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Showing posts with label wodehouse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wodehouse. Show all posts

Sunday, October 3, 2010

P.G. Wodehouse: Ring for Jeeves - "...rhinoceri are equipped with license numbers"

In chapter 8, conversation among Captain Biggar, Bill and Jeeves, while Captain Biggar is trying to find out the racecourse bookie who ran away with his prize amount:

‘Obviously what happened was that friend Biggar got the wrong number.’ Said Bill.

‘Yes, m’lord.’ Agreed Jeeves.

The red of Captain Biggar’s face deepened to purple. His proud spirit was wounded.

‘are you telling me I don’t know the number of a car that I followed all the way from Epsom Downs to Southmothtonshire? That car was used today by this Honest Patch Perkins and his clerk, and I’m asking you if you lent it to him.’

‘My dear good bird, would I lend my car to a chap in a check suit and a crimson tie, not mention a clack patch and ginger moustache? The thing’s not… what, Jeeves?’

‘Feasible, m’lord.’ Jeeves coughed. ‘Possibly the gentleman’s eyesight needs medical attention.’

Captain Biggar swelled portentously.

‘My eyesight? My eyesight? Do you know who you’re talking to? I am Bwana Biggar.’

‘I regret that the name is strange to me, sir. But I still maintain that you have made the pardonable mistake of failing to read the license number correctly.’

Before speaking again, Captain Biggar was obliged to swallow once or twice, to restore his composure. He also took another nut.

‘Look,’ he said, almost mildly. ‘perhaps you’re not up on these things. You haven’t been told who’s who and what’s what. I am Biggar the White Hunter, the most famous White Hunter in all Africa and Indonesia. I can stand without a tremor in the path of an onrushing rhino… and why? Because my eyesight is so superb that I know …I know I can get him in that one vulnerable sport before he has come within sixty paces. That’s the sort of eyesight mine is.’

Jeeves maintained his iron front.

‘I fear I cannot recede from my position, sir. I grant that you may have trained your vision for such a contingency as you have described, but, poorly informed as I am on the subject of larger fauna of the East, I do not believe that rhinoceri are equipped with license numbers.’

Saturday, December 20, 2008

P.G. Wodehouse: Ring for Jeeves - "But a woman can always tell."

In chapter 6, author, describing Mrs. Spottsworth's contemplation, during her drive to Rowcester Abbey, of the recent unscheduled rendezvous with Captain Biggar, writes:

"...it may seem strange that Mrs. Spottsworth should have known anything about the way he felt. But a woman can always tell. When she sees a man choke up and look like an embarrassed beetroot every time he catches her eye over the eland steaks and lime juice, she soon forms an adequate diagnosis of his case."

Author makes further effort in next paragraph to emphasize a woman's observation powers:
"She had not failed to observe the pop-eyed stare in his keen blue eyes, the deepening of the hue of his vermilion face and the way his number eleven feet shuffled from start to finish of the interview. If he did not still consider her the tree on which the fruit of his life hung, Rosalinda Spottsworth was vastly mistaken."

P.G. Wodehouse: Ring for Jeeves - Fatal "Confusion of Ideas"

In chapter 1, author, describing how Mrs. Spottsworth "was almost immediately widowed again", writes:

"It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A.B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't. The result being that when he placed his foot on the animal's neck preparatory to being photographed by Captain Biggar, the White Hunter accompanying the expedition, a rather unpleasant brawl had ensued, and owing to Captain Biggar having to drop the camera and spend several vital moments looking about for is rifle, his bullet, though unerring, had come too late to be of practical assistance."

Monday, August 18, 2008

P.G. Wodehouse: Jeeves in the Offing - Love and the Male Sex

In Chapter 12, while Bertie Wooster is conversing with his aunt Dahlia Traver about his past relationships with Roberta Wickham:

"The snag in this business of falling in love, aged relative, is that the parties of the first part so often get mixed up with the wrong parties of the second part, robbed of their cooler judgment by the parties of the second part's glamour. Put it like this. The male sex is divided into rabbits and non-rabbits and the female sex into dashers and dormice, and the trouble is that the male rabbit has a way of getting attracted by the female dasher (who would be fine for the male non-rabbit) and realizing too late that he ought to have been concentrating on some mild, gentle dormouse with whom he could settle down peacefully and nibble lettuce."

Monday, July 21, 2008

P.G. Wodehouse: Jeeves in the Offing - Goofiness in the Opposite Sex

In Chapter 3, while Bertie Wooster is hunting for Bobbie (Roberta) Wickham at his aunt Dahlia Traver's house and is encountered with a sight of Phyllis Mills:

"One learns, as one goes through life, to spot goofiness in the other sex with an unerring eye, and this exhibit had a sort of mild, Soul's Awakening kind of expression which made it abundantly clear that, while not a super-goof like some of the female goofs I'd met, she was quite goofy enough to be going on with."