Indiscretions of Archie - P. G. Wodehouse (essential books to read txt) 📗

“Nifty! My dear old soul! It’s frightful!”

“Can’t see what’s wrong with it,” grumbled Miss Silverton. “After I’ve had someone get New York on the long-distance phone and give the story to the papers you can explain, and they’ll let you out. Surely to goodness you don’t object, as a personal favour to me, to spending an hour or two in a cell? Why, probably they haven’t got a prison at all out in these parts, and you’ll simply be locked in a room. A child of ten could do it on his head,” said Miss Silverton. “A child of six,” she emended.

“But, dash it⁠—I mean⁠—what I mean to say⁠—I’m married!”

“Yes?” said Miss Silverton, with the politeness of faint interest. “I’ve been married myself. I wouldn’t say it’s altogether a bad thing, mind you, for those that like it, but a little of it goes a long way. My first husband,” she proceeded, reminiscently, “was a travelling man. I gave him a two-weeks’ tryout, and then I told him to go on travelling. My second husband⁠—now, he wasn’t a gentleman in any sense of the word. I remember once⁠—”

“You don’t grasp the point. The jolly old point! You fail to grasp it. If this bally thing comes out, my wife will be most frightfully sick!”

Miss Silverton regarded him with pained surprise.

“Do you mean to say you would let a little thing like that stand in the way of my getting on the front page of all the papers⁠—with photographs? Where’s your chivalry?”

“Never mind my dashed chivalry!”

“Besides, what does it matter if she does get a little sore? She’ll soon get over it. You can put that right. Buy her a box of candy. Not that I’m strong for candy myself. What I always say is, it may taste good, but look what it does to your hips! I give you my honest word that, when I gave up eating candy, I lost eleven ounces the first week. My second husband⁠—no, I’m a liar, it was my third⁠—my third husband said⁠—Say, what’s the big idea? Where are you going?”

“Out!” said Archie, firmly. “Bally out!”

A dangerous light flickered in Miss Silverton’s eyes.

“That’ll be all of that!” she said, raising the pistol. “You stay right where you are, or I’ll fire!”

“Right-o!”

“I mean it!”

“My dear old soul,” said Archie, “in the recent unpleasantness in France I had chappies popping off things like that at me all day and every day for close on five years, and here I am, what! I mean to say, if I’ve got to choose between staying here and being pinched in your room by the local constabulary and having the dashed thing get into the papers and all sorts of trouble happening, and my wife getting the wind up and⁠—I say, if I’ve got to choose⁠—”

“Suck a lozenge and start again!” said Miss Silverton.

“Well, what I mean to say is, I’d much rather take a chance of getting a bullet in the old bean than that. So loose it off and the best o’ luck!”

Miss Silverton lowered the pistol, sank into a chair, and burst into tears.

“I think you’re the meanest man I ever met!” she sobbed. “You know perfectly well the bang would send me into a fit!”

“In that case,” said Archie, relieved, “cheerio, good luck, pip-pip, toodle-oo, and goodbye-ee! I’ll be shifting!”

“Yes, you will!” cried Miss Silverton, energetically, recovering with amazing swiftness from her collapse. “Yes, you will, I by no means suppose! You think, just because I’m no champion with a pistol, I’m helpless. You wait! Percy!”

“My name is not Percy.”

“I never said it was. Percy! Percy, come to muzzer!”

There was a creaking rustle from behind the armchair. A heavy body flopped on the carpet. Out into the room, heaving himself along as though sleep had stiffened his joints, and breathing stertorously through his tilted nose, moved the fine bulldog. Seen in the open, he looked even more formidable than he had done in his basket.

“Guard him, Percy! Good dog, guard him! Oh, heavens! What’s the matter with him?”

And with these words the emotional woman, uttering a wail of anguish, flung herself on the floor beside the animal.

Percy was, indeed, in manifestly bad shape. He seemed quite unable to drag his limbs across the room. There was a curious arch in his back, and, as his mistress touched him, he cried out plaintively,

“Percy! Oh, what is the matter with him? His nose is burning!”

Now was the time, with both sections of the enemy’s forces occupied, for Archie to have departed softly from the room. But never, since the day when at the age of eleven he had carried a large, damp, and muddy terrier with a sore foot three miles and deposited him on the best sofa in his mother’s drawing-room, had he been able to ignore the spectacle of a dog in trouble.

“He does look bad, what!”

“He’s dying! Oh, he’s dying! Is it distemper? He’s never had distemper.”

Archie regarded the sufferer with the grave eye of the expert. He shook his head.

“It’s not that,” he said. “Dogs with distemper make a sort of snifting noise.”

“But he is making a snifting noise!”

“No, he’s making a snuffling noise. Great difference between snuffling and snifting. Not the same thing at all. I mean to say, when they snift they snift, and when they snuffle they⁠—as it were⁠—snuffle. That’s how you can tell. If you ask me”⁠—he passed his hand over the dog’s back. Percy uttered another cry. “I know what’s the matter with him.”

“A brute of a man kicked him at rehearsal. Do you think he’s injured internally?”

“It’s rheumatism,” said Archie. “Jolly old rheumatism. That’s all that’s the trouble.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely!”

“But what can I do?”

“Give him a good hot bath, and mind and dry him well. He’ll have a good sleep then, and won’t have any pain. Then, first thing tomorrow, you want to give him salicylate of soda.”

“I’ll never remember that.”⁠—“I’ll write it down for you. You ought to give him from ten to twenty grains