Read Online Aunts Aren't Gentlemen by Sir P G Wodehouse - Free Book Online Page A

how the script reads, thereby rendering myself liable to
a sizeable sojourn in chokey, a little enthusiasm would not
have been amiss. Nothing to be done about it except give her
a reproachful look. I did this. It made no impression whatever,
and she proceeded.
    'Is he staying at the Goose and Grasshopper?'
    'I couldn't say,' I said, and if I spoke with a touch of what-d'you-
call-it in my voice, who can blame me? 'When I met
him, we talked mostly about my interior organs.'
    'What's wrong with your interior organs?'
    'Nothing so far, but he thought there might be something
later on.'
    'He has a wonderfully sympathetic nature.'
    'Yes, hasn't he.'
    'Did he recommend anything that would be good for you?'
    'As a matter of fact he did.'
    'How like him!'
She was silent for a while, no doubt pondering on all Orlo's
lovable qualities, many of which I had missed. At length she
spoke.
    'He must be at the Goose and Grasshopper. It's the only
decent inn in the place. Go there and tell him to meet me here
at three o'clock tomorrow afternoon.'
    'Here?'
    'Yes.'
    'You mean at this cottage?'
    'Why not?'
    'I thought you might want to see him alone.'
    'Oh, that's all right. You can go for a walk.'
    Once more I sent up a silent vote of thanks to my guardian
angel for having fixed it that this proud beauty should not
become Mrs Bertram Wooster. Her cool assumption that she
had only got to state her wishes and all and sundry would jump
to fulfil them gave me the pip. So stung was the Wooster pride
by the thought of being slung out at her bidding from my
personal cottage that it is not too much to say that my blood
boiled, and I would probably have said something biting like
'Oh, yes?', only I felt that a pieux chevalier, which I always aim
to be, ought not to crush the gentler sex beneath the iron heel,
no matter what the provocation.
    So I changed it to 'Right-ho', and went off to the Goose and
Grasshopper to give Orlo the low-down.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    I found him in the private bar having a gin and ginger ale. His
face, never much to write home about, was rendered even
less of a feast for the eye by a dark scowl. His spirits were
plainly at their lowest ebb, as so often happens when Sundered
Heart A is feeling that the odds against his clicking with
Sundered Heart B cannot be quoted at better than a hundred
to eight.
    Of course he may have been brooding because he had just
heard that a pal of his in Moscow had been liquidated that
morning, or he had murdered a capitalist and couldn't think of
a way of getting rid of the body, but I preferred to attribute his
malaise to frustrated love, and I couldn't help feeling a pang of
pity for him.
    He looked at me as I entered in a manner which made me
realize how little chance there was of our exchanging presents
at Christmas, and I remember thinking what a lot of him there
was and all of it anti-Wooster. I had often felt the same about
Spode. It seemed that there was something about me that
aroused the baser passions in men who were eight feet tall and
six across. I took this up with Jeeves once, and he agreed that
it was singular.
    His eye as I approached was what I have heard described as
lacklustre. Whatever it was that was causing this V-shaped
depression, seeing me had not brought the sunshine into his
life. His demeanour was that of any member of a Wednesday
matinée audience or, let us say, a dead fish on a fishmonger's
slab. Nor did he brighten when I had delivered my message.
After I had done so there was a long silence, broken only by
the gurgling of ginger ale as it slid down his throat.
    Eventually he spoke, his voice rather like that of a living
corpse in one of those horror films where the fellow takes the
lid off the tomb in the vault beneath the ruined chapel and
blowed if the occupant doesn't start a conversation with him.
    'I don't understand this.'
    'What don't you understand?' I said, adding 'Comrade', for
there is never anything lost by being civil. 'Any assistance I can
give in the way of