The Inimitable Jeeves
By Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
I realized now that poor old Bingo was going through it once again. Ever since I have known him—and we were at school together—he has been perpetually falling in love with someone, generally in the spring, which seems to act on him like magic. At school, he had the finest collection of actresses’ photographs of anyone of his time, and at Oxford, his romantic nature was a byword.
“You’d better come along and meet her at lunch,” he said, looking at his watch.
“That’s a ripe suggestion. Where are you meeting her? At the Ritz?”
“Near the Ritz.”
He was geographically accurate. About fifty yards east of the Ritz, there is one of those blighted tea-and-bun shops you see dotted about all over London. Into this, if you’ll believe me, young Bingo dived like a homing rabbit, and before I had time to say a word, we were wedged in at a table, on the brink of a silent pool of coffee left there by an early luncher.
I’m bound to say I couldn’t quite follow the development of the scenario. While not rolling in the stuff, Bingo has always had a fair amount of the ready. Apart from what he got from his uncle, I knew he had finished up the jumping season well on the right side of the ledger. Why, then, was he lunching the girl at this Godforsaken eatery? It couldn’t be because he was hard up.
Just then, the waitress arrived—rather a pretty girl.
“Aren’t we going to wait——?” I started to say to Bingo, thinking it somewhat thick that, besides asking a girl to lunch with him in a place like this, he should fling himself on the foodstuffs before she turned up, when I caught sight of his face and stopped.
The man was giggling. His entire map was suffused with a rich blush. He looked like the Soul’s Awakening done in pink.
“Hello, Mabel!” he said with a gulp.
“Hello!” said the girl.
Genre: Non-Fiction
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Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975) was an English writer and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century.
Biography.
His creations include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious Psmith; Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the Oldest Member, with golf stories; and Mr Mulliner, with tall tales on subjects ranging from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls.
Born in Guildford, the third son of a British magistrate based in Hong Kong, Wodehouse spent happy teenage years at Dulwich College, to which he remained devoted all his life. After leaving school he was employed by a bank but disliked the work and turned to writing in his spare time. His early novels were mostly school stories, but he later switched to comic fiction. Most of Wodehouse’s fiction is set in his native United Kingdom, although he spent much of his life in the US and used New York and Hollywood as settings for some of his novels and short stories. He wrote a series of Broadway musical comedies during and after the First World War, together with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, that played an important part in the development of the American musical. He began the 1930s writing for MGM in Hollywood. In a 1931 interview, his naive revelations of incompetence and extravagance in the studios caused a furor. In the same decade, his literary career reached a new peak.
In 1934 Wodehouse moved to France for tax reasons; in 1940 he was taken prisoner at Le Touquet by the invading Germans and interned for nearly a year. After his release, he made six broadcasts from German radio in Berlin to the US, which had not yet entered the war. The talks were comic and apolitical, but his broadcasting over enemy radio prompted anger and strident controversy in Britain and a threat of prosecution. Wodehouse never returned to England. From 1947 until his death he lived in the US, taking dual British-American citizenship in 1955. He died in 1975, at the age of 93, in Southampton, New York, one month after he was awarded a knighthood of the Order of the British Empire (KBE).
Wodehouse was a prolific writer throughout his life, publishing more than ninety books, forty plays, two hundred short stories, and other writings between 1902 and 1974. He worked extensively on his books, sometimes having two or more in preparation simultaneously. He would take up to two years to build a plot and write a scenario of about thirty thousand words. After the scenario was complete he would write the story. Early in his career, Wodehouse would produce a novel in about three months, but he slowed in old age to around six months. He used a mixture of Edwardian slang, quotations from and allusions to numerous poets, and several literary techniques to produce a prose style that has been compared to comic poetry and musical comedy. Some critics of Wodehouse have considered his work flippant, but among his fans are former British prime ministers and many of his fellow writers.
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
