Free Service with a Smile by P.G. Wodehouse

yes. I ran into Stinker at the club the other day, and we got talking and I
said I was coming to Blandings, and the subject of the pig came up. It appears
that he keeps pigs at his place in Buckinghamshire, just the sort of potty
thing he would do, and he has coveted this ghastly animal of Emsworth’s ever
since he saw it. He specifically told me that he would give me two thousand
pounds to add it to his piggery.’
    ‘How
extraordinary!’
    ‘Opportunity
of a lifetime.’
    ‘Clarence
must be made to see reason.’
    ‘Who’s
going to make him? I can’t. You heard him just now. And you won’t pinch the
creature. The thing’s an impasse. No co-operation, that’s what’s wrong with
this damned place. Very doubtful if I’ll ever come here again. You’ll miss me,
but that can’t be helped. Only yourself to blame. I’m going for a walk,’ said
the Duke, and proceeded to do so.
     
     
    3
     
    Lord Emsworth was a man
with little of the aggressor in his spiritual make-up. He believed in living
and letting live. Except for his sister Constance, his secretary Lavender
Briggs, the Duke of Dunstable and his younger son Frederick, now fortunately
residing in America, few things were able to ruffle him. Placid is the word
that springs to the lips.
    But the
Church Lads had pierced his armour, and he found resentment growing within him
like some shrub that has been treated with a patent fertilizer. He brooded
bleakly on the injuries he had suffered at the hands of these juvenile delinquents.
    The
top-hat incident he could have overlooked, for he knew that when small boys are
confronted with a man wearing that type of headgear and there is a crusty roll
within reach, they are almost bound to lose their calm judgment. The happy
laughter which had greeted him as he emerged from the lake had gashed him like
a knife, but with a powerful effort he might have excused it. But in upsetting
Empress of Blandings’ delicately attuned digestive system by dangling potatoes
before her eyes and jerking them away as she snapped at them they had gone too
far. As Hamlet would have put it, their offence was rank and smelled to heaven.
And if heaven would not mete out retribution to them — and there was not a sign
so far of any activity in the front office — somebody else would have to attend
to it. And that somebody, he was convinced, was Ickenham. He had left Ickenham
pondering on the situation, and who knew that by this time his fertile mind
might not have hit on a suitable method of vengeance.
    On
leaving Lady Constance’s boudoir, accordingly, he made his way to the hammock
and bleated his story into the other’s ear. Nor was he disappointed in its
reception. Where a man of coarser fibre might have laughed, Lord Ickenham was
gravity itself. By not so much as a twitch of the lip did he suggest that he
found anything amusing in his host’s narrative.
    ‘A
potato?’ he said, knitting his brow.
    ‘A
large potato.’
    ‘On a
string?’
    ‘Yes,
on a string.’
    ‘And
the boy jerked it away?’
    ‘Repeatedly.
It must have distressed the Empress greatly. She is passionately fond of
potatoes.’
    ‘And
you wish to retaliate? You think that something in the nature of a counter move
is required?’
    ‘Eh?
Yes, certainly:’
    ‘Then
how very fortunate,’ said Lord Ickenham heartily, ‘that I can put you in the
way of making it. I throw it out merely as a suggestion, you understand, but I
know what I would do in your place.’
    ‘What
is that?’
    ‘I’d
bide my time and sneak down to the lake in the small hours of the morning and
cut the ropes of their tent, as one used to do at the Public Schools Camp at
Aldershot in the brave days when I was somewhat younger. That, to my mind,
would be the retort courteous.’
    ‘God
bless my soul!’ said Lord Emsworth.
    He
spoke with sudden animation. Forty-six years had rolled away from him, the
forty-six years which had passed since, a junior member of the Eton contingent
at the Aldershot