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Page 20
Worrying, indeed, seemed to be the twentieth-century specialty.
Lord Emsworth never worried. Nature had equipped him with a mind
so admirably constructed for withstanding the disagreeableness of
life that if an unpleasant thought entered it, it passed out
again a moment later. Except for a few of life's fundamental
facts, such as that his check book was in the right-hand top
drawer of his desk; that the Honorable Freddie Threepwood was a
young idiot who required perpetual restraint; and that when in
doubt about anything he had merely to apply to his secretary,
Rupert Baxter--except for these basic things, he never remembered
anything for more than a few minutes.
At Eton, in the sixties, they had called him Fathead.
His was a life that lacked, perhaps, the sublimer emotions which
raise man to the level of the gods; but undeniably it was an
extremely happy one. He never experienced the thrill of ambition
fulfilled; but, on the other hand, he never knew the agony of
ambition frustrated. His name, when he died, would not live
forever in England's annals; he was spared the pain of worrying
about this by the fact that he had no desire to live forever in
England's annals. He was possibly as nearly contented as a human
being could be in this century of alarms and excursions.
Indeed, as he bowled along in his cab and reflected that a really
charming girl, not in the chorus of any West End theater, a girl
with plenty of money and excellent breeding, had--in a moment,
doubtless, of mental aberration--become engaged to be married to
the Honorable Freddie, he told himself that life at last was
absolutely without a crumpled rose leaf.
The cab drew up before a house gay with flowered window boxes.
Lord Emsworth paid the driver and stood on the sidewalk looking
up at this cheerful house, trying to remember why on earth he had
told the man to drive there.
A few moments' steady thought gave him the answer to the riddle.
This was Mr. Peters' town house, and he had come to it by
invitation to look at Mr. Peters' collection of scarabs. To be
sure! He remembered now--his collection of scarabs. Or was it
Arabs?
Lord Emsworth smiled. Scarabs, of course. You couldn't collect
Arabs. He wondered idly, as he rang the bell, what scarabs might
be; but he was interested in a fluffy kind of way in all forms of
collecting, and he was very pleased to have the opportunity of
examining these objects; whatever they were. He rather thought
they were a kind of fish.
There are men in this world who cannot rest; who are so
constituted that they can only take their leisure in the shape of
a change of work. To this fairly numerous class belonged Mr. J.
Preston Peters, father of Freddie's Aline. And to this merit--or
defect--is to be attributed his almost maniacal devotion to that
rather unattractive species of curio, the Egyptian scarab.
Five years before, a nervous breakdown had sent Mr. Peters to a
New York specialist. The specialist had grown rich on similar
cases and his advice was always the same. He insisted on Mr.
Peters taking up a hobby.
"What sort of a hobby?" inquired Mr. Peters irritably. His
digestion had just begun to trouble him at the time, and his
temper now was not of the best.
"Now my hobby," said the specialist, "is the collecting of
scarabs. Why should you not collect scarabs?"
"Because," said Mr. Peters, "I shouldn't know one if you brought
it to me on a plate. What are scarabs?"
"Scarabs," said the specialist, warming to his subject, "the
Egyptian hieroglyphs."
"And what," inquired Mr. Peters, "are Egyptian hieroglyphs?"
The specialist began to wonder whether it would not have been
better to advise Mr. Peters to collect postage stamps.
"A scarab," he said--"derived from the Latin scarabeus--is
literally a beetle."
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