Free A Few Quick Ones by P. G. Wodehouse Page A

the trick. Are you still sober?"
    "I am."
    "Then keep so over this next weekend, because you're coming down here."
    "Who, me?"
    "You, in person."
    "But, why?"
    "To help me sway her. You will exercise all your charm…"
    "I haven't much."
    "Well, exercise what you've got. Give her the old oil. Play on her as on a stringed instrument."
    I chewed the lip somewhat. I'm not keen on these blind dates. And if life has taught me one thing, it is that the prudent man keeps away from female novelists. But it might be, of course, that a gay house-party was contemplated. I probed her on this point.
    "Will anyone else be there? Is there any bright young society, I mean?"
    "I wouldn't call the society young, but it's very bright. There's Cornelia's husband, Everard Fothergill the artist, and his father Edward Fothergill. He's an artist, too, of a sort. You won't have a dull moment. So tell Jeeves to pack your effects, and we shall expect you on Friday. You will continue to haunt the house till Monday."
    "Cooped up with a couple of artists and a writer of rich goo? I don't like it,"
    "You don't have to like it," the aged relative assured me. "You just do it. Oh, and by the way, when you get here, I've a little something I want you to do for me."
    "What sort of a little something?"
    "I'll tell you about it when I see you. Just a simple little thing to help Auntie. You'll enjoy it," she said, and with a cordial "Toodle-oo" rang off.
     
    It surprises many people, I believe, that Bertram Wooster, as a general rule a man of iron, is as wax in the hands of his Aunt Dahlia, jumping to obey her lightest behest like a performing seal going after a slice of fish. They do not know that this woman possesses a secret weapon by means of which she can always bend me to her will - viz. the threat that if I give her any of my lip, she will bar me from her dinner table and deprive me of the roasts and boileds of her French chef Anatole, God's gift to the gastric juices. When she says Go, accordingly, I do not demur, I goeth, as the Bible puts it, and so it came about that toward the quiet evenfall of Friday the 22nd inst. I was at the wheel of the old sports model, tooling through Hants with Jeeves at my side and weighed down with a nameless foreboding.
    "Jeeves," I said, "I am weighed down with a nameless foreboding."
    "Indeed, sir?"
    "Yes. What, I ask myself, is cooking?"
    "I do not think I quite follow you, sir."
    "Then you jolly well ought to. I reported my conversation with Aunt Dahlia to you verbatim, and you should have every word of it tucked away beneath your bowler hat. To refresh your memory, after a certain amount of kidding back and forth she said I've a little something I want you to do for me', and when I enquired what, she fobbed me off…is it fobbed?"
    "Yes, sir."
    "She fobbed me off with a careless ‘Oh, just a simple little thing to help Auntie'. What construction do you place on those words ?"
    "One gathers that there is something Mrs. Travers wishes you to do for her, sir."
    "One does, but the point is - what? You recall what has happened in the past when the gentler sex have asked me to do things for them. Especially Aunt Dahlia. You have not forgotten the affair of Sir Watkyn Basset and the silver cow-creamer?"
    "No, sir."
    "On that occasion, but for you, Bertram Wooster would have done a stretch in the local hoosegow. Who knows that this little something to which she referred will not land me in a similar peril? I wish I could slide out of this binge, Jeeves."
    "I can readily imagine it, sir."
    "But I can't, I'm like those Light Brigade fellows. You remember how matters stood with them?"
    "Very vividly, sir. Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and. die."
    "Exactly. Cannons to right of them, cannons to left of them volleyed and thundered, but they had to keep snapping into it regardless. I know just how they felt," I said, moodily stepping on the accelerator. The brow was furrowed and the spirits low.
     
    Arrival at Marsham