A Gentleman of Leisure

by P. G. Wodehouse

From that moment Jimmy’s troubles began. Charteris was a young man in whom a passion for the stage was ineradicably implanted. It mattered nothing to him during these days that the sun shone, that it was pleasant on the lake, and that Jimmy would have given five pounds a minute to be allowed to get Molly to himself for half an hour every afternoon. All he knew or cared about was that the local nobility and gentry were due to arrive at the castle a week from that day, and that very few of the company even knew their lines. Having hustled Jimmy into the part of Captain Browne, he gave his energy free play. He conducted rehearsals with a vigour which occasionally almost welded the rabble he was coaching into something approaching coherency. He painted scenery and left it about—wet—and people sat on it; he nailed up horseshoes for luck, and they fell on people. But nothing daunted him; he never rested.

“Mr. Charteris,” said Lady Julia rather frigidly, after one energetic rehearsal, “is indefatigable. He whirled me about!”

It was, perhaps, his greatest triumph, properly considered, that he had induced Lady Julia to take a part in his piece; but to the born organiser of amateur theatricals no miracle of this kind is impossible, and Charteris was one of the most inveterate organisers in the country. There had been some talk—late at night in the billiard-room—of his being about to write in a comic footman role for Sir Thomas, but it had fallen through; not, it was felt, because Charteris could not have hypnotised him into undertaking it, but rather because Sir Thomas was histrionically unfit.

Mainly as a result of the producer’s energy Jimmy found himself one of a crowd, and disliked the sensation. He had not experienced much difficulty in mastering the scenes in which he appeared; but unfortunately those who appeared with him had. It occurred to Jimmy daily, after he had finished “running through the lines” with a series of agitated amateurs, male and female, that for all practical purposes he might just as well have gone to Japan. In this confused welter of rehearsers his opportunities of talking with Molly were infinitesimal. And worse, she did not appear to mind. She was cheerful, and apparently quite content to be engulfed in a crowd. Probably, he thought with some melancholy, if she met his eye, and noted in it a distracted gleam, she put it down to the same cause which made other eyes in the company gleam distractedly during that week.

Jimmy began to take a thoroughly jaundiced view of amateur theatricals, and of these amateur theatricals in particular. He felt that in the electric flame department of the infernal regions there should be a special gridiron, reserved exclusively for the man who invented these performances, so diametrically opposed to the true spirit of civilisation. At the close of each day he cursed Charteris with unfailing regularity.

There was another thing that disturbed him. That he should be unable to talk with Molly was an evil, but a negative evil. It was supplemented by one that was positive. Even in the midst of the chaos of rehearsals he could not help noticing that Molly and Lord Dreever were very much together. Also—and this was even more sinister—he observed that both Sir Thomas Blunt and Mr. McEachern were making determined efforts to foster this state of affairs.

Of this he had sufficient proof one evening when, after scheming and plotting in a way that had made the great efforts of Machiavelli and Richelieu seem like the work of raw novices, he had cut Molly out from the throng and carried her off for the alleged purpose of helping him feed the chickens. There were, as he had suspected, chickens attached to the castle. They lived in a little world of noise and smells at the back of the stables. Bearing an iron pot full of a poisonous-looking mash, and accompanied by Molly, he had felt, for perhaps a minute and a half, like a successful general. It is difficult to be romantic when you are laden with chicken-feed in an unwieldy iron pot, but he had resolved that that portion of the proceedings should be brief—the birds should dine that evening on the quick-lunch principle—then to the more fitting surroundings of the rose-garden. There was plenty of time before the hour of the sounding of the dressing-gong. Perhaps even a row on the lake——

“What-ho!” said a voice.

Behind them, with a propitiatory smile on his face, stood his lordship of Dreever.

“My uncle told me I should find you out here. What have you got there, Pitt? Is this what you feed them on? I say, you know, queer coves, hens! I wouldn’t touch the stuff for a fortune. What? Looks to me poisonous.”