Uneasy Money, P. G. Wodehouse [little bear else holmelund minarik txt] 📗

supper his views on her had been definite and clear. When they had first been introduced to each other he had had a stunned feeling that this sort of thing ought not to be allowed at large, and his battered brain had instinctively recalled that line of Tennyson: “The curse is come upon me.” But now, warmed with food and drink and smoking an excellent cigar, he found that a gentler, more charitable mood had descended upon him.

He argued with himself in extenuation of the girl’s peculiar idiosyncrasies. Was it, he asked himself, altogether her fault that she was so massive and spoke as if she were addressing an open-air convention in a strong gale? Perhaps it was hereditary. Perhaps her father had been a circus giant and her mother the strong woman of the troupe. And for the unrestraint of her manner defective training in early girlhood would account. He began to regard her with a quiet, kindly commiseration, which in its turn changed into a sort of brotherly affection. He discovered that he liked her. He liked her very much. She was so big and jolly and robust, and spoke in such a clear, full voice. He was glad that she was patting his hand. He was glad that he had asked her to call him Bill. He was glad⁠—for it showed that he had won her confidence⁠—that she had twice told him the rather long story of how badly the stage director had treated her by leaving her out of the Bully, Bully Summer Time number.

People were dancing now. It has been claimed by patriots that American dyspeptics lead the world. This supremacy, though partly due no doubt to vast supplies of pie absorbed in youth, may be attributed to a certain extent also to the national habit of dancing during meals. Lord Dawlish had that sturdy reverence for his interior organism which is the birthright of every Briton, and at the beginning of supper he had resolved that nothing should induce him to court disaster in this fashion. But as the time went on he began to waver.

The situation was awkward. Nutty and Miss Leonard were repeatedly leaving the table to tread the measure, and on these occasions the Good Sport’s wistfulness was a haunting reproach. Nor was the spectacle of Nutty in action without its effect on Bill’s resolution. Nutty dancing was a sight to stir the most stolid. Six months’ abstinence had keyed him up, and he was throwing himself into the thing in a way that recalled the gentleman in the poem who had fed on honeydew and drunk the milk of Paradise:

Beware, beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair.
Weave a circle round him thrice.

A stimulating spectacle!

Bill wavered. The music had started again now, one of those twentieth-century eruptions of sound that begin like a train going through a tunnel and continue like audible electric shocks, that set the feet tapping beneath the table and the spine thrilling with an unaccustomed exhilaration. Every drop of blood in his body cried to him “Dance!” He could resist no longer.

“Shall we?” he said.

His companion rose as if impelled by powerful machinery. She said she was crazy about dancing. Bill should not have danced. He was an estimable young man, honest, amiable, with high ideals. He had played an excellent game of football at the university; his golf handicap was plus two; and he was no mean performer with the gloves. But we all of us have our limitations, and Bill had his. He was not a good dancer. He was energetic, but he required more elbow room than the ordinary dancing floor provides. As a dancer, in fact, he closely resembled a Newfoundland puppy trying to run across a field.

It takes a good deal to daunt the New York dancing man, but the invasion of the floor by Bill and the Good Sport undoubtedly caused a profound and even painful sensation. Linked together they formed a living projectile which might well have intimidated the bravest. Nutty was their first victim. They caught him in midstep⁠—one of those fancy steps which he was just beginning to exhume from the cobwebbed recesses of his memory⁠—and swept him away. After which they descended irresistibly upon a stout gentleman of middle age, chiefly conspicuous for the glittering diamonds which he wore and the stoical manner in which he danced to and fro on one spot of not more than a few inches in size in the exact center of the room. He had apparently staked out a claim to this small spot, a claim which the other dancers had decided to respect; but Bill and the Good Sport, coming up from behind, had him two yards away from it at the first impact. Then, scattering apologies broadcast like a medieval monarch distributing largesse, Bill whirled his partner round by sheer muscular force and began what he intended to be a movement toward the farther corner, skirting the edge of the floor. It was his simple belief that there was more safety there than in the middle.

He had not reckoned with Heinrich Joerg. Indeed he was not aware of Heinrich Joerg’s existence. Yet fate was shortly to bring them together with far-reaching results. Heinrich Joerg had left the Fatherland some three years before with the prudent purpose of escaping military service. After various vicissitudes in the land of his adoption⁠—which it would be extremely interesting to relate, but which must wait for a more favorable opportunity⁠—he had secured a useful and not ill-recompensed situation as one of the staff of Riegelheimer’s Restaurant. He was, in point of fact, a waiter, and he comes into the story at this point bearing a tray full of glasses, knives, forks, and pats of butter on little plates. He was setting a table for some new arrivals, and in order to obtain more scope for that task he had left the crowded aisle beyond the table and come round to the edge