"Listen, Nobby," I said.
"She didn't, of course. I've never met a girl yet who did. Say "listen" to any member of the delicately nurtured sex, and she takes it as a cue to start talking herself. However, as the subject she introduced proved to be the very one I had been planning to ventilate, the desire to beat her brains out with a brick was not so pronounced as it would otherwise have been.
(from Joy in the Morning, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
I groaned a hollow one. The heart had sunk. One has, of course, to make allowances for writers, all of them being more or less looney. Look at Shakespeare, for instance. Very unbalanced. Used to go about stealing ducks. Nevertheless, I couldn't help feeling that in springing Joke Goods on the guardian of the girl he loved Boko had carried an author's natural goofiness too far. Even Shakespeare might have hesitated to go to such lengths.
(from Joy in the Morning, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Well, I could readily understand Boko falling in love at first sight with Nobby, of course, for she is a girl liberally endowed with oomph. But how she could have fallen in love at first sight with Boko beat me. The first sight of Boko reveals to the beholder an object with a face like an intellectual parrot. Furthermore, as is the case with so many of the younger literati, he dresses like a tramp cyclist, affecting turtleneck sweaters and grey flannel bags with a patch on the knee and conveying a sort of general suggestion of having been left out in the rain overnight in an ash can. The only occasion on which I have ever seen Jeeves really rattled was when he met Boko for the first time. He winced visibly and tottered off to the kitchen, no doubt to pull himself together with cooking sherry.
(from Joy in the Morning, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"You don't mean Aunt Agatha's in London?"
"Merely passing through, sir," replied the honest fellow, calming my apprehensions. "Her ladyship is on her way to minister to Master Thomas, who has contracted mumps at his school."
His allusion was to the old relative's son by her first marriage, one of our vilest citizens. Many good judges rank him even higher in England's Rogue Gallery than her step-son Edwin. I was rejoiced to learn that he had got mumps, and toyed for a moment with a hope that Aunt Agatha would catch them from him.
(from Joy in the Morning, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
It is sad to reflect that a generation has arisen which does not know what spats were. I once wrote a book called Young Men in Spats. I could not use that title today.
Spatterdashes was, I believe, their full name, and they were made of white cloth and buttoned round the ankles, partly no doubt to protect the socks from getting dashed with spatter but principally because they lent a sort of gay diablerie to the wearer's appearance. The monocle might or might not be worn, according to taste, but spats, like the tightly rolled umbrella, were obligatory.
(from the Preface to Joy in the Morning, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Why can't I?" he said to his Countess as they sat one night trying to balance the budget.
"Why can't you what?" said the Countess.
"Let Algy starve."
"Algy who?"
"Our Algy."
"You mean our second son, the Hon. Algernon Blair Worthington ffinch-ffinch?"
"That's right. He's getting into my ribs to the tune of a cool thousand a year because I felt I couldn't let him starve. The point I'm making is why not let the young blighter starve?"
"It's a thought," the Countess agreed. "Yes, a very sound scheme. We all eat too much these days, anyway."
(from the Preface to Joy in the Morning, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
What generally happened was this. And Earl, let us say, begat an heir. So far, so good. One can always do with an heir. But then - these Earls never know when to stop - he absent-mindedly, as it were, begat a second son and this time was not any too pleased about the state of affairs. It was difficult to see how to fit him in. But there he was, requiring his calories just the same as if he had been first in succession. It made the Earl feel that he was up against something hard to handle.
(from the Preface to Joy in the Morning, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
The world of which I have been writing ever since I was so high, the world of the Drones Club and the lads who congregate there, was always a small world - one of the smallest I ever met, as Bertie Wooster would say. It was bounded on the east by St. James's Street, on the west by Hyde Park Corner, by Oxford Street on the north and by Piccadilly on the south. And now it is not even small, it is non-existent. It has gone with the wind and is one with Nineveh and Tyre. In a word, it has had it.
This is pointed out to me every time a new book of mine dealing with the Drones Club of Jeeves and Bertie is published in England. "Edwardian!" the critics hiss at me. (It is not easy to hiss the word Edwardian, containing as it does no sibilant, but they manage it.)
(from the Preface to Joy in the Morning, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
There were enough who remained, but any one of them might die, and that went for him as well. He was good - he knew that deep inside himself. He was resolute, he was fast, he was sure. Above all, at the moment of truth, that moment when it came time to draw and live, or draw and die, he was cool - or he always had been.
(from The Man Called Noon, by Louis L'Amour)
One of the main tests of a man's character is how he responds when he is in the minority opinion.
These men who were hunting him were outlaws, they were killers, and if they found him they would kill him, and they might kill Fan as well. Certainly they would terrorize her, bully her, keep her a prisoner. They were his enemies, enemies of society, beasts of prey. And yet he did not want to kill them.
Now his very lack of intent was a danger. In the situation he faced there could be no time for hesitation, no time for philosophical considerations. He must kill or be killed - and he did not want to die.
(from The Man Called Noon, by Louis L'Amour)
"You, and only you, know where the money is hidden. I do not know why Tom Davidge trusted you, but he did. We need each other, you and I."
He was impelled to laugh at the irony of it, but he held his face still. Only he knew where the half-million dollars was hidden, and he had lost his memory! He could just imagine trying to convince the Judge of that.
(from The Man Called Noon, by Louis L'Amour)
He remembered that the old man, Hennecker, had said he was a bad one. Was he? Searching himself, he could find no such motivations. He felt no animosity toward anyone, nor any desire to do evil.
Yet, did evil men ever think of themselves as evil? Did they not find excuses for the wrong that they did?
(from The Man Called Noon, by Louis L'Amour)
Often our father, when in the woods with us, would suddenly stop and ask that we describe some area just passed or the tracks of animals or insects we had just glimpsed in the dust of the track. With time our awareness had grown until we missed very little.
In the wilderness attention to detail was the price of survival.
(from The Warrior's Path, by Louis L'Amour)
Yet who was I to talk of women? I knew less of them than of deer or beaver, and they were much more chancy things from all I had heard.
Noelle was but a child when she left for England, so the little I knew of women was by observing the wife of my brother or those of my friends, and they were not helpful. A woman who has trapped her game has a different way about her than one who is still on the stalk.
(from The Warrior's Path, by Louis L'Amour)
The old man was reaching for the end of his rope. He was worn out and in need of help, but I'd had dealings with redskins since I was knee-high to a short duck, and Indians could be mighty sly. That old Indian might be a decoy to get me to show myself so's I could be bow shot or lanced, and I was wishful for neither. (from The Warrior's Path, by Louis L'Amour)
One wonders if that expression was actually in use in the 1600s or if L'Amour merely applied a more recent colloquialism to an historic period.
Women are practical. They get right down to bedrock about things, and no woman is going to waste much time remembering a man who was fool enough to kill himself. Thing to do is live for love, not die for it.
(from Sackett, by Louis L'Amour)
Not that it was likely she could ever see me. Girl that pretty had her choice of men. Nobody ever said much about me being good-looking - except Ma - and even Ma, with the best intentions in the world, looked kind of doubtful when she said it.
(from Sackett, by Louis L'Amour)
"Of course, one can see it from Sir Watkyn's point of view," said Stinker, who, if he has a fault besides bumping into furniture and upsetting it, is always far too tolerant in his attitude toward the dregs of humanity. "He thinks that if I'd drilled the distinction between right and wrong more vigorously into the minds of the Infants Bible Class, the thing wouldn't have happened."
"I don't see why not," said Stiffy.
Nor did I. In my opinion, no amount of Sunday afternoon instruction would have been sufficient to teach a growing boy not to throw hard-boiled eggs at Sir Watkyn Bassett.
(from Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"But you can't marry Emerald Stoker."
"Why not? We're twin souls."
I thought for a moment of giving him a word-portrait of old Stoker, to show him the sort of father-in-law he would be getting if he carried through the project he had in mind, but I let it go. Reason told me that a fellow who for months had been expecting to draw Pop Bassett as a father-in-law was not going to be swayed by an argument like that. However frank my description of him, Stoker could scarcely seem anything but a change for the better.
(from Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
