A Few Quick Ones by P. G. Wodehouse Read Free Book Online

every limb. He had recognized that voice.
    "Excuse me," said Troon Rockett. "Does Mr. Pickering live here?"
    "Yes," said Sidney McMurdo.
    "If," added Agnes Flack, "you can call it living when a man enters for an important competition and gets beaten ten and eight. He's out at the moment. Better go in and stick around."
    "Thank you," said the girl. "I will."
    She vanished into the cottage. Sidney McMurdo took advantage of her departure to embrace Agnes Flack again.
    "Old blighter," he said tenderly, "let's get married right away, before there can be any more misunderstandings and rifts and what not. How about Tuesday?"
    "Can't Tuesday. Mixed foursomes."
    "Wednesday?"
    "Can't Wednesday. Bogey competition."
    "And Thursday I'm playing in the invitation tournament at Squashy Heath," said Sidney McMurdo. "Oh, well, I daresay we shall manage to find a day when we're both free. Let's stroll along and talk it over."
    They crashed off, and as the echoes of their clumping feet died away in the distance Harold Pickering left the form in which he had been crouching and walked dizzily to the cottage. And the first thing he saw as he entered the sitting-room was Troon Rockett kissing a cabinet photograph of himself which she had taken from place on the mantelpiece. The spectacle drew from him a sharp, staccato bark of amazement, and she turned, her eyes wide.
    "Harold!" she cried, and flung herself into his arms.
    To say that Harold Pickering was surprised, bewildered, startled and astounded would be merely to state the facts. He could not remember having been so genuinely taken aback since the evening when, sauntering in his garden in the dusk, he had trodden on the teeth of a rake and had the handle jump up and hit him on the nose.
    But, as I have had occasion to observe before, he was a  publisher, and I doubt if there is a publisher on the list who would not know what to do if a charming girl flung herself into his arms. I have told this story to one or two publishers of my acquaintance, and they all assured me that the correct procedure would come instinctively to them. Harold Pickering kissed Troon Rockett sixteen times in quick succession, and Macmillan and Faber and Faber say they would have done just the same.
    At length, he paused. He was, as I have said, a man who liked to go into things.
    "But I don't understand."
    "What don't you understand?'
    "Well, don't think for a moment that I'm complaining, but this flinging-into-arms sequence strikes me as odd,"
    "I can't imagine why. I love you."
    "But when I asked you to be my wife, you rose and walked haughtily from the room."
    "I didn't."
    "You did. I was there."
    "I mean, I didn't walk haughtily. I hurried out because I was alarmed and agitated. You sat there gasping and gurgling, and I thought you were having a fit of some kind. So I rushed off to phone the doctor, and when I got back you had gone. And then a day or two later another man proposed to me, and he, too, started gasping and gurgling, and I realized the truth. They told me at your office that you were living here, so I came along to let you know that I loved you."
    "You really do?"
    "Of course I do. I loved you the first moment I saw you. You remember? You were explaining to father that thirteen copies count as twelve, and I came in and our eyes met. In that instant I knew that you were the only man in the world for me."
    For a moment Harold Pickering was conscious only of a wild exhilaration. He felt as if his firm had brought out Gone With the Wind, Then a dull, hopeless look came into his sensitive face.
    "It can never be," he said.
    "Why not?"
    "You heard what that large girl was saying outside there, but probably you did not take it in. It was the truth. I was beaten this afternoon ten and eight."
    "Everybody has an off day."
    He shook his head.
    "It was not an off day. That was my true form. I haven't the nerve to be a scratch man. When the acid test comes, I blow up. I suppose I'm about ten, really. You can't