CHAPTER II
ENTER PSMITH
§ 1
A
At about the hour when Lord Emsworth’s train, whirling him and his son Freddie to London, had reached the half-way point in its journey, a very tall, very thin, very solemn young man, gleaming in a speckless top hat and a morning-coat of irreproachable fit, mounted the steps of Number Eighteen, Wallingford Street, West Kensington, and rang the front-door bell. This done, he removed the hat; and having touched his forehead lightly with a silk handkerchief, for the afternoon sun was warm, gazed about him with a grave distaste.
“A scaly neighbourhood!” he murmured.
The young man’s judgment was one at which few people with an eye for beauty would have cavilled. When the great revolution against London’s ugliness really starts and yelling hordes of artists and architects, maddened beyond endurance, finally take the law into their own hands and rage through the city burning and destroying, Wallingford Street, West Kensington, will surely not escape the torch. Long since it must have been marked down for destruction. For, though it possesses certain merits of a low practical kind, being inexpensive in the matter of rents and handy for the buses and the Underground, it is a peculiarly beastly little street. Situated in the middle of one of those districts where London breaks out into a sort of eczema of red brick, it consists of two parallel rows of semi-detached villas, all exactly alike, each guarded by a ragged evergreen hedge, each with coloured glass of an extremely regrettable nature let into the panels of the front door; and sensitive young impressionists from the artists’ colony up Holland Park way may sometimes be seen stumbling through it with hands over their eyes, muttering between clenched teeth “How long? How long?”
A small maid-of-all-work appeared in answer to the bell, and stood transfixed as the visitor, producing a monocle, placed it in his right eye and inspected her through it.
“A warm afternoon,” he said cordially.