Service with a Smile by P.G. Wodehouse Page B

Briggs who entered. In her bearing, though he was too agitated to
observe it, there was an unaccustomed jauntiness, a jauntiness occasioned by
the fact that after dinner on the previous night the Duke had handed her a cheque
for five hundred pounds and she was going to London for the night to celebrate.
There are few things that so lend elasticity to a girl’s step as the knowledge
that in the bag swinging from her right hand there is a cheque for this sum
payable to herself. Lavender Briggs was not actually skipping like the high
hills, but she came within measurable distance of doing so. On her way to the
library she had been humming a morceau from one of the avant-garde composers
and sketching out preliminary plans for that typewriting bureau for which she
now had the requisite capital.
    Her
prospects, she felt, were of the brightest. She could think off-hand of at
least a dozen poets and as many whimsical essayists in her own circle of
friends who were always writing something and having to have it typed. Shade
her prices a little in the first month or so, and all these Aubreys and Lionels
and Lucians and Eustaces would come running, and after them — for the news of
good work soon gets around — the general public. Every red-blooded man in
England, she knew, not to mention the red-blooded women, was writing a novel
and would have to have top copy and two carbons.
    It was
consequently with something approaching cheeriness that she addressed Lord Emsworth.
    ‘Oh,
Lord Emsworth, I am sorry to disturb you, but Lady Constance has given me leave
to go to London for the night. I was wondering if there was anything I could do
for you while I am there?’
    Lord Emsworth
thanked her and said No, he could not think of anything, and she went her way,
leaving him to his thoughts. He was still feeling boneless and had asked
himself for the hundredth time if his friend Ickenham’s advice about stout
denial could be relied on to produce the happy ending, when a second knock on
the door brought him out of his chair again.
    This
time it was Bill Bailey.
    ‘Could
I see you for a moment, Lord Emsworth?’ said Bill.
     
     
    3
     
    Having interviewed
Lavender Briggs and given her permission to go to London for the night, Lady
Constance had retired to her boudoir to look through the letters which had
arrived for her by the morning post. One of them was from her friend James Schoonmaker
in New York, and she was reading it with the pleasure which his letters always
gave her, when from the other side of the door there came a sound like a mighty
rushing wind, and Lord Emsworth burst over the threshold. And she was about to
utter a rebuking ‘Oh, Clarence!’, the customary formula for putting him in his
place, when she caught sight of his face and the words froze on her lips.
    He was
a light mauve in colour, and his eyes, generally so mild, glittered behind
their pince-nez with a strange light. It needed but a glance to tell her that
he was in one of his rare berserk moods. These occurred perhaps twice in each
calendar year, and even she, strong woman though she was, always came near to
quailing before them, for on these occasions he ceased to be a human doormat
whom an ‘Oh, Clarence!’ could quell and became something more on the order of
one of those high winds which from time to time blow through the state of Kansas
and send its inhabitants scurrying nimbly to their cyclone cellars. When the
oppressed rise and start setting about the oppressor, their fury is always
formidable. One noticed this in the French Revolution.
    ‘Where’s
that damned Briggs woman?’ he demanded, snapping out the words as if he had
been a master of men and not a craven accustomed to curl up in a ball at the
secretary’s lightest glance. ‘Have you seen that blasted female anywhere,
Constance? I’ve been looking for her all over the place.’
    Normally,
Lady Constance would have been swift to criticize such laxity of speech, but
until his belligerent