Money for nothingWodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville)
General
Money for nothing
Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville)
Greed -- Fiction; Humorous stories; Swindlers and swindling -- Fiction
At once Emily became herself again. All her sporting blood stirred in
answer to these shouts. She forgot her agony. Her sense of grievance
left her. Recognizing Hugo, she saw all things clearly, and realized
in a flash that here at last was the burglar for whom she had been
waiting ever since her conversation with that wire-haired terrier over
at Webleigh Manor.
John had taken her to lunch there one day and, fraternizing with
the Webleigh dog under the table, she had immediately noticed in
his manner something aloof and distinctly patronizing. It had then
come out in conversation that they had had a burglary at the Manor
a couple of nights ago, and the wire-haired terrier, according to
his own story, had been the hero of the occasion. He spoke with an
ill-assumed offhandedness of barking and bitings and chasings in the
night, and, though he did not say it in so many words, gave Emily
plainly to understand that it took an unusual dog to grapple with such
a situation, and that in a similar crisis she herself would inevitably
be found wanting. Ever since that day she had been longing for a chance
to show her mettle, and now it had come. Calling instructions in a high
voice, she raced for the bushes into which Chimp had disappeared. Hugo,
a bad third, brought up the rear of the procession.
Chimp, meanwhile, had been combining with swift movement some very
rapid thinking. Fortune had been with him in the first moments of this
dash for safety, but now, he considered, it had abandoned him, and he
must trust to his native intelligence to see him through. He had not
anticipated dogs. Dogs altered the whole complexion of the affair. To
a go-as-you-please race across country with Hugo he would have trusted
himself, but Hugo in collaboration with a dog was another matter. It
became now a question not of speed but of craft; and he looked about
him, as he ran, for a hiding place, for some shelter from this canine
and human storm which he had unwittingly aroused.
And Fortune, changing sides again, smiled upon him once more. Emily,
who had been coming nicely, attempted very injudiciously at this
moment to take a short cut and became involved in a bush. And Chimp,
accelerating an always active brain, perceived a way out. There was a
low stone wall immediately in front of him, and beyond it, as he came
up, he saw the dull gleam of water.
It was not an ideal haven, but he was in no position to pick and
choose. The interior of the tank from which the gardeners drew
ammunition for their watering cans had, for one who from childhood had
always disliked bathing, a singularly repellent air. Those dark, oily
looking depths suggested the presence of frogs, newts, and other slimy
things that work their way down a man's back and behave clammily around
his spine. But it was most certainly a place of refuge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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