Love Among the Chickens, P. G. Wodehouse [top non fiction books of all time .TXT] 📗

some laborious process known only to himself. At present my words conveyed no meaning to him. He was trying to identify me. He had seen me before somewhere, he was certain, but he could not say where, or who I was.

“I want to know,” I said, “what induced you to be such an abject idiot as to let our arrangement get known?”

I spoke quietly. I was not going to waste the choicer flowers of speech on a man who was incapable of understanding them. Later on, when he had awakened to a sense of his position, I would begin really to talk to him.

He continued to stare at me. Then a sudden flash of intelligence lit up his features.

“Mr. Garnick,” he said.

“You’ve got it at last.”

“From ch⁠—chicken farm,” he continued, with the triumphant air of a cross-examining King’s Counsel who has at last got on the track.

“Yes,” I said.

“Up top the hill,” he proceeded, clinchingly. He stretched out a huge hand.

“How you?” he inquired with a friendly grin.

“I want to know,” I said distinctly, “what you’ve got to say for yourself after letting our affair with the professor become public property?”

He paused awhile in thought.

“Dear sir,” he said at last, as if he were dictating a letter, “dear sir, I owe you⁠—ex⁠—exp⁠—”

He waved his hand, as who should say, “It’s a stiff job, but I’m going to do it.”

“Explashion,” he said.

“You do,” said I grimly. “I should like to hear it.”

“Dear sir, listen me.”

“Go on, then.”

“You came me. You said ‘Hawk, Hawk, ol’ fren’, listen me. You tip this ol’ bufflehead into watter,’ you said, ‘an’ gormed if I don’t give ’ee a poond note.’ That’s what you said me. Isn’t that what you said me?”

I did not deny it.

“ ‘Ve’ well,’ I said you. ‘Right,’ I said. I tipped the ol’ soul into watter, and I got the poond note.”

“Yes, you took care of that. All this is quite true, but it’s beside the point. We are not disputing about what happened. What I want to know⁠—for the third time⁠—is what made you let the cat out of the bag? Why couldn’t you keep quiet about it?”

He waved his hand.

“Dear sir,” he replied, “this way. Listen me.”

It was a tragic story that he unfolded. My wrath ebbed as I listened. After all the fellow was not so greatly to blame. I felt that in his place I should have acted as he had done. It was Fate’s fault, and Fate’s alone.

It appeared that he had not come well out of the matter of the accident. I had not looked at it hitherto from his point of view. While the rescue had left me the popular hero, it had had quite the opposite result for him. He had upset his boat and would have drowned his passenger, said public opinion, if the young hero from London⁠—myself⁠—had not plunged in, and at the risk of his life brought the professor ashore. Consequently, he was despised by all as an inefficient boatman. He became a laughingstock. The local wags made laborious jests when he passed. They offered him fabulous sums to take their worst enemies out for a row with him. They wanted to know when he was going to school to learn his business. In fact, they behaved as wags do and always have done at all times all the world over.

Now, all this, it seemed, Mr. Hawk would have borne cheerfully and patiently for my sake, or, at any rate for the sake of the crisp pound note I had given him. But a fresh factor appeared in the problem, complicating it grievously. To wit, Miss Jane Muspratt.

“She said to me,” explained Mr. Hawk, with pathos, “ ‘Harry ’Awk,’ she said, ‘yeou’m a girt fule, an’ I don’t marry noone as is ain’t to be trusted in a boat by hisself, and what has jokes made about him by that Tom Leigh!’

“I punched Tom Leigh,” observed Mr. Hawk parenthetically. “ ‘So,’ she said me, ‘you can go away, an’ I don’t want to see yeou again!’ ”

This heartless conduct on the part of Miss Muspratt had had the natural result of making him confess in self-defence; and she had written to the professor the same night.

I forgave Mr. Hawk. I think he was hardly sober enough to understand, for he betrayed no emotion. “It is Fate, Hawk,” I said, “simply Fate. There is a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will, and it’s no good grumbling.”

“Yiss,” said Mr. Hawk, after chewing this sentiment for a while in silence, “so she said me, ‘Hawk,’ she said⁠—like that⁠—‘you’re a girt fule⁠—’ ”

“That’s all right,” I replied. “I quite understand. As I say, it’s simply Fate. Goodbye.” And I left him.

As I was going back, I met the professor and Phyllis. They passed me without a look.

I wandered on in quite a fervour of self-pity. I was in one of those moods when life suddenly seems to become irksome, when the future stretches black and grey in front of one. I should have liked to have faded almost imperceptibly from the world, like Mr. Bardell, even if, as in his case, it had involved being knocked on the head with a pint pot in a public-house cellar.

In such a mood it is imperative that one should seek distraction. The shining example of Mr. Harry Hawk did not lure me. Taking to drink would be a nuisance. Work was what I wanted. I would toil like a navvy all day among the fowls, separating them when they fought, gathering in the eggs when they laid, chasing them across country when they got away, and even, if necessity arose, painting their throats with turpentine when they were stricken with roop. Then, after dinner, when the lamps were lit, and Mrs. Ukridge nursed Edwin and sewed, and Ukridge smoked cigars and incited the gramophone to murder “Mumbling Mose,” I would steal away to my bedroom, and write⁠—and write⁠—and write. And go on writing till my fingers were numb and my eyes refused to do their duty. And,