Piccadilly Jim P. G. Wodehouse (great book club books .TXT) 📖

the passage encouraged him to place his fingers on the handle, but a crashing chord from an unseen piano made him remove them swiftly. He roamed on, and a few minutes later the process of elimination had brought him to what was technically his own private library⁠—a large, soothing room full of old books, of which his father had been a great collector. Mr. Pett did not read old books himself, but he liked to be among them, and it is proof of his pessimism that he had not tried the library first. To his depressed mind it had seemed hardly possible that there could be nobody there.

He stood outside the door, listening tensely. He could hear nothing. He went in, and for an instant experienced that ecstatic thrill which only comes to elderly gentlemen of solitary habit who in a house full of their juniors find themselves alone at last. Then a voice spoke, shattering his dream of solitude.

“Hello, pop!”

Ogden Ford was sprawling in a deep chair in the shadows.

“Come in, pop, come in. Lots of room.”

Mr. Pett stood in the doorway, regarding his stepson with a sombre eye. He resented the boy’s tone of easy patronage, all the harder to endure with philosophic calm at the present moment from the fact that the latter was lounging in his favourite chair. Even from an aesthetic point of view the sight of the bulging child offended him. Ogden Ford was round and blobby and looked overfed. He had the plethoric habit of one to whom wholesome exercise is a stranger and the sallow complexion of the confirmed candy-fiend. Even now, a bare half hour after breakfast, his jaws were moving with a rhythmical, champing motion.

“What are you eating, boy?” demanded Mr. Pett, his disappointment turning to irritability.

“Candy.”

“I wish you would not eat candy all day.”

“Mother gave it to me,” said Ogden simply. As he had anticipated, the shot silenced the enemy’s battery. Mr. Pett grunted, but made no verbal comment. Ogden celebrated his victory by putting another piece of candy in his mouth.

“Got a grouch this morning, haven’t you, pop?”

“I will not be spoken to like that!”

“I thought you had,” said his stepson complacently. “I can always tell. I don’t see why you want to come picking on me, though. I’ve done nothing.”

Mr. Pett was sniffing suspiciously.

“You’ve been smoking.”

“Me!!”

“Smoking cigarettes.”

“No, sir!”

“There are two butts in the ashtray.”

“I didn’t put them there.”

“One of them is warm.”

“It’s a warm day.”

“You dropped it there when you heard me come in.”

“No, sir! I’ve only been here a few minutes. I guess one of the fellows was in here before me. They’re always swiping your coffin-nails. You ought to do something about it, pop. You ought to assert yourself.”

A sense of helplessness came upon Mr. Pett. For the thousandth time he felt himself baffled by this calm, goggle-eyed boy who treated him with such supercilious coolness.

“You ought to be out in the open air this lovely morning,” he said feebly.

“All right. Let’s go for a walk. I will if you will.”

“I⁠—I have other things to do,” said Mr. Pett, recoiling from the prospect.

“Well, this fresh-air stuff is overrated anyway. Where’s the sense of having a home if you don’t stop in it?”

“When I was your age, I would have been out on a morning like this⁠—er⁠—bowling my hoop.”

“And look at you now!”

“What do you mean?”

“Martyr to lumbago.”

“I am not a martyr to lumbago,” said Mr. Pett, who was touchy on the subject.

“Have it your own way. All I know is⁠ ⁠…”

“Never mind!”

“I’m only saying what mother⁠—”

“Be quiet!”

Ogden made further researches in the candy box.

“Have some, pop?”

“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.