The Jeeves Omnibus – Vol 5 by Wodehouse P.G

Author:Wodehouse, P.G.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-40707-364-4
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

6

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THE AFTERNOON HAD now hotted up to quite a marked extent, and what with a substantial lunch and several beakers of port I was more or less in the condition a python gets into after its mid-day meal. A certain drowsiness had stolen over me, so much so that twice in the course of my narrative the aged r. had felt compelled to notify me that if I didn’t stop yawning in her face, she would let me have one on the side of my fat head with the parasol with which she was shielding herself from the rays of the sun.

There had been no diminution of this drowsiness since last heard of, and as I bowled along the high road I was practically in dreamland, and it occurred to me that if I didn’t pause somewhere and sleep it off, I should shortly become a menace to pedestrians and traffic. The last thing I wanted was to come before my late host in his magisterial capacity, charged with having struck some citizen amidships while under the influence of his port. Colonel Briscoe’s port, I mean, not the citizen’s. Embarrassing for both of us, though in a way a compliment to the excellence of his cellar.

The high road, like most high roads, was flanked on either side by fields, some with cows, some without, so, the day being as warm as it was, just dropping anchor over here or over there meant getting as cooked to a crisp as Major Plank would have been, had the widows and surviving relatives of the late chief of the ‘Mgombis established connection with him. What I wanted was shade, and by great good fortune I came on a little turning leading to wooded country, just what I needed. I drove into this wooded country, stopped the machinery, and it wasn’t long before sleep poured over me in a healing wave, as the expression is.

It started off by being one of those dreamless sleeps, but after a while a nightmare took over. It seemed to me that I was out fishing with E. Jimpson Murgatroyd in what appeared to be tropical waters, and he caught a shark and I was having a look at it, when it suddenly got hold of my arm. This of course gave me a start, and I woke. And as I opened my eyes I saw that there was something attached to my port-side biceps, but it wasn’t a shark, it was Orlo Porter.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he was saying, ‘for interrupting your doze, but I am a bird-watcher. I was watching a Clarkson’s warbler in that thicket over there, and I was afraid your snoring might frighten it away, so might I beg you to go easy on the sound effects. Clarkson’s warblers are very sensitive to loud noises, and you were making yourself audible a mile off.’

Or words to that general import.

I would have replied ‘Oh, hullo’, or something like that, but I was

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