Indiscretions of Archie, P. G. Wodehouse [best english books to read for beginners TXT] 📗

“It might be a good idea,” said Bill reflectively.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” said Lucille. “I’m going to get Bill to introduce me to his Mabel, and, if she’s as nice as he says she is, I’ll go to father and talk convincingly to him.”

“You’re an ace!” said Bill.

“Absolutely!” agreed Archie cordially. “My partner, what! All the same, we ought to keep the book as a second string, you know. I mean to say, you are a young and delicately nurtured girl⁠—full of sensibility and shrinking what’s-its-name and all that⁠—and you know what the jolly old pater is. He might bark at you and put you out of action in the first round. Well, then, if anything like that happened, don’t you see, we could unleash old Bill, the trained silver-tongued expert, and let him have a shot. Personally, I’m all for the P. that W.’s.”

“Me, too,” said Bill.

Lucille looked at her watch.

“Good gracious! It’s nearly one o’clock!”

“No!” Archie heaved himself up from his chair. “Well, it’s a shame to break up this feast of reason and flow of soul and all that, but, if we don’t leg it with some speed, we shall be late.”

“We’re lunching at the Nicholson’s!” explained Lucille to her brother. “I wish you were coming too.”

“Lunch!” Bill shook his head with a kind of tolerant scorn. “Lunch means nothing to me these days. I’ve other things to think of besides food.” He looked as spiritual as his rugged features would permit. “I haven’t written to Her yet today.”

“But, dash it, old scream, if she’s going to be over here in a week, what’s the good of writing? The letter would cross her.”

“I’m not mailing my letters to England,” said Bill. “I’m keeping them for her to read when she arrives.”

“My sainted aunt!” said Archie.

Devotion like this was something beyond his outlook.

The Personality That Wins cost Archie two dollars in cash and a lot of embarrassment when he asked for it at the store. To buy a treatise of that name would automatically seem to argue that you haven’t a winning personality already, and Archie was at some pains to explain to the girl behind the counter that he wanted it for a friend. The girl seemed more interested in his English accent than in his explanation, and Archie was uncomfortably aware, as he receded, that she was practising it in an undertone for the benefit of her colleagues and fellow workers. However, what is a little discomfort, if endured in friendship’s name?

He was proceeding up Broadway after leaving the store when he encountered Reggie van Tuyl, who was drifting along in somnambulistic fashion near Thirty-Ninth Street.

“Hullo, Reggie old thing!” said Archie.

“Hullo!” said Reggie, a man of few words.

“I’ve just been buying a book for Bill Brewster,” went on Archie. “It appears that old Bill⁠—What’s the matter?”

He broke off his recital abruptly. A sort of spasm had passed across his companion’s features. The hand holding Archie’s arm had tightened convulsively. One would have said that Reginald had received a shock.

“It’s nothing,” said Reggie. “I’m all right now. I caught sight of that fellow’s clothes rather suddenly. They shook me a bit. I’m all right now,” he said, bravely.

Archie, following his friend’s gaze, understood. Reggie van Tuyl was never at his strongest in the morning, and he had a sensitive eye for clothes. He had been known to resign from clubs because members exceeded the bounds in the matter of soft shirts with dinner-jackets. And the short, thickset man who was standing just in front of them in attitude of restful immobility was certainly no dandy. His best friend could not have called him dapper. Take him for all in all and on the hoof, he might have been posing as a model for a sketch of What the Well-Dressed Man Should Not Wear.

In costume, as in most other things, it is best to take a definite line and stick to it. This man had obviously vacillated. His neck was swathed in a green scarf; he wore an evening dress coat; and his lower limbs were draped in a pair of tweed trousers built for a larger man. To the north he was bounded by a straw hat, to the south by brown shoes.

Archie surveyed the man’s back carefully.

“Bit thick!” he said, sympathetically. “But of course Broadway isn’t Fifth Avenue. What I mean to say is, Bohemian licence and whatnot. Broadway’s crammed with deuced brainy devils who don’t care how they look. Probably this bird is a mastermind of some species.”

“All the same, man’s no right to wear evening dress coat with tweed trousers.”

“Absolutely not! I see what you mean.”

At this point the sartorial offender turned. Seen from the front, he was even more unnerving. He appeared to possess no shirt, though this defect was offset by the fact that the tweed trousers fitted snugly under the arms. He was not a handsome man. At his best he could never have been that, and in the recent past he had managed to acquire a scar that ran from the corner of his mouth halfway across his cheek. Even when his face was in repose he had an odd expression; and when, as he chanced to do now, he smiled, odd became a mild adjective, quite inadequate for purposes of description. It was not an unpleasant face, however. Unquestionably genial, indeed. There was something in it that had a quality of humorous appeal.

Archie started. He stared at the man, Memory stirred.

“Great Scot!” he cried. “It’s the Sausage Chappie!”

Reginald van Tuyl gave a little moan. He was not used to this sort of thing. A sensitive young man as regarded scenes, Archie’s behaviour unmanned him. For Archie, releasing his arm, had bounded forward and was shaking the other’s hand warmly.

“Well, well, well! My dear old chap! You must remember me, what? No? Yes?”

The man with the scar seemed puzzled. He shuffled the