Jeeves Stories - P. G. Wodehouse (best non fiction books to read txt) 📗

Jeeves Stories

By P. G. Wodehouse.

Table of Contents Titlepage Imprint Editor’s Preface Jeeves Stories Extricating Young Gussie Leave It to Jeeves The Aunt and the Sluggard Jeeves Takes Charge Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg Jeeves in the Springtime Aunt Agatha Makes a Bloomer Scoring Off Jeeves Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch Jeeves and the Chump Cyril Comrade Bingo The Great Sermon Handicap The Purity of the Turf The Metropolitan Touch The Delayed Exit of Claude and Eustace Bingo and the Little Woman The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy Without the Option Fixing It for Freddie Clustering Round Young Bingo Bertie Changes His Mind The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy Jeeves and the Impending Doom Colophon Uncopyright Imprint

This ebook is the product of many hours of hard work by volunteers for Standard Ebooks, and builds on the hard work of other literature lovers made possible by the public domain.

This particular ebook is based on a transcriptions produced for Project Gutenberg and on digital scans available at the Internet Archive (The Inimitable Jeeves, The Man with Two Left Feet, The Saturday Evening Post, The Strand Magazine 1916–17 and Carry On, Jeeves) and HathiTrust Digital Library (The Strand Magazine 1926).

The writing and artwork within are believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks releases this ebook edition under the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. For full license information, see the Uncopyright at the end of this ebook.

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces ebook editions of public domain literature using modern typography, technology, and editorial standards, and distributes them free of cost. You can download this and other ebooks carefully produced for true book lovers at standardebooks.org.

Editor’s Preface

P. G. Wodehouse was an incredibly prolific writer who sold short stories to various publications around the world for the bulk of his career. His stories were also often anthologized later in larger collections like Carry on Jeeves or The Inimitable Jeeves.

As a result of this practice, variations⁠—sometimes extreme⁠—exist between the published versions of the stories. They were adapted for differences between British and American audiences, titles were changed and, in the case of the anthologies, whole paragraphs were added or deleted to create a more consistent internal flow. Wodehouse was also known to rewrite stories with entirely new characters in order to resell the content. In this anthology we have attempted to include the most recently published versions of the texts that are in the public domain⁠—subsequent versions may indeed have further revisions.

Most of the stories are, despite a paragraph or two, relatively unchanged from their original form. Stories that were split into chapters for publication in The Inimitable Jeeves have been recombined and published under their original titles, with a notable exception being “Aunt Agatha Makes a Bloomer.” It was originally published in April 1922 in The Strand Magazine as “Aunt Agatha Takes the Count.” Then a few months later, in October 1922, it was republished in Cosmopolitan as “Aunt Agatha Makes a Bloomer,” having been extensively rewritten and certain key plot elements changed. That version was split to make up two chapters in the 1922 The Inimitable Jeeves: “Aunt Agatha Speaks Her Mind” and “Pearls Mean Tears.” This revised version is reproduced here, recombined and titled “Aunt Agatha Makes a Bloomer.”

As many of the later stories are drawn from The Inimitable Jeeves, they are presented in the order they appeared in that volume. The rest are ordered by the date they first appeared in magazine form.

B. Timothy Keith

Edmonton, September 2019

Jeeves Stories Extricating Young Gussie

She sprang it on me before breakfast. There in seven words you have a complete character sketch of my Aunt Agatha. I could go on indefinitely about brutality and lack of consideration. I merely say that she routed me out of bed to listen to her painful story somewhere in the small hours. It can’t have been half past eleven when Jeeves, my man, woke me out of the dreamless and broke the news:

“Mrs. Gregson to see you, sir.”

I thought she must be walking in her sleep, but I crawled out of bed and got into a dressing-gown. I knew Aunt Agatha well enough to know that, if she had come to see me, she was going to see me. That’s the sort of woman she is.

She was sitting bolt upright in a chair, staring into space. When I came in she looked at me in that darn critical way that always makes me feel as if I had gelatine where my spine ought to be. Aunt Agatha is one of those strong-minded women. I should think Queen Elizabeth must have been something like her. She bosses her husband, Spencer Gregson, a battered little chappie on the Stock Exchange. She bosses my cousin, Gussie Mannering-Phipps. She bosses her sister-in-law, Gussie’s mother. And, worst of all, she bosses me. She has an eye like a man-eating fish, and she has got moral suasion down to a fine point.

I dare say there are fellows in the world⁠—men of blood and iron, don’t you know, and all that sort of thing⁠—whom she couldn’t intimidate; but if you’re a chappie like me, fond of a quiet life, you simply curl into a ball when you see her coming, and hope for the best. My experience is that when Aunt Agatha wants you to do a thing you do it, or else you find yourself wondering why those fellows in the olden days made such a fuss when they had trouble with the Spanish Inquisition.

“Halloa, Aunt Agatha!” I said.

“Bertie,” she said, “you look a sight. You look perfectly dissipated.”

I was feeling like a badly wrapped brown-paper parcel. I’m