(no subject)
Simon Templar rose from the seat where he had sat through the rather damp court proceedings (the judge having ordered the windows on that side opened despite all protests), tapped Roger Conway lightly on the shoulder, and issued forth into the street.
"I've never been fond of lawyers," he said musingly. Roger struggled with an umbrella and emitted a noise meant to indicate his lack of surprise at this admission. Simon took the umbrella himself and led the way to one of those multitudinous establishments known to their habitués as "the pub around the corner."
"That particular example," he continued as he led, "seems to me to be more than usually execrable. I've always sort of wondered how a fellow like that manages to get to sleep at night without his conscience strangling him with the bedsheets."
"Maybe he's had his conscience surgically removed," suggested Roger, holding the door of the pub open while Simon spun the umbrella dry.
"What you think is his hair beneath that barrister's wig is merely a patent-leather helmet to hide the scars," agreed the Saint cheerfully, finding them places at a high table and nodding to the barmaid.
For the duration of three pints apiece and a plate full of sandwiches, their conversation meandered over topics which had nothing to do with how they'd spent the morning, but Simon's eyes were thoughtful and his voice dreamingly soft, and Roger knew something interesting was on the docket for their afternoon.
-----
Meanwhile, in the supper-room of a nearby club, the patent-leather helmet was enduring similar accusations from a friendlier and more genteel quarter.
"Really, Psmith, maybe it's askin' too much," said Lord Peter, "but when y'know a chap's blacker'n a rotten log, couldn't y'step back a bit from the fire-breathin' rhetoric act?"
"Wimsey, I'm surprised you could suggest such a thing," said Psmith. His manner revealed no such surprise, however; in fact, after the brilliantly passionate plea he'd argued before the court, he now resembled nothing so much as a mannequin from an expensive haberdashery, and a rather bored mannequin at that. He absorbed a portion of a snifter of brandy before continuing. "My job is to defend the man. If I were to give any less than my best I would be doing him wrong, both legally and ethically."
"Ethically!" snorted Lord Peter, not entirely unkindly. "Well, don't go usin' your powers o' persuasion on me, or I'll end up payin' for your lunch."
Psmith smiled, faintly folding up the corners of his mouth and more sincerely crinkling the corners of his eyes. "And I had so hoped," he murmured into his brandy.
"After a perform'nce like today's y' can't expect me to believe y' live on char'ty," said Lord Peter, raising the eyebrow that was not required to hold in his monocle.
"Bumming meals," said Psmith delicately, "is excellent exercise for the mental and lingual faculties."
"If exercise's all you want, let's head upstairs. I'm sure somebody'll argue with you in the smokin' lounge."
-----
A few minutes past two o'clock, the infamous barrister strolled into his office, deposited his umbrella inside a rather horrible old elephant's foot which was quite out of keeping with the rest of the neat interior, and lazily stripped off his gloves. He gazed smilingly at the man - his own age, but seemingly younger, if only for his lack of Psmith's immense gravity - who sat behind the desk there in the main room. "Hullo, Comrade Jackson. You haven't had too rough a time beating off rabid reporters with your trusty old cricket-bat, I hope."
Mike, who looked harried enough for the supposition to be plausible, shook his head. "You've got visitors," he said in his most professional voice, and added in a rushed undertone, "They insisted on waiting in your private office, and when I asked them to take a seat here one of them actually nicked an armchair. I figured I ought to let you deal with them. I'm sorry, but -- " He shrugged. Mike Jackson's unique talents and abilities were not of the sort that particularly suited him for handling the sorts of people who take invitations to take a seat literally.
Psmith inclined his head, brushed a speck of imaginary dust from his trousers, and pushed into the second room.
Simon Templar (whom Psmith recognized from his photographs in the paper) was sitting behind his desk, with his feet on a stack of paperwork and one of Psmith's personal stash of cigars clenched between his teeth. If he noticed the opening of the door, he did not show it.
Roger Conway was in the armchair from the lobby, reading a back issue of a legal periodical which he found unbelievably boring, and smoking a cigarette to which he had an incontrovertible legal right as it was from his own packet of Players. He looked up at Psmith's entrance, then leaned back with a studied insouciance that was nearly as effective as the Saint's.
Psmith looked at them for a moment, outwardly unflappable, then sat in his own clients' chair. "May I help you?" he inquired politely.
"I just wanted to take a look at you," said Simon blithely. "I've always sort of wondered what a walking polyp looked like. Is your tongue really silver, or did you just get it electroplated? How do you keep it from tarnishing - do you brush with Brasso or something? I bet you're hard on forks."
Psmith weathered this spell of impertinent nonsense nearly imperturbably, the faint smile just barely touching his lips though not his eyes. He waited a moment, then asked sombrely: "Are you done?"
"Nope!" Simon chirped. Roger rolled his eyes in Psmith's peripheral vision. "You see, what makes you such an unsightly blot on the landscape isn't that awful beak you've got or even the way you drop all the oil in Texas on top of your scalp every morning. It's that you're a worse waste of space than the worst of the crooks you defend. You're not even in it for justice - you're in it for money or fame, and you don't care whether you're wrong or you're right. You don't care if a killer goes free or an arsonist goes unpunished just so long as the newspapers spell your name right and the jury think you're a genius. You're selfish and self-centered and you ought to be held personally responsible for every single crime committed by every single crook you've knowingly gotten off the hook on a technicality."
The Saint never moved from his relaxed sprawl, never raised his voice above a gentle, almost playful tone, never let his steely blue eyes leave Psmith's inscrutable brown ones. When he stopped speaking, the silence hung almost palpable in the air.
"Is that all you wanted?" asked Psmith finally.
"I was sort of hoping," Simon admitted delicately, sitting up, "you would have a change of heart or something. Prodigal son returns, repents the error of his ways -- "
" -- falls in tears at father's feet, goes out to make up for everything bad he's ever done, marries the poor-but-beautiful peasant girl he'd scorned in Act One?"
"Something like that," the Saint agreed, "only since the closest thing we've got to a beautiful peasant girl is Roger here and he refused to wear a dress, I was thinking we might specifically go with something along the lines of helping justice reach those whom you had helped evade it."
Psmith looked at him for a long, slow moment. Then the lazy smile crept up into his eyes. "That might," he conceded, "be just possible."
-----
"Really, I don't care what you say about me professionally," Psmith said as he walked them to the door an hour or so later, past the mystified Mike. "I've heard it all before, much less entertainingly. I shall have my stock Explanation of the Justification and Morality of the Public Defender printed up and offered in format suitable for framing at one and sixpence, halfpenny postage paid, gold leaf sixpence additionally."
"I'm sorry for the crack about your nose, though. It's a perfectly jolly-looking nose, really." Simon's smile was innocent, his eyes devilish. Roger glared at him.
Psmith rolled his eyes. "As you seem to have enjoyed that cigar so much," he said, holding the door open for their egress, "I would offer you the box, but upon closer inspection you seem to have more or less emptied it yourself."
Simon patted his pockets and had the grace to look sheepish for a fraction of a second, for having been caught. Then the smile was back in full force. "Thanks, honeybunch. Keep in touch! Toodles!"
Psmith locked the door and returned to his office, returning to the main room a moment later with the armchair. He collapsed into it with the air of a man who has wandered the desert for forty days and forty nights.
"What on earth was that about?" inquired Comrade Jackson.
"It's really best for both of us if you don't ask."