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

marry a ten-handicap man."
    "Why not?"
    "You! The daughter of John Rockett and his British Ladies Champion wife. The great-grand-daughter of old Ma Rockett. The sister of Prestwick, Sandwich, Hoylake and St. Andrew Rockett."
    "But that's just why. It has always been my dream to marry a man with a handicap of about ten, so that we could go through life together side by side, twin souls. I should be ten, if the family didn't make me practise five hours a day all the year round. I'm not a natural scratch. I have made myself scratch by ceaseless, unremitting toil, and if there's one thing in the world I loathe it is ceaseless, unremitting toil. The relief of being able to let myself slip back to ten is indescribable. Oh, Harold, we shall be so happy. Just to think of taking three putts on a green! It will be heaven!"
    Harold Pickering had been reeling a good deal during these remarks. He now ceased to do so. There is a time for reeling and a time for not reeling.
    "You mean that?"
    "I certainly do."
    "You will really marry me?"
    "How long does it take to get a licence?"
    For an instant Harold Pickering sought for words, but found none. Then a rather neat thing that Sidney McMurdo had said came back to him. Sidney McMurdo was a man he could never really like, but his dialogue was excellent.
    "My mate!" he said.
     
     

3
     
    The Right Approach
     
    THE subject of magazine stories came up quite suddenly in the bar parlour of the Angler's Rest, as subjects are wont to do there, for in the way the minds of our little group flit from this top to that there is always a suggestion of the chamois of the Alps springing from crag to crag. We were, if I remember rightly, discussing supralapsarianism, when a Whisky-and- Splash, who had been turning the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, the property of our courteous and popular barmaid Miss Postlethwaite, uttered a snort.
    "Gesundheit," said a Draught Ale.
    "I wasn't sneezing, I was snorting," said the Whisky-and-Splash. Disgustedly, he added. "Why do they publish these things?"
    "What things would that be?"
    "These stories, illustrated in glorious technicolour, where the fellow meets the girl on the beach, and they start kidding back and forth, and twenty minutes after they've seen each other for the first time, they're engaged to be married."
    Mr. Mulliner took a sip from his hot Scotch and lemon.
    "You find that unconvincing?"
    "Yes, I do. I am a married man, and it took me two years and more boxes of chocolates than I care to think of to persuade the lady who is now my wife to sign on the dotted line. And though it is not for me to say so, I was a pretty fascinating chap in those days. Ask anybody."
    Mr. Mulliner nodded.
    "Your point is well taken. But you must make allowances for the editor of the Saturday Evening Post. He lives in a world of his own, and really does think that two complete strangers can meet in bathing suits on the beach and conclude their initial conversation by becoming betrothed. However, as you say, it seldom happens in ordinary life. Even the Mulliners, most of whom have fallen in love at first sight, have not found the going quite so smooth and simple as that. They have been compelled to pull up their socks and put in not a little preliminary spadework. The case of my nephew Augustus is one that springs to the mind."
    "Did he meet girls in bathing suits on beaches?"
    "Frequently. But it was at a charity bazaar at a house called Balmoral on Wimbledon Common that love came to him, for it was there that he saw Hermione Brimble and fell with a thud that could have been heard as far off as Putney Hill."
     
    It was owing to his godmother's fondness for bazaars (said Mr. Mulliner) that Augustus found himself in the garden of Balmoral, and it is ironical to reflect that when she ordered him to escort her there, he was considerably annoyed, for he had been planning to go to Kempton Park and with word and gesture encourage in the two-thirty race a horse in whose