The problem with over-population

     "Whoever told you about population explosions?"

    "Jeeves. They are rather a favorite subject of his. He says if something isn't done pretty soon - "

    "I'll bet he said, If steps are not taken shortly through the proper channels."

    "He did, as a matter of fact. He said, If steps are not taken shortly through the proper channels, half the world will soon be standing on the other half's shoulders."

    "All right if you're one of the top layer."

    "Yes, there's that, of course."

    "Though even then it would be uncomfortable. Tricky sort of balancing act."

    "True."

    "And difficult to go for a stroll if you wanted to stretch the legs. And one wouldn't get much hunting."

    "Not much."

(from Jeeves and the Tie That Binds, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

    

Watch those stockbrokers!

     "You'll hardly believe this, but soon after that he turned up at Totleigh Towers, Sir Watkyn's house in Gloucestershire."

    "Incredible!'

    "I thought you'd think so."

    "Disguised, of course? A wig? A false beard? His cheeks stained with walnut juice?"

    "No, he came quite openly, invited by my future wife. She has a sort of sentimental pity for him. I think she hopes to reform him."

    "Girls will be girls."

    "Yes, but I wish they wouldn't."

    "Did you rebuke your future wife?"

    "I wasn't in a position to then."

    "Probably a wise thing, anyway. I once rebuked the girl I wanted to marry, and she went off and teamed up with a stockbroker."

(from Jeeves and the Tie That Binds, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Defending the family honor

     There was something in the unhappy man's tone as he spoke, something so crushed and forlorn, that John could not but melt a little. He paused at the door. I crossed his mind that he might possibly be able to cheer him up.

    "Uncle Lester," he said, "hod did you get on with Sergeant-Major Flannery at Healthward Ho?" 

    Mr. Carmody winced. Unpleasant memories seemed to be troubling him.

    "Just before I left," said John, "I blacked his eye and we fell downstairs together."

    "Downstairs?"

    "Right down the entire flight. He thumped his head against an oak chest."

    On Mr. Carmody's drawn face there hovered for an instant a faint flickering smile.

    "I thought you'd be pleased," said John.

(from Money For Nothing," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Felony and fat

 It has been laid down by an acute thinker that there is a subtle connection between felony and fat. Almost all embezzlers, for instance, says this authority, are fat men. Whether this is or is not true, the fact remains that the sensational criminality of the suggestion just made to him awoke no horror in Mr. Carmody's ample bosom. He was startled, as any man might be who had this sort of idea sprung suddenly on him in his own garden, but he was not shocked. A youth and middle age spent on the London Stock Exchange had left Lester Carmody singularly broad-minded. He had to a remarkable degree that spacious charity which allows a man to look indulgently on any financial project, however, fishy, provided he can see a bit in it for himself.

(from Money For Nothing, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Ah, for the days when churls were churls

 The lot of the English landed proprietor, felt Mr. Carmody, is not what it used to be in the good old times. When the first Carmody settled in Rudge he had found little to view with alarm. those were the days when churls were churls, and a scurvy knave was quite content to work twelve hours a day, Saturdays included, in return for a little black bread and an occasional nod of approval from his overlord. But in this twentieth century England's peasantry has degenerated. Modern sons of the soil expect coddling. Their roofs leak, and you have to mend them; their walls fall down and you have to build them up; their lanes develop holes and you have to restore the surface, and all this runs into money. The way things were shaping, felt Mr. Carmody, in a few years a landlord would be expected to pay for the repairs of his tenants' wireless sets.

(from Money For Nothing, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

I don't need to know about your BVDs

     Some years before the date of the events narrated in this story, at the time when there was all that trouble between the aristocratic householders of Riverside Row and the humbler dwellers in Budd Street (arising, if you remember, from the practice of the later of washing their more intimate articles of underclothing and hanging them to dry in back-gardens into which their exclusive neighbors were compelled to gaze every time they looked out of the window), the vicar of the parish, the  Rev. Alistair Pond-Pond, always a happy phrase-maker, wound up his address at the annual village sports of Rudge with an impressive appeal to the good feeling of those concerned.

    "We must not," said the Rev. Alistair, "consider ourselves as belonging to this section of Rudge-in-the-Vale or to that section of Rudge-in-the-Vale. Let us get together. Let us recollect that we are all fellow-members of one united community. Rudge must be looked on as a whole. And what a whole it is!"

(from Money For Nothing, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Society boxers?

 "Have you noticed," said Hugo, touching on a matter to which he had given some thought, "a rather odd thing about boxers these days? A few years ago you never heard of one that wasn't Beefy this or Porky that or Young Cat's-meat or something. But now they're all Claudes and Harolds and Cuthberts. And when you consider that the heavyweight champion of the world is actually named Eugene it makes you think a bit."

(from Money For Nothing, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

[By way of context, this book was first published in 1928, when the heavyweight champ was Gene Tunney. Tunney's birth name was actually James Joseph Tunney. In 1928, he married wealthy socialite Mary "Polly" Lauder. One of Tunney's sons because a U. S. Representative and Senator from California, and one became a lawyer and district attorney, so his life was somewhat different from that of most boxers of the era.]

A grip like a gorilla

     "My father left me a few thousand, you see, but most injudiciously made Uncle Lester my trustee, and I'm not allowed to get at the capital without the old blighter's consent. And now a pal of mine in London has written offering me a half share in a new night club which he's starting if I will put up five hundred pounds."

    "I see."

    "And what I ask myself," said Hugo, "is, will Uncle Lester part? That's what I ask myself.'

    "From what I've seen of Mr. Carmody, I shouldn't say that parting was the thing he does best."

    "He's got absolutely no gift for it whatever," said Hugo gloomily.

(from Money For Nothing, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Perhape one too many?

    "Oh, hallo, Aunt Daphne," he said. "Where are you off to?"

    "I am going to bed. I have a headache. Why are you so late, Esmond?"

    "Well, if you ask me," said Esmond cheerily, "I'd say it was because I didn't arrive sooner."

    "Colonel and Mrs. Kegley-Bassington were most surprised. They could not understand why you were not here."

    Esmond uttered a ringing laugh. "Then they must be the most priceless fatheads," he said. "You'd think a child would have realized that the solution was that I was somewhere else."

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

    

It doesn't take a brain surgeon

 Police constables are not built for speed. Where you catch them at their best is standing on street corners saying, "Pass along there." But, as I was stressing a moment ago, Augustus Fink-Nottle, in addition to being a flat racer of marked ability, was also a fathead, and now, when he had victory in his grasp, the fatheaded streak in him came uppermost. There was a tree standing at the roadside and, suddenly swerving off the course, he made for it and hoisted himself into its branches. And what he supposed that was going to get him, only his diseased mind knew. Ernest Dobbs may not have been one of Hampshire's brightest thinkers, but he was smart enough to stand under a tree.

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Frogs?!

     I goggled. "Doing what?"

    "Strewing frogs. In Constable Dobbs's boudoir. The Vicar suggested it."

    "The Vicar?"

    "I mean it was he who gave Corky the idea. She had been brooding a lot, poor girl, on Dobbs's high-handed behaviour in connection with her dog, and last night the Vicar happened to speak of Pharaoh and all those Plagues he got when he wouldn't let the Children of Israel go. You probably recall the incident? His words started a train of thought. It occurred to Corky that if Dobbs were visited by a Plague of Frogs, it might quite possibly change his heart and make him let Sam Goldwyn go. So she asked me to look in at his cottage and attend to the matter. She said it would please her and be good for Dobbs and would only take a few minutes of my time. She felt that the Plague of Lice might be even more effective, but she is a practical, clear-thinking girl and realized that lice are had to come by, whereas you can find frogs in any hedgerow."

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

    

Short, but sturdy

 The sleepless guardian of the peace of King's Deverill was one of those chunky, nobbly officers. It was as though Nature, setting out to assemble him, had said to herself, "I will not skimp." Nor had she done so, except possibly in the matter of height. I believe that in order to become a member of the Force you have to stand five feet nine inches in your socks, and Ernest Dobbs can only just have got his nose under the wire. But this slight perpendicular shortage had the effect of rendering his bulk all the more impressive. He was plainly a man who, had he felt disposed, could have understudied the village blacksmith and no questions asked, for it could be seen at a glance that the muscles of his brawny arms were strong as iron bands.

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Step aside, brother

 "H'm!" he said. "This will want a little management."

"Yes," I concurred.

"It calls for sophisticated handling. We shall have to think this over."

"I've been thinking it over for hours."

"Yes, but you've got one of those cheap substitute brains which are never any good. It will be different when a man like me starts giving it the cream of his intellect."

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

There are poets, and then there are poets

 It would not have surprised you to learn that Esmond Haddock was the author of sonnet sequences of a fruity and emotional nature which had made him the toast of Bloomsbury, for his air was that of a man who could rhyme "love" and "dove" as well as the next chap. Nor would you have been astonished if informed that he had recently felled an ox with a single blow. You would simply have felt what an ass the ox must have been to get into an argument with a fellow with a chest like that.

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Just call me Bertie

       "Let Madeline Bassett become hep to what has occurred and there can be but one result. Gussie will get the bum's rush, and the bowed figure you will see shambling down the aisle at her side, while the customers reach for their hats and the organ plays 'The Voice That Breathed O'er Eden' will be that of Bertram Wilberforce Wooster."

    "I didn't know your name was Wilberforce."

    I explained that except in moments of great emotion one hushed it up.

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

It tends not to promote romance

There had been moments when it had been touch and go, notably on the occasion when Gussie got lit up like a candelabra and in that condition presented the prizes to the young scholars of Market Snodsbury Grammar School. She had scratched his nomination then, though subsequently relenting, and it could not but be that she could scratch it again, should she discover that the man on whom she looked as a purer, loftier spirit than other men had received an exemplary sentence for wading in the Trafalgar Square fountain. Nothing puts an idealistic girl off a fellow more than the news that he is doing fourteen days in the jug.

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Perhaps a standing ovation?

 This came under the head of tidings of great joy. Too often at these binges the Brass Hats in charge tell you off to render the "Yoeman's Wedding Song," which for some reason always arouse the worst passions of the tough eggs who stand behind the back row. But no rustic standees have ever been known not to eat a knockabout cross-talk act. There is something about the spectacle of Performer A sloshing Performer B over the head with an umbrella and Performer B prodding Performer A in the midriff with a similar blunt instrument that seems to speak to their depths. Wearing a green beard and given adequate assistance by my supporting cast, I could confidently anticipate that I should have the clientele rolling in the aisles.

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Happy days again

 Even as his lips parted, there was a noise like a rising pheasant from the outskirts, and some solid object left the ranks and hurled itself on Constable Dobbs's chest. Closer inspection showed this to be Queenie. She was clinging to the representative of the Law like a poultice, and from the fact that she was saying, "Oh, Ernie!'" and bedewing his uniform with happy tears I deduced, being pretty shrewd, that what she was trying to convey was that all was forgiven and forgotten and that she was expecting the prompt return of the ring, the letters, and the china ornament with "A Present From Blackpool" on it. And as it did not escape my notice that he, on his side, was covering her upturned face with burning kisses and saying, "Oh, Queenie!" I gathered that Tortured Souls Preferred had taken another upward trend and that one could chalk up to the slate two more sundered hearts reunited in the springtime.

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

In short, he is a brat

 This Thos is one of those tough, hardboiled striplings, a sort of juvenile James Cagney with a touch of Edward G. Robinson. He has carroty hair and a cynical expression, and his manner is supercilious. You would think that anyone conscious of having a mother like my Aunt Agatha and knowing it could be proved against him, would be crushed and apologetic, but this is not the case. He swanks about the place as if he'd bought it, and in conversation with a cousin lacks tact and is apt to verge on the personal.

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Entirely too cheerful

 Though howling hurricanes and driving rainstorms would have been a more suitable accompaniment to the run of the action, the morning - or morn, if you prefer to string along with Aunt Charlotte - was bright and fair. My nervous system was seriously disordered, and one of God's less likeable creatures with about a hundred and fourteen legs had crawled down the back of my neck and was doing its daily dozen on the sensitive skin, but did Nature care? Not a hoot. The sky continued blue, and the fatheaded sun which I have mentioned shone smilingly throughout.

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)