A wodehouse bestiary, p.1
A Wodehouse Bestiary, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Foreword
Preface
Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court
Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch
Something Squishy
Pig-Hoo-o-o-o-ey!
Comrade Bingo
Monkey Business
Jeeves and the Impending Doom
Open House
Ukridge's Dog College
The Story of Webster
The Go-Getter
Jeeves and the Old School Chum
Uncle Fred Flits By
The Mixer
About the Author
First Mariner Books edition 1999
Preface copyright © 1985 by D. R. Bensen
"Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court" and "Something Squishy"
were originally collected in Mr. Mulliner Speaking, copyright 1925,
1926, 1927, 1928 and 1929 by P. G. Wodehouse; renewed 1953, 1954,
1955, 1956 and 1957.
"Pig-Hoo-o-o-o-ey!," "Monkey Business" and "The Go-Getter"
were originally collected in Blandings Castle, copyright 1924, 1926,
1927, 1928, 1932, 1933, 1935 by P. G. Wodehouse; renewed 1952, 1954,
1955, 1956, 1960, 1961 and 1963.
"Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch" and "Comrade Bingo" were first
collected in Jeeves, copyright 1923 by George H. Doran Company;
renewed 1951 by P. G. Wodehouse.
"Jeeves and the Impending Doom" and "Jeeves and the Old School
Chum" were first collected in Very Good, Jeepes!, copyright 1926, 1927,
1929, 1930 by P. G. Wodehouse; renewed 1954, 1955, 1957 and 1958.
"Open House" and "The Story of Webster" were first collected in
Mulliner Nights, copyright 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933 by P. G. Wodehouse;
renewed 1958, 1959, 1960 and 1961.
"Ukridge's Dog College" was originally collected in He Rather
Enjoyed It, copyright 1923 by International Magazine Company, Inc.;
copyright 1925 by George H. Doran Company; renewed 1951, 1953 by
P. G. Wodehouse.
"Uncle Fred Flits By" was first collected in Young Men in Spats,
copyright 1931, 1933, 1934, 1935 and 1936 by P. G. Wodehouse; renewed
1959, 1961, 1962, 1963 and 1964.
"The Mixer" was first collected in The Man with Turn Left Feet, copy-
right 1917 by P. G. Wodehouse; renewed 1945.
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville), 1881–1975.
A Wodehouse bestiary.
1. Animals—Fiction. 2. Pekingese spaniels—Fiction.
I. Bensen, D. R. (Donald R.), date. II. Title.
PR6045.O53A6 1985 823'.912 85-7999
ISBN 0-618-00186-7 (pbk.)
Printed in the United States of America
QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Foreword
Fans already familiar with Wodehouse the Connoisseur of Country Houses or Wodehouse the Golfing Enthusiast have a real and unexpected treat in store for them in this remarkable anthology, which highlights a previously overlooked Wodehouse—the Keen Animal Observer, a Wodehouse worthy of a special place of honor. Since the collection contains some of his very best stories, it will also serve as a delightful introduction to his complete oeuvre as well as to his natural history.
The P. G. Wodehouse Shelter of the Bide-a-Wee Home Association in Westhampton, Long Island, was quite appropriately named to honor his warm-hearted generosity toward his dumb chums. While, of course, the shelter housed dogs and cats and not the giraffes or rhinos that live some two hours away at the Bronx Zoo, our author's interests include many wild as well as tame animals, judging by the frequent mention of well- and lesser-known fauna. Unfortunately he is sometimes unspecific, referring only to a "snake" or a "parrot," and is frequently guilty of adopting a stereotyped view of snakes, parrots, rabbits, and rats. It is clear that he knows better, for in "Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court" he rattles off the names and habits of big game, and incidentally shows more sympathy toward the viewpoint of trophy hunters wise in animal lore than toward the saccharine opinions of the uninformed. His writings show that he understands both why zoo animals appeal to all types and ages and why millions are spent on advertising pet food.
Anyone who has been a student of animals or has lived in the country will recognize the precision and profundity of some of the zoological observations scattered throughout the Master's work. No ornithologist has transcribed more accurately the warning hiss of a large, white, active, and short-tempered swan "like a tire bursting in a nest of cobras," or ever before saw fit to ask, "Have you ever noticed how a swan's eyebrows sort of meet in the middle?" Wodehouse appears to be very sound in his observations on the prudent opossum, while shy naturalists, comfortable only when they can share their deepest interests, can understand perfectly why "Gussie, terrified by the arrival of the mood, the moonlight and the expectant Madeline all together, started talking about newts."
Considering that it was written long before the publication of Dr. George B. Schaller's authoritative study on the mountain gorilla, Wodehouse's sketch of a gorilla personality is a model of verisimilitude, and it is a constant pleasure to find him tossing off lines that deepen our appreciation of the kinship between man and nature, such as, "The magistrate looked like an owl with a dash of weasel blood in him."
Then, too, one of the most memorable animals in literature is the Berkshire sow, Empress of Blandings. The passionate care that is lavished upon her should be an example to every zoo's curatorial staff.
Besides pigs, a high proportion of the creatures in these stories are domesticated; not surprising considering the urban and bucolic scenes where the action takes place. Wodehouse himself enjoyed pets and was generally surrounded by his beloved Pekes, shepherds, boxers, dachshunds, and by his cats. "Cats are not dogs" is only one of the many thoughtful comments you will find in this book.
His pre—World War II tale "Open House" is concerned, at least in part, with a Peke named Reginald. The British six-month quarantine is a fact bearing some importance on the shape of the plot. Ironically, years later, that same quarantine, threatening to separate Wodehouse from his Peke, Wonder, caused him to delay his departure from France across the channel despite clear warnings he had received, until it was too late and he was caught by the German occupation.
I believe that Wodehouse, by helping to develop a vast and happy audience sympathetic to the most bizarre patterns of behavior, animal and human, and by encouraging a relish for the variety of life on earth, has contributed toward the goal of today's zoos, which is to preserve nature's diversity for coming generations.
Howard Phipps, Jr.
President, New York Zoological Society
Preface
The first time I met P. G. Wodehouse, he was substantially more occupied with a dachshund called Jed than with a visiting editor and publisher. As Wodehouse's attentions involved holding Jed rather as if the dog were a bolster and pulling gently at his ears, I was content to allow the animal primacy.
This Jed was, in dog years, somewhat Wodehouse's senior (98 to 80), though he had not written as many books; they were clearly close companions in spite of the disparities in age, achievement and background. All the same, dachshunds were not Wodehouse's prime enthusiasm. For him, the canine acme was the Peke. Particularly in his middle years, he seemed to wade in a sea of Pekingese; they occupy long stretches of his letters and appear in family photographs as full equals; their health and exploits are at least as constant concerns as how the new novel is going or what the tax authorities are up to. Howard Phipps has recalled in the Foreword how the conflict of the British quarantine regulations and Wodehouse's commitment to his Peke Wonder led to his being scooped up and interned by the German army in 1940. This is sometimes criticized as frivolously unforesighted, but Wodehouse shared this lack of prescience with most of the military and political leaders of Britain and France—Belgium, Holland, Norway, and Denmark as well, for that matter.
It will be no surprise, then, that Pekes predominate in this assembly of animal tales—no fewer than nine, six of whom appear in one story. There is nothing that can, or even should, be done about that; if you want to do business with Wodehouse, the Pekes follow inevitably. Relax and enjoy them.
There is of course more to life, and fiction, than Pekes. We can also offer a brace of versatile mongrels, Beefy Bingham's stout-hearted Bottles and the nameless Mixer—Wodehouse's only canine narrator—and major and minor cat characters, including Webster, whose ecclesiastical dignity was shattered when he proved to have paws of clay.
The menagerie also contains one each parrot, snake, swan, rabbit (dead), gorilla (fake), canary, gnu, and pig, and some racehorses, a heady enough variety to satisfy all but the most demanding zoophile. True, such a selection may seem tame to those who look for peril in their animal stories, but in quite a few of these accounts, if Nature isn't red in tooth and claw, it's only because of quick thinking and determined timidity on the part of the human protagonists. Given full scope, that swan would have terminated Bertie Wooster's non-career long before its time. And
In a curious way, this is not the first Wodehouse bestiary, at least not the first bestiary to contain Wodehouses. Many medieval treatises contained accounts, sometimes illustrated, of "wild men of the woods," variously called wudewasa or wode-houses. These could be distinguished from great apes chiefly by the large size of the feet and the elongated big toe. Wodehouse, I believe, took a size 9, often preferring tennis shoes.
D. R. Bensen
Croton-on-Hudson
Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court
THE POET who was spending the summer at the Anglers' Rest had just begun to read us his new sonnet sequence when the door of the bar-parlor opened and there entered a young man in gaiters. He came quickly in and ordered beer. In one hand he was carrying a double-barreled gun, in the other a posy of dead rabbits. These he dropped squashily to the floor, and the poet, stopping in midsentence, took one long, earnest look at the remains. Then, wincing painfully, he turned a light green and closed his eyes. It was not until the banging of the door announced the visitor's departure that he came to life again.
Mr. Mulliner regarded him sympathetically over his hot Scotch and lemon.
"You appear upset," he said.
"A little," admitted the poet. "A momentary malaise. It may be purely personal prejudice, but I confess to preferring rabbits with rather more of their contents inside them."
"Many sensitive souls in your line of business hold similar views," Mr. Mulliner assured him. "My niece Charlotte did."
"It is my temperament," said the poet. "I dislike all dead things—particularly when, as in the case of the above rabbits, they have so obviously, so—shall I say?—blatantly made the Great Change. Give me," he went on, the greenish tinge fading from his face, "life and joy and beauty."
"Just what my niece Charlotte used to say."
"Oddly enough, that thought forms the theme of the second sonnet in my sequence—which, now that the young gentleman with the portable Morgue has left us, I will..."
"My niece Charlotte," said Mr. Mulliner, with quiet firmness, "was one of those gentle, dreamy, wistful girls who take what I have sometimes felt to be a mean advantage of having an ample private income to write Vignettes in Verse for the artistic weeklies. Charlotte's Vignettes in Verse had a wide vogue among the editors of London's higher-browed but less prosperous periodicals. Directly these frugal men realized that she was willing to supply unstinted vignettes gratis, for the mere pleasure of seeing herself in print, they were all over her. The consequence was that before long she had begun to move freely in the most refined literary circles, and one day, at a little luncheon at the Crushed Pansy (the Restaurant with a Soul), she found herself seated next to a godlike young man, at the sight of whom something seemed to go off inside her like a spring."
"Talking of spring..." said the poet.
"Cupid," proceeded Mr. Mulliner, "has always found the family to which I belong a ready mark for his bow. Our hearts are warm, our passions quick. It is not too much to say that my niece Charlotte was in love with this young man before she had finished spearing the first anchovy out of the hors d'oeuvres dish. He was intensely spiritual-looking, with a broad, white forehead and eyes that seemed to Charlotte not so much eyes as a couple of holes punched in the surface of a beautiful soul. He wrote, she learned, Pastels in Prose, and his name, if she had caught it correctly at the moment of their introduction, was Aubrey Trefusis."
Friendship ripens quickly at the Crushed Pansy (said Mr. Mulliner). The poulet rôti au cresson had scarcely been distributed before the young man was telling Charlotte his hopes, his fears, and the story of his boyhood. And she was amazed to find that he sprang—not from a long line of artists but from an ordinary, conventional county family of the type that cares for nothing except hunting and shooting.
"You can readily imagine," he said, helping her to Brussels sprouts, "how intensely such an environment jarred upon my unfolding spirit. My family are greatly respected in the neighborhood, but I personally have always looked upon them as a gang of blood-imbrued plug-uglies. My views on kindness to animals are rigid. My impulse, on encountering a rabbit, is to offer it lettuce. To my family, on the other hand, a rabbit seems incomplete without a deposit of small shot in it. My father, I believe, has cut off more assorted birds in their prime than any other man in the Midlands. A whole morning was spoiled for me last week by the sight of a photograph of him in the Tatler, looking rather severely at a dying duck. My elder brother Reginald spreads destruction in every branch of the animal kingdom. And my younger brother Wilfred is, I understand, working his way up to the larger fauna by killing sparrows with an air-gun. Spiritually, one might just as well live in Chicago as at Bludleigh Court."
"Bludleigh Court?" cried Charlotte.
"The moment I was twenty-one and came into a modest but sufficient inheritance, I left the place and went to London to lead the life literary. The family, of course, were appalled. My Uncle Francis, I remember, tried to reason with me for hours. Uncle Francis, you see, used to be a famous big-game hunter. They tell me he has shot more gnus than any other man who ever went to Africa. In fact, until recently he virtually never stopped shooting gnus. Now, I hear, he has developed lumbago and is down at Bludleigh treating it with Riggs's Superfine Emulsion and sun-baths."
"But is Bludleigh Court your home?"
"That's right. Bludleigh Court, Lesser Bludleigh, near Goresby-on-the-Ouse, Bedfordshire."
"But Bludleigh Court belongs to Sir Alexander Bassinger."
"My name is really Bassinger. I adopted the pen-name of Trefusis to spare the family's feelings. But how do you come to know of the place?"
"I'm going down there next week for a visit. My mother was an old friend of Lady Bassinger."
Aubrey was astonished. And, being, like all writers of Pastels in Prose, a neat phrasemaker, he said what a small world it was, after all.
"Well, well, well!" he said.
"From what you tell me," said Charlotte, "I'm afraid I shall not enjoy my visit. If there's one thing I loathe, it's anything connected with sport."
"Two minds with but a single thought," said Aubrey. "Look here, I'll tell you what. I haven't been near Bludleigh for years, but if you're going there, why, dash it, I'll come too—aye, even though it means meeting my Uncle Francis."
"You will?"
"I certainly will. I don't consider it safe that a girl of your exquisite refinement and sensibility should be dumped down at an abattoir like Bludleigh Court without a kindred spirit to lend her moral stability."
"What do you mean?"
"I'll tell you." His voice was grave. "That house exercises a spell."
"A what?"
"A spell. A ghastly spell that saps the strongest humanitarian principles. Who knows what effect it might have upon you, should you go there without someone like me to stand by you and guide you in your hour of need?"
"What nonsense!"
"Well, all I can tell you is that once, when I was a boy, a high official of Our Dumb Brothers' League of Mercy arrived there lateish on a Friday night, and at two-fifteen on the Saturday afternoon he was the life and soul of an informal party got up for the purpose of drawing one of the local badgers out of an upturned barrel."
Charlotte laughed merrily.
"The spell will not affect me," she said.
"Nor me, of course," said Aubrey. "But all the same, I would prefer to be by your side, if you don't mind."
"Mind, Mr. Bassinger!" breathed Charlotte softly, and was thrilled to note that at the words and the look with which she accompanied them this man to whom—for, as I say, we Mulliners are quick workers—she had already given her heart, quivered violently. It seemed to her that in those soulful eyes of his she had seen the love-light.
Bludleigh Court, when Charlotte reached it some days later, proved to be a noble old pile of Tudor architecture, situated in rolling parkland and flanked by pleasant gardens leading to a lake with a tree-fringed boathouse. Inside, it was comfortably furnished and decorated throughout with groves of glass cases containing the goggle-eyed remnants of birds and beasts assassinated at one time or another by Sir Alexander Bassinger and his son Reginald. From every wall there peered down with an air of mild reproach selected portions of the gnus, moose, elks, zebus, antelopes, giraffes, mountain goats and wapiti which had had the misfortune to meet Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake before lumbago spoiled him for the chase. The cemetery also included a few stuffed sparrows, which showed that little Wilfred was doing his bit.
