Love Among the Chickens u-1

by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

  And so it came about that, having reached the Cob and spying in the distance the grey head of the professor bobbing about on the face of the waters, we dived in and swam rapidly towards him.

  His face was turned in the opposite direction when we came up with him. He was floating peacefully on his back, and it was plain that he had not observed our approach. For when, treading water easily in his rear, I wished him good morning in my most conciliatory tone, he stood not upon the order of his sinking, but went under like so much pig– iron.

  I waited courteously until he rose to the surface again, when I repeated my remark.

  He expelled the last remnant of water from his mouth with a wrathful splutter, and cleared his eyes with the back of his hand. I confess to a slight feeling of apprehension as I met his gaze. Nor was my uneasiness diminished by the spectacle of Ukridge splashing tactfully in the background like a large seal. Ukridge so far had made no remarks. He had dived in very flat, and I imagine that his breath had not yet returned to him. He had the air of one who intends to get used to his surroundings before trusting himself to speech.

  “The water is delightfully warm,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s you!” said the professor; and I could not cheat myself into the belief that he spoke cordially. Ukridge snorted loudly in the offing. The professor turned sharply, as if anxious to observe this marine phenomenon; and the annoyed gurgle which he gave showed that he was not approving of Ukridge either. I did not approve of Ukridge myself. I wished he had not come. Ukridge, in the water, lacks dignity. I felt that he prejudiced my case.

  “You are swimming splendidly this morning,” I went on perseveringly, feeling that an ounce of flattery is worth a pound of rhetoric. “If,” I added, “you will allow me to say so.”

  “I will not!” he snapped. “I—” here a small wave, noticing that his mouth was open, stepped in. “I wish,” he resumed warmly, “as I said in me letter, to have nothing to do with you. I consider that ye’ve behaved in a manner that can only be described as abominable, and I will thank you to leave me alone.”

  “But allow me—”

  “I will not allow ye, sir. I will allow ye nothing. Is it not enough to make me the laughing-stock, the butt, sir, of this town, without pursuing me in this way when I wish to enjoy a quiet swim?”

  “Now, laddie, laddie,” said Ukridge, placing a large hand on his shoulder, “these are harsh words! Be reasonable! Think before you speak. You little know …”

  “Go to the devil!” said the professor. “I wish to have nothing to do with either of you. I should be glad if you would cease this persecution. Persecution, sir!”

  His remarks, which I have placed on paper as if they were continuous and uninterrupted, were punctuated in reality by a series of gasps and puffings, as he received and rejected the successors of the wave he had swallowed at the beginning of our little chat. The art of conducting conversation while in the water is not given to every swimmer. This he seemed to realise, for, as if to close the interview, he proceeded to make his way as quickly as he could to the shore. Unfortunately, his first dash brought him squarely up against Ukridge, who, not having expected the collision, clutched wildly at him and took him below the surface again. They came up a moment later on the worst terms.

  “Are you trying to drown me, sir?” barked the professor.

  “My dear old horse,” said Ukridge complainingly, “it’s a little hard. You might look where you’re going.”

  “You grappled with me!”

  “You took me by surprise, laddie. Rid yourself of the impression that you’re playing water-polo.”

  “But, professor,” I said, joining the group and treading water, “one moment.”

  I was growing annoyed with the man. I could have ducked him, but for the reflection that my prospects of obtaining his consent to my engagement would scarcely have been enhanced thereby.

  “But, professor,” I said, “one moment.”

  “Go away, sir! I have nothing to say to you.”

  “But he has lots to say to you,” said Ukridge. “Now’s the time, old horse,” he added encouragingly to me. “Spill the news!”

  Without preamble I gave out the text of my address.

  “I love your daughter, Phyllis, Mr. Derrick. She loves me. In fact, we are engaged.”

  “Devilish well put, laddie,” said Ukridge approvingly.

  The professor went under as if he had been seized with cramp. It was a little trying having to argue with a man, of whom one could not predict with certainty that at any given moment he would not be under water. It tended to spoil the flow of one’s eloquence. The best of arguments is useless if the listener suddenly disappears in the middle of it.

  “Stick to it, old horse,” said Ukridge. “I think you’re going to bring it off.”

  I stuck to it.

  “Mr. Derrick,” I said, as his head emerged, “you are naturally surprised.”

  “You would be,” said Ukridge. “We don’t blame you,” he added handsomely.

  “You—you—you—” So far from cooling the professor, liberal doses of water seemed to make him more heated. “You impudent scoundrel!”

  My reply was more gentlemanly, more courteous, on a higher plane altogether.

  I said, winningly: “Cannot we let bygones be bygones?”

  From his remarks I gathered that we could not. I continued. I was under the unfortunate necessity of having to condense my speech. I was not able to let myself go as I could have wished, for time was an important consideration. Ere long, swallowing water at his present rate, the professor must inevitably become waterlogged.

  “I have loved your daughter,” I said rapidly, “ever since I first saw her …”

  “And he’s a capital chap,” interjected Ukridge. “One of the best. Known him for years. You’ll like him.”

  “I learned last night that she loved me. But she will not marry me without your consent. Stretch your arms out straight from the shoulders and fill your lungs well and you can’t sink. So I have come this morning to ask for your consent.”

  “Give it!” advised Ukridge. “Couldn’t do better. A very sound fellow. Pots of money, too. At least he will have when he marries.”

  “I know we have not been on the best of terms lately. For Heaven’s sake don’t try to talk, or you’ll sink. The fault,” I said, generously, “was mine …”

  “Well put,” said Ukridge.

  “But when you have heard my explanation, I am sure you will forgive me. There, I told you so.”

  He reappeared some few feet to the left. I swam up, and resumed.

  “When you left us so abruptly after our little dinner-party—”

  “Come again some night,” said Ukridge cordially. “Any time you’re passing.”

  “ … you put me in a very awkward position. I was desperately in love with your daughter, and as long as you were in the frame of mind in which you left I could not hope to find an opportunity of revealing my feelings to her.”

  “Revealing feelings is good,” said Ukridge approvingly. “Neat.”

  “You see what a fix I was in, don’t you? Keep your arms well out. I thought for hours and hours, to try and find some means of bringing about a reconciliation. You wouldn’t believe how hard I thought.”

  “Got as thin as a corkscrew,” said Ukridge.

  “At last, seeing you fishing one morning when I was on the Cob, it struck me all of a sudden …”

  “You know how it is,” said Ukridge.

  “ … all of a sudden that the very best way would be to arrange a little boating accident. I was confident that I could rescue you all right.”

  Here I paused, and he seized the opportunity to curse me—briefly, with a wary eye on an incoming wavelet.

  “If it hadn’t been for the inscrutable workings of Providence, which has a mania for upsetting everything, all would have been well. In fact, all was well till you found out.”

  “Always the way,” said Ukridge sadly. “
Always the way.”

  “You young blackguard!”

  He managed to slip past me, and made for the shore.

  “Look at the thing from the standpoint of a philosopher, old horse,” urged Ukridge, splashing after him. “The fact that the rescue was arranged oughtn’t to matter. I mean to say, you didn’t know it at the time, so, relatively, it was not, and you were genuinely saved from a watery grave and all that sort of thing.”

  I had not imagined Ukridge capable of such an excursion into metaphysics. I saw the truth of his line of argument so clearly that it seemed to me impossible for anyone else to get confused over it. I had certainly pulled the professor out of the water, and the fact that I had first caused him to be pushed in had nothing to do with the case. Either a man is a gallant rescuer or he is not a gallant rescuer. There is no middle course. I had saved his life—for he would certainly have drowned if left to himself—and I was entitled to his gratitude. That was all there was to be said about it.

  These things both Ukridge and I tried to make plain as we swam along. But whether it was that the salt water he had swallowed had dulled the professor’s normally keen intelligence or that our power of stating a case was too weak, the fact remains that he reached the beach an unconvinced man.

  “Then may I consider,” I said, “that your objections are removed? I have your consent?”

  He stamped angrily, and his bare foot came down on a small, sharp pebble. With a brief exclamation he seized his foot in one hand and hopped up the beach. While hopping, he delivered his ultimatum. Probably the only instance on record of a father adopting this attitude in dismissing a suitor.

  “You may not!” he cried. “You may consider no such thing. My objections were never more absolute. You detain me in the water, sir, till I am blue, sir, blue with cold, in order to listen to the most preposterous and impudent nonsense I ever heard.”

  This was unjust. If he had listened attentively from the first and avoided interruptions and had not behaved like a submarine we should have got through the business in half the time.

  I said so.

  “Don’t talk to me, sir,” he replied, hobbling off to his dressing– tent. “I will not listen to you. I will have nothing to do with you. I consider you impudent, sir.”

  “I assure you it was unintentional.”

  “Isch!” he said—being the first occasion and the last on which I have ever heard that remarkable monosyllable proceed from the mouth of a man. And he vanished into his tent.

  “Laddie,” said Ukridge solemnly, “do you know what I think?”

  “Well?”

  “You haven’t clicked, old horse!” said Ukridge.

  Chapter 20.

  Scientific Golf

  People are continually writing to the papers—or it may be one solitary enthusiast who writes under a number of pseudonyms—on the subject of sport, and the over-doing of the same by the modern young man. I recall one letter in which “Efficiency” gave it as his opinion that if the Young Man played less golf and did more drill, he would be all the better for it. I propose to report my doings with the professor on the links at some length, in order to refute this absurd view. Everybody ought to play golf, and nobody can begin it too soon. There ought not to be a single able-bodied infant in the British Isles who has not foozled a drive. To take my case. Suppose I had employed in drilling the hours I had spent in learning to handle my clubs. I might have drilled before the professor by the week without softening his heart. I might have ported arms and grounded arms and presented arms, and generally behaved in the manner advocated by “Efficiency,” and what would have been the result? Indifference on his part, or—and if I overdid the thing—irritation. Whereas, by devoting a reasonable portion of my youth to learning the intricacies of golf I was enabled …

  It happened in this way.

  To me, as I stood with Ukridge in the fowl-run in the morning following my maritime conversation with the professor, regarding a hen that had posed before us, obviously with a view to inspection, there appeared a man carrying an envelope. Ukridge, who by this time saw, as Calverley almost said, “under every hat a dun,” and imagined that no envelope could contain anything but a small account, softly and silently vanished away, leaving me to interview the enemy.

  “Mr. Garnet, sir?” said the foe.

  I recognised him. He was Professor Derrick’s gardener.

  I opened the envelope. No. Father’s blessings were absent. The letter was in the third person. Professor Derrick begged to inform Mr. Garnet that, by defeating Mr. Saul Potter, he had qualified for the final round of the Combe Regis Golf Tournament, in which, he understood, Mr. Garnet was to be his opponent. If it would be convenient for Mr. Garnet to play off the match on the present afternoon, Professor Derrick would be obliged if he would be at the Club House at half-past two. If this hour and day were unsuitable, would he kindly arrange others. The bearer would wait.

  The bearer did wait. He waited for half-an-hour, as I found it impossible to shift him, not caring to use violence on a man well stricken in years, without first plying him with drink. He absorbed more of our diminishing cask of beer than we could conveniently spare, and then trudged off with a note, beautifully written in the third person, in which Mr. Garnet, after numerous compliments and thanks, begged to inform Professor Derrick that he would be at the Club House at the hour mentioned.

  “And,” I added—to myself, not in the note—”I will give him such a licking that he’ll brain himself with a cleek.”

  For I was not pleased with the professor. I was conscious of a malicious joy at the prospect of snatching the prize from him. I knew he had set his heart on winning the tournament this year. To be runner-up two years in succession stimulates the desire for first place. It would be doubly bitter to him to be beaten by a newcomer, after the absence of his rival, the colonel, had awakened hope in him. And I knew I could do it. Even allowing for bad luck—and I am never a very unlucky golfer—I could rely almost with certainty on crushing the man.

  “And I’ll do it,” I said to Bob, who had trotted up. I often make Bob the recipient of my confidences. He listens appreciatively, and never interrupts. And he never has grievances of his own. If there is one person I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.

  “Bob,” I said, running his tail through my fingers, “listen to me, my old University chum, for I have matured a dark scheme. Don’t run away. You know you don’t really want to go and look at that chicken. Listen to me. If I am in form this afternoon, and I feel in my bones that I shall be, I shall nurse the professor. I shall play with him. Do you understand the principles of Match play at Golf, Robert? You score by holes, not strokes. There are eighteen holes. All right, how was /I/ to know that you knew that without my telling you? Well, if you understand so much about the game, you will appreciate my dark scheme. I shall toy with the professor, Bob. I shall let him get ahead, and then catch him up. I shall go ahead myself, and let him catch me up. I shall race him neck and neck till the very end. Then, when his hair has turned white with the strain, and he’s lost a couple of stone in weight, and his eyes are starting out of his head, and he’s praying—if he ever does pray—to the Gods of Golf that he may be allowed to win, I shall go ahead and beat him by a hole. /I’ll/ teach him, Robert. He shall taste of my despair, and learn by proof in some wild hour how much the wretched dare. And when it’s all over, and he’s torn all his hair out and smashed all his clubs, I shall go and commit suicide off the Cob. Because, you see, if I can’t marry Phyllis, I shan’t have any use for life.”

  Bob wagged his tail cheerfully.

  “I mean it,” I said, rolling him on his back and punching him on the chest till his breathing became stertorous. “You don’t see the sense of it, I know. But then you’ve got none of the finer feelings. You’re a jolly good dog, Robert, but you’re a rank materialist. Bones and cheese and potatoes with gravy over them make you happy. You don’t know what it is to be in love.
You’d better get right side up now, or you’ll have apoplexy.”

  It has been my aim in the course of this narrative to extenuate nothing, nor set down aught in malice. Like the gentleman who played euchre with the Heathen Chinee, I state but facts. I do not, therefore, slur over my scheme for disturbing the professor’s peace of mind. I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.

  I felt ruthless towards the professor. I cannot plead ignorance of the golfer’s point of view as an excuse for my plottings. I knew that to one whose soul is in the game as the professor’s was, the agony of being just beaten in an important match exceeds in bitterness all other agonies. I knew that, if I scraped through by the smallest possible margin, his appetite would be destroyed, his sleep o’ nights broken. He would wake from fitful slumber moaning that if he had only used his iron instead of his mashie at the tenth, all would have been well; that, if he had putted more carefully on the seventh green, life would not be drear and blank; that a more judicious manipulation of his brassey throughout might have given him something to live for. All these things I knew.

  And they did not touch me. I was adamant. The professor was waiting for me at the Club House, and greeted me with a cold and stately inclination of the head.

  “Beautiful day for golf,” I observed in my gay, chatty manner. He bowed in silence.

  “Very well,” I thought. “Wait. Just wait.”

  “Miss Derrick is well, I hope?” I added, aloud.

  That drew him. He started. His aspect became doubly forbidding.

  “Miss Derrick is perfectly well, sir, I thank you.”

  “And you? No bad effect, I hope, from your dip yesterday?”

  “Mr. Garnet, I came here for golf, not conversation,” he said.