Indiscretions of Archie, P. G. Wodehouse [read a book txt] 📗
- Author: P. G. Wodehouse
Book online «Indiscretions of Archie, P. G. Wodehouse [read a book txt] 📗». Author P. G. Wodehouse
“But, dash it—I mean—what I mean to say—I’m married!”
“Yes?” said Miss Silverton, with the politeness of faint interest. “I’ve been married myself. I wouldn’t say it’s altogether a bad thing, mind you, for those that like it, but a little of it goes a long way. My first husband,” she proceeded, reminiscently, “was a travelling man. I gave him a two-weeks’ try-out, and then I told him to go on travelling. My second husband—now, he wasn’t a gentleman in any sense of the word. I remember once—”
“You don’t grasp the point. The jolly old point! You fail to grasp it. If this bally thing comes out, my wife will be most frightfully sick!”
Miss Silverton regarded him with pained surprise.
“Do you mean to say you would let a little thing like that stand in the way of my getting on the front page of all the papers—with photographs? Where’s your chivalry?”
“Never mind my dashed chivalry!”
“Besides, what does it matter if she does get a little sore? She’ll soon get over it. You can put that right. Buy her a box of candy. Not that I’m strong for candy myself. What I always say is, it may taste good, but look what it does to your hips! I give you my honest word that, when I gave up eating candy, I lost eleven ounces the first week. My second husband—no, I’m a liar, it was my third—my third husband said—Say, what’s the big idea? Where are you going?”
“Out!” said Archie, firmly. “Bally out!”
A dangerous light flickered in Miss Silverton’s eyes.
“That’ll be all of that!” she said, raising the pistol. “You stay right where you are, or I’ll fire!”
“Right-o!”
“I mean it!”
“My dear old soul,” said Archie, “in the recent unpleasantness in France I had chappies popping off things like that at me all day and every day for close on five years, and here I am, what! I mean to say, if I’ve got to choose between staying here and being pinched in your room by the local constabulary and having the dashed thing get into the papers and all sorts of trouble happening, and my wife getting the wind up and—I say, if I’ve got to choose—”
“Suck a lozenge and start again!” said Miss Silverton.
“Well, what I mean to say is, I’d much rather take a chance of getting a bullet in the old bean than that. So loose it off and the best o’ luck!”
Miss Silverton lowered the pistol, sank into a chair, and burst into tears.
“I think you’re the meanest man I ever met!” she sobbed. “You know perfectly well the bang would send me into a fit!”
“In that case,” said Archie, relieved, “cheerio, good luck, pip-pip, toodle-oo, and good-bye-ee! I’ll be shifting!”
“Yes, you will!” cried Miss Silverton, energetically, recovering with amazing swiftness from her collapse. “Yes, you will, I by no means suppose! You think, just because I’m no champion with a pistol, I’m helpless. You wait! Percy!”
“My name is not Percy.”
“I never said it was. Percy! Percy, come to muzzer!”
There was a creaking rustle from behind the arm-chair. A heavy body flopped on the carpet. Out into the room, heaving himself along as though sleep had stiffened his joints, and breathing stertorously through his tilted nose, moved the fine bulldog. Seen in the open, he looked even more formidable than he had done in his basket.
“Guard him, Percy! Good dog, guard him! Oh, heavens! What’s the matter with him?”
And with these words the emotional woman, uttering a wail of anguish, flung herself on the floor beside the animal.
Percy was, indeed, in manifestly bad shape. He seemed quite unable to drag his limbs across the room. There was a curious arch in his back, and, as his mistress touched him, he cried out plaintively,
“Percy! Oh, what is the matter with him? His nose is burning!”
Now was the time, with both sections of the enemy’s forces occupied, for Archie to have departed softly from the room. But never, since the day when at the age of eleven he had carried a large, damp, and muddy terrier with a sore foot three miles and deposited him on the best sofa in his mother’s drawing-room, had he been able to ignore the spectacle of a dog in trouble.
“He does look bad, what!”
“He’s dying! Oh, he’s dying! Is it distemper? He’s never had distemper.”
Archie regarded the sufferer with the grave eye of the expert. He shook his head.
“It’s not that,” he said. “Dogs with distemper make a sort of snifting noise.”
“But he is making a snifting noise!”
“No, he’s making a snuffling noise. Great difference between snuffling and snifting. Not the same thing at all. I mean to say, when they snift they snift, and when they snuffle they—as it were—snuffle. That’s how you can tell. If you ask me”—he passed his hand over the dog’s back. Percy uttered another cry. “I know what’s the matter with him.”
“A brute of a man kicked him at rehearsal. Do you think he’s injured internally?”
“It’s rheumatism,” said Archie. “Jolly old rheumatism. That’s all that’s the trouble.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely!”
“But what can I do?”
“Give him a good hot bath, and mind and dry him well. He’ll have a good sleep then, and won’t have any pain. Then, first thing to-morrow, you want to give him salicylate of soda.”
“I’ll never remember that.”—“I’ll write it down for you. You ought to give him from ten to twenty grains three times a day in an ounce of water. And rub him with any good embrocation.”
“And he won’t die?”
“Die! He’ll live to be as old as you are!-I mean to say—”
“I could kiss you!” said Miss Silverton, emotionally.
Archie backed hastily.
“No, no, absolutely not! Nothing like that required, really!”
“You’re a darling!”
“Yes. I mean no. No, no, really!”
“I don’t know what to say. What can I say?”
“Good night,” said Archie.
“I wish there was something I could do! If you hadn’t been here, I should have gone off my head!”
A great idea flashed across Archie’s brain.
“Do you really want to do something?”
“Anything!”
“Then I do wish, like a dear sweet soul, you would pop straight back to New York to-morrow and go on with those rehearsals.”
Miss Silverton shook her head.
“I can’t do that!”
“Oh, right-o! But it isn’t much to ask, what!”
“Not much to ask! I’ll never forgive that man for kicking Percy!”
“Now listen, dear old soul. You’ve got the story all wrong. As a matter of fact, jolly old Benham told me himself that he has the greatest esteem and respect for Percy, and wouldn’t have kicked him for the world. And, you know it was more a sort of push than a kick. You might almost call it a light shove. The fact is, it was beastly dark in the theatre, and he was legging it sideways for some reason or other, no doubt with the best motives, and unfortunately he happened to stub his toe on the poor old bean.”
“Then why didn’t he say so?”
“As far as I could make out, you didn’t give him a chance.”
Miss Silverton wavered.
“I always hate going back after I’ve walked out on a show,” she said. “It seems so weak!”
“Not a bit of it! They’ll give three hearty cheers and think you a topper. Besides, you’ve got to go to New York in any case. To take Percy to a vet., you know, what!”
“Of course. How right you always are!” Miss Silverton hesitated again. “Would you really be glad if I went back to the show?”
“I’d go singing about the hotel! Great pal of mine, Benham. A thoroughly cheery old bean, and very cut up about the whole affair. Besides, think of all the coves thrown out of work—the thingummabobs and the poor what-d’you-call-’ems!”
“Very well.”
“You’ll do it?”
“Yes.”
“I say, you really are one of the best! Absolutely like mother made! That’s fine! Well, I think I’ll be saying good night.”
“Good night. And thank you so much!”
“Oh, no, rather not!”
Archie moved to the door.
“Oh, by the way.”
“Yes?”
“If I were you, I think I should catch the very first train you can get to New York. You see—er—you ought to take Percy to the vet. as soon as ever you can.”
“You really do think of everything,” said Miss Silverton.
“Yes,” said Archie, meditatively.
THE SAD CASE OF LOONEY BIDDLE
Archie was a simple soul, and, as is the case with most simple souls, gratitude came easily to him. He appreciated kind treatment. And when, on the following day, Lucille returned to the Hermitage, all smiles and affection, and made no further reference to Beauty’s Eyes and the flies that got into them, he was conscious of a keen desire to show some solid recognition of this magnanimity. Few wives, he was aware, could have had the nobility and what not to refrain from occasionally turning the conversation in the direction of the above-mentioned topics. It had not needed this behaviour on her part to convince him that Lucille was a topper and a corker and one of the very best, for he had been cognisant of these facts since the first moment he had met her: but what he did feel was that she deserved to be rewarded in no uncertain manner. And it seemed a happy coincidence to him that her birthday should be coming along in the next week or so. Surely, felt Archie, he could whack up some sort of a not unjuicy gift for that occasion—something pretty ripe that would make a substantial hit with the dear girl. Surely something would come along to relieve his chronic impecuniosity for just sufficient length of time to enable him to spread himself on this great occasion.
And, as if in direct answer to prayer, an almost forgotten aunt in England suddenly, out of an absolutely blue sky, shot no less a sum than five hundred dollars across the ocean. The present was so lavish and unexpected that Archie had the awed feeling of one who participates in a miracle. He felt, like Herbert Parker, that the righteous was not forsaken. It was the sort of thing that restored a fellow’s faith in human nature. For nearly a week he went about in a happy trance: and when, by thrift and enterprise—that is to say, by betting Reggie van Tuyl that the New York Giants would win the opening game of the series against the Pittsburg baseball team—he contrived to double his capital, what it amounted to was simply that life had nothing more to offer. He was actually in a position to go to a thousand dollars for Lucille’s birthday present. He gathered in Mr. van Tuyl, of whose taste in these matters he had a high opinion, and dragged him off to a jeweller’s on Broadway.
The jeweller, a stout, comfortable man, leaned on the counter and fingered lovingly the bracelet which he had lifted out of its nest of blue plush. Archie, leaning on the other side of the counter, inspected the bracelet searchingly, wishing that he knew more about these things; for he had rather a sort of idea that the merchant was scheming to do him in the eyeball. In a chair by his side, Reggie van Tuyl, half asleep as usual, yawned despondently. He had permitted Archie to lug him into this shop; and he wanted to buy something and go. Any form of sustained concentration fatigued Reggie.
“Now this,” said the jeweller, “I could do at eight hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Grab it!” murmured Mr. van Tuyl.
The jeweller eyed him approvingly, a man after his own heart; but Archie looked doubtful. It was all very well for Reggie to tell him to grab it in that careless way. Reggie was a dashed millionaire, and no doubt bought bracelets by the pound or the gross or what not; but he himself was in an entirely different position.
“Eight hundred and fifty dollars!” he said, hesitating.
“Worth it,” mumbled Reggie van Tuyl.
“More than worth it,” amended the jeweller. “I can assure you that it is better value than you could get anywhere on Fifth Avenue.”
“Yes?” said Archie. He took the bracelet and twiddled it thoughtfully. “Well, my dear old jeweller, one can’t say fairer than that, can one—or two, as the case may be!” He frowned. “Oh, well, all right! But it’s rummy that women are so fearfully keen on these little thingummies, isn’t it? I mean to say, can’t see what they see in them.
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