The Most Of P.G. Wodehouse - Softcover

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Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975) was an English humorist who wrote novels, short stories, plays, lyrics, and essays, all with the same light touch of gentle satire. He is best known as the creator of the bumbling Bertie Wooster and his all-knowing valet, Jeeves.

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The most Lavish P. G. Wodehouse collection ever published. In addition to Wodehouse's best-known and beloved Jeeves and Bertie stories, The Most of P. G. Wodehouse features delightful stories about The Drones Club and its affable, vacuous members: Mr. Mulliner, whose considered judgment on any and all topics is drawn from the experiences of his innumerable relatives; Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, the man of gilt-edged schemes; and Lord Emsworth, ruler of all he surveys at Blanding's Castle. Rounding out the collection are Wodehouse's witty golf stories and a complete and completely hilarious novel, Quick Service. As Jeeves would say, "The mind boggles, sir".

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Fate

It was the hour of the morning snifter, and a little group of Eggs and Beans and Crumpets had assembled in the smoking room of the Drones Club to do a bit of inhaling. There had been a party of sorts overnight, and the general disposition of the company was toward a restful and somewhat glassy-eyed silence. This was broken at length by one of the Crumpets.

"Old Freddie's back," he observed.

Some moments elapsed before any of those present felt equal to commenting on this statement. Then a Bean spoke.

"Freddie who?"

"Freddie Widgeon."

"Back where?"

"Back here."

"I mean, back from what spot?"

"New York."

"I didn't know Freddie had been to New York."

"Well, you can take it from me he has. Or else how," argued the Crumpet, "could he have got back?"

The Bean considered the point.

"Something in that," he agreed. "What sort of a time did he have?"

"Not so good. He lost the girl he loved."

"I wish I had a quid for every girl Freddie Widgeon has loved and lost," sighed an Egg wistfully. "If I had, I shouldn't be touching you for a fiver."

"You aren't," said the Crumpet.

The Bean frowned. His head was hurting him, and he considered that the conversation was becoming sordid.

"How did he lose his girl?"

"Because of the suitcase."

"What suitcase?"

"The suitcase he carried for the other girl."

"What other girl?"

"The one he carried the suitcase for."

The Bean frowned again.

"A bit complex, all this, isn't it?" he said. "Hardly the sort of stuff, I mean, to spring on personal friends who were up a trifle late last night."

"It isn't really," the Crumpet assured him. "Not when you know the facts. The way old Freddie told me the story it was as limpid as dammit. And what he thinks -- and what I think, too -- is that it just shows what toys we are in the hands of Fate, if you know what I mean. I mean to say, it's no good worrying and trying to look ahead and plan and scheme and weigh your every action, if you follow me, because you never can tell when doing such-and-such won't make so-and-so happen -- while, on the other hand, if you do so-and-so it may just as easily lead to such-and-such."

A pale-faced Egg with heavy circles under his eyes rose at this point and excused himself. He said his head had begun to throb again and he proposed to step round to the chemist on the corner for another of his dark-brown pick-me-ups.

"I mean to say," resumed the Crumpet, "if Freddie -- with the best motives in the world -- hadn't carried that suitcase for that girl, he might at this moment be walking up the aisle with a gardenia in his buttonhole and Mavis Peasemarch, only daughter of the fifth Earl of Bodsham, on his arm."

The Bean demurred. He refused to admit the possibility of such a thing, even if Freddie Widgeon had sworn off suitcases for life.

"Old Bodders would never have allowed Mavis to marry a bird of Freddie's caliber. He would think him worldly and frivolous. I don't know if you are personally acquainted with the Bod, but I may tell you that my people once lugged me to a week end at his place and not only were we scooped in and shanghaied to church twice on the Sunday, regardless of age or sex, but on the Monday morning at eight o'clock -- eight, mark you -- there were family prayers in the dining room. There you have old Bodders in a nutshell. Freddie's a good chap, but he can't have stood a dog's chance from the start."

"On the contrary," said the Crumpet warmly. "He made his presence felt right from the beginning to an almost unbelievable extent, and actually clicked as early as the fourth day out."

"Were Bodders and Mavis on the boat, then?"

"They certainly were. All the way over."

"And Bodders, you say, actually approved of Freddie?"

"He couldn't have been more all over him, Freddie tells me, if Freddie had been a Pan-Anglican Congress. What you overlook is that Bodsham -- living, as he does, all the year round in the country -- knew nothing of Freddie except that one of his uncles was his old school friend, Lord Blicester, and another of his uncles was actually a bishop. Taking a line through them, he undoubtedly regarded Freddie as a pretty hot potato."

The Bean seemed shaken, but he put another point.

"What about Mavis, then?"

"What about her?"

"I should have thought Freddie would have been the last bloke she would have considered hitching up with. I've seen her in action down at Peasemarch, and you can take it from me that she is very far from being one of the boys. You needn't let it get about, of course, but that girl, to my certain knowledge, plays the organ in the local church and may often be seen taking soup to the deserving villagers with many a gracious word."

The Crumpet had his answer to this, too.

"She knew nothing of Freddie, either. She liked his quiet, saintly manner and considered that he had a soul. At any rate, I can assure you that everything went like a breeze. Helped by the fact that the sea was calm and that there was a dashed fine moon every night, old Freddie shoved his nose past the judge's box at 10:45 P.M. on the fourth day out. And when next morning he informed old Bodsham that he had now a son to comfort his declining years, there was not a discordant note. The old boy said that he could wish no better husband for his daughter than a steady, respectable young fellow like Freddie, and they arrived in New York a happy and united family."

The only thing in the nature of a flaw that Freddie found in New York, he tells me, was the fact that the populace, to judge from the daily papers, didn't seem to be so ideally happy in its love life as he was. What I mean to say, he wanted smiling faces about him, so to speak, and it looked to him as if everybody in the place were cutting up their wives and hiding them in sacks in the Jersey marshes or else putting detectives on to them to secure the necessary evidence.

It saddened him, he tells me, when he opened his illustrated tabloid of a morning, to have to try to eat eggs and bacon while gazing at a photograph of Mae Belle McGinnis, taken when she was not looking her best because Mr. McGinnis had just settled some domestic dispute with the meat ax.

Also, there seemed to him far too much of all that stuff about Sugar Daddies being Discovered in Love Nest As Blizzard Grips City.

However, when you are the guest of a great nation, you have to take the rough with the smooth. And there appears to be no doubt that, despite all the marital unrest around him, Freddie at this juncture was indisputably in the pink. I've never been engaged myself, so I know nothing of the symptoms at first hand, but Freddie tells me that the way it takes a fellow is to make him feel as if he were floating on a fleecy cloud, high up in the air, and only touching the ground at odd spots.

Most of the time, he says, he just hovered over New York like some winged thing. But occasionally he would come down and emerge from the ether, and on one of these rare occasions he found himself wandering in the neighborhood of Seventy-second Street, somewhere on the West Side.

And just in front of him was a girl lugging a dashed great heavy suitcase.

Now, I want you to follow me very closely here. This is where Freddie stands or falls. He was pretty eloquent at this point, when he told me the story; and, as far as I am concerned, I may say fearlessly that I dismiss him without a stain on his character. I consider his motives to have been pure to the last drop.

One of the things that being engaged does to you, you must remember, is to fill you to the gills with a sort of knightly chivalry. So Freddie tells me. You go about the place like a Boy Scout, pouncing out on passers-by and doing acts of kindness to them. Three times that day Freddie had chased seedy-looking birds up side streets and forced cash on...