Pelham Wodehouse: Piccadilly Jim

"No."

"Quite right. Got to be careful at your age."

"What do you mean?"

"Getting on, you know. Not so young as you used to be. Come in, pop, if you're coming in. There's a draft from that door."

Mr. Pett retired, fermenting. He wondered how another man would have handled this situation. The ridiculous inconsistency of the human character infuriated him. Why should he be a totally different man on Riverside Drive from the person he was in Pine Street? Why should he be able to hold his own in Pine Street with grown men—whiskered, square-jawed financiers—and yet be unable on Riverside Drive to eject a fourteen-year-old boy from an easy chair? It seemed to him sometimes that a curious paralysis of the will came over him out of business hours.

Meanwhile, he had still to find a place where he could read his Sunday paper.

He stood for a while in thought. Then his brow cleared, and he began to mount the stairs. Reaching the top floor, he walked along the passage and knocked on a door at the end of it. From behind this door, as from behind those below, sounds proceeded, but this time they did not seem to discourage Mr. Pett. It was the tapping of a typewriter that he heard, and he listened to it with an air of benevolent approval. He loved to hear the sound of a typewriter: it made home so like the office.

"Come in," called a girl's voice.

The room in which Mr. Pett found himself was small but cosy, and its cosiness—oddly, considering the sex of its owner—had that peculiar quality which belongs as a rule to the dens of men. A large bookcase almost covered one side of it, its reds and blues and browns smiling cheerfully at whoever entered. The walls were hung with prints, judiciously chosen and arranged. Through a window to the left, healthfully open at the bottom, the sun streamed in, bringing with it the pleasantly subdued whirring of automobiles out on the Drive. At a desk at right angles to this window, her vivid red-gold hair rippling in the breeze from the river, sat the girl who had been working at the typewriter. She turned as Mr. Pett entered, and smiled over her shoulder.

Ann Chester, Mr. Pett's niece, looked her best when she smiled. Although her hair was the most obviously striking feature of her appearance, her mouth was really the most individual thing about her. It was a mouth that suggested adventurous possibilities. In repose, it had a look of having just finished saying something humorous, a kind of demure appreciation of itself. When it smiled, a row of white teeth flashed out: or, if the lips did not part, a dimple appeared on the right cheek, giving the whole face an air of mischievous geniality. It was an enterprising, swashbuckling sort of mouth, the mouth of one who would lead forlorn hopes with a jest or plot whimsically lawless conspiracies against convention. In its corners and in the firm line of the chin beneath it there lurked, too, more than a hint of imperiousness. A physiognomist would have gathered, correctly, that Ann Chester liked having her own way and was accustomed to get it.

"Hello, uncle Peter," she said. "What's the trouble?"

"Am I interrupting you, Ann?"

"Not a bit. I'm only copying out a story for aunt Nesta. I promised her I would. Would you like to hear some of it?"

Mr. Pett said he would not.

"You're missing a good thing," said Ann, turning the pages. "I'm all worked up over it. It's called 'At Dead of Night,' and it's full of crime and everything. You would never think aunt Nesta had such a feverish imagination. There are detectives and kidnappers in it and all sorts of luxuries. I suppose it's the effect of reading it, but you look to me as if you were trailing something. You've got a sort of purposeful air."

Mr. Pett's amiable face writhed into what was intended to be a bitter smile.

"I'm only trailing a quiet place to read in. I never saw such a place as this house. It looks big enough outside for a regiment. Yet, when you're inside, there's a poet or something in every room."

"What about the library? Isn't that sacred to you?"

"The boy Ogden's there."

"What a shame!"

"Wallowing in my best chair," said Mr. Pett morosely. "Smoking cigarettes."

"Smoking? I thought he had promised aunt Nesta he wouldn't smoke."

"Well, he said he wasn't, of course, but I know he had been. I don't know what to do with that boy. It's no good my talking to him. He—he patronises me!" concluded Mr. Pett indignantly. "Sits there on his shoulder blades with his feet on the table and talks to me with his mouth full of candy as if I were his grandson."

"Little brute."

Ann was sorry for Mr. Pett. For many years now, ever since the death of her mother, they had been inseparable. Her father, who was a traveller, explorer, big-game hunter, and general sojourner in the lonelier and wilder spots of the world and paid only infrequent visits to New York, had left her almost entirely in Mr. Pett's care, and all her pleasantest memories were associated with him. Mr. Chester's was in many ways an admirable character, but not a domestic one; and his relations with his daughter were confined for the most part to letters and presents. In the past few years she had come almost to regard Mr. Pett in the light of a father. Hers was a nature swiftly responsive to kindness; and because Mr. Pett besides being kind was also pathetic she pitied as well as loved him. There was a lingering boyishness in the financier, the boyishness of the boy who muddles along in an unsympathetic world and can never do anything right: and this quality called aloud to the youth in her. She was at the valiant age when we burn to right wrongs and succour the oppressed, and wild rebel schemes for the reformation of her small world came readily to her. From the first she had been a smouldering spectator of the trials of her uncle's married life, and if Mr. Pett had ever asked her advice and bound himself to act on it he would have solved his domestic troubles in explosive fashion. For Ann in her moments of maiden meditation had frequently devised schemes to that end which would have made his grey hair stand erect with horror.

"I've seen a good many boys," she said, "but Ogden is in a class by himself. He ought to be sent to a strict boarding-school, of course."

"He ought to be sent to Sing-Sing," amended Mr. Pett.

"Why don't you send him to school?"

"Your aunt wouldn't hear of it. She's afraid of his being kidnapped. It happened last time he went to school. You can't blame her for wanting to keep her eye on him after that."

Ann ran her fingers meditatively over the keys.

"I've sometimes thought . . ."

"Yes?"

"Oh, nothing. I must get on with this thing for aunt Nesta."

Mr. Pett placed the bulk of the Sunday paper on the floor beside him, and began to run an appreciative eye over the comic supplement. That lingering boyishness in him which endeared him to Ann always led him to open his Sabbath reading in this fashion. Grey-headed though he was, he still retained both in art and in real life a taste for the slapstick. No one had ever known the pure pleasure it had given him when Raymond Green, his wife's novelist protege, had tripped over a loose stair-rod one morning and fallen an entire flight.

From some point farther down the corridor came a muffled thudding. Ann stopped her work to listen.

"There's Jerry Mitchell punching the bag."

"Eh?" said Mr. Pett.

"I only said I could hear Jerry Mitchell in the gymnasium."

"Yes, he's there."

Ann looked out of the window thoughtfully for a moment. Then she swung round in her swivel-chair.

"Uncle Peter."

Mr. Pett emerged slowly from the comic supplement.

"Eh?"

"Did Jerry Mitchell ever tell you about that friend of his who keeps a dogs' hospital down on Long Island somewhere? I forget his name. Smithers or Smethurst or something. People—old ladies, you know, and people—bring him their dogs to be cured when they get sick. He has an infallible remedy, Jerry tells me. He makes a lot of money at it."