P G Wodehouse, page 1
The Manor Wodehouse Col ection
CLICK ON TITLE TO BUY FROM AMAZON.COM
Go to www.ManorWodehouse.com for more options and to download e-books
The Little Warrior
The Swoop
William Tell Told Again
Mike: A Public School Story
Jill the Reckless
The Politeness of Princes & Other School Stories
The Man Upstairs & Other Stories
The Coming of Bill
A Man of Means: A Series of Six Stories
The Gem Collector
The Adventures of Sally
The Clicking of Cuthbert
A Damsel in Distress
Jeeves in the Springtime & Other Stories
The Pothunters
My Man Jeeves
The Girl on the Boat
Mike & Psmith
The White Feather
The Man With Two Left Feet & Other Stories
Piccadilly Jim
Psmith in the City
Right Ho, Jeeves
Uneasy Money
A Prefect’s Uncle
Psmith Journalist
The Prince and Betty
Something New
The Gold Bat & Other Stories
Head of Kay’s
The Intrusion of Jimmy
The Little Nugget
Love Among the Chickens
Tales of St. Austin’s
Indiscretions of Archie
Jeeves, Emsworth and Others
Piccadilly Jim
P. G. Wodehouse
The Manor Wodehouse Collection
Tark Classic Fiction
an imprint of
MANOR
Rockville, Maryland
2008
Piccadilly Jim by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, in its current format, copyright © Arc Manor 2008.
Th
is book, in whole or in part, may not be copied or reproduced in its current format by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without the permission of the publisher.
Th
e original text has been reformatted for clarity and to fi t this edition.
Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Manor Classics, TARK Classic Fiction, Th
e and the Arc
Manor logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland.
All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.
Th
is book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation. Th
e publisher does not take responsibility for any typesetting, format-
ting, translation or other errors which may have occurred during the production of this book.
ISBN: 978-1-60450-069-1
Please Visit
www.ManorWodehouse.com
for a complete list of titles available in our
Manor Wodehouse Collection
Published by TARK Classic Fiction
An Imprint of Arc Manor
P. O. Box 10339
Rockville, MD 20849-0339
www.ArcManor.com
Printed in the United States of America/United Kingdom
Contents
A Red-Haired Girl
The Exiled Fan
Family Jars
Jimmy’s Disturbing News
The Morning After
Jimmy Abandons Piccadilly
On the Boat-Deck
Painful Scene in a Cafe
Mrs. Pett is Shocked
Instruction in Deportment
Jimmy Decides to be Himself
Jimmy Catches the Boss’s Eye
Slight Complications
Lord Wisbeach
A Little Business Chat
Mrs. Pett Takes Precautions
Miss Trimble, Detective
The Voice Prom the Past
Between Father and Son
Celestine Imparts Information
Chicago Ed.
In The Library
Stirring Times for the Petts
Sensational Turning of a Worm
Nearly Everybody Happy
Everybody Happy
Chapter
A Red-Haired Girl
The residence of Mr. Peter Pett, the well-known fi nancier, on Riv-
erside Drive is one of the leading eyesores of that breezy and expen-
sive boulevard. As you pass by in your limousine, or while enjoying
ten cents worth of fresh air on top of a green omnibus, it jumps
out and bites at you. Architects, confronted with it, reel and throw
up their hands defensively, and even the lay observer has a sense of
shock. Th
e place resembles in almost equal proportions a cathedral,
a suburban villa, a hotel and a Chinese pagoda. Many of its win-
dows are of stained glass, and above the porch stand two terra-cotta
lions, considerably more repulsive even than the complacent animals
which guard New York’s Public Library. It is a house which is im-
possible to overlook: and it was probably for this reason that Mrs.
Pett insisted on her husband buying it, for she was a woman who
liked to be noticed.
Th
rough the rich interior of this mansion Mr. Pett, its nominal
proprietor, was wandering like a lost spirit. Th
e hour was about ten
of a fi ne Sunday morning, but the Sabbath calm which was upon
the house had not communicated itself to him. Th
ere was a look of
exasperation on his usually patient face, and a muttered oath, picked
up no doubt on the godless Stock Exchange, escaped his lips.
“Darn it!”
He was affl
icted by a sense of the pathos of his position. It was
not as if he demanded much from life. He asked but little here be-
low. At that moment all that he wanted was a quiet spot where he
might read his Sunday paper in solitary peace, and he could not fi nd
one. Intruders lurked behind every door. Th
e place was congested.
5
P. G. WODEHOUSE
Th
is sort of thing had been growing worse and worse ever since
his marriage two years previously. Th
ere was a strong literary virus
in Mrs. Pett’s system. She not only wrote voluminously herself – the
name Nesta Ford Pett is familiar to all lovers of sensational fi ction –
but aimed at maintaining a salon. Starting, in pursuance of this aim,
with a single specimen, – her nephew, Willie Partridge, who was
working on a new explosive which would eventually revolutionise
war – she had gradually added to her collections, until now she gave
shelter beneath her terra-cotta roof to no fewer than six young and
unrecognised geniuses. Six brilliant youths, mostly novelists who
had not yet started and poets who were about to begin, cluttered up
Mr. Pett’s rooms on this fair June morning, while he, clutching his
Sunday paper, wandered about, fi nding, like the dove in Genesis,
no rest. It was at such times that he was almost inclined to envy his
wife’s fi rst husband, a business friend of his named Elmer Ford, who
had perished suddenly of an apoplectic seizure: and the pity which
he generally felt for the deceased tended to shift its focus.
Marriage had certainly complicated life for Mr. Pett, as it fre-
quently does for the man who waits fi fty years before trying it. In
addition to the geniuses, Mrs. Pett had brought with her to her new
home her only son, Ogden, a fourteen-year-old boy of a singularly
unloveable type. Years of grown-up society and the absence of any-
thing approaching discipline had given him a precocity on which
the earnest eff orts of a series of private tutors had expended them-
selves in vain. Th
ey came, full of optimism and self-confi dence, to
retire after a brief interval, shattered by the boy’s stodgy resistance to
education in any form or shape. To Mr. Pett, never at his ease with
boys, Ogden Ford was a constant irritant. He disliked his stepson’s
personality, and he more than suspected him of stealing his ciga-
rettes. It was an additional annoyance that he was fully aware of the
impossibility of ever catching him at it.
Mr. Pett resumed his journey. He had interrupted it for a mo-
ment to listen at the door of the morning-room, but, a remark in a
high tenor voice about the essential Christianity of the poet Shelley
fi ltering through the oak, he had moved on.
Silence from behind another door farther down the passage en-
couraged him to place his fi ngers 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
6
PICADILLY JIM
him to what was technically his own private library – a large, sooth-
ing 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 fi rst. 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 fi nd themselves alone at last. Th
en 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 step-son 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 off ended
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 confi rmed candy-fi end. Even now,
a bare half hour after breakfast, his jaws were moving with a rhyth-
mical, champing motion.
“What are you eating, boy?” demanded Mr. Pett, his disap-
pointment turning to irritability.
“Candy.”
“I wish you would not eat candy all day.”
“Mother gave it to me,” said Ogden simply. As he had antici-
pated, 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 step-son complacently. “I can al-
ways tell. I don’t see why you want to come picking on me, though.
I’ve done nothing.”
Mr. Pett was sniffi
ng suspiciously.
“You’ve been smoking.”
7
P. G. WODEHOUSE
“Me!!”
“Smoking cigarettes.”
“No, sir!”
“Th
ere are two butts in the ash-tray.”
“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. Th
ey’re always swiping your coffi
n-
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 baffl
ed by this calm, goggle-eyed boy who treat-
ed 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?”
8
PICADILLY JIM
“Getting on, you know. Not so young as you used to be. Come
in, pop, if you’re coming in. Th
ere’s a draft from that door.”
Mr. Pett retired, fermenting. He wondered how another man
would have handled this situation. Th
e ridiculous inconsistency of
the human character infuriated him. Why should he be a totally
diff erent 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 fi nanciers – and yet be un-
able 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 fi nd a place where he could read his
Sunday paper.
He stood for a while in thought. Th
en his brow cleared, and he
began to mount the stairs. Reaching the top fl oor, 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 offi
ce.
“Come in,” called a girl’s voice.
Th
e 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. Th
e walls were hung with
prints, judiciously chosen and arranged. Th
rough a window to the
left, healthfully open at the bottom, the sun streamed in, bring-
ing 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 ap-
pearance, her mouth was really the most individual thing about her.
It was a mouth that suggested adventurous possibilities. In repose,
it had a look of having just fi nished saying something humorous, a
9
P. G. WODEHOUSE
kind of demure appreciation of itself. When it smiled, a row of white
teeth fl ashed out: or, if the lips did not part, a dimple appeared on
the right cheek, giving the whole face an air of mischievous genial-
ity. It was an enterprising, swashbuckling sort of mouth, the mouth
of one who would lead forlorn hopes with a jest or plot whimsically
lawless conspiracies against convention. In its corners and in the
fi rm line of the chin beneath it there lurked, too, more than a hint
of imperiousness. A physiognomist would have gathered, correctly,
that Ann Chester liked having her own way and was accustomed to
get it.
“Hello, uncle Peter,” she said. “What’s the trouble?”
“Am I interrupting you, Ann?”
“Not a bit. I’m only copying out a story for aunt Nesta. I prom-
ised her I would. Would you like to hear some of it?”
