Money for Nothing by Wodehouse P G

Author:Wodehouse, P G [P G Wodehouse]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409063742
Publisher: Random House

VIII

Sergeant-Major Flannery, that able and conscientious man, walked briskly up the main staircase of Healthward Ho. Outside a door off the second landing he stopped and knocked.

A loud sneeze sounded from within.

'Cub!' called a voice.

Chimp Twist, propped up with pillows, was sitting in bed, swathed in a woollen dressing-gown. His face was flushed, and he regarded his visitor from under swollen eyelids with a moroseness which would have wounded a more sensitive man. Sergeant-Major Flannery stood six feet two in his boots: he had a round, shiny face at which it was agony for a sick man to look, and Chimp was aware that when he spoke it would be in a rolling, barrack-square bellow which would go clean through him like a red-hot bullet through butter. One has to be in rude health and at the top of one's form to bear up against the Sergeant-Major Flannerys of this world.

'Well?' he muttered thickly.

He broke off to sniff at a steaming jug which stood beside his bed, and the Sergeant-Major, gazing down at him with the offensive superiority of a robust man in the presence of an invalid, fingered his waxed moustache. The action intensified Chimp's dislike. From the first he had been jealous of that moustache. Until it had come into his life he had always thought highly of his own fungoid growth, but one look at this rival exhibit had taken all the heart out of him. The thing was long and blond and bushy, and it shot heavenwards into two glorious needle-point ends, a shining zareba of hair quite beyond the scope of any mere civilian. Non-army men may grow moustaches and wax them and brood over them and be fond and proud of them, but to obtain a waxed moustache in the deepest and holiest sense of the words you have to be a Sergeant-Major.

'Oo-er!' said Mr Flannery. 'That's a nasty cold you've got.'

Chimp, as if to endorse this opinion, sneezed again.

'A nasty feverish cold,' proceeded the Sergeant Major in the tones in which he had once been wont to request squads of recruits to number off from the right. 'You ought to do something about that cold.'

'I am doing sobthig about it,' growled Chimp, having recourse to the jug once more.

'I don't mean sniffing at jugs, sir. You won't do yourself no good sniffing at jugs, Mr Twist. You want to go to the root of the matter, if you understand the expression. You want to attack it from the stummick. The stummick is the seat of the trouble. Get the stummick right and the rest follows natural.'

'Wad do you wad?'

'There's some say quinine and some say a drop of camphor on a lump of sugar and some say cinnamon, but you can take it from me the best thing for a nasty feverish cold in the head is taraxacum and hops. There is no occasion to damn my eyes, Mr Twist. I am only trying to be helpful. You send out for some taraxacum and hops, and before you know where you are .

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