09 Not George Washington

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  09 Not George Washington

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  Title: Not George Washington An Autobiographical Novel

  Author: P. G. Wodehouse

  Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7230] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on March 29, 2003]

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  NOT GEORGE WASHINGTON An Autobiographical Novel

  by P. G. Wodehouse and Herbert Westbrook

  1907

  CONTENTS

  Miss Margaret Goodwin’s Narrative“>PART ONE

  Miss Margaret Goodwin’s Narrative

  1. James Arrives 2. James Sets Out 3. A Harmless Deception

  James Orlebar Cloyster’s Narrative“>PART TWO

  James Orlebar Cloyster’s Narrative

  1. The Invasion of Bohemia 2. I Evacuate Bohemia 3. The Orb 4. Julian Eversleigh 5. The Column 6. New Year’s Eve 7. I Meet Mr. Thomas Blake 8. I Meet the Rev. John Hatton 9. Julian Learns My Secret 10. Tom Blake Again 11. Julian’s Idea 12. The First Ghost 13. The Second Ghost 14. The Third Ghost 15. Eva Eversleigh 16. I Tell Julian

  Sidney Price’s Narrative

  17. A Ghostly Gathering 18. One in the Eye 19. In the Soup 20. Norah Wins Home

  Julian Eversleigh’s Narrative

  21. The Transposition of Sentiment 22. A Chat with James 23. In a Hansom

  Narrative Resumed by James Orlebar Cloyster

  24. A Rift in the Clouds 25. Briggs to the Rescue 26. My Triumph

  PART ONE

  Miss Margaret Goodwin’s Narrative

  CHAPTER 1

  JAMES ARRIVES

  I am Margaret Goodwin. A week from today I shall be Mrs. James Orlebar Cloyster.

  It is just three years since I first met James. We made each other’s acquaintance at half-past seven on the morning of the 28th of July in the middle of Fermain Bay, about fifty yards from the shore.

  Fermain Bay is in Guernsey. My home had been with my mother for many years at St. Martin’s in that island. There we two lived our uneventful lives until fate brought one whom, when first I set my eyes on him, I knew I loved.

  Perhaps it is indiscreet of me to write that down. But what does it matter? It is for no one’s reading but my own. James, my fiancé, is not peeping slyly over my shoulder as I write. On the contrary, my door is locked, and James is, I believe, in the smoking-room of his hotel at St. Peter’s Port.

  At that time it had become my habit to begin my day by rising before breakfast and taking a swim in Fermain Bay, which lies across the road in front of our cottage. The practice—I have since abandoned it—was good for the complexion, and generally healthy. I had kept it up, moreover, because I had somehow cherished an unreasonable but persistent presentiment that some day Somebody (James, as it turned out) would cross the pathway of my maiden existence. I told myself that I must be ready for him. It would never do for him to arrive, and find no one to meet him.

  On the 28th of July I started off as usual. I wore a short tweed skirt, brown stockings—my ankles were, and are, good—a calico blouse, and a red tam-o’-shanter. Ponto barked at my heels. In one hand I carried my blue twill bathing-gown. In the other a miniature alpenstock. The sun had risen sufficiently to scatter the slight mist of the summer morning, and a few flecked clouds were edged with a slender frame of red gold.

  Leisurely, and with my presentiment strong upon me, I descended the steep cliffside to the cave on the left of the bay, where, guarded by the faithful Ponto, I was accustomed to disrobe; and soon afterwards I came out, my dark hair over my shoulders and blue twill over a portion of the rest of me, to climb out to the point of the projecting rocks, so that I might dive gracefully and safely into the still blue water.

  I was a good swimmer. I reached the ridge on the opposite side of the bay without fatigue, not changing from a powerful breast-stroke. I then sat for a while at the water’s edge to rest and to drink in the thrilling glory of what my heart persisted in telling me was the morning of my life.

  And then I saw Him.

  Not distinctly, for he was rowing a dinghy in my direction, and consequently had his back to me.

  In the stress of my emotions and an aggravation of modesty, I dived again. With an intensity like that of a captured conger I yearned to be hidden by the water. I could watch him as I swam, for, strictly speaking, he was in my way, though a little farther out to sea than I intended to go. As I drew near, I noticed that he wore an odd garment like a dressing-gown. He had stopped rowing.

  I turned upon my back for a moment’s rest, and, as I did so, heard a cry. I resumed my former attitude, and brushed the salt water from my eyes.

  The dinghy was wobbling unsteadily. The dressing-gown was in the bows; and he, my sea-god, was in the water. Only for a second I saw him. Then he sank.

  How I blessed the muscular development of my arms.

  I reached him as he came to the surface.

  “That’s twice,” he remarked contemplatively, as I seized him by the shoulders.

  “Be brave,” I said excitedly; “I can save you.”

  “I should be most awfully obliged,” he said.

  “Do exactly as I tell you.”

  “I say,” he remonstrated, “you’re not going to drag me along by the roots of my hair, are you?”

  The natural timidity of man is, I find, attractive.

  I helped him to the boat, and he climbed in. I trod water, clinging with one hand to the stern.

  “Allow me,” he said, bending down.

  “No, thank you,” I replied.

  “Not, really?”

  “Thank you very much, but I think I will stay where I am.”

  “But you may get cramp. By the way—I’m really frightfully obliged to you for saving my life—I mean, a perfect stranger—I’m afraid it’s quite spoiled your dip.”

  “Not at all,” I said politely. “Did you get cramp?”

  “A twinge. It was awfully kind of you.”

  “Not at all.”

  Then there was a rather awkward silence.

  “Is this your first visit to Guernsey?” I asked.

  “Yes; I arrived yesterday. It’s a delightful place. Do you live here?”

  “Yes; that white cottage you can just see through the trees.”

  “I suppose I couldn’t give you a tow anywhere?”

  “No; thank you very much. I will swim back.”

  Another constrained silence.

  “Are you ever in London, Miss–-?” />
  “Goodwin. Oh, yes; we generally go over in the winter, Mr.–-“

  “Cloyster. Really? How jolly. Do you go to the theatre much?”

  “Oh, yes. We saw nearly everything last time we were over.”

  There was a third silence. I saw a remark about the weather trembling on his lip, and, as I was beginning to feel the chill of the water a little, I determined to put a temporary end to the conversation.

  “I think I will be swimming back now,” I said.

  “You’re quite sure I can’t give you a tow?”

  “Quite, thanks. Perhaps you would care to come to breakfast with us, Mr. Cloyster? I know my mother would be glad to see you.”

  “It is very kind of you. I should be delighted. Shall we meet on the beach?”

  I swam off to my cave to dress.

  Breakfast was a success, for my mother was a philosopher. She said very little, but what she did say was magnificent. In her youth she had moved in literary circles, and now found her daily pleasure in the works of Schopenhauer, Kant, and other Germans. Her lightest reading was Sartor Resartus, and occasionally she would drop into Ibsen and Maeterlinck, the asparagus of her philosophic banquet. Her chosen mode of thought, far from leaving her inhuman or intolerant, gave her a social distinction which I had inherited from her. I could, if I had wished it, have attended with success the tea-drinkings, the tennis-playings, and the éclair-and-lemonade dances to which I was frequently invited. But I always refused. Nature was my hostess. Nature, which provided me with balmy zephyrs that were more comforting than buttered toast; which set the race of the waves to the ridges of Fermain, where arose no shrill, heated voice crying, “Love—forty”; which decked foliage in more splendid sheen than anything the local costumier could achieve, and whose poplars swayed more rhythmically than the dancers of the Assembly Rooms.

  The constraint which had been upon us during our former conversation vanished at breakfast. We were both hungry, and we had a common topic. We related our story of the sea in alternate sentences. We ate and we talked, turn and turn about. My mother listened. To her the affair, compared with the tremendous subjects to which she was accustomed to direct her mind, was broad farce. James took it with an air of restrained amusement. I, seriously.

  Tentatively, I diverged from this subject towards other and wider fields. Impressions of Guernsey, which drew from him his address, at the St. Peter’s Port Hotel. The horrors of the sea passage from Weymouth, which extorted a comment on the limitations of England. England. London. Kensington. South Kensington. The Gunton-Cresswells? Yes, yes! Extraordinary. Curious coincidence. Excursus on smallness of world. Queer old gentleman, Mr. Gunton-Cresswell. He is, indeed. Quite one of the old school. Oh, quite. Still wears that beaver hat? Does he really? Yes. Ha, ha! Yes.

  Here the humanising influence of the Teutonic school of philosophic analysis was demonstrated by my mother’s action. Mr. Cloyster, she said, must reconcile himself to exchanging his comfortable rooms at the St. Peter’s Port—(“I particularly dislike half-filled hotel life, Mrs. Goodwin”)—for the shelter of our cottage. He accepted. He was then “warned” that I was chef at the cottage. Mother gave him “a chance to change his mind.” Something was said about my saving life and destroying digestion. He went to collect his things in an ecstasy of merriment.

  At this point I committed an indiscretion which can only be excused by the magnitude of the occasion.

  My mother had retired to her favourite bow-window where, by a tour de force on the part of the carpenter, a system of low, adjustable bookcases had been craftily constructed in such a way that when she sat in her window-seat they jutted in a semicircle towards her hand.

  James, whom I had escorted down the garden path, had left me at the little wooden gate and had gone swinging down the road. I, shielded from outside observation (if any) by a line of lilacs, gazed rapturously at his retreating form. The sun was high in the sky now. It was a perfect summer’s day. Birds were singing. Their notes blended with the gentle murmur of the sea on the beach below. Every fibre of my body was thrilling with the magic of the morning.

  Through the kindly branches of the lilac I watched him, and then, as though in obedience to the primaeval call of that July sunshine, I stood on tiptoe, and blew him a kiss.

  I realised in an instant what I had done. Fool that I had been. The bow-window!

  I was rigid with discomfiture. My mother’s eyes were on the book she held. And yet a faint smile seemed to hover round her lips. I walked in silence to where she sat at the open window.

  She looked up. Her smile was more pronounced.

  “Margie,” she said.

  “Yes, mother?”

  “The hedonism of Voltaire is the indictment of an honest bore.”

  “Yes, mother.”

  She then resumed her book.

  CHAPTER 2

  JAMES SETS OUT (Miss Margaret Goodwin’s narrative continued)

  Those August days! Have there been any like them before? I realise with difficulty that the future holds in store for me others as golden.

  The island was crammed with trippers. They streamed in by every boat. But James and I were infinitely alone. I loved him from the first, from the moment when he had rowed out of the unknown into my life, clad in a dressing-gown. I like to think that he loved me from that moment, too. But, if he did, the knowledge that he did came to him only after a certain delay. It was my privilege to watch this knowledge steal gradually but surely upon him.

  We were always together; and as the days passed by he spoke freely of himself and his affairs, obeying unconsciously the rudder of my tactful inquisitiveness. By the end of the first week I knew as much about him as he did himself.

  It seemed that a guardian—an impersonal sort of business man with a small but impossible family—was the most commanding figure in his private life. As for his finances, five-and-forty sovereigns, the remnant of a larger sum which had paid for his education at Cambridge, stood between him and the necessity of offering for hire a sketchy acquaintance with general literature and a third class in the classical tripos.

  He had come to Guernsey to learn by personal observation what chances tomato growing held out to a young man in a hurry to get rich.

  “Tomato growing?” I echoed dubiously. And then, to hide a sense of bathos, “People have made it pay. Of course, they work very hard.”

  “M’yes,” said James without much enthusiasm.

  “But I fancy,” I added, “the life is not at all unpleasant.”

  At this point embarrassment seemed to engulf James. He blushed, swallowed once or twice in a somewhat convulsive manner, and stammered.

  Then he made his confession guiltily.

  I was not to suppose that his aims ceased with the attainment of a tomato-farm. The nurture of a wholesome vegetable occupied neither the whole of his ambitions nor even the greater part of them. To write—the agony with which he throatily confessed it!—to be swept into the maelstrom of literary journalism, to be en rapport with the unslumbering forces of Fleet Street—those were the real objectives of James Orlebar Cloyster.

  “Of course, I mean,” he said, “I suppose it would be a bit of a struggle at first, if you see what I mean. What I mean to say is, rejected manuscripts, and so on. But still, after a bit, once get a footing, you know—I should like to have a dash at it. I mean, I think I could do something, you know.”

  “Of course you could,” I said.

  “I mean, lots of men have, don’t you know.”

  “There’s plenty of room at the top,” I said.

  He seemed struck with this remark. It encouraged him.

  He had had his opportunity of talking thus of himself during our long rambles out of doors. They were a series of excursions which he was accustomed to describe as hunting expeditions for the stocking of our larder.

  Thus James would announce at breakfast that prawns were the day’s quarry, and the foreshore round Cobo Bay the hunting-ground. And to Cobo, accordingl
y, we would set out. This prawn-yielding area extends along the coast on the other side of St. Peter’s Port, where two halts had to be made, one at Madame Garnier’s, the confectioners, the other at the library, to get fiction, which I never read. Then came a journey on the top of the antediluvian horse-tram, a sort of diligence on rails; and then a whole summer’s afternoon among the prawns. Cobo is an expanse of shingle, dotted with seaweed and rocks; and Guernsey is a place where one can take off one’s shoes and stockings on the slightest pretext. We waded hither and thither with the warm brine lapping unchecked over our bare legs. We did not use our nets very industriously, it is true; but our tongues were seldom still. The slow walk home was a thing to be looked forward to. Ah! those memorable homecomings in the quiet solemnity of that hour, when a weary sun stoops, one can fancy with a sigh of pleasure, to sink into the bosom of the sea!

  Prawn-hunting was agreeably varied by fish-snaring, mussel-stalking, and mushroom-trapping—sports which James, in his capacity of Head Forester, included in his venery.

  For mushroom-trapping an early start had to be made—usually between six and seven. The chase took us inland, until, after walking through the fragrant, earthy lanes, we turned aside into dewy meadows, where each blade of grass sparkled with a gem of purest water. Again the necessity of going barefoot. Breakfast was late on these mornings, my mother whiling away the hours of waiting with a volume of Diogenes Laertius in the bow-window. She would generally open the meal with the remark that Anaximander held the primary cause of all things to be the Infinite, or that it was a favourite expression of Theophrastus that time was the most valuable thing a man could spend. When breakfast was announced, one of the covers concealed the mushrooms, which, under my superintendence, James had done his best to devil. A quiet day followed, devoted to sedentary recreation after the labours of the run.

  The period which I have tried to sketch above may be called the period of good-fellowship. Whatever else love does for a woman, it makes her an actress. So we were merely excellent friends till James’s eyes were opened. When that happened, he abruptly discarded good-fellowship. I, on the other hand, played it the more vigorously. The situation was mine.