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

table-talk when he could use his mouth for more practical purposes. It was not until the final roll had been devoured to its last crumb that the guest found leisure to address his host. Then he leaned back with a contented sigh.

“Mother,” said the human python, “says you ought to chew every mouthful thirty-three times.⁠ ⁠…”

“Yes, sir! Thirty-three times!” He sighed again, “I haven’t ever had a meal like that.”

“All right, was it, what?”

“Was it! Was it! Call me up on the phone and ask me! Yes, sir! Mother’s tipped off these darned waiters not to serve me anything but vegetables and nuts and things, darn it!”

“The mater seems to have drastic ideas about the good old feedbag, what!”

“I’ll say she has! Pop hates it as much as me, but he’s scared to kick. Mother says vegetables contain all the proteins you want. Mother says, if you eat meat, your blood pressure goes all blooey. Do you think it does?”

“Mine seems pretty well in the pink.”

“She’s great on talking,” conceded the boy. “She’s out tonight somewhere, giving a lecture on Rational Eating to some ginks. I’ll have to be slipping up to our suite before she gets back.” He rose, sluggishly. “That isn’t a bit of roll under that napkin, is it?” he asked, anxiously.

Archie raised the napkin.

“No. Nothing of that species.”

“Oh, well!” said the boy, resignedly. “Then I believe I’ll be going. Thanks very much for the dinner.”

“Not a bit, old top. Come again if you’re ever trickling round in this direction.”

The long boy removed himself slowly, loath to leave. At the door he cast an affectionate glance back at the table.

“Some meal!” he said, devoutly. “Considerable meal!”

Archie lit a cigarette. He felt like a Boy Scout who has done his day’s Act of Kindness.

On the following morning it chanced that Archie needed a fresh supply of tobacco. It was his custom, when this happened, to repair to a small shop on Sixth Avenue which he had discovered accidentally in the course of his rambles about the great city. His relations with Jno. Blake, the proprietor, were friendly and intimate. The discovery that Mr. Blake was English and had, indeed, until a few years back maintained an establishment only a dozen doors or so from Archie’s London club, had served as a bond.

Today he found Mr. Blake in a depressed mood. The tobacconist was a hearty, red-faced man, who looked like an English sporting publican⁠—the kind of man who wears a fawn-coloured topcoat and drives to the Derby in a dogcart; and usually there seemed to be nothing on his mind except the vagaries of the weather, concerning which he was a great conversationalist. But now moodiness had claimed him for its own. After a short and melancholy “Good morning,” he turned to the task of measuring out the tobacco in silence.

Archie’s sympathetic nature was perturbed.⁠—“What’s the matter, laddie?” he enquired. “You would seem to be feeling a bit of an onion this bright morning, what, yes, no? I can see it with the naked eye.”

Mr. Blake grunted sorrowfully.

“I’ve had a knock, Mr. Moffam.”

“Tell me all, friend of my youth.”

Mr. Blake, with a jerk of his thumb, indicated a poster which hung on the wall behind the counter. Archie had noticed it as he came in, for it was designed to attract the eye. It was printed in black letters on a yellow ground, and ran as follows:

Clover Leaf Social and Outing Club
Grand Contest
Pie-Eating Championship of the West Side

Spike O’Dowd
(Champion)
v.
Blake’s Unknown
For a Purse of $50 and Side-Bet

Archie examined this document gravely. It conveyed nothing to him except⁠—what he had long suspected⁠—that his sporting-looking friend had sporting blood as well as that kind of exterior. He expressed a kindly hope that the other’s Unknown would bring home the bacon.

Mr. Blake laughed one of those hollow, mirthless laughs.

“There ain’t any blooming Unknown,” he said, bitterly. This man had plainly suffered. “Yesterday, yes, but not now.”

Archie sighed.

“In the midst of life⁠—Dead?” he enquired, delicately.

“As good as,” replied the stricken tobacconist. He cast aside his artificial restraint and became voluble. Archie was one of those sympathetic souls in whom even strangers readily confided their most intimate troubles. He was to those in travail of spirit very much what catnip is to a cat. “It’s ’ard, sir, it’s blooming ’ard! I’d got the event all sewed up in a parcel, and now this young feller-me-lad ’as to give me the knock. This lad of mine⁠—sort of cousin ’e is; comes from London, like you and me⁠—’as always ’ad, ever since he landed in this country, a most amazing knack of stowing away grub. ’E’d been a bit underfed these last two or three years over in the old country, what with food restrictions and all, and ’e took to the food over ’ere amazing. I’d ’ave backed ’im against a ruddy orstridge! Orstridge! I’d ’ave backed ’im against ’arff a dozen orstridges⁠—take ’em on one after the other in the same ring on the same evening⁠—and given ’em a handicap, too! ’E was a jewel, that boy. I’ve seen him polish off four pounds of steak and mealy potatoes and then look round kind of wolfish, as much as to ask when dinner was going to begin! That’s the kind of a lad ’e was till this very morning. ’E would have out-swallowed this ’ere O’Dowd without turning a hair, as a relish before ’is tea! I’d got a couple of ’undred dollars on ’im, and thought myself lucky to get the odds. And now⁠—”

Mr. Blake relapsed into a tortured silence.

“But what’s the matter with the blighter? Why can’t he go over the top? Has he got indigestion?”

“Indigestion?” Mr. Blaife laughed another of his hollow laughs. “You couldn’t give that boy indigestion if you fed ’im in on safety-razor blades. Religion’s more like what ’e’s got.”

“Religion?”

“Well, you can call it that. Seems last night, instead of goin’ and resting ’is mind at a picture-palace like I told him to, ’e sneaked off to some sort of a lecture down on Eighth Avenue.