Summer Moonshine by P. G. Wodehouse Read Free Book Online Page B

are practically strangers?'
    'Girls often employ that apparently specious argument on a man. Only to discover later that he was a tadpole and they were a fish in the Palaeozoic Age. Then they look silly.'
    'Do you think you and I were?'
    'Of course. I remember it distinctly. Bless my soul, those were the days. Never a dull moment.'
    'I don't think I like tadpoles.'
    'Ah, but I've come on a lot since then. I'm a pretty brilliant figure these days. For one thing, I've written a play.'
    'So has everybody.'
    'True. But where I get the bulge is that mine has been produced, and with stupendous success. I'll tell you all about it, shall I? Or I might read you the notices. I have them here.'
    'Later on, I think, don't you?'
    'Any time that suits you.'
    'I mean, I'm very glad you have had a stupendous success, and I'm simply dying to hear all about it, but you haven't told me yet about Mr Busby.'
    'Oh, that?'
    'Yes.'
    'A bagatelle. You really want to hear what happened?'
    'Start at the beginning and don't leave out anything. So far, it seems like a miracle to me.'
    Joe took a sip of hock cup.
    'Well, it's scarcely worth talking about, and I shall always regard it as one of my purely minor triumphs, but here is the scenario. When I left you, I went to his room. "Ha, Busby!" I said. And he said, "Oh, it's you, is it?" And I said yes, it was, and told him that I had come about your bill.'
    'And then—'
    'Well, then, I admit, I began by taking the wrong line. The one I sketched out for you, if you recall.'
    'You appealed to his better feelings?'
    'Exactly. I said here was a lovely girl, the loveliest girl I had ever seen, with the most wonderful eyes and a sort of how-shall-I-describe-it about her, looking like a Fournier picture in La Vie Parisienne come to life, asking a favour of him, and was he going to refuse it? Was he going to send her away with those wonderful eyes swimming in tears? Was he going to compel her to break it to her white-haired father—'
    'He's only grizzled.'
    ' – her grizzled father that the ramp was still on and that he had got to dig down into his jeans for ninety-six pounds, three and eleven? Was he, from sheer sordid greed, going to cast a blight on a once-happy home and make a deserving big-game hunter wish that he had never seen a charging rhinoceros in his life? Well, to cut a long story short, he was. He was quite definite about it. I begged him to think again. I said that this was not the real Mortimer Busby speaking. I implored him to make a gesture. I'll tell you something about your eyes,' said Joe. 'Most people would say they were blue – the deep, soft, unearthly blue of a Southern California summer twilight, and, in a sense, they would be right. They are blue. But at certain moments there comes into them a sort of green, like the sea at—'
    'Never mind my eyes. I expect they're all right—'
    'They're super-colossal.'
    ' – but in any case, it's too late to do anything about them now. You were saying you asked him to make a gesture. Upon which—'
    'Upon which, he curtly refused to make a gesture. So I did. I raised my hand and allowed it to hover over his back like a butterfly about to settle on some lovely flower.'
    'Why was that so good?'
    'Because he had already informed me that he had been sitting in the sun and got his shoulders skinned. Well, after that everything went as smooth as the oil he should have used, but didn't. I told him that, unless he let Conscience be his guide, I proposed to slap him on the back and keep right along slapping; and that, though he would no doubt yell for assistance, before that assistance could arrive I should have been able to administer fully fifty sloshes – thirteen, as he was a publisher, of course counting as twelve. Was not this, I said, a heavy price to pay for the satisfaction of gypping a retired hippopotamus shooter out of a mere ninety-six, three, eleven? He saw my point, and with pretty eagerness reached for his fountain pen and started