said Eve, ‘that I was at school with Cynthia.’

Psmith was not a young man who often found himself at a loss, but this remark gave him a bewildered feeling such as comes in dreams. It was plain to him that this delightful girl thought she had said something serious, even impressive; but for the moment it did not seem to him to make sense. He sparred warily for time.

‘Indeed? With Cynthia? That must have been jolly.’

The harmless observation appeared to have the worst effect upon his companion. The frown came back to her face.

‘Oh, don’t speak in that flippant, sneering way,’ she said. ‘It’s so cheap.’

Psmith, having nothing to say, remained silent, and the boat drifted on. Eve’s face was delicately pink, for she was feeling extraordinarily embarrassed. There was something in the solemn gaze of the man before her which made it difficult for her to go on. But, with the stout-heartedness which was one of her characteristics, she stuck to her task.

‘After all,’ she said, ‘however you may feel about her now, you must have been fond of poor Cynthia at one time, or I don’t see why you should have married her.’

Psmith, for want of conversation, had begun rowing again. The start he gave at these remarkable words caused him to skim the surface of the water with the left oar in such a manner as to send a liberal pint into Eve’s lap. He started forward with apologies.

‘Oh, never mind about that,’ said Eve impatiently. ‘It doesn’t matter. . . . Mr McTodd,’ she said, and there was a note of gentleness in her voice, ‘I do wish you would tell me what the trouble was.’

Psmith stared at the floor of the boat in silence. He was wrestling with a feeling of injury. True, he had not during their brief conversation at the Senior Conservative Club specifically inquired of Mr McTodd whether he was a bachelor, but somehow he felt that the man should have dropped some hint as to his married state. True, again, Mr McTodd had not asked him to impersonate him at Blandings Castle. And yet, undeniably, he felt that he had a grievance. Psmith’s was an orderly mind. He had proposed to continue the pleasant relations which had begun between Eve and himself, seeing to it that every day they became a little pleasanter, until eventually, in due season, they should reach the point where it would become possible to lay heart and hand at her feet. For there was no doubt in his mind that in a world congested to overflowing with girls Eve Halliday stood entirely alone. And now this infernal Cynthia had risen from nowhere to stand between them. Even a young man as liberally endowed with calm assurance as he was might find it awkward to conduct his wooing with such a handicap as a wife in the background.

Eve misinterpreted his silence.

‘I suppose you are thinking that it is no business of mine?’

Psmith came out of his thoughts with a start.

‘No, no. Not at all.’

‘You see, I’m devoted to Cynthia – and I like you.’

She smiled for the first time. Her embarrassment was passing.

‘That is the whole point,’ she said. ‘I do like you. And I’m quite sure that if you were really the sort of man I thought you when I first heard about all this, I shouldn’t. The friend who told me about you and Cynthia made it seem as if the whole fault had been yours. I got the impression that you had been very unkind to Cynthia. I thought you must be a brute. And when Lord Emsworth told me who you were, my first impulse was to hate you. I think if you had come along just then I should have been rather horrid to you. But you were late, and that gave me time to think it over. And then I remembered how nice you had been to me and I felt somehow that – that you must really be quite nice, and it occurred to me that there might be some explanation. And I thought that – perhaps – if you would let me interfere in your private affairs – and if things hadn’t gone too far – I might do something to help – try to bring you together, you know.’

She broke off, a little confused, for now that the words were out she was conscious of a return of her former shyness. Even though she was an old friend of Cynthia’s, there did seem something insufferably officious in this meddling. And when she saw the look of pain on her companion’s face, she regretted that she had spoken. Naturally, she thought, he was offended.

In supposing that Psmith was offended she was mistaken. Internally he was glowing with a renewed admiration for all those beautiful qualities in her which he had detected, before they had ever met, at several yards’ range across the street from the window of the Drones Club smoking-room. His look of pain was due to the fact that, having now had time to grapple with the problem, he had decided to dispose of this Cynthia once and for all. He proposed to eliminate her for ever from his life. And the elimination of even such a comparative stranger seemed to him to call for a pained look. So he assumed one.

‘That,’ he said gravely, ‘would, I fear, be impossible. It is like you to suggest it, and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the kindness which has made you interest yourself in my troubles, but it is too late for any reconciliation. Cynthia and I are divorced.’

For a moment the temptation had come to him to kill the woman off with some wasting sickness, but this he resisted as tending towards possible future complications. He was resolved, however, that there should be no question of bringing them together again.

He was disturbed to find Eve staring at him in amazement.

‘Divorced? But how can you be divorced? It’s only a few days since you and she were in London together.’

Psmith ceased to wonder that Mr McTodd had had trouble with his wife. The woman was a perfect pest.

‘I used the term in a spiritual rather than a legal sense,’ he replied. ‘True, there has been no actual decree, but we are separated beyond hope of reunion.’ He saw the distress in Eve’s eyes and hurried on. ‘There are things,’ he said, ‘which it is impossible for a man to overlook, however broad-minded he may be. Love, Miss Halliday, is a delicate plant. It needs tending, nursing, assiduous fostering. This cannot be done by throwing the breakfast bacon at a husband’s head.’

‘What!’ Eve’s astonishment was such that the word came out in a startled squeak.

‘In
the dish,’ said Psmith sadly.

Eve’s blue eyes opened wide.

‘Cynthia
did that!’

‘On more than one occasion. Her temper in the mornings was terrible. I have known her lift the cat over two chairs and a settee with a single kick. And all because there were no mushrooms.’

‘But – but I can’t believe it!’

‘Come over to Canada,’ said Psmith, ‘and I will show you the cat.’

‘Cynthia did that! – Cynthia – why, she was always the gentlest little creature.’

‘At school, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘That,’ said Psmith, ‘would, I suppose, be before she had taken to drink.’

‘Taken to drink!’

Psmith was feeling happier. A passing thought did come to him that all this was perhaps a trifle rough on the absent Cynthia, but he mastered the unmanly weakness. It was necessary that Cynthia should suffer in the good cause. Already he had begun to detect in Eve’s eyes the faint dawnings of an angelic pity, and pity is recognised by all the best authorities as one of the most valuable emotions which your wooer can awaken.

‘Drink!’ Eve repeated, with a little shudder.

‘We lived in one of the dry provinces of Canada, and, as so often happens, that started the trouble. From the moment when she installed a private still her downfall was swift. I have seen her, under the influence of home-brew, rage through the house like a devastating cyclone. . . . I hate speaking like this of one who was your friend,’ said Psmith, in a low, vibrating voice. ‘I would not tell these things to anyone but you. The world, of course, supposes that the entire blame for the collapse of our home was mine. I took care that it should be so. The opinion of the world matters little to me. But with you it is different. I should not like you to think badly of me, Miss Halliday. I do not make friends easily – 1 am a lonely man – but somehow it has seemed to me since we met that you and I might be friends.’

Eve stretched her hand out impulsively.

‘Why, of course!’

Psmith took her hand and held it far longer than was strictly speaking necessary.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

He turned the nose of the boat to the shore, and rowed slowly back.

‘I have suffered,’ said Psmith gravely, as he helped her ashore. ‘But, if you will be my friend, I think that I may forget.’

They walked in silence up the winding path to the castle.

§ 6

To Psmith five minutes later, as he sat in his room smoking a cigarette and looking dreamily out at the distant hills, there entered the Hon. Frederick Threepwood, who, having closed the door behind him, tottered to the bed and uttered a deep and discordant groan. Psmith, his mind thus rudely wrenched from pleasant meditations, turned and regarded the gloomy youth with disfavour.

‘At any other time, Comrade Threepwood,’ he said politely but with firmness, ‘certainly. But not now. I am not in the vein.’

‘What?’ said the Hon. Freddie vacantly.

‘I say that at any other time I shall be delighted to listen to your farmyard imitations, but not now. At the moment I am deep in thoughts of my own, and I may say frankly that I regard you as more or less of an excrescence. I want solitude, solitude. I am in a beautiful reverie, and your presence jars upon me somewhat profoundly.’

The Hon. Freddie ruined the symmetry of his hair by passing his fingers feverishly through it.

‘Don’t
talk
so much! I never met a fellow like you for talking.’ Having rumpled his hair to the left, he went through it again and rumpled it to the right. ‘I say, do you know what? You’ve jolly well got to clear out of here quick!’ He got up from the bed, and approached the window. Having done which, he bent towards Psmith and whispered in his ear. ‘The game’s up!’

Psmith withdrew his ear with a touch of hauteur, but he looked at his companion with a little more interest. He had feared, when he saw Freddie stagger in with such melodramatic despair and emit so hollow a groan, that the topic on which he wished to converse was the already exhausted one of his broken heart. It now began to appear that weightier matters were on his mind.

‘I fail to understand you, Comrade Threepwood,’ he said. ‘The last time I had the privilege of conversing with you, you informed me that Susan, or whatever her name is, merely giggled and told you not to be silly when you embraced her. In other words, she is
not
a detective. What has happened since then to get you all worked up?’

‘Baxter!’

‘What has Baxter been doing?’

‘Only giving the whole bally show away to me, that’s all,’ said Freddie feverishly. He clutched Psmith’s arm violently, causing that exquisite to utter a slight moan and smooth out the wrinkles thus created in his sleeve. ‘Listen! I’ve just been talking to the blighter. I was passing the library just now, when he popped out of the door and hauled me in. And, dash it, he hadn’t been talking two seconds before I realised that he has seen through the whole dam’ thing practically from the moment you got here. Though he doesn’t seem to know that I’ve anything to do with it, thank goodness.’

‘I should imagine not, if he makes you his confidant. Why did he do that, by the way? What made him select you as the recipient of his secrets?’

‘As far as I can make out, his idea was to form a gang, if you know what I mean. He said a lot of stuffabout him and me being the only two able-bodied young men in the place, and we ought to be prepared to tackle you if you started anything.’

‘I see. And now tell me how our delightful friend ever happened to begin suspecting that I was not all I seemed to be. I had been flattering myself that I had put the little deception over with complete success.’

‘Well, in the first place, dash it, that dam’ fellow McTodd – the real one, you know – sent a telegram saying that he wasn’t coming. So it seemed rummy to Baxter bang from the start when you blew in all merry and bright.’

Ah! That was what they all meant by saying they were glad I had come “after all”. A phrase which at the moment, I confess, rather mystified me.’

And then you went and wrote in the Peavey female’s autograph-book.’

‘In what way was that a false move?’

‘Why, that was the biggest bloomer on record, as it has turned out,’ said Freddie vehemently. ‘Baxter apparently keeps every letter that comes to the place on a file, and he’d skewered McTodd’s original letter with the rest. I mean, the one he wrote accepting the invitation to come here. And Baxter compared his handwriting with what you wrote in the Peavey’s album, and, of course, they weren’t a dam’ bit alike. And that put the lid on it.’

Psmith lit another cigarette and drew at it thoughtfully. He realised that he had made a tactical error in underestimating the antagonism of the Efficient One.