Pigs Have Wings by P G Wodehouse

Author:P G Wodehouse [Wodehouse, P G]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409063865
Publisher: Random House
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

4

The process of going to have a look at the Empress was always, when you did it in Lord Emsworth’s company, a lengthy one, and nearly forty minutes elapsed before Maudie and her host returned to the terrace.

Lord Emsworth had employed these forty minutes shrewdly and well. Playing on his companion’s womanly sympathy by telling her of the agonies he was enduring, having to make this dashed speech to these dashed Shropshire, Herefordshire, and South Wales Pig Breeders chaps, he had won from her a promise that she would accompany him next day and see him through his ordeal. It made such a difference to someone, he explained, if someone had someone someone could sort of lean on at times like this, and Maudie said she quite understood. They would have to make a pretty early start, he warned her, because Shropshire, Herefordshire, and South Wales Pig Breeders were assembling in Wolverhampton of all ghastly places, and Maudie said she liked early starts and spoke of seeing Wolverhampton as if it had been a lifelong dream of hers. In short, by the time they reached the terrace, their relations were practically those of Tristan and Isolde.

They found the terrace empty, for Penny had accepted Gally’s invitation to go off with him in the car. She might be heartbroken, but she was not so heartbroken as to hold herself aloof from an enterprise which involved stealing pigs. Except for the winged creatures of the night which haunt English country house terraces when the shadows have fallen, nothing was to be seen except a small oblong object lying in the fairway. It looked like a photograph, and Lord Emsworth, picking it up, found that it was a photograph.

‘God bless my soul!’ he said. ‘How very peculiar.’

‘What is it?’ asked Maudie.

‘It is a photograph of a neighbour of mine, a Sir Gregory Parsloe. Lives out Matchingham way. Somebody must have dropped it out of the window. Though what anyone would want with a photograph of Sir Gregory Parsloe I cannot understand,’ said Lord Emsworth, marvelling at the eccentric tastes of his fellow men.

Maudie took it from him, and gazed at it in silence. And as her eyes fell, for the first time in ten years, upon those once familiar features, her bosom seethed with feelings too deep for utterance. Like Gloria Salt, she had become a volcano.

Her once coherent thought, apart from the reflexion that this old love of hers had put on a bit of weight since she had seen him last, was that, even if it meant a three mile walk there and a three mile walk back, she intended to go to Matchingham Hall at the earliest opportunity and tell Tubby Parsloe what she thought of him.

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