Something New Part 7

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."

"I will not collect beetles!" said Mr. Peters definitely. "They give me the w.i.l.l.i.e.s."

"Scarabs are Egyptian symbols in the form of beetles," the specialist hurried on. "The most common form of scarab is in the shape of a ring. Scarabs were used for seals. They were also employed as beads or ornaments. Some scarabaei bear inscriptions having reference to places; as, for instance: 'Memphis is mighty forever.'"

Mr. Peters' scorn changed to active interest.

"Have you got one like that?"

"Like what?"

"A scarab boosting Memphis. It's my home town."

"I think it possible that some other Memphis was alluded to."

"There isn't any other except the one in Tennessee," said Mr.

Peters patriotically.

The specialist owed the fact that he was a nerve doctor instead of a nerve patient to his habit of never arguing with his visitors.

"Perhaps," he said, "you would care to glance at my collection.

It is in the next room."

That was the beginning of Mr. Peters' devotion to scarabs. At first he did his collecting without any love of it, partly because he had to collect something or suffer, but princ.i.p.ally because of a remark the specialist made as he was leaving the room.

"How long would it take me to get together that number of the things?" Mr. Peters inquired, when, having looked his fill on the dullest a.s.sortment of objects he remembered ever to have seen, he was preparing to take his leave.

The specialist was proud of his collection. "How long? To make a collection as large as mine? Years, Mr. Peters. Oh, many, many years."

"I'll bet you a hundred dollars I'll do it in six months!"

From that moment Mr. Peters brought to the collecting of scarabs the same furious energy which had given him so many dollars and so much indigestion. He went after scarabs like a dog after rats.

He scooped in scarabs from the four corners of the earth, until at the end of a year he found himself possessed of what, purely as regarded quant.i.ty, was a record collection.

This marked the end of the first phase of--so to speak--the scarabaean side of his life. Collecting had become a habit with him, but he was not yet a real enthusiast. It occurred to him that the time had arrived for a certain amount of pruning and elimination. He called in an expert and bade him go through the collection and weed out what he felicitously termed the "dead ones." The expert did his job thoroughly. When he had finished, the collection was reduced to a mere dozen specimens.

"The rest," he explained, "are practically valueless. If you are thinking of making a collection that will have any value in the eyes of archeologists I should advise you to throw them away. The remaining twelve are good."

"How do you mean--good? Why is one of these things valuable and another so much punk? They all look alike to me."

And then the expert talked to Mr. Peters for nearly two hours about the New Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, Osiris, Ammon, Mut, Bubastis, dynasties, Cheops, the Hyksos kings, cylinders, bezels, Amenophis III, Queen Taia, the Princess Gilukhipa of Mitanni, the lake of Zarukhe, Naucratis, and the Book of the Dead. He did it with a relish. He liked to do it.

When he had finished, Mr. Peters thanked him and went to the bathroom, where he bathed his temples with eau de Cologne.

That talk changed J. Preston Peters from a supercilious scooper-up of random scarabs to what might be called a genuine scarab fan. It does not matter what a man collects; if Nature has given him the collector's mind he will become a fanatic on the subject of whatever collection he sets out to make. Mr. Peters had collected dollars; he began to collect scarabs with precisely the same enthusiasm. He would have become just as enthusiastic about b.u.t.terflies or old china if he had turned his thoughts to them; but it chanced that what he had taken up was the collecting of the scarab, and it gripped him more and more as the years went on.

Gradually he came to love his scarabs with that love, surpa.s.sing the love of women, which only collectors know. He became an expert on those curious relics of a dead civilization. For a time they ran neck and neck in his thoughts with business. When he retired from business he was free to make them the master pa.s.sion of his life. He treasured each individual scarab in his collection as a miser treasures gold.

Collecting, as Mr. Peters did it, resembles the drink habit. It begins as an amus.e.m.e.nt and ends as an obsession. He was gloating over his treasures when the maid announced Lord Emsworth.

A curious species of mutual toleration--it could hardly be dignified by the t.i.tle of friends.h.i.+p--had sprung up between these two men, so opposite in practically every respect. Each regarded the other with that feeling of perpetual amazement with which we encounter those whose whole viewpoint and mode of life is foreign to our own.

The American's force and nervous energy fascinated Lord Emsworth.

As for Mr. Peters, nothing like the earl had ever happened to him before in a long and varied life. Each, in fact, was to the other a perpetual freak show, with no charge for admission. And if anything had been needed to cement the alliance it would have been supplied by the fact that they were both collectors.

They differed in collecting as they did in everything else. Mr.

Peters' collecting, as has been shown, was keen, furious, concentrated; Lord Emsworth's had the amiable dodderingness that marked every branch of his life. In the museum at Blandings Castle you could find every manner of valuable and valueless curio. There was no central motive; the place was simply an amateur junk shop. Side by side with a Gutenberg Bible for which rival collectors would have bidden without a limit, you would come on a bullet from the field of Waterloo, one of a consignment of ten thousand s.h.i.+pped there for the use of tourists by a Birmingham firm. Each was equally attractive to its owner.

"My dear Mr. Peters," said Lord Emsworth sunnily, advancing into the room, "I trust I am not unpunctual. I have been lunching at my club."

"I'd have asked you to lunch here," said Mr. Peters, "but you know how it is with me ... I've promised the doctor I'll give those nuts and gra.s.ses of his a fair trial, and I can do it pretty well when I'm alone with Aline; but to have to sit by and see somebody else eating real food would be trying me too high."

Lord Emsworth murmured sympathetically. The other's digestive tribulations touched a ready chord. An excellent trencherman himself, he understood what Mr. Peters must suffer.

"Too bad!" he said.

Mr. Peters turned the conversation into other channels.

"These are my scarabs," he said.

Lord Emsworth adjusted his gla.s.ses, and the mild smile disappeared from his face, to be succeeded by a set look. A stage director of a moving-picture firm would have recognized the look.

Lord Emsworth was registering interest--interest which he perceived from the first instant would have to be completely simulated; for instinct told him, as Mr. Peters began to talk, that he was about to be bored as he had seldom been bored in his life.

Mr. Peters, in his character of showman, threw himself into his work with even more than his customary energy. His flow of speech never faltered. He spoke of the New Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, Osiris and Ammon; waxed eloquent concerning Mut, Bubastis, Cheops, the Hyksos kings, cylinders, bezels and Amenophis III; and became at times almost lyrical when touching on Queen Taia, the Princess Gilukhipa of Mitanni, the lake of Zarukhe, Naucratis and the Book of the Dead. Time slid by.

"Take a look at this, Lord Emsworth."

As one who, brooding on love or running over business projects in his mind, walks briskly into a lamppost and comes back to the realities of life with a sense of jarring shock, Lord Emsworth started, blinked and returned to consciousness. Far away his mind had been--seventy miles away--in the pleasant hothouses and shady garden walks of Blandings Castle. He came back to London to find that his host, with a mingled air of pride and reverence, was extending toward him a small, dingy-looking something.

He took it and looked at it. That, apparently, was what he was meant to do. So far, all was well.

"Ah!" he said--that blessed word; covering everything! He repeated it, pleased at his ready resource.

"A Cheops of the Fourth Dynasty," said Mr. Peters fervently.