MONEY FOR NOTHING

Taranaki Daily News, 24 November 1934, Page 23 (Supplement)

MONEY FOR NOTHING

By

P. G. Wodehouse

CHAPTER 23 (continued).

The desire to say something almost inhumanly sarcastic and the difficulty of finding just the right words caused the colonel to miss his chance of interrupting at this point. What should have been a searing retort became a mere splutter. “He feels he behaved badly to you. He admits that in grabbing you round the waist and putting you in between him and that dynamite he acted on the spur of an impulse to which he should never have yielded. He has been wondering ever since how best he miS l / heal the breach. Haven’t you, Uucle Lester?” Mr. Carmody swallowed painfully.

“Yes.” “He says ‘Yes,’ ” said John, relaying the Information to its receiving station. ‘"You have always been his closest friend, and the thought that there was this estrangement has been preying on my uncle's mind. This morning, unable to endure it any longer, he came to me and asked my advice. I was very glad to give it him. And I am still moie glad that he took it. My uncle will now say a few words. Uucle Lester! Mr. Carmody rose haltingly from his seat. He was a man who stood on the verge of parting with one thousand pounds in cool cash, and he looked it. His face was haggard, and his. voice, when ■he contrived to speak, thin ano trembling.

“Wyvern, I—” “—thought-” prompted John. “I thought,” said Mr. Carmody, that in the circumstances—” “It would be best—” “It would be best if—” Words—and there should have been sixty-three more of them—failed Mr. Carmody. He pushed a slip of paper across the table and resumed his seat, a suffering man. “I fall to-” began Colonel Wyvern. And then his eye fell on the slip of paper, and pomposity slipped from him like breath off a razor blade. What—what—” he said. “Moral and intellectual damages, said John. “My uncle feels he owes It to 5 Silence fell upon the room. The colonel had picked up the cheque and was scrutinising it as if he had been a naturalist and it some rare specimen encountered in the course of his walks abroad. His eyebrows, disentangling themselves and moving apart, rose in an astonishment he made no attempt to conceal. He looked from the cheque to Mr. Carmody and back again. “Good heavens!” said Colonel Wyvern. With a sudden movement he tore the paper in two, burst into a crackling laugh, and held his hand out. . “Good heavens!” he cried jovially. Do you thing I want money? All I ever wanted was for you to admit you were an old scoundrel and murderer, and you’ve done it. And if you knew how lonely it’s been in this infernal place with no one to speak to or smoke a cigar with—” . ; Mr. Carmody had risen, m his eyes the look of one who sees, visions and beholds miracles. He gazed at his old friend m awe. Long as he had known him, it was only now that he realised his true nobility of soul. “Wyvern!” “Carmody,** said Colonel Wyvern, “how are the pike?” “The pike?” Mr. Carmody blinked, still dazed. “Pike?” “In the moat. Have you caught the big one yet?” “Not-yet.” ~ s '“I’ll come up and try for him this afternoon, shall I?”

“Yes.” . “He says ‘Yes,’” said John, mterpretonly just now,” said Colonel Wvvern, “I was savaging my . daughter because she wanted to marry into your “What’s that?” cried Mr. Carmody, and John clutched the edge of the table. His heart had given a sudden ecstatic leap, and for an instant the room haa seemed to rock about him. “Yes,” said Colonel Wyvern. He broke into another of his laughs, and John could not help wondering where Pat bad got that heavenly tinkle of silver bells which served her on occasions when sne was amused. Not from her fathers side of the family. “Bless my soul!” said Mr. Carmodv. “Yes,” said Colonel Wyvern. ohe came to me just before you arrived and told me that she wanted to marry your nephew Hugo.” Some years before, in pursuance or

his 'duties as' a member of the English Rugby football fifteen, it had become necessary for John one rainy afternoon in Dublin to fall on the ball at a moment when five or six muscular Irish forwards full of Celtic enthusiasm were endeavouring to kick it. Uutil this moment he had always ranked that as the most unpleasant and disintegrating experience of his life. His fingers tightened their clutch on the table. He found its support grateful. He blinked once very quickly as if he had just received a blow in the face, and then a second time more slowly. , ■ . “Hugo?” he said. He felt , numbed, just as he had felt numbed in Dublin when what had appeared to be a flock of centipedes with cleated boots, had made him the object of their attentions. All the breath had gone out of him, and though what he was suffering was at the present more a dull shock than actual pain, he realised dimly that there would be pain coming shortly in full measure, “Hugo?” he said. Faintly blurred by the drumming of the blood in his ears, there came to him the sound of his uncle’s voice. Mr. Carmody was saying that he was delighted. And the utter impossibility of remaining in the same room with a man who could be delighted at the news that Pat was engaged to Hugo swept over John like a wave.. Releasing his grip on the table, he. laid a . course for the french windows and, reaching them, tottered out into, the garden.. Pat was walking on the little lawn, and at the sight of her his numbness left John. He seemed to wake with a start, and, waking, found himself in the grip of a great many emotions which, after seething and bubbling for awhile, crystallised suddenly into a white-hot fury. He was hurt all over and through and through, but he was so angry that only subconsciously was he aware»of this. Pat was looking so cool and trim and alluring, so altogether as if it caused her no concern whatever that she had made a fool of a good man, raising his hopes only to let them fall and encouraging him to dream dreams only to shatter -them, that' he felt he hated her. 1 She turned as he stepped on to ‘he grass, and they looked at one another in silence for a moment. Then John, in a voice which was strangely unm.e his own, said ‘‘Good morning. “Good morning,” said Pat, and there was silence again. She did not attempt to avoid his eye —the least, John felt, that she could have . done in the circumstances. She waJ looking straight at him, and there was something of defiance in her gaze. Her chin was tilted. To her, judging from her manner, he was not the man whose hopes she had frivolously raised by kissing him that night on the Skirme, but merely an unwelcome intruder interrupting a pleasant reverie. “So you’re back?” she said. John swallowed what appeared to oe some sort of obstruction half-way down his chest. He was anxious to speak, but afraid that, if he spoke, he would stammer. And a man on an occasion like this does not wish to give, away by stammering the fact that he is not perfectly happy and debonair and altogether without a care in the world. , “I . hear you’re engaged to Hugo,” he said, speaking carefully and spacing the syllables so that they did not run into each other as they showed an inclination to do. “Yes.”

“I congratulate you” “You ■ ought.' to congratulate • him, oughtn’t" you, and just say to me that you hope I’ll be happy? ’ “I hope you will be happy,” said John, accepting this maxim from the Book of Etiquette. ■ “Thanks.” , “Very happy." “Thanks,” There was a pause. . . “It’s—a little sudden, isn't it?” “Is it?” “When did Hugo, get back?” “This morning. His letter arrived by the' first, post, and he came in right on top of it,” “His letter?” “Yes. He wrote asking me to marry him.” “Oh?” . . Pat traced an arabesque on the grass with the toe of her shoe. “It was a beautiful letter.” “Was it?”.. “Very. I didn’t, think Hugo was, capable of it.” . (To be continued).