Short Fiction - P. G. Wodehouse (top ten ebook reader txt) 📗

taken a hand in this game. If it hadn’t of been my evening off, don’t you see, I wouldn’t have got home till one o’clock or past that in the morning, being on duty. Whereas, seeing it was my evening off, I was back at half past eight.

I was living at the same boardinghouse in Bloomsbury what I’d lived at for the past ten years, and when I got there I find her letter shoved half under my door.

I can tell you every word of it. This is how it went:

Darling Uncle Bill,

Don’t be too sorry when you read this. It is nobody’s fault, but I am just tired of everything, and I want to end it all. You have been such a dear to me always that I want you to be good to me now. I should not like Andy to know the truth, so I want you to make it seem as if it had happened naturally. You will do this for me, won’t you? It will be quite easy. By the time you get this, it will be one, and it will all be over, and you can just come up and open the window and let the gas out and then everyone will think I just died naturally. It will be quite easy. I am leaving the door unlocked so that you can get in. I am in the room just above yours. I took it yesterday, so as to be near you. Goodbye, Uncle Bill. You will do it for me, won’t you? I don’t want Andy to know what it really was.

Katie

That was it, mister, and I tell you it floored me. And then it come to me, kind of as a new idea, that I’d best do something pretty soon, and up the stairs I went quick.

There she was, on the bed, with her eyes closed, and the gas just beginning to get bad.

As I come in, she jumped up, and stood staring at me. I went to the tap, and turned the flow off, and then I gives her a look.

“Now then,” I says.

“How did you get here?”

“Never mind how I got here. What have you got to say for yourself?”

She just began to cry, same as she used to when she was a kid and someone had hurt her.

“Here,” I says, “let’s get along out of here, and go where there’s some air to breathe. Don’t you take on so. You come along out and tell me all about it.”

She started to walk to where I was, and suddenly I seen she was limping. So I gave her a hand down to my room, and set her on a chair.

“Now then,” I says again.

“Don’t be angry with me, Uncle Bill,” she says.

And she looks at me so pitiful that I goes up to her and puts my arm round her and pats her on the back.

“Don’t you worry, dearie,” I says, “nobody ain’t going to be angry with you. But, for goodness’ sake,” I says, “tell a man why in the name of goodness you ever took and acted so foolish.”

“I wanted to end it all.”

“But why?”

She burst out a-crying again, like a kid.

“Didn’t you read about it in the paper, Uncle Bill?”

“Read about what in the paper?”

“My accident. I broke my ankle at rehearsal ever so long ago, practising my new dance. The doctors say it will never be right again. I shall never be able to dance any more. I shall always limp. I shan’t even be able to walk properly. And when I thought of that⁠ ⁠… and Andy⁠ ⁠… and everything⁠ ⁠… I.⁠ ⁠…”

I got on to my feet.

“Well, well, well,” I says. “Well, well, well! I don’t know as I blame you. But don’t you do it. It’s a mug’s game. Look here, if I leave you alone for half an hour, you won’t go trying it on again? Promise.”

“Very well, Uncle Bill. Where are you going?”

“Oh, just out. I’ll be back soon. You sit there and rest yourself.”

It didn’t take me ten minutes to get to the restaurant in a cab. I found Andy in the back room.

“What’s the matter, Henry?” he says.

“Take a look at this,” I says.

There’s always this risk, mister, in being the Andy type of feller what must have his own way and goes straight ahead and has it; and that is that when trouble does come to him, it comes with a rush. It sometimes seems to me that in this life we’ve all got to have trouble sooner or later, and some of us gets it bit by bit, spread out thin, so to speak, and a few of us gets it in a lump⁠—biff! And that was what happened to Andy, and what I knew was going to happen when I showed him that letter. I nearly says to him, “Brace up, young feller, because this is where you get it.”

I don’t often go to the theatre, but when I do I like one of those plays with some ginger in them which the papers generally cuss. The papers say that real human beings don’t carry on in that way. Take it from me, mister, they do. I seen a feller on the stage read a letter once which didn’t just suit him; and he gasped and rolled his eyes and tried to say something and couldn’t, and had to get a hold on a chair to keep him from falling. There was a piece in the paper saying that this was all wrong, and that he wouldn’t of done them things in real life. Believe me, the paper was wrong. There wasn’t a thing that feller did that Andy didn’t do when he read that letter.

“God!” he says. “Is she⁠ ⁠… She isn’t.⁠ ⁠… Were you in time?” he says.

And he looks at me, and I seen that he had got it in the neck, right enough.

“If you mean is she dead,” I says, “no, she ain’t dead.”

“Thank