Free Sunset at Blandings by P.G. Wodehouse Page A

[37]
    ‘How
absolutely absurd. I’ve all sorts of money.’
    ‘Held
in trust for you by your stepmother.’
    ‘She’d
have given it to me.’
    ‘Want
to bet?’
    ‘Anyway
we’d have got along somehow. There are a hundred things Jeff could have done.’
    ‘Name
three. I can only think of two—robbing a bank and stealing the Crown Jewels.
The trouble with you, young Victoria, is that you’re like all girls, you don’t
look ahead. You want something, and you go for it like a monkey after a banana.
The more prudent male counts the cost.’
    ‘When
have you ever counted the cost?’
    ‘Not
often, I admit. But I’m not a prudent male. Jeff’s different.’
    There
was a pause. Gally’s voice had lacked the Sarah Bernhardt note which had come
into it when he had been telling the tale, but his words, even without that
added attraction, were such as to give food for thought, and they had made
Vicky look pensive. She played a bar or two with an abstracted air.
    ‘I’ve
thought of something,’ she said suddenly.
    ‘That’s
good. What?’
    ‘There
wouldn’t be any need for us to starve in gutters. Freddie will sell that thing
of Jeff’s at any moment and we’ll be all right even if I can’t get my money.
They pay millions for these comic strips in America, and they go on for ever.
And when you’re tired of doing the work yourself you hand it over to someone
else and get paid just the same. Look at some of them. About as old as
Blandings Castle, and I’ll bet the fellows who started them have been dead for
centuries.’
    Gally
saw that the time had come to acquaint this optimistic girl with the facts of
life.
    ‘I was
about to touch on the J. Bennison comic strip,’ he said. ‘Don’t expect a large
annual income from it. Freddie tells me he has tried every possible market and
nobody wants it. However promising an architect Jeff may have been, he
apparently isn’t good at comic strips. Don’t blame him. Many illustrious
artists would have had the same trouble. Michelangelo, Tintoretto and Holbein
are names that spring to the mind.’
    Gally’s
prediction that it would not be long before his niece ceased to smile was
fulfilled with a promptitude which should have gratified him. If a bomb had
exploded in the smaller drawing-room, scattering old English folk songs left
and right, she could not have reacted more instantaneously. The haughtiness
which had been so distasteful to her uncle fell from her like a garment.
    ‘Oh,
Gally!’ she cried, her voice breaking and her attractive eyes widening to their
fullest extent. ‘Oh, the poor darling angel, he must be feeling awful.’
    ‘He is,’
said Gally, holding the view that this softer mood should be encouraged. ‘His
reception of the news was pitiful to see. It knocked him flatter than a Dover
sole. He reminded me of Blinky Bender, an old pal of mine at the Pelican, the
time when he won sixty pounds on the fourth at Newmarket and suddenly realized
that in order to collect the money he would have to go past five other bookies
in whose debt he was. You had better run along and console him.’
    ‘I
will.’
    ‘Making
it clear that all is forgiven and forgotten and that you are sweethearts still,’
said Gally, and he went off to get a glass of port in Beach’s pantry.

 
     
     
    CHAPTER
TWELVE
     
    JEFF had gone to his room
after dinner and changed into a sweater and flannel trousers. There was a full
moon, and it was his intention to sit on the terrace in its rays. [38] Not that he expected anything
curative to come of this. He did not share Gally’s confidence that telling the
tale to Vicky would pick up the pieces of a shattered world and glue them
together as good as new. He was aware that in his time Gally with his silver
eloquence had played on hardened turf commissioners as on so many stringed
instruments, but he could not but feel that the gifted man was faced now with a
task beyond even his great powers. Those cruel words to which Gally had