Piccadilly Jim

Piccadilly Jim

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Piccadilly Jim, by P.G. Wodehouse
#1 in our series by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
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Title: Piccadilly Jim
Author: Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
Release Date: December, 1999 [EBook #2005] [This file was last

updated on April 1, 2002]
Edition: 11
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
PICCADILLY JIM ***

Etext scanned by Jim Tinsley



CHAPTER I
A RED-HAIRED GIRL
The residence of Mr. Peter Pett, the well-known financier, on Riverside
Drive is one of the leading eyesores of that breezy and expensive
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. The
place resembles in almost equal proportions a cathedral, a suburban
villa, a hotel and a Chinese pagoda. Many of its windows 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 impossible 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.
Through the rich interior of this mansion Mr. Pett, its nominal
proprietor, was wandering like a lost spirit. The hour was about ten of a

fine Sunday morning, but the Sabbath calm which was upon the house
had not communicated itself to him. There 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 afflicted by a sense of the pathos of his position. It was not as if
he demanded much from life. He asked but little here below. 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 find one. Intruders
lurked behind every door. The place was congested.
This sort of thing had been growing worse and worse ever since his
marriage two years previously. There 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 fiction--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,
finding, like the dove in Genesis, no rest. It was at such times that he
was almost inclined to envy his wife's first 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 frequently
does for the man who waits fifty 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 anything approaching
discipline had given him a precocity on which the earnest efforts of a
series of private tutors had expended themselves in vain. They came,

full of optimism and self-confidence, to retire after a brief interval,
shattered by the boy's stodgy resistance to education