If [Freddie] was allowed to live at London, he piled up debts and got into mischief; and when you jerked him back into the purer surroundings of Blandings Castle, he just mooned about the place, moping broodily. Hamlet’s society at Elsinore must have had much the same effect on his stepfather as did that of Freddie Threepwood at Blandings on Lord Emsworth.
And, though normally a fair-minded and reasonable man, well aware that modern earls must think twice before pulling the feudal stuff on their employés, he took on the forthright truculence of a large landowner of the early Normal period ticking off a serf.
A curious expression came into Angus McAllister’s face—always excepting the occupied territories. It was the look of a man who has not forgotten Bannockburn, a man conscious of belonging to the country of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce.
He had gone with King George to show his Gracious Majesty the pumpkin promising the treat of a lifetime; and, when they arrived, there in the corner of the frame was a shrivelled thing the size of a pea. He woke, sweating, with the Sovereign’s disappointed screams ringing in his ears[.]
He hated London. He loathed its crowds, its smells, its noises; its omnibuses, its taxis, and its hard pavements. And, in addition to all its other defects, the miserable town did not seem to be able to produce a single decent head gardener. He went from agency to agency, interviewing candidates and not one of them came within a mile of meeting his requirements. He disliked their faces, he distrusted their references.
In a crass and materialistic world there must inevitably be a scattered few in whom pumpkins touch no chord. The Hon. Frederick Threepwood was one of these. He was accustomed to speak in mockery of all pumpkins[.]
There is that about a well-set-out bed of flowers which acts on men who love their gardens like a drug, and he was in a sort of trance. Already he had completely forgotten where he was, and seemed to himself to be back in his paradise of Blandings.
Without a thought of annoying or doing harm to anybody, he appeared to have unchained the fearful passions of a French Revolution; and there came over a sense of how unjust it was that this sort of thing should be happening to him, of all people – a man already staggering beneath the troubles of a Job.
There is every reason to suppose that Mr Donaldson had subscribed for years to those personality courses advertised in the magazines which guarantee to impart to the pupil who takes ten correspondence lessons the ability to look the boss in the eye and make him wilt. Mr Donaldson looked Lord Emsworth in the eye, and Lord Emsworth wilted.
“Ten million? Ten million? Did you say you had ten million dollars?”
“Between nine and ten, I suppose. Not more. You must remember,” said Mr Donaldson, with a touch of apology, “that conditions have changed very much in America of late. […] But things are coming back. Yes, sir, they’re coming right back. I am a firm believer in President Roosevelt and the New Deal.”
In an age of rush and hurry like that of today, an age in which there are innumerable calls on the time of everyone, it is possible that here and there throughout the ranks of those who have read this chronicle there may be one or two who for various reasons found themselves unable to attend the last Agricultural Show at Shrewsbury.
