"A frown darkened her brow, and she kicked petulantly at a passing beetle." (from Eggs Beans and Crumpets)
We find expressions similar to this occasionally in the writings of Sir Pelham Wodehouse. This raises the question, Did the author carry a grudge against beetles? Had he had a particularly disturbing confrontation with one in his childhood? One wonders.
"Stamps" he said. "Yes, I am always ready to add to my collection, provided that what I am offered is of value and the price reasonable. Had you any figure in mind for these of yours, my dear Mulliner?"
Anselm said that he had been thinking of something in the neighbourhood of five thousand pounds, and Sir Leopold shook from stem to stern like a cat that has received half a brick in the short ribs. All his life the suggestion that he should part with large sums of money had shocked him.
(from Eggs Beans and Crumpets, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"They were engaged?" asked the Stout and Mild, beginning to get it.
"Secretly. Anselm did not dare to inform her uncle of the position of affairs, because all he had to marry on was his meagre stipend. He feared the wrath of that millionaire philatelist."
"Millionaire what?" asked a Small Bass.
"Sir Leopold," explained Mr. Mulliner, "collected stamps."
The Small Bass said that he had always thought that a philatelist was a man who was kind to animals.
"No," said Mr. Mulliner, "a stamp collector. Though many philatelists are, I believe, also kind to animals."
(from Eggs Beans and Crumpets, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse0
"Could you lend me a tenner, Oofy, old man?"
"No, I couldn't."
"It would save my life."
"There," said Oofy, "you have put your finger on the insuperable objection to the scheme. I see no percentage in your being alive. I wish you were a corpse, preferably a mangled one. I should like to dance on your remains."
Bingo was surprised. "Dance on my remains?"
"All over them."
Bingo drew himself up. He had his pride.
"Oh?" he said. "Well, in that case, tinkerty tonk."
(from Eggs Beans and Crumpets, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Mrs. Bingo's Pekes were all in bed when he got there, and when he went and sprang the little stranger on them he was delighted with the ready affability with which they made him one of themselves. Too often, when you introduce a ringer into a gaggle of Pekes, there ensues a scrap like New Year's Eve in Madrid; but tonight, after a certain amount of tentative sniffing, the home team issued their OK, and he left them all curled up in their baskets like so many members of the Athenaeum.
(from Eggs, Beans and Crumpets, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Well, as it turned out, Oofy's appetite was the reverse of blunted. The extraordinary position in which he found himself - guest and not host to a fellow-member of the Drones - seemed to have put an edge on it. It is not too much to say that from the very outset he ate like a starving python. The light, casual way in which he spoke to the head waiter about hothouse grapes and asparagus froze Bingo to the marrow. And when - from force of habit, no doubt - he called for the wine list and ordered a nice, dry champagne, it began to look to Bingo as if the bill for this binge was going to resemble something submitted to Congress by President Roosevelt in aid of the American Farmer.
(from Eggs, Beans, and Crumpets by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Ah-hum!" said Mr. Pickering
The effect on Lord Wetherby was remarkable. To hear someone clear his throat at the back of a dark room, where there should rightfully be no throat to be cleared, would cause even your man of stolid habit a passing thrill. The thing got right in among Lord Wetherby's highly sensitive ganglions like an earthquake. He uttered a strangled cry, then dashed out and slammed the door behind him.
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
But of the other members of the party, Dudley Pickering was unhappy because he feared that burglars were about to raid the house; Roscoe Sherriff because he feared they were not; Claire because, now that the news of the engagement was out, it seemed to be everybody's aim to leave her alone with Mr. Pickering, whose undiluted society tended to pall. And Lord Wetherby was unhappy because he found Eustace, the monkey, a perpetual strain upon his artistic nerves. It was Eustace who had driven him to his shack in the woods. He could have painted far more comfortably in the house, but Eustace had developed a habit of stealing up to him and plucking the leg of his trousers; and an artist simply cannot give of his best with that sort of thing going on.
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Dudley Pickering was not a self-starter in the motordrome of love. He needed cranking. He was that most unpromising of matrimonial material, a shy man with a cautious disposition. If he overcame his shyness, caution applied the foot-brake. If he succeeded in forgetting caution, shyness shut off the gas. At Reigelheimer's some miracle had made him not only reckless but un-selfconscious. Possibly the Dream of Psyche had gone to his head. At any rate, he had been on the very verge of proposing to Claire when the interruption had occurred, and in bed that night, reviewing the affair, he had been appalled at the narrowness of his escape from taking a definite step. Except in the way of business, he was a man who hated definite steps. He never accepted even a dinner invitation without subsequent doubts and remorse. The consequence was that, in the days that followed the Reigelheimer episode, what Lord Wetherby would have called the lamp of love burned rather low in Mr. Pickering, as if the acetylene were running out.
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Don't you wear a veil for this sort of job?"
As a rule Elizabeth did. She had reached a stage of intimacy with her bees which rendered a veil a superfluous precaution, but until today she had never abandoned it. Her view of the matter was that, though the inhabitants of the hives were familiar and friendly with her by this time and recognized that she came among them without hostile intent, it might well happen that among so many thousands there might be one slow-witted enough and obtuse enough not to have grasped this fact. And in such an event a veil was better than any amount of explanations, for you cannot stick to pure reasons when quarrelling with bees.
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Elizabeth entered Nutty's room and, seating herself on the bed, surveyed him with a bright, quiet eye that drilled holes in her brother's uneasy conscience. This was her second visit to him that morning. She had come an hour ago, bearing breakfast on a tray, and had departed without saying a word. It was this uncanny silence of hers even more than the effects - which still lingered - of his revels in the metropolis that had interfered with Nutty's enjoyment of the morning meal. Never a hearty breakfaster, he had found himself under the influence of her wordless disapproval physically unable to consume the fried egg that confronted him. He had given it one look; then, endorsing the opinion which he had once heard a character in a play utter in somewhat similar circumstances - that there was nothing on earth so homely as an egg - he had covered it with a handkerchief and tried to pull himself round with hot tea.
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
He had not reckoned with Heinrich Joerg. Indeed, he was not aware of Heinrich Joerg's existence. Yet fate was shortly to bring them together, with far-reaching results. Heinrich Joerg had left the Fatherland a good many years before with the prudent purpose of escaping military service. After various vicissitudes in the land of his adoption - which it would be extremely interesting to relate, but which mut wait for a more favourable opportunity, he had secured a useful and not ill-recompensed situation as one of the staff of Reigelheimer's Restaurant. He was, in point of fact, a waiter, and he comes into the story at this point bearing a tray full of glasses, knives, forks, and pats of butter on little plates. He was setting a table for some new arrivals, and in order to obtain more scope for that task he had left the crowded aisle beyond the table and come round to the edge of the dancing floor.
He should not have come out on to the dancing floor. In another moment he was admitting that himself. For just as he was lowering his tray and bending over the table in the pursuance of his professional duties, along came Bill at his customary high rate of speed, propelling his partner before him, and for the first time since he left home Heinrich was conscious of a regret that he had done so. There are worse things than military service!
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
It is a curious law of Nature that the most undeserving brothers always have the best sisters. Thrifty, plodding young men, who get up early, and do it now, and catch the employer's eye, and save half their salaries, have sisters who never speak civilly to them except when they want to borrow money.
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Was he sane, do you think?"
"Absolutely, for legal purposes. We have three opinions from leading doctors - collected by him in case of accidents, I suppose - each of which declares him perfectly sound from the collar upward. But a man can be pretty far gone, you know, without being legally insane, and old Nutcombe - well, suppose we call him whimsical. He seems to have zigzagged between the normal and the eccentric.
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
It was stimulating. The probability was that all Jerry Nichols wanted to tell him was that he had received stable information about some horse or had been given a box for the Empire, but for all that it was stimulating.
Bill looked at his watch. He could spare half an hour. He set out at once for the offices of the eminent law firm of Nichols, Nichols, Nichols, and Nichols, of which aggregation of Nicholses his friend Jerry was the last and smallest.
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
When she became engaged to Bill she had reached a point where she could obtain without difficulty good parts in the touring companies of London successes, but beyond that it seemed it was impossible for her to soar. It was not, perhaps, a very exhilarating life, but, except to the eyes of love, there was nothing tragic about it. It was the cumulative effect of having a mother in reduced circumstances and grumbling about it, of being compelled to work and grumbling about that, and of achieving in her work only a semi-success and grumbling about that also, that - backed by her looks - enabled Claire to give quite a number of people, and Bill Dawlish in particular, the impression that she was a modern martyr, only sustained by her indomitable courage.
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"I wish," said Claire, fretfully, leading the way down the grillroom stairs, "that you wouldn't let all London sponge on you like this. I keep telling you not to. I should have thought that if anyone needed to keep what little money he has got it was you."
Certainly Lord Dawlish would have been more prudent not to have parted with even eleven shillings, for he was not a rich man. Indeed, with the single exception of the Earl of Wetherby, whose finances were so irregular that he could not be said to possess an income at all, he was the poorest man of his rank in the British Isles.
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
It seemed to her that she was very much alone now. She was marooned on a desert island of froth and laughter. Everything that mattered she had lost.
Even Bill had gone from her. The bitter justice of Kirk's words came home to her now in her time of clear thinking. It was all true. In the first excitement of the new life he had bored her. She had looked upon Mrs. Porter as a saviour who brought her freedom together with an easy conscience. It had been so simple to deceive herself, to cheat herself into the comfortable belief that all that could be done for him was being done, when, as concerned the essential thing, as Kirk had said, there was no child of the streets who was not better off.
She tramped her round of social duties mechanically. Everything bored her now. The joy of life had gone out of her. She ate the bread of sorrow in captivity.
(from The Coming of Bill, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Her father, she knew, had always had a high opinion of Bailey's business instincts, and that was good enough for her. She could not know how completely revolutionized the latter's mind had become since the old man's death, and how freedom had turned him from a steady young man of business to a frenzied financier.
It was common report now that Bailey was taking big chances. Some went so far as to say that he was "asking for it," "it" in his case being presumably the Nemesis which waits on those who take big chances in an uncertain market. It was in the air that he was "going up against" the Pinkney-Dowd group and the Norman-Graham combination, and everybody knew that the cemeteries of Wall Street were full of the unhonoured graves of others who in years past had attempted to do the same.
(from The Coming of Bill, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
