Service with a Smile

P. G. Wodehouse

Service with a Smile

Penguin
Books

Penguin Books Ltd. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

Viking Penguin Inc.. 40 west 23rd Street, New York.
New York 10010, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Australia Ltd. Ringwood, Victoria,
Australia

Penguin Books Canada Limited. 2801 John Street.
Markham, Ontario. Canada L3R IB4

Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd. 182—190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand

First published in the U.S.A. 1961

Published in Great Britain by Herbert Jenkins 1962

Published in Penguin Books 1966

Reprinted 1971. 1975. 1981, 1983. 1986

Copyright © P. G. Wodehouse, 1961

All rights reserved

Made and printed in Great Britain by

Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

Set in Linotype Times

Except in the United States of America. this book is
sold subject to the condition that it shell not, by way of trade or otherwise,
be lent. re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other then that in which it is
published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser

All
the characters in this book are purely imaginary

and
have no relation whatsoever to any living persons

Chapter
One

1

The morning sun shone down
on Blandings Castle, and the various inmates of the ancestral home of Clarence,
ninth Earl of Emsworth, their breakfasts digested, were occupying themselves
in their various ways. One may as well run through the roster just to keep the
record straight.

Beach,
the butler, was in his pantry reading an Agatha Christie; Voules, the
chauffeur, chewing gum in the car outside the front door. The Duke of
Dunstable, who had come uninvited for a long visit and showed no signs of ever
leaving, sat spelling through
The Times
on the terrace outside the amber
drawing-room, while George, Lord Emsworth’s grandson, roamed the grounds with
the camera which he had been given on his twelfth birthday. He was
photographing — not that the fact is of more than mild general interest — a
family of rabbits down by the west wood.

Lord Emsworth’s
sister, Lady Constance, was in her boudoir writing a letter to her American
friend James Schoonmaker. Lord Emsworth’s secretary, Lavender Briggs, was out
looking for Lord Emsworth. And Lord Emsworth himself, accompanied by Mr Schoonmaker’s
daughter Myra, was on his way to the headquarters of Empress of Blandings, his
pre-eminent sow, three times silver medallist in the Fat Pigs class at the
Shropshire Agricultural Show. He had taken the girl with him because it seemed
to him that she was a trifle on the low-spirited side these days, and he knew
from his own experience that there was nothing like an after-breakfast look at
the Empress for bracing one up and bringing the roses back to the cheeks.

‘There
is her sty,’ he said, pointing a reverent finger as they crossed the little
meadow dappled with buttercups and daisies. ‘And that is my pigman Wellbeloved
standing by it.’

Myra Schoonmaker,
who had been walking with bowed head, as if pacing behind the coffin of a dear and
valued friend, glanced listlessly in the direction indicated. She was a pretty
girl of the small, slim, slender type, who would have been prettier if she had
bean more cheerful. Her brow was furrowed, her lips drawn, and the large brown
eyes which rested on George Cyril Wellbeloved had in them something of the sadness
one sees in those of a dachshund which, coming to the, dinner table to get its
ten per cent, is refused a cut of the joint.

‘Looks
kind of a plug-ugly,’ she said, having weighed George Cyril in the balance.

‘Eh?
What? What?’ said Lord Emsworth, for the word was new to him.

‘I
wouldn’t trust a guy like that an inch.’

Enlightenment
came to Lord Emsworth.

‘Ah,
you have heard, then, how he left me some time ago and went to my neighbour,
Sir Gregory Parsloe. Outrageous and disloyal, of course, but these fellows will
do these things. You don’t find the old feudal spirit nowadays. But all that is
in the past, and I consider myself very fortunate to have got him back. A most
capable man.’

‘Well,
I still say I wouldn’t trust him as far as I can throw an elephant.’

At any
other moment it would have interested Lord Emsworth to ascertain how far she
could throw an elephant, and he would have been all eager questioning. But with
the Empress awaiting him at journey’s end he was too preoccupied to go into the
matter. As far as he was capable of hastening, he hastened on, his mild eyes
gleaming in anticipation of the treat in store.

Propping
his back against the rail of the sty, George Cyril Wellbeloved watched him
approach, a silent whistle of surprise on his lips.

‘Well,
strike me pink!’ he said to his immortal soul. ‘Cor chase my aunt Fanny up a
gum tree!’

What
had occasioned this astonishment was the fact that his social superior, usually
the sloppiest of dressers and generally regarded as one of Shropshire’s more
prominent eyesores, was now pure Savile Row from head to foot. Not even the
Tailor
and Cutter’s
most acid critic could have found a thing to cavil at in the
quiet splendour of his appearance. Enough to startle any beholder accustomed to
seeing him in baggy flannel trousers, an old shooting coat with holes in the
elbows, and a hat which would have been rejected disdainfully by the least fastidious
of tramps.

It was
no sudden outbreak of foppishness that had wrought this change in the ninth
earl’s outer crust, turning him into a prismatic sight at which pigmen blinked
amazed. As he had explained to Myra Schoonmaker on encountering her mooning
about in the hall, he was wearing the beastly things because he was going to
London on the 10.35 train, because his sister Connie had ordered him to attend
the opening of Parliament. Though why Parliament could not get itself opened
without his assistance he was at a loss to understand.

A
backwoods peer to end all backwoods peers, Lord Emsworth had a strong dislike
for London. He could never see what pleasure his friend Ickenham found in
visiting that frightful city. The latter’s statement that London brought out
all the best in him and was the only place where his soul could expand like a
blossoming flower and his generous nature find full expression bewildered him.
Himself he wanted nothing but Blandings Castle, even though his sister
Constance, his secretary Lavender Briggs and the Duke of Dunstable were there
and Connie, overriding his veto, had allowed the Church Lads’ Brigade to camp
out by the lake. Many people are fond of church lads, but he was not of their
number, and he chafed at Connie’s highhandedness in letting loose on his
grounds and messages what sometimes seemed to him about five hundred of them,
all squealing simultaneously.

But
this morning there was no room in his mind for morbid thoughts about these
juvenile plug-uglies. He strongly suspected that it was one of them who had
knocked his top hat off with a crusty roll at the recent school treat, but with
a visit to the Empress in view he had no leisure to brood on past wrongs. One
did not think of mundane things when about to fraternize with that wonder-pig.

Arriving
at her G.H.Q., he beamed on George Cyril Wellbeloved as if on some spectacle in
glorious technicolor. And this was odd, for the O.C. Pigs, as Myra Schoonmaker
had hinted, was no feast for the eye, having a sinister squint, a broken nose
acquired during a political discussion at the Goose and Gander in Market Blandings,
and a good deal of mud all over him. He also smelt rather strongly. But what
enchanted Lord Emsworth, gazing on this son of the soil, was not his looks or
the bouquet he diffused but his mere presence. It thrilled him to feel that
this prince of pigmen was back again, tending the Empress once more. George
Cyril might rather closely resemble someone for whom the police were spreading
a drag-net in the expectation of making an arrest shortly, but nobody could
deny his great gifts. He knew his pigs.

So Lord
Emsworth beamed, and when he spoke did so with what, when statesmen meet for
conferences, is known as the utmost cordiality.

‘Morning,
Wellbeloved.’

‘Morning,
m’lord.’

‘Empress
all right?’

‘In the
pink, m’lord.’

‘Eating
well?’

‘Like a
streak, m’lord.’

‘Splendid.
It is so important,’ Lord Emsworth explained to Myra Schoonmaker, who was
regarding the noble animal with a dull eye, ‘that her appetite should remain
good. You have of course read your Wolff-Lehmann and will remember that,
according to the Wolff-Lehmann feeding standards, a pig, to enjoy health, must
consume daily nourishment amounting to fifty-seven thousand eight hundred
calories, these to consist of proteids four pounds five ounces, carbohydrates
twenty-five pounds.’