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

you’ve got to do, my old college chum,” I said, “is to pull yourself together, and jolly quick, too. As things are shaping, you’re due for a nasty knock before you know what’s hit you. You’ve got to make an effort. Don’t say you can’t. This two quid business shows that, even if your memory is rocky, you can remember some things. What you’ve got to do is to see that wedding anniversaries and so on are included in the list. It may be a brainstrain, but you can’t get out of it.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Bobbie. “But it beats me why she thinks such a lot of these rotten little dates. What’s it matter if I forgot what day we were married on or what day she was born on or what day the cat had the measles? She knows I love her just as much as if I were a memorizing freak at the halls.”

“That’s not enough for a woman,” I said. “They want to be shown. Bear that in mind, and you’re all right. Forget it, and there’ll be trouble.”

He chewed the knob of his stick.

“Women are frightfully rummy,” he said gloomily.

“You should have thought of that before you married one,” I said.

I don’t see that I could have done any more. I had put the whole thing in a nutshell for him. You would have thought he’d have seen the point, and that it would have made him brace up and get a hold on himself. But no. Off he went again in the same old way. I gave up arguing with him. I had a good deal of time on my hands, but not enough to amount to anything when it was a question of reforming dear old Bobbie by argument. If you see a man asking for trouble, and insisting on getting it, the only thing to do is to stand by and wait till it comes to him. After that you may get a chance. But till then there’s nothing to be done. But I thought a lot about him.

Bobbie didn’t get into the soup all at once. Weeks went by, and months, and still nothing happened. Now and then he’d come into the club with a kind of cloud on his shining morning face, and I’d know that there had been doings in the home; but it wasn’t till well on in the spring that he got the thunderbolt just where he had been asking for it⁠—in the thorax.

I was smoking a quiet cigarette one morning in the window looking out over Piccadilly, and watching the buses and motors going up one way and down the other⁠—most interesting it is; I often do it⁠—when in rushed Bobbie, with his eyes bulging and his face the colour of an oyster, waving a piece of paper in his hand.

“Reggie,” he said. “Reggie, old top, she’s gone!”

“Gone!” I said. “Who?”

“Mary, of course! Gone! Left me! Gone!”

“Where?” I said.

Silly question? Perhaps you’re right. Anyhow, dear old Bobbie nearly foamed at the mouth.

“Where? How should I know where? Here, read this.”

He pushed the paper into my hand. It was a letter.

“Go on,” said Bobbie. “Read it.”

So I did. It certainly was quite a letter. There was not much of it, but it was all to the point. This is what it said:

“My dear Bobbie⁠—I am going away. When you care enough about me to remember to wish me many happy returns on my birthday, I will come back. My address will be Box 341, London Morning News.”

I read it twice, then I said, “Well, why don’t you?”

“Why don’t I what?”

“Why don’t you wish her many happy returns? It doesn’t seem much to ask.”

“But she says on her birthday.”

“Well, when is her birthday?”

“Can’t you understand?” said Bobbie. “I’ve forgotten.”

“Forgotten!” I said.

“Yes,” said Bobbie. “Forgotten.”

“How do you mean, forgotten?” I said. “Forgotten whether it’s the twentieth or the twenty-first, or what? How near do you get to it?”

“I know it came somewhere between the first of January and the thirty-first of December. That’s how near I get to it.”

“Think.”

“Think? What’s the use of saying ‘Think’? Think I haven’t thought? I’ve been knocking sparks out of my brain ever since I opened that letter.”

“And you can’t remember?”

“No.”

I rang the bell and ordered restoratives.

“Well, Bobbie,” I said, “it’s a pretty hard case to spring on an untrained amateur like me. Suppose someone had come to Sherlock Holmes and said, ‘Mr. Holmes, here’s a case for you. When is my wife’s birthday?’ Wouldn’t that have given Sherlock a jolt? However, I know enough about the game to understand that a fellow can’t shoot off his deductive theories unless you start him with a clue, so rouse yourself out of that pop-eyed trance and come across with two or three. For instance, can’t you remember the last time she had a birthday? What sort of weather was it? That might fix the month.”

Bobbie shook his head.

“It was just ordinary weather, as near as I can recollect.”

“Warm?”

“Warmish.”

“Or cold?”

“Well, fairly cold, perhaps. I can’t remember.”

I ordered two more of the same. They seemed indicated in the Young Detective’s Manual. “You’re a great help, Bobbie,” I said. “An invaluable assistant. One of those indispensable adjuncts without which no home is complete.”

Bobbie seemed to be thinking.

“I’ve got it,” he said suddenly. “Look here. I gave her a present on her last birthday. All we have to do is to go to the shop, hunt up the date when it was bought, and the thing’s done.”

“Absolutely. What did you give her?”

He sagged.

“I can’t remember,” he said.

Getting ideas is like golf. Some days you’re right off, others it’s as easy as falling off a log. I don’t suppose dear old Bobbie had ever had two ideas in the same morning before in his life; but now he did it without an effort. He just loosed another dry Martini into the undergrowth, and before you could turn round it had flushed quite a brainwave.

Do you know those