Smallwood Bessemer mused. Once again he was weighing the pro’s and con’s. It was his habit of giving advice that had freed him from, Agnes Flack. On the other hand, if it had not been for his habit of giving advice, Agnes Flack would never, so to speak, have arisen.
“Do you know,” he said, “I doubt if I shall be doing much advising from now on. I think I shall ask the paper to release me from my columnist contract. I have a feeling that I shall be happier doing something like the Society News or the Children’s Corner.”
CHAPTER VIII
Birth of a Salesman
THE day was so fair, the breeze so gentle, the sky so blue and the sun so sunny, that Lord Emsworth that vague and woollen-headed peer, who liked fine weather, should have been gay and carefree, especially as he was looking at flowers, a thing which always gave him pleasure. But on his face, as he poked it over the hedge beyond which the flowers lay, a close observer would have noted a peevish frown. He was thinking of his younger son Freddie.
Coming to America to attend the wedding of one of his nieces to a local millionaire of the name of Tipton Plimsoll, Lord Emsworth had found himself, in the matter of board and lodging, confronted with a difficult choice. The British Government, notoriously slow men with a dollar, having refused to allow him to take out of England a sum sufficient to enable him to live in a New York hotel, he could become the guest of the bridegroom’s aunt, who was acting as M.C. of the nuptials, or he could dig in with Freddie in the Long Island suburb where the latter had made his home. Warned by his spies that Miss Plimsoll maintained in her establishment no fewer than six Pekinese dogs, a breed of animal which always made straight for his ankles, he had decided on Freddie and was conscious now of having done the wrong thing. Pekes chew the body, but Freddie seared the soul.
The flowers grew in the garden of a large white house at the end of the road, and Lord Emsworth had been goggling at them for some forty minutes, for he was a man who liked to take his time over these things, when his reverie was interrupted by the tooting of a horn and the sound of a discordant voice singing “Buttons and Bows”. Freddie’s car drew up, with Freddie at the wheel.
“Oh, there you are, guv’nor,” said Freddie.
“Yes,” said Lord Emsworth, who was. “I was looking at the flowers. A nice display. An attractive garden.”
“Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile,” said Freddie austerely. “Keep away from the owner of that joint, guv’nor. He lowers the tone of the neighbourhood.”
“Indeed? Why is that?”
“Not one of the better element. His wife’s away, and he throws parties. I’ve forgotten his name… Griggs or Follansbee or something… but we call him the Timber Wolf. He’s something in the lumber business.”
“And he throws parties?”
“Repeatedly. You might say incessantly. Entertains blondes in droves. All wrong. My wife’s away, but do you find me festooned in blondes? No. I pine for her return. Well, I must be oozing along. I’m late.”
“You are off somewhere?”
Freddie clicked his tongue.
“I told you yesterday, guv’nor, and I told you twice this morning, that I was giving a prospect lunch to-day at the golf club. I explained that I couldn’t ask you to join us at the trough, because I shall be handing this bird a sales talk throughout the meal. You’ll find your rations laid out on a tray. A cold collation today, because it’s Thursday and on Thursdays the domestic staff downs tools.”
He drove on, all briskness and efficiency, and Lord Emsworth tut-tutted an irritable tut-tut.
There, he was telling himself, you had in a nutshell what made Freddie such a nerve-rasping companion. He threw his weight about. He behaved as if he were the Spirit of Modem Commerce. He was like something out of one of those advertisements which show the employee who has taken the correspondence course in Confidence and Self-Reliance looking his boss in the eye and making him wilt.
Freddie worked for Donaldson’s Inc., dealers in dog biscuits of Long Island City, and had been doing so now for three years. And in those three years some miracle had transformed him from a vapid young London lizard into a go-getter, a live wire and a man who thought on his feet and did it now. Every night since Lord Emsworth had come to enjoy his hospitality, if enjoy is the word, he had spoken lyrically and at length of his success in promoting the interests of Donaldson’s Dog Joy (“Get Your Dog Thinking The Donaldson Way”), making no secret of his view that it had been a lucky day for the dear old firm when it had put him on the payroll. As a salesman he was good, a fellow who cooked with gas and did not spare himself, and he admitted it.
All of which might have been music to Lord Emsworth’s ears, for a younger son earning his living in America is unquestionably a vast improvement on a younger son messing about and getting into debt in England, had it not been for one circumstance. He could not rid himself of a growing conviction that after years of regarding this child of his as a drone and a wastrel, the child was now regarding him as one. A world’s worker himself, Freddie eyed with scorn one who, like Lord Emsworth, neither toiled nor spun. He patronized Lord Emsworth. He had never actually called Lord Emsworth a spiv, but he made it plain that it was in this category that he had mentally pencilled in the author of his being. And if there is one thing that pierces the armour of an English father of the upper classes, it is to be looked down on by his younger son. Little wonder that Lord Emsworth, as he toddled along the road, was gritting his teeth. A weaker man would have gnashed them.
His gloom was not lightened by the sight of the cold collation which leered at him on his return to the house. There was the tray of which Freddie had spoken, and on it a plate on which, like corpses after a baffle, lay a slice of vermilion ham, a slice of sepia corned beef, a circle of mauve liverwirst and, of all revolting things, a large green pickle. It seemed to Lord Emsworth that Freddie’s domestic staff was temperamentally incapable of distinguishing between the needs of an old gentleman who had to be careful what he ate and those of a flock of buzzards taking pot luck in the Florida Everglades.
For some moments he stood gaping at this unpleasant picture in still life; then there stole into his mind the thought that there might be eggs in the ice-box. He went thither and tested his theory and it was proved correct.
“Ha!” said Lord Emsworth. He remembered how he had frequently scrambled eggs at school.
But his school days lay half a century behind him, and time in its march robs us of our boyhood gifts. Since the era when he had worn Eton collars and ink spots on his face, he had lost the knack, and it all too speedily became apparent that Operation Eggs was not going to be the walkover he had anticipated. Came a moment when he would have been hard put to it to say whether he was scrambling the eggs or the eggs were scrambling him. And he had paused to clarify his thoughts on this point, when there was a ring at the front door bell. Deeply incrusted in yolk, he shuffled off to answer the summons.
A girl was standing in the porch. He inspected her through his pince-nez with the vacant stare on which the female members of his family had so often commented adversely. She seemed to him, as he drank her slowly in, a nice sort of girl. A man with a great many nieces who were always bursting in on him and ballyragging him when he wanted to read his pig book, he had come to fear and distrust the younger members of the opposite sex, but this one’s looks he liked immediately. About her there was none of that haughty beauty and stormy emotion in which his nieces specialized. She was small and friendly and companionable.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning. Would you like a richly bound encyclopædia of Sport?”
“Not in the least,” said Lord Emsworth cordially. “Can you scramble eggs?”
“Why, sure.”
“Then come in,” said Lord Emsworth. “Come in. And if you will excuse me leaving you, I will go and change my clothes.”
Women are admittedly wonderful. It did not take Lord Emsworth long to remove his best suit, which he
had been wearing in deference to the wishes of Freddie, who was a purist on dress, and don the older and shabbier one which made him look like a minor employee in some shady firm of private detectives. but, brief though the interval had been, the girl had succeeded in bringing order out of chaos. Not only had she quelled what had threatened to become an ugly revolt among the eggs, but she had found bacon and coffee and produced toast. What was virtually a banquet was set out in the living-room, and Lord Emsworth was about to square his elbows and have at it, when he detected an omission.
“Where is your plate?” he asked.
“Mine?” The girl seemed surprised. “Am I in on this?”
“Most certainly.”
“That’s mighty nice of you. I’m starving.”
“These eggs,” said Lord Emsworth some moments later speaking thickly through a mouthful of them, “are delicious Salt?”
“Thanks.”
“Pepper? Mustard? Tell me,” said Lord Emsworth, for it was a matter that had been perplexing him a good deal, “why do you go about the countryside offering people richly bound encyclopædias of Sport? Deuced civil of you, of course,” he added hastily, lest she might think that he was criticizing, “but why do you?”
“I’m selling them.”
“Selling them?”
“Yes.”
A bright light shone upon Lord Emsworth. It had been well said of him that he had an I.Q. some thirty points lower than that of a not too agile-minded jelly-fish, but he had grasped her point. She was selling them.
“Of course, yes. Quite. I see what you mean. You’re selling them.”
“That’s right. They set you back five dollars and I get forty per cent. Only I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because people won’t buy them.”
“No?”
“No, sir.”
“Don’t people want richly bound encyclopædias of Sport?”
“If they do, they keep it from me.”
“Dear, dear.” Lord Emsworth swallowed a piece of bacon emotionally. His heart was bleeding for this poor child. “That must be trying for you.”
“It is.”
“But why do you have to sell the bally things?”
“Well, it’s like this. I’m going to have a baby.”
“Good God!”
“Oh, not immediately. Next January. Well, that sort of thing costs money. Am I right or wrong?”
“Right, most decidedly,” said Lord Emsworth, who had never been a young mother himself but knew the ropes. “I remember my poor wife complaining of the expense when my son Frederick was born. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ I remember her saying. She was alive at the time,” explained Lord Emsworth.
“Ed. works in a garage.”
“Does he? I don’t think I have met him. Who is Ed?”
“My husband.”
“Oh, your husband? You mean your husband. Works in a garage, does he?”
That’s right. And the take-home pay doesn’t leave much over for extras.”
“Like babies?”
“Like babies. So I got this job. I didn’t tell Ed., of course. He’d have a fit.”
“He is subject to fits?”
“He wants me to lie down and rest.”
“I think he’s right.”
“Oh, he’s right, all right, but how can I? I’ve got to hustle out and sell richly bound encyclopædias.”
“Of Sport?”
“Of Sport. And it’s tough going. You do become discouraged. Besides getting blisters on the feet. I wish you could see my feet right now.”
On the point of saying that he would be delighted, Lord Emsworth paused. He had had a bright idea and it had taken his breath away. This always happened when he had bright ideas. He had had one in the Spring of 1921 and another in the Summer of 1933, and those had taken his breath away, too.
“I will sell your richly bound encyclopædias of Sport,” he said.
“You?”
The bright idea which had taken Lord Emsworth’s breath away was that if he went out and sold richly bound encyclopædias of Sport, admitted by all the cognoscenti to be very difficult to dispose of, it would rid him once and for all of the inferiority complex which so oppressed him when in the society of his son Freddie. The brassiest of young men cannot pull that Spirit of Modern Commerce stuff on a father if the father is practically a Spirit of Modern Commerce himself.
“Precisely,” he said.
“But you couldn’t.”
Lord Emsworth bridled. A wave of confidence and self-reliance was surging through him.
“Who says I couldn’t? My son Frederick sells things, and I resent the suggestion that I am incapable of doing anything that Frederick can do.” He wondered if it would be possible to explain to her what a turnip-headed young ass Frederick was, then gave up the attempt as hopeless. “Leave this to me,” he said. “Lie down on that sofa and get a nice rest.”
“But “
“Don’t argue,” said Lord Emsworth dangerously, becoming the dominant male. “Lie down on that sofa.”
Two minutes later, he was making his way down the road, still awash with that wave of confidence and self-reliance. His objective was the large white house where the flowers were. He was remembering what Freddie had said about its owner. The man, according to Freddie, threw parties and entertained blondes in his wife’s absence. And while we may look askance from the moral standpoint at one who does this, we have to admit that it suggests the possession of sporting blood. That reckless, raffish type probably buys its encyclopædias of Sport by the gross.
But one of the things that make life so difficult is that waves of confidence and self-reliance do not last. They surge, but they recede, leaving us with dubious minds and cooling feet. Lord Emsworth had started out in uplifted mood, but as he reached the gate of the white house the glow began to fade.
It was not that he had forgotten the technique of the thing. Freddie had explained it too often for him to do that. You rapped on the door. You said “I wonder if I could interest you in a good dog biscuit?” And then by sheer personal magnetism you cast a spell on the householder so that he became wax in your hands. All perfectly simple and straightforward. And yet, having opened the gate and advanced a few feet into the driveway, Lord Emsworth paused. He removed his pince-nez, polished them, replaced them on his nose, blinked, swallowed once or twice and ran a finger over his chin. The first fine frenzy had abated. He was feeling like a nervous man who in an impulsive moment has volunteered to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
He was still standing in the driveway, letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would”, as cats do in adages, when the air became full of tooting horns and grinding brakes and screaming voices.
“God bless my soul,” said Lord Emsworth, coming out of his coma.
The car which had so nearly caused a vacancy in the House of Lords was bursting with blondes. There was a blonde at the wheel, another at her side, further blondes in the rear seats and on the lap of the blonde beside the blonde at the wheel a blonde Pekinese dog. They were all shouting, and the Pekinese dog was hurling abuse in Chinese.
“God bless my soul,” said Lord Emsworth. “I beg your pardon. I really must apologize. I was plunged in thought.”
“Oh, was that what you were plunged in?” said the blonde at the wheel, mollified by his suavity. Speak civilly to blondes, and they will speak civilly to you.
“I was thinking of dog biscuits. Of dog biscuits. Of… er… in short … dog biscuits. I wonder,” said Lord Emsworth, striking while the iron was hot, “if I could interest you in a good dog biscuit?”
The blonde at the wheel weighed the question.
“Not me,” she said. “I never touch ‘em.”
“Nor me,” said a blonde at the back. “Doctor’s orders.”
“And if you’re thinking of making a quick sale to Eisenhower here,” said the blonde beside the driver, kissing the Pekinese on the tip of its nose, a feat of daring at wh
ich Lord Emsworth marvelled, “he only eats chicken.”
Lord Emsworth corrected himself.
“When I said dog biscuit,” he explained, “I meant a richly bound encyclopædia of Sport.”
The blondes exchanged glances.
“Look,” said the one at the wheel. “If you don’t know the difference between a dog biscuit and a richly bound encyclopædia of Sport, seems to me you’d be doing better in some other lie of business.”
“Much better,” said the blonde beside her.
“A whole lot better,” agreed the blonde at the back.
“No future in it, the way you’re going,” said the blonde at the wheel, summing up. “That’s the first thing you want to get straight on, the difference between dog biscuits and richly bound encyclopædias of Sport. It’s a thing that’s cropping up all the time. There is a difference. I couldn’t explain it to you offhand, but you go off into a corner somewheres and mull it over quietly and you’ll find it’ll suddenly come to you.”
“Like a flash,” said the blonde at the back.
“Like a stroke of lightning or sump’n,” assented the blonde at the wheel. “You’ll be amazed how you ever came to mix them up. Well, good-bye. Been nice seeing you.”
The car moved on toward the house, and Lord Emsworth, closing his burning ears to the happy laughter proceeding from its interior, tottered out into the road. His spirit was broken. It was his intention to return home and stay there. And he had started on his way when there came stealing into his mind a disturbing thought.
That girl. That nice young Mrs Ed. who was going to have a fit in January … or, rather, a baby. (It was her husband, he recalled, who had the fits.) She was staking everything on his salesmanship. Could he fail her? Could he betray her simple trust?
The obvious answer was “Yes, certainly”, but the inherited chivalry of a long lie of ancestors, all of whom had been noted for doing the square thing by damsels in distress, caused Lord Emsworth to shrink from making it. In the old days when knighthood was in flower and somebody was needed to rescue a suffering female from a dragon or a two-headed giant, the cry was always “Let Emsworth do it!”, and the Emsworth of the period had donned his suit of mail, stropped his sword, parked his chewing gum under the round table and snapped into it. A pretty state of things if the twentieth century holder of the name were to allow himself to be intimidated by blondes.