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

unstuck. Always a dreamy and absentminded man, unequal to the rough hurly-burly of life, he had passed this afternoon through an ordeal which might well have unsettled the most practical. And this extraordinary announcement, coming on top of all he had been through, was too much for him. He tottered into the sitting-room and sank into a chair. It seemed to him that he was living in a nightmare.

And certainly in the figure that entered a few moments later there was nothing whatever to correct this impression. It might have stepped straight into anybody’s nightmare and felt perfectly at home right from the start.

The figure was that of a tall, thin man with white hair and a long and flowing beard of the same venerable hue. Strange as it seemed that a person of such appearance should not have been shot on sight early in his career, he had obviously reached an extremely advanced age. He was either a man of about a hundred and fifty who was rather young for his years or a man of about a hundred and ten who had been aged by trouble.

“My dear child!” piped the figure in a weak, quavering voice.

“Freddie!” cried the girl in the kimono.

“Oh, dash it!” said the figure.

There was a pause, broken by a sort of gasping moan from Lord Emsworth. More and more every minute his lordship was feeling the strain.

“Good God, guv’nor!” said the figure, sighting him. His wife pointed at Lord Emsworth.

“Freddie, is that your father?”

“Oh, yes. Rather! Of course. Absolutely. But he said he wasn’t coming.”

“I changed my mind,” said Lord Emsworth in a low, stricken voice.

“I told you so, Jane,” said the girl. “I thought he was Lord Emsworth all the time. Surely you can see the likeness now?”

A kind of wail escaped his lordship.

“Do I look like that?” he said brokenly. He gazed at his son once more and shut his eyes.

“Well,” said Miss Yorke, in her detestable managing way, turning her forceful personality on the newcomer, “now that you are here, Freddie Threepwood, looking like Father Christmas, what’s the idea? Aggie told you never to come near her again.”

A young man of his natural limpness of character might well have retired in disorder before this attack, but Love had apparently made Frederick Threepwood a man of steel. Removing his beard and eyebrows, he directed a withering glance at Miss Yorke.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” he said. “You’re a serpent in the bosom. I mean a snake in the grass.”

“Oh, am I?”

“Yes, you are. You poisoned Aggie’s jolly old mind against me. If it hadn’t been for you, I could have got her alone and told her my story as man to man.”

“Well, let’s hear it now. You’ve had plenty of time to rehearse it.”

Freddie turned to his wife with a sweeping gesture.

“I⁠—” He paused. “I say, Aggie, old thing, you look perfectly topping in that kimono.”

“Stick to the point,” said Miss Yorke.

“That is the point,” said Mrs. Freddie, not without a certain softness. “But if you think I look perfectly topping, why do you go running around with movie-actresses with carroty hair?”

“Red-gold,” suggested Freddie, deferentially.

“Carroty!”

“Carroty it is. You’re absolutely right. I never liked it all along.”

“Then why were you dining with it?”

“Yes, why?” inquired Miss Yorke.

“I wish you wouldn’t butt in,” said Freddie, petulantly. “I’m not talking to you.”

“You might just as well, for all the good it’s going to do you.”

“Be quiet, Jane. Well, Freddie?”

“Aggie,” said the Hon. Freddie, “it was this way.”

“Never believe a man who starts a story like that,” said Miss Yorke.

“Do please be quiet, Jane. Yes, Freddie?”

“I was trying to sell that carroty female a scenario, and I was keeping it from you because I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“Freddie darling! Was that really it?”

“You don’t mean to say⁠—” began Miss Yorke, incredulously.

“Absolutely it. And, in order to keep in with the woman⁠—whom, I may as well tell you, I disliked rather heartily from the start⁠—I had to lush her up a trifle from time to time.”

“Of course.”

“You have to with these people.”

“Naturally.”

“Makes all the difference in the world if you push a bit of food into them preparatory to talking business.”

“All the difference in the world.”

Miss Yorke, who seemed temporarily to have lost her breath, recovered it.

“You don’t mean to tell me,” she cried, turning in a kind of wild despair to the injured wife, “that you really believe this apple sauce?”

“Of course she does,” said Freddie. “Don’t you, precious?”

“Of course I do, sweetie-pie.”

“And, what’s more,” said Freddie, pulling from his breast-pocket a buff-coloured slip of paper with the air of one who draws from his sleeve that extra ace which makes all the difference in a keenly-contested game, “I can prove it. Here’s a cable that came this morning from the Super-Ultra-Art Film Company, offering me a thousand merry dollars for the scenario. So another time, you, will you kindly refrain from judging your⁠—er⁠—fellows by the beastly light of your own⁠—ah⁠—foul imagination?”

“Yes,” said his wife, “I must say, Jane, that you have made as much mischief as anyone ever did. I wish in future you would stop interfering in other people’s concerns.”

“Spoken,” said Freddie, “with vim and not a little terse good sense. And I may add⁠—”

“If you ask me,” said Miss Yorke, “I think it’s a fake.”

“What’s a fake?”

“That cable.”

“What do you mean, a fake?” cried Freddie, indignantly. “Read it for yourself.”

“It’s quite easy to get cables cabled you by cabling a friend in New York to cable them.”

“I don’t get that,” said Freddie, puzzled.

“I do,” said his wife; and there shone in her eyes the light that shines only in the eyes of wives who, having swallowed their husband’s story, resent destructive criticism from outsiders. “And I never want to see you again, Jane Yorke.”

“Same here,” agreed Freddie. “In Turkey they’d have shoved a girl like that in a sack and dropped her in the Bosphorus.”

“I might as well go,” said Miss Yorke.

“And don’t come back,” said Freddie. “The door is behind