"Пэлем Вудхауз. Jeeves in the offing (Предложения Дживса, engl)" - читать интересную книгу автора

she would carelessly plunge you.
'Miss Wickham, sir,' Jeeves had once said to me warningly at the
time when the fever was at its height, 'lacks seriousness She is
volatile and frivolous. I would always hesitate to recommend as a life
partner a young lady with quite such a vivid shade of red hair.'
His judgment was sound I have already mentioned how with her subtle
wiles this girl had induced me to sneak into Sir Roderick Glossop's
sleeping apartment and apply the darning needle to his hot-water
bottle, and that was comparatively mild going for her. In a word,
Roberta, daughter of the late Sir Cuthbert and Lady Wickham of
Skeldings Hall, Herts, was pure dynamite and better kept at a distance
by all those who aimed at leading the peaceful life The prospect of
being immured with her in the same house, with all the facilities a
country-house affords an enterprising girl for landing her nearest and
dearest in the mulligatawny, made me singularly dubious about the shape
of things to come.
And I was tottering under this blow when the old relative
administered another, and it was a haymaker.
'And there's Aubrey Upjohn and his stepdaughter Phyllis Mills,' she
said That's the lot What's the matter with you? Got asthma?'
I took her to be alluding to the sharp gasp which had escaped my
lips, and I must confess that it had come out not unlike the last words
of a dying duck. But I felt perfectly justified in gasping A weaker man
would have howled like a banshee. There floated into my mind something
Kipper Herring had once said to me. 'You know, Bertie,' he had said, in
philosophical mood, 'we have much to be thankful for in this life of
ours, you and I However rough the going, there is one sustaining
thought to which we can hold. The storm clouds may lower and the
horizon grow dark, we may get a nail in our shoe and be caught in the
rain without an umbrella, we may come down to breakfast and find that
someone else has taken the brown egg, but at least we have the
consolation of knowing that we shall never see Aubrey Gawd-help-us
Upjohn again. Always remember this in times of despondency,' he said,
and I always had. And now here the bounder was, bobbing up right in my
midst. Enough to make the stoutest-hearted go into his dying-duck
routine.
'Aubrey Upjohn?' I quavered. 'You mean my Aubrey Upjohn?'
'That's the one. Soon after you made your escape from his chain gang
he married Jane Mills, a friend of mine with a colossal amount of
money. She died, leaving a daughter. I'm the daughter's godmother.
Upjohn's retired now and going in for politics. The hot tip is that the
boys in the back room are going to run him as the Conservative
candidate in the Market Snodsbury division at the next by-election.
What a thrill it'll be for you, meeting him again. Or does the prospect
scare you?'
'Certainly not. We Woosters are intrepid. But what on earth did you
invite him to Brinkley for?'
'I didn't. I only wanted Phyllis, but he came along, too.'
'You should have bunged him out.'
'I hadn't the heart to.'