Short Fiction, P. G. Wodehouse [books for 20 year olds .txt] 📗

changed more by the time I come out.”

“Come out?”

“Come out of prison.”

“You’re not going to prison.”

“Yes, I am.”

“I won’t take you.”

“Yes, you will. Think I’m going to let you get yourself in trouble like that, to get me out of a fix? Not much.”

“You hop it, like a good girl.”

“Not me.”

He stood looking at her like a puzzled bear.

“They can’t eat me.”

“They’ll cut off all of your hair.”

“D’you like my hair?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’ll grow again.”

“Don’t stand talking. Hop it.”

“I won’t. Where’s the station?”

“Next street.”

“Well, come along, then.”

The blue glass lamp of the police-station came into sight, and for an instant she stopped. Then she was walking on again, her chin tilted. But her voice shook a little as she spoke.

“Nearly there. Next stop, Battersea. All change! I say, mister⁠—I don’t know your name.”

“Plimmer’s my name, miss. Edward Plimmer.”

“I wonder if⁠—I mean it’ll be pretty lonely where I’m going⁠—I wonder if⁠—What I mean is, it would be rather a lark, when I come out, if I was to find a pal waiting for me to say ‘Hallo.’ ”

Constable Plimmer braced his ample feet against the stones, and turned purple.

“Miss,” he said, “I’ll be there, if I have to sit up all night. The first thing you’ll see when they open the doors is a great, ugly, red-faced copper with big feet and a broken nose. And if you’ll say ‘Hallo’ to him when he says ‘Hallo’ to you, he’ll be as pleased as Punch and as proud as a duke. And, miss”⁠—he clenched his hands till the nails hurt the leathern flesh⁠—“and, miss, there’s just one thing more I’d like to say. You’ll be having a good deal of time to yourself for awhile; you’ll be able to do a good bit of thinking without anyone to disturb you; and what I’d like you to give your mind to, if you don’t object, is just to think whether you can’t forget that narrow-chested, Godforsaken blighter who treated you so mean, and get halfway fond of someone who knows jolly well you’re the only girl there is.”

She looked past him at the lamp which hung, blue and forbidding, over the station door.

“How long’ll I get?” she said. “What will they give me? Thirty days?”

He nodded.

“It won’t take me as long as that,” she said. “I say, what do people call you?⁠—people who are fond of you, I mean?⁠—Eddie or Ted?”

The Test Case

Well-meaning chappies at the club sometimes amble up to me and tap me on the wishbone, and say “Reggie, old top,”⁠—my name’s Reggie Pepper⁠—“you ought to get married, old man.” Well, what I mean to say is, it’s all very well, and I see their point and all that sort of thing; but it takes two to make a marriage, and to date I haven’t met a girl who didn’t seem to think the contract was too big to be taken on.

Looking back, it seems to me that I came nearer to getting over the home-plate with Ann Selby than with most of the others. In fact, but for circumstances over which I had no dashed control, I am inclined to think that we should have brought it off. I’m bound to say that, now that what the poet chappie calls the first fine frenzy has been on the ice for awhile and I am able to consider the thing calmly, I am deuced glad we didn’t. She was one of those strong-minded girls, and I hate to think of what she would have done to me.

At the time, though, I was frightfully in love, and, for quite a while after she definitely gave me the mitten, I lost my stroke at golf so completely that a child could have given me a stroke a hole and got away with it. I was all broken up, and I contend to this day that I was dashed badly treated.

Let me give you what they call the data.

One day I was lunching with Ann, and was just proposing to her as usual, when, instead of simply refusing me, as she generally did, she fixed me with a thoughtful eye and kind of opened her heart.

“Do you know, Reggie, I am in doubt.”

“Give me the benefit of it,” I said. Which I maintain was pretty good on the spur of the moment, but didn’t get a hand. She simply ignored it, and went on.

“Sometimes,” she said, “you seem to me entirely vapid and brainless; at other times you say or do things which suggest that there are possibilities in you; that, properly stimulated and encouraged, you might overcome the handicap of large private means and do something worthwhile. I wonder if that is simply my imagination?” She watched me very closely as she spoke.

“Rather not. You’ve absolutely summed me up. With you beside me, stimulating and all that sort of rot, don’t you know, I should show a flash of speed which would astonish you.”

“I wish I could be certain.”

“Take a chance on it.”

She shook her head.

“I must be certain. Marriage is such a gamble. I have just been staying with my sister Hilda and her husband⁠—”

“Dear old Harold Bodkin. I know him well. In fact, I’ve a standing invitation to go down there and stay as long as I like. Harold is one of my best pals. Harold is a corker. Good old Harold is⁠—”

“I would rather you didn’t eulogize him, Reggie. I am extremely angry with Harold. He is making Hilda perfectly miserable.”

“What on earth do you mean? Harold wouldn’t dream of hurting a fly. He’s one of those dreamy, sentimental chumps who⁠—”

“It is precisely his sentimentality which is at the bottom of the whole trouble. You know, of course, that Hilda is not his first wife?”

“That’s right. His first wife died about five years ago.”

“He still cherishes her memory.”

“Very sporting of him.”

“Is it! If you were a girl, how would you like to be married to a man who was always making you bear in mind that you