The florist who had settled down to ply his trade opposite the Senior Conservative Club was a delightful fellow, thoroughly sound on the hollyhock question and so informative in the matter of delphiniums, achilleas, coreopsis, eryngiums, geums, lupines, bergamot and early phloxes that Lord Emsworth gave himself up whole-heartedly to the feast of reason and the flow of soul; and it was only some fifteen minutes later that he remembered that he had left a guest languishing in the lower smoking-room and that this guest might be thinking him a trifle remiss in the observance of the sacred duties of hospitality. “Bless my soul, yes!” said his lordship, coming out from under the influence with a start.
Even then he could not bring himself to dash abruptly from the shop. Twice he reached the door and twice pottered back to sniff at flowers and say something he had forgotten to mention about the Stronger Growing Clematis. Finally, however, with one last, longing, lingering look behind, he tore himself away and trotted back across the road.
Arrived in the lower smoking-room, he stood in the doorway for a moment, peering. The place had been a blur to him when he had left it, but he remembered[p. 106] that he had been sitting in the middle window and, as there were only two seats by the window, that tall, dark young man in one of them must be the guest he had deserted. That he could be a changeling never occurred to Lord Emsworth. So pleasantly had the time passed in the shop across the way that he had the impression that he had only been gone a couple of minutes or so. He made his way to where the young man sat. A vague idea came into his head that the other had grown a bit in his absence, but it passed.
“My dear fellow,” he said genially, as he slid into the other chair, “I really must apologise.”
It was plain to Psmith that the other was under a misapprehension, and a really nice-minded young man would no doubt have put the matter right at once. The fact that it never for a single instant occurred to Psmith to do so was due, no doubt, to some innate defect in his character. He was essentially a young man who took life as it came, and the more inconsequently it came the better he liked it. Presently, he reflected, it would become necessary for him to make some excuse and steal quietly out of the other’s life; but meanwhile the situation seemed to him to present entertaining possibilities.
“Not at all,” he replied graciously. “Not at all.”
“I was afraid for a moment,” said Lord Emsworth, “that you might—quite naturally—be offended.”
“Absurd!”
“Shouldn’t have left you like that. Shocking bad manners. But, my dear fellow, I simply had to pop across the street.”
“Most decidedly,” said Psmith. “Always pop across streets. It is the secret of a happy and successful life.”
Lord Emsworth looked at him a little perplexedly, and wondered if he had caught the last remark correctly. But his mind had never been designed for the purpose[p. 107] of dwelling closely on problems for any length of time, and he let it go.
“Beautiful roses that man has,” he observed. “Really an extraordinarily fine display.”
“Indeed?” said Psmith.
“Nothing to touch mine, though. I wish, my dear fellow, you could have been down at Blandings at the beginning of the month. My roses were at their best then. It’s too bad you weren’t there to see them.”
“The fault no doubt was mine,” said Psmith.
“Of course you weren’t in England then.”
“Ah! That explains it.”
“Still, I shall have plenty of flowers to show you when you are at Blandings. I expect,” said Lord Emsworth, at last showing a host-like disposition to give his guest a belated innings, “I expect you’ll write one of your poems about my gardens, eh?”
Psmith was conscious of a feeling of distinct gratification. Weeks of toil among the herrings of Billingsgate had left him with a sort of haunting fear that even in private life there clung to him the miasma of the fish market. Yet here was a perfectly unprejudiced observer looking squarely at him and mistaking him for a poet—showing that in spite of all he had gone through there must still be something notably spiritual and unfishy about his outward appearance.
“Very possibly,” he said. “Very possibly.”
“I suppose you get ideas for your poetry from all sorts of things,” said Lord Emsworth, nobly resisting the temptation to collar the conversation again. He was feeling extremely friendly towards this poet fellow. It was deuced civil of him not to be put out and huffy at being left alone in the smoking-room.
“From practically everything,” said Psmith, “except fish.”
[p. 108]“Fish?”
“I have never written a poem about fish.”
“No?” said Lord Emsworth, again feeling that a pin had worked loose in the machinery of the conversation.
“I was once offered a princely sum,” went on Psmith, now floating happily along on the tide of his native exuberance, “to write a ballad for the Fishmonger’s Gazette entitled, ‘Herbert the Turbot.’ But I was firm. I declined.”
“Indeed?” said Lord Emsworth.
“One has one’s self-respect,” said Psmith.
“Oh, decidedly,” said Lord Emsworth.
“It was p............