Tired Nature’s Sweet Restorer

Unfortunately sometimes circumstances prevent a night’s sleep from providing the full restorative effect. Being pelted with dead cats and flung flower pots or serenaded by snoring bulldogs and blaring orchestrions are the least of the hazards lurking in the night watches. Can you identify the following examples of people who failed to feel sufficiently restored in the morning?

1. Waking at a quarter to two from dreams of being burned at the stake by Red Indians, __(A)__ found himself suffering acute pain in the right leg.

(The next two paragraphs describe the patient’s attempts to treat this pain over the next four hours.)

At a quarter to six, succeeding in falling asleep, he enjoyed a slumber, somewhat disturbed by the intermittent biting of sharks, which lasted till a few minutes past eight. Then he woke as if an alarm clock had rung, and realized that further sleep was out of the question.

2. ___(B)___ approached the bed with rather an awestruck air.

“You’ve got a cold,” he said.

__(C)__ sniffed – twice. Once with annoyance and once at the jug.

“So would you have a code if you’d been sitting up to your neck in water for half an hour last night and had to ride home tweddy biles wriggig wet on a motor-cycle.”

“Says which?” exclaimed __(B)__, astounded.

__(C)__ related the saga of the previous night, touching disparagingly on __(D)__ and saying some things about __(E)__ which it was well she could not hear.

3. “At about three o’clock in the morning I was aroused by a somewhat hefty banging on the door.”

“What!”

“A banging at the door,” repeated ___(F)___. “There, standing on the mat, were three policemen. From their remarks I gathered that certain bright spirits had been running a gambling establishment in the lower regions of the building – where, I think I told you, there is a saloon – and the Law was now about to clean up the place. Very cordially the honest fellows invited me to go with them. A conveyance, it seemed, waited in the street without. I pointed out, even as you appear to have done, that sea-green pyjamas with old rose frogs were not the costume in which (a or an) __(F)__ should be seen abroad in one of the world’s greatest cities; but they assured me – more by their manner than their words – that my misgivings were out of place, so I yielded. These men, I told myself, have lived longer in New York than I. They know what is done and what is not done. I will bow to their views. So I went with them, and after a very pleasant and cosy little ride in the patrol waggon, arrived at the police station. This morning I chatted a while with the courteous magistrate, convinced him by means of arguments and by silent evidence of my open, honest face and unwavering eye that I was not a professional gambler, and came away without a stain on my character.”

4. I streaked for the garage. And I was just about to fling wide the gates, when there suddenly came from the other side of the door the sound of a hoarse voice, and I paused, astounded. Unless the ears had deceived me, there was a human soul inside the edifice.

It spoke again, and what enabled me to get abreast and identify the thorax from which it proceeded was the fact that one caught the name __(G)__, preceded by a number of qualifying adjectives of a rugged and rather Elizabethan nature. In a flash, I got the whole set-up.

Driving away (…) at the conclusion of the recent festivities, __(G)__ must inadvertently have taken __(H)__ with him. He had sped homewards with a song on his lips, and all unknown to him, overlooked while getting a spot of tired Nature’s sweet restorer in the back of the car, the old relative had come along for the ride.

5. (For a relatively easy bonus point, can you identify the "I" responsible for interrupting the author Wodehouse’s sleep in the following autobiographical piece?)

Often (…) my telephone would ring in the small hours.

“Plum? __(I)__.”

“Good heavens, __(I)__, do you know what time it is?

“Quite early isn’t it? Are you in bed?”

“I was.”

“Oh? Well, I’ve just got that first act duet we were worrying about. Get a pencil and paper.”

His telephone was on the piano, and he would play me the melody and I would take down a dummy and totter back to bed. __(I)__ probably stayed up and worked on the second act trio.

6. (And for a somewhat more difficult bonus point can you identify the person who, after weeks of heavy training for an important foot-race, was compelled to scratch due to exhaustion after being hauled out of bed at one in the morning the night before the race and asked to make an emergency life-and-death one-mile run to fetch the local doctor to treat a gravely ill patient?)

Round 342 - 22 January 2008

The Worm Turns

Bertie Wooster rising up to defy Spode, Lord Emsworth temporarily taming Lady Constance, normally timid nephews rebelling against the tyranny of overbearing uncles. We all enjoy seeing authority figures getting it in the neck. Here are a few more examples.

1. __(A)__’s stupor of astonishment had passed away, whirled to the four winds on a tempestuous rush of homicidal fury. “You mean to tell me that you had the – the nerve – the insolence –” he gulped. Being a young man usually quick to express his rare bursts of anger in terms of action, he looked longingly at __(B)__, regretting that the latter’s age and physique disqualified him as a candidate for assault and battery. (…snip three paragraphs...)

“You so-and-so!” said __(A)__. “You such-and-such!”

Sailors are toughened by early training and long usage to bear themselves phlegmatically beneath abuse. __(B)__ had had no such advantages. He sprang backward as if he had been scalded by a sudden jet of boiling water.

“You pernicious little bounder!” said __(A)__. He strode to the door and flung it open. “Get out!”

(…After another page-and-a-half of brisk back-and-forth dialogue, “A” got in the last word…)

“Listen!” said __(A)__. “If you aren’t out of the house in two seconds, I’ll take those trousers back.”

2. For the second time in the evening the jolly old scales had fallen from __(C)__’s eyes, and (…) he saw __(D)__ as he was.

“My sainted aunt!” he said slowly. “So that’s it, what? Well, I’ve always thought a dashed lot of you, as you know. I’ve always looked up to you as a bit of a nib and wished I was like you. But, great Scott! if that’s the sort of chap you are, I’m deuced glad I’m not! I’m going to wake up in the middle of the night and think how unlike you I am and pat myself on the back! (…) A tick’s a tick, and that’s all there is to say about it. (…) It’s no good standing there looking like your mother,” said __(C)__ firmly. “This is where we jolly well part brass-rags! If we ever meet again, I’ll trouble you not to speak to me, because I’ve a reputation to keep up! So there you have it in a bally nutshell!”

3. Beginning with a curt “Listen, Buster,” she proceeded to sketch out with admirable clearness the salient points in the situation as she envisaged it, and judging from the loud buzzing noises that came over the wire, clearly audible to me though now standing in the background, it was evident that the nub was not escaping him. They were the buzzing noises of a man slowly coming to the realization that a woman’s hand had got him by the short hairs.

4. “’My house’!” repeated __(E)__, choking on the words like one who chokes upon a muffin. “Of all the crust! Of all the nerve! It’s about time, __(F)__, that we got this thing cleared up about who this ruddy house belongs to. (…) I’m sick and tired of being a cipher in the home. You can jolly well clear out, __(F)__. You understand me? Buzz off. Where you buzz to, I don’t care, but buzz. Go back to Cheltenham, if you like. Or Bexhill.”

“Or Bognor Regis,” suggested __(G)__.

“Or Bognor Regis. Go anywhere you like, but you’re not going to stay here. Is that clear?”

“Quite clear,” said __(G)__. “Very well put.”

“Right,” said __(E)__. He strode out through the French window and __(G)__ helped himself to a muffin.

“Nice chap (…)” he said. “I like a young fellow who knows his own mind. Extraordinarily good muffins, these, __(F)__. I’ll have another.”

5. “So kindly stop talking like a fool, __(H)__, and go to Wimbledon immediately.”

A purist might have considered his tone peremptory and his manner brusque. __(H)__ was such a purist (…) but he had not yet reached the stage of open defiance. (…) It was only when __(I)__ went on to say “Do you hear me, you idiot? What are you waiting for?” with an even more offensive intonation that he finally cast off the shackles. Who, he asked himself, was this old blighter to order him about? He spoke curtly.

I haven’t time to go to Wimbledon. I’ve a business to attend to.”

“__(H)__!” said __(I)__ awfully, but __(H)__ was now beyond intimidation. (…)

“Oh, come off it, __(I)__,” he said. “The trouble with you is that you’ve got so used to pushing people around that you think you can do it to everyone you meet, and then you run up against someone like me who doesn’t give a tinker’s curse for what you say or what you don’t say and you get what’s coming to you. I’ll be blowed if I go slogging off to Wimbledon. I’ll tell you what I will do though, as you’re an old friend. I’ll sell you these trousers of mine.”

6. For a bonus point – and very much on topic as per the title of this week’s Quiz – your task is to identify the person who managed to temporarily tame a domineering older sister by recalling a shared incident of their Youth and threatening to repeat it by depositing down the sister’s back “a bevy of worms. Large, fat, sticky worms. Slithery, writhing, wriggly worms. Cold, clammy –” at which point the domineering older sister capitulated.

Round 343 - 30 January 2008

Exit, Pursued By a Bear

Or by an aunt or a dog or a leopard, or a wolf. Or by a jealous love-rival or an enraged father or a zealous policeman. Or even by a retired headmaster-turned-bishop or by an air-gun toting Earl. Or by a multitude of other varieties of threat to life and limb.

1. __(A)__ had dressed for dinner with considerable care. (…) Looking at the result in the mirror, he had felt a glow of contentment. This glow was still warming him as he passed into the corridor. As his eyes fell on __(B)__, it faded abruptly. (…) He was a man who found no pleasure in physical violence. And that physical violence threatened now was only too sickeningly plain. It was foreshadowed in the very manner in which this small but sturdy young man confronting him had begun to creep forward. __(A)__, who was an F.R.Z.S., had seen leopards at the Zoo creep just like that.

(…) One finds it difficult in the present instance to over-praise __(A)__’s ready resource. Had a great military strategist been present, he would have nodded approval. With the grim menace of __(B)__ coming closer and closer, __(A)__ did exactly what Napoleon, Hannibal, or the great Duke of Marlborough would have done. Reaching behind him for the handle and twisting it sharply, he slipped through the door of his bedroom, banged it, and was gone. Many an eel had disappeared into the mud with less smoothness and celerity.

2. He simply couldn’t go on indefinitely, leaping from spot to spot, endeavouring with a mere mop to stem the advance of a foe as resolute as this __(C)__. The time had come for a strategic retreat. Not ten seconds, accordingly, after the other had disappeared, he was wrenching the front door open.

He was taking a risk, of course. There was the possibility that he might be walking into an ambush. But all seemed well. __(C)__ had apparently genuinely gone round to the back, and __(D)__ reached the gate with the comfortable feeling that in another couple of seconds we would be out in the open and in a position to leg it away from the danger zone.

All’s well that ends well, felt __(D)__.

It was at this juncture that he found that he had no trousers on.

3. It was the satchel that saved __(E)___. It shows the lengths to which fear will drive a man (…) and if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it. But it’s the truth that as that dog came leaping up in a business-like way that it did me good to watch, __(E)__, having given one look over his shoulder at the gate and decided that he couldn’t make it, uttered a piercing cry and flung considerably over two hundred quid in bank-notes at the animal. The satchel took him low down on the chest, got entangled in his legs, and held him up. And while he was trying to unscramble himself, __(E)__ nipped to the gate and slammed it behind him.

It was only then that he seemed to realize what a perfect chump he had made of himself.

4. For this question you don’t need to waste time or energy worrying about the identity of Mr and Mrs (F), Mr and Mrs (H), or Colonel (I). They are all mere supernumeraries, the literary equivalents of the anonymous and silent spear-carriers in the Triumphal March scene of Aida. Indeed, the (F)s, (H)s and Colonel (I) don’t even merit entries in Prof. Garrison’s book Who’s Who In Wodehouse. Mr and Mrs (G) and Sir (J) are the hosts of the binge in the drawing-room and important characters in the book but might just as well be painted on the backdrop for this scene. The ones I want you to identify are (K) and (L).

Something large and solid brushed (the butler) out of the way; and, staggering back, he saw a big man without a hat careering along the hall in the direction of the drawing-room. (…)

The drawing-room was full of men and women dressed and eager for the feast. Here Mr __(F)__ of Heath Prospect chatted about the weather to Mrs __(G)__; there Mrs __(H)__ of The Towers spoke to her host of new plays. Colonel __(I)__ was drinking sherry and entertaining Mrs __(F)__ with an account of his most recent passage of arms with the local Council. Sir __(J)___ and Mr __(H)__ were talking politics. __(K)__, a solitary figure attached to no group, stood by the open window.

Into this refined gathering __(L)__ charged like a ravening wolf. And __(K)__, turning with the others at the sound of the opening door and catching sight of his ghastly face, acted promptly. This was the fourth time to-day that he felt the imperative need of flight from forces beyond his control, and, nimble though he had shown himself on each of the previous occasions, his movements then had been leaden-footed compared with the turn of speed which he exhibited now. He shot out into the garden like a cannon-ball, with __(L)__ in close attendance.

5. Three minutes later the revellers on the lawn were interested to observe a sight rare at the better class of English garden-party. Out of a clump of laurel-bushes that bordered the smoothly mown turf there came charging a stout, pink gentleman of middle age who hopped from side to side as he ran. He was wearing a loin-cloth, and seemed in a hurry. They had just time to recognise in this newcomer their hostess’s brother, __(M)__, when he snatched a cloth from the nearest table, draped it round him, and with a quick leap took refuge behind the portly form of the Bishop of Stortford, who was talking to the local Master of Hounds about the difficulty he had in keeping his vicars off the incense.

6. Not an “exit” as such, but definitely a case of a person being compelled to run for his (or her) life. For this week’s Bonus Point, can you identify the individual who was chased twenty-seven times around a chimney-stack by an adversary armed with a whangee?

Round 344 - 7 February 2008

Rem Acu Tetigisti

This week we examine people who succeed in going straight to the crux of the problem and putting their finger on the nub or, as old Pop Plautus put it, by doing a spot of rem acu tetigistiing.

1. After the coffee, the girl said, Well, she supposed she ought to be (…) catching her train. (...) __(A)__, brightening a little, said he would come and see her off. And __(B)__, faithful to his policy of not letting __(A)__ out of his sight, said he would come too. So they all tooled along, and after the train had pulled out __(B)__, liking his arm in __(A)__’s said:

“I say, __(A)__, I wonder if you would do me a trifling favour?”

Even as he spoke, he tells me he seemed to notice something odd in his companion’s manner. __(A)__’s eyes had a sort of bleak glazed look in them.
“Oh?” he said distantly. “You do, do you? And what is it, my bright young limpet? What can I do for you, my adhesive old porous plaster?”

“Could you lend me a tenner, __(A)__, old man?”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“It would save my life.”

“There,” said __(A)___, “you have put your finger on the insuperable objection to the scheme. I see no percentage in your being alive. I wish you were a corpse, preferably a mangled one. I should like to dance on your remains.”

(…) __(B)__ drew himself up. He had his pride.

“Oh?” he said. “Well, in that case, tinkerty-tonk.”

2. “Subject for a historical picture,” said __(C)__. “Wounded leaving the field after the Battle of Clapham Common. How are your injuries, __(D)__?”

“My back’s hurting like blazes,” said __(D)__. “And my ear’s all sore where that chap got me. Anything the matter with you?”

“Physically,” said __(C)__, “no. Spiritually much. Do you realize, __(D)__, the thing that has happened? I am riding in a tram. I, __(C)__, have paid a penny for a ticket on a tram. If this should get about the clubs! I tell you,__(D)__, no such crisis has ever occurred before in the course of my career.”

“You can always get off, you know,” said __(D)__.

“He thinks of everything,” said __(C)__, admiringly. “You have touched the spot with an unerring finger. Let us descend. I observe in the distance a cab. That looks to me more the sort of thing we want. Let us go and parley with the driver.”

3. The jeweller counted the notes (…). The process made him genial.

“A nasty wet day, sir, it’s been,” he observed, chattily.

__(E)__ shook his head.

“Old friend,” he said, “you’re all wrong. Far otherwise, and not a bit like it, my dear old trafficker in gems! You’ve put your finger on the one aspect of this blighted p.m. that really deserves credit and respect. Rarely in the experience of a lifetime have I encountered a day so absolutely bally in nearly every shape and form, but there was one thing that saved it, and that was its merry old wetness! Toodle-oo, laddie!”

“Good evening, sir,” said the jeweller.

4. __(F)__ passed a hand across his forehead.

“I’m feeling stunned.”

“Well, nobody has a better right to.”

“I was never more surprised in my life (…) than when I came out of my swoon and found you kissing me. (…) You were kissing me? It was not just a lovely dream?”

“No. I was kissing you. You see, I thought you were dead.”

__(F)__ paused. They were approaching the nub. From this point, he would have to follow her answers very carefully.

“Do I have to be dead for you to kiss me?”

“Not at all. I would prefer it otherwise.”

5. “Oh, it’s so difficult … How can I say it? … Can’t you guess?”

“No, I’m dashed if I can.”

“__(G)__ – let me go!”

“But I haven’t got hold of you.”

“Release me!”

“Re –”

And then I suddenly got it. I suppose it was fatigue that had made me so slow to apprehend the nub. (…) I staggered, and the left pedal came up and caught me on the shin. But such was the ecstasy in the soul that I didn’t utter a cry.

6. And for this week’s Bonus Point, you are asked to identify the person who put his or her finger on the crux of the problem with the simple sentence: “Lots of department stores in Brussels.”

Round 345 - 15 February 2008

Sixth Annual Valentine’s Day Quiz

“I congratulate you, George. You are engaged to two of the prettiest girls I have ever seen.”

– J Hamilton Beamish, The Small Bachelor, Chapter 10

Nothing is more heartwarming than two young people engaged to each other, except, of course, for three young people engaged to each other. Fr Rob Bovendeaard gave several examples of this in Round 321, but here are a few more. Name the happy triples (the five fiancés and their ten fiancées).

1. “Fine!” said A__. “So you’re engaged? Well, well!”

“Yes.”

“Just to this one girl, I suppose?”

“What do you mean?”

“You always were a prudent, level-headed fellow who knew where to stop,” said A__ enviously. “I’m engaged to two girls.”

“What!”

A__ sighed.

“Yes, two. And I’m hoping that you may have a word of advice to offer on the subject. Otherwise, I see a slightly tangled future ahead of me.”

“Two?” said B__, dazed.

“Two,” said A__. “I’ve counted them over and over again, but that’s what the sum keeps working out at.”

2. That this seemingly fragile young man, so obviously unfitted for living dangerously, should have been capable of the hazardous feat of becoming engaged to two women simultaneously – and one of them a lady who even in repose resembled a leopardess – is not so really remarkable as it may appear at first sight. There is a simple explanation of his heroism.

Briefly, he had not, as has been said, expected Prospect No 1 until a considerable later date, and by that time, he had hoped, he would have been able to establish himself solidly with Prospect No 2.

3. “Yes, I proposed to her on the practice green, carried away by the superexcellence of her chip shots, and I can’t stand the sight of her. And what’s more, in about three weeks I’m supposed to be marrying someone else. You remember C__, the girl who showed you into my office?”

“Very vividly.”

“She holds the copyright.”

4. Setting out on his walk along the Promenade des Anglais, D__ had suddenly remembered that he had left his mail on the table at the bar at which he had been sitting, and he was hastening now to retrieve it … He sat down and with that morbid urge to self-torture which led the priests of Baal to gash themselves with knives started to reread E__’s note.

It had not changed since he had read it last, nor had the emotions with which he perused it. On first acquaintance it had affected him like the explosion of a hydrogen bomb, and that was how it affected him still.

He sat there in the depths. It is only a man of exceptional strength of character who, having recently become engaged to one girl, can remain wholly unmoved when he discovers that he is also engaged to another.

5. “You say you’re going to marry F__?”

“Sure.”

“That wasn’t the story I heard. The way I got it was that you were going to marry G__.”

“Oh, gosh!” said H__, pausing. He seemed disconcerted. It was plain that G__ had to some extent slipped his memory.

“Yes, what about me?” said G__. “Are you proposing to throw this eager heart aside like an old tube of tooth paste?”

H__ reflected. It was not long before he reached his decision.

“You betcher. You don’t mind, do you?”

Round 346 - 25 February 2008

When husbands who’d been roaming came back homing in the gloaming,
It would give the little woman quite a scare;
For when, like Mother Hubbard, they looked inside their cupboard,
They’d always find a Popham there!
– PG Wodehouse, lyric for Oh, Kay! (1960)

Though several Wodehouse characters hide under beds (see Round 293), Bertie Wooster hides behind sofas on at least two occasions, and Claude Pott hides in a pig-infested bathroom, cupboards are the preferred place of concealment.

Name the people involved in the passages below. (For full credit on #2, name the lady in the case as well as the narrator.)

1. …A good many A__s, notably in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had been constrained by circumstances to think quick on occasions just such as this and, having thought quick, to hide women in cupboards. It was to the cupboard, therefore, acting automatically in accordance with the family tradition, that B__ now directed C__.

“Slide in there!” he hissed. “And not a sound, not a yip, not a murmur. A human life hangs on your silence.”

He closed the cupboard door, straightened his tie and drawing a deep breath called “Come in.” …

A few paragraphs later:

“What’s that?” he [the visitor] asked, pausing in his remarks.

“Eh?”

“That sort of scratching sound. In the cupboard.”

B__ wiped a bead of perspiration from his forehead.

“Mice,” he said.

2. There was a cupboard on the other side of the room, and she nipped across and flung open the door.

“Quick!” she hissed, and it’s all rot to say you can’t hiss a word that hasn't an “s” in it. She did it on her head. “In here!”

The suggestion struck me as a good one. I popped in and she closed the door behind me. …

Again, we snip a few paragraphs:

… I started violently. And, of course, the one place where it is unwise to start violently, if you wish to remain unobserved and incognito, is a cupboard in a female bedroom.

3. But there was still a way. It was for precisely this sort of emergency that he kept that tall and spacious cupboard on his premises. To dart back into the office and dive for this sanctuary like a homing rabbit was with C__ the work of a moment. A few seconds later, he was curled up in its interior, breathing very softly through the nostrils, when D__, arriving at journey’s end, found only an empty room.

4. “…So where was I? Oh yes, in the dame’s sleeping quarters, and she was saying “Well, where’s your ruddy burglar?” and giving me the horse’s laugh, when guess what. The cupboard in the corner of the room, which had hitherto not spoken, suddenly sneezed.”

“Good gracious!”

“… She stiffened like a monarch of the jungle scenting its prey. This needs attending to promptly, she said, and she pops into the other room and comes back with a statuette that had been on the mantelpiece, a thing about a foot long with no clothes on, Shakespeare it may have been or Queen Victoria, and she whispers to me to open the cupboard door quick, which I done, revealing a bloke in a crouching posture, and she reaches in and lets him have it on the topknot with the statuette, using a good deal of follow-through, and he tumbles out …”

5. The fact that E__, who had started the evening in one cupboard, was finishing it in another is readily explained. It was not so much that he was fond of cupboards as because, finding himself in this room and hearing footsteps approaching, the cupboard had seemed to him the logical place in which to hide …

E__ was far from being the type that remains cool and calm in every crisis, but a man who has once taken to hiding in cupboards acquires a certain knack. Where another might have stood congealed, he acted. Another moment and he was inside, trying not to breathe. And he was standing there, festooned in summer suits, when the cupboard door opened. A hand came groping in, apparently reaching for the shelf above his head, but before it could arrive there, it had touched his face.

Extra Credit: First, determine how the people in group A differ from those in group B:

Group A: Roland Attwater, Joey Cooley (while in Lord Havershot’s body), Robert Mowbray Fenn, Augustus Fink-Nottle, Sam Marlowe, John Hamilton Potter, Cyprian Rossiter, Jacob K Schnellenhammer, Adolphus Stiffham, Jerry Vail, Jill Willard. (Cyprian Rossiter’s case differs slightly from the others’, but for the sake of this quiz, he belongs in group A.)

Group B: Lord Belpher, Monty Bodkin, Frederick Mulliner, Jane Oliphant.

Second, to which group(s) would you assign the following characters: (a) Lord Ickenham, (b) Julia Ukridge?

Round 347 - 4 March 2008

Wardrobes

Having considered Wodehouse characters who hide in cupboards, we now turn to wardrobes. I couldn’t find four who had actually hidden in wardrobes (though I’m sure I’m overlooking some), so I’ve broadened the scope of the quiz to wardrobes in general.

1. … For an instant, A__ stood transfixed, his beady little eyes flickering to and fro. Then, at the end of the room beside the fireplace, he saw that there stood a small wardrobe.

The sight of it affected him very much as that of a rainbow used to affect the poet Wordsworth … Thirty seconds later, he was inside …

Another man enters the room, hears a noise, and diagnoses the presence of a burglar.

He based his reasoning on the fact that the noise, whatever it had been, had come from inside the wardrobe. Honest men, he felt, do not hide in wardrobes, and he was, of course, perfectly correct. The simple question “Do you hide in wardrobes?” is a handy way of separating the sheep from the goats in this world. It is the acid test. At the man who answers “Yes,” we look askance, and rightly.

2. “It appears that he met B__ and spilled the beans with a lavish hand. He told her so many things about me that I wonder she remembered them all. But she did.”

“Such as–?”

“Well, getting pinched at the C__ [place/location omitted] and going down to the drawing-room last night to get a spot and being caught this morning in D__’s wardrobe. Things like that.”

“In the wardrobe? What were you doing there?”

“I had gone to her room to get you a lipstick, and–“

“Oh, E__! My hero! Did you really do that for me?”

3. There was a wardrobe not far from where he stood, a handsome piece in old walnut, and he dived into it like a seal going after a chunk of halibut, taking his roll with him.

And I popped in through the French windows and turned the key in the wardrobe door …

You see, I had studied this F__’s psychology, and my researches had left me with the conviction that he was one of those who, finding themselves locked in a wardrobe by a policeman during a raid on premises which they have been employing for illegal purposes, will endeavour to make a dicker with that policeman.

4. “I’ll tell you what it is,” she said, seeming to experience some difficulty in articulating. “The G__ [name of object] is at H__ [name of place].”

“What!”

“On top of the wardrobe in our bedroom, that’s what.”

J__ could understand why his honey was looking like that, as he had expressed it. He was looking like that himself.

“On top of the wardrobe?” he gurgled weakly.

“Seemed to me the safest place to put it.”

5. “I saw a monkey!” said her brother, hollowly. “I was standing over there and I saw a monkey! Of course, it wasn’t there really. I flung the bottle at it, and it seemed to climb on to that wardrobe.”

“This wardrobe?”

“Yes.”

K__ struck it a resounding blow with the palm of her hand, and L__’s face popped over the edge, peering down anxiously.

Round 348 - 13 March 2008

My experience is that when Aunt Agatha wants you to do a thing you do it, or else you find yourself wondering why those fellows in the olden days made such a fuss when they had trouble with the Spanish Inquisition.
– Bertram Wooster, “Extricating Young Gussie”

You weren’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition, were you? Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon … Oh, never mind.

For full credit on the first two passages, name not only the narrator(s) but B and D.

1. I spent the night in what is called durance vile, and bright and early next day was haled before the beak at A__ Street police court, charged with assaulting an officer of the Law …

It seemed to me, as I stood listening to the cop running through the story sequence, that B__, in describing this Solon as a twenty-minute egg with many of the less lovable qualities of some high-up official of the Spanish Inquisition, had understated rather than exaggerated the facts.

2. My Aunt C__’s idea of a chair, for instance, was something antique made to the order of the Spanish Inquisition. D__ had the right conception. Men arrived in vans and unloaded things with slanting backs and cushioned seats, and whenever I wasn’t over at the Hall I wallowed in these.

3. In the Blue Room, E__, dressed and ready for dinner, was thoroughly approving of his quarters … Its windows, as his hostess had stated, looked out upon the rose garden and beyond it on a pleasing panorama of woods and fields, rooks cawing in the former, rabbits moving briskly to and fro in the latter, and its interior was comfortable, even luxurious. He particularly liked the easy chair. Too often in English country house bedrooms the guest finds himself fobbed off with something hard and upright, constructed to the order of some remote ancestor by the upholsterer of the Spanish Inquisition, but this one invited repose.

4. “You don’t think they might excuse him because his blood was young at the time?”

“Not a hope. They won’t be worrying about his ruddy blood. You don’t know what these blighters here are like. Most of them are chapel folk with a moral code that would have struck Torquemada as too rigid.”

“Torquemada?”

“The Spanish Inquisition man.”

“Oh, that Torquemada?”

“How many Torquemadas did you think there were?”

5. The butler gave F_ a haughty glance, and stalked out.

“So they’ve been putting you through your paces, eh?” said G__.

“’Ave they?” H__’s face twisted. His manner resembled that of some victim of the Inquisition who, released from the torture chamber, has been asked by an interested friend how it all came out in there.

Round 349 - 23 March 2008

A Round of "Hunt the Name"

Format this week is something new (fresh). Each question assembles several passages, each referring to a different inhabitant of the Wodehouse universe. All the characters in a question have a name in common. Your assignment is to find that name for each question. You are not required to provide the exact source of each excerpt or identify every character.

For example, given

a) "You won't find them any trouble. There's nothing of the athlete about ___. A brisk walk of twenty minutes in the park sets him up for the day, as regards exercise. And as far as food, give him whatever you're having yourself – raw meat, puppy biscuits and so on. Don't let him have cocktails. They unsettle him."

b) "Right from the first day he came to me, I have looked on him as a sort of guide, philosopher and friend."

c) "__ had tied the can to his Uncle Fred's suggestion of a pleasant and instructive afternoon in London ..."

d) "A lifelong buddy of mine, this ___, linked to me by what are called imperishable memories. Years ago, when striplings, he and I had done a stretch together at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, the preparatory school conducted by that prince of stinkers , Aubrey Upjohn, MA, and had frequently stood side by side in the Upjohn study awaiting the receipt of six of the juiciest from a cane of the type that biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder, as the fellow said.

You have likely recognized (b) as Bertie referring to Jeeves, and might be hollering "REGINALD" as does Sir Aylmer near the beginning of Uncle Dynamite so you could proceed to confirm your guess by locating all or some of Reginald the Peke of Open House, Reginald "Pongo" Twistleton, and Reginald "Kipper" Herring.

Characters whose names are your targets are A-P, Other omitted names are replaced with numbers.

1. a) Drinking her in, I could see how _1__had got that way. _A__ was slim and blonde and fragile, in sharp contradistinction to her mother, whom I had now identified as the one on my left, a rugged light-heavyweight with a touch of Wallace Beery in her make-up. Her eyes were blue, her teeth pearly, and in other respects she had what it takes. I was quite able to follow _1__'s thought processes. According to his own statement, he had walked with this girl in an old garden on twilight evenings, with the birds singing sleepily in the shrubberies and the stars beginning to peep out, and no man of spirit could do that with a girl like this without going under the ether.

b) _B__ had been moving to and fro through the castle with a drawn face, doing good right and left: and _2_, being handiest, had had to bear the brunt of it. It was with the first real smile he had smiled that day that he came out of the telephone-cupboard and found the object of his thoughts entering the hall in front of him.

"Well, well, well, my dear," he said cheerily. "And what have you been doing?"
There was no answering smile on _B_'s face. Indeed, looking at her, you could see that this was a girl who had forgotten how to smile. She suggested something out of Maeterlinck.

c) ... he gradually brought into focus a fine, upstanding girl in heather-mixture tweed and recognized in her_C__. Her charming face was rose-flushed, her hazel eyes shining. She was a delightful picture of radiant health. It made him feel sick to look at her.

2. a) It was one of those cold, clammy, accusing sort of eyes – the kind that makes you reach up and see if your tie is straight: and he looked at me as if I were some sort of unnecessary product which _D__ had brought in after a ramble among the local ash-cans.

b) Nobody was fonder of _E__ than I was, but everybody knows that, where money was concerned, he was the most complete chump in the annals of the nation. He had an expensive thirst. He never backed a horse that didn't get housemaid's knee in the middle of the race. He had a system of beating the bank at Monte Carlo which used to make the administration hang out the bunting and ring the joy-bells when he was sighted in the offing. Take him for all in all, _E__ was as willing a spender as ever called the family lawyer a bloodsucking vampire because he wouldn't let _E__ cut down the timber to raise another thousand.

c) _F__ met with his instant approval. He liked his curates substantial, and _F__ proved to be definitely the large economy size, the sort of curate whom one could picture giving the local backslider the choice between seeing the light or getting plugged in the eye.

d) As for _3__, how shall I describe her emotions? She was stunned. Before her very eyes the stone which the builders had rejected had become the main thing, the hundred-to-one shot had walked away with the race. A rush of tender admiration for _G__ flooded her heart.

3. a) I pursed the lips. This didn't sound too good. Nothing that I had seen of _H__ had led me to suppose that the divine fire lurked within her. One didn't want to condemn her unheard, of course, but I was prepared to bet that anything proceeding from her pen would be well on the lousy side.

b) Once, in her childhood, a sportive playmate had secretly withdrawn the chair on which _I__ was preparing to seat herself. Years had passed, but the recollection of the incident remained green in her memory. In frosty weather she could still feel the old wound. And now, as _4__ suddenly behaved in this remarkable manner, she experienced the same sensation again. It was as though something blunt and heavy had hit her on the head at the exact moment when she was slipping on a banana-skin.

c) They were a very C3 collection. _5__ looked like one of the things that come out of dead trees after the rain; moth-eaten was the word I should have used to describe _6__; and as for _J__, she seemed to take me straight into another and a dreadful world. It wasn't that she was exactly bad-looking. In fact, if she had knocked off starchy foods and done Swedish exercises for a bit, she might have been quite tolerable. But there was too much of her. Billowy curves. Well-nourished, perhaps, expresses it best. And, while she may have had a heart of gold, the thing you noticed about her first was that she had a tooth of gold. I knew that _7__, when in form, could fall in love with practically anything of the other sex; but this time I couldn't see any excuse for him at all.

4. a) He spoke dully. He was pale and leaden-eyed and looked like a butler who had come home with the milk, for he had had little sleep. Few things are less conducive to slumber than the sudden collapse of all one's hopes and dreams round about bedtime ... [call him _K__]

b) "And every day you must be meeting men who would give anything to marry you."

The compliment plainly pleased _C__. A gratified smile softened the sternness of her face.

"Well, I wouldn't say that," she said, "but I did have two proposals this week."

"Two?"

One was _L__, which of course was too absurd for words. No girl would marry _L__ except to win a substantial bet."

Privately _8__ considered _L__ a far more suitable match than _9__, but he prudently did not say so.

c) "I think they send a man down from time to time to see that everything is all right. I haven't been at this heirloom-possessing game long enough myself to be able to tell you definitely, but my friend _M__, who has a friend who has a number of the beastly things, tells me that's what they do. It seems plausible. They would naturally want to be sure there was no funny business going on."

5. This last one is a little different. How does name P differ from N and O?

a) He was enabled now to get a closer, more leisurely and much more satisfactory view of_N__ than had been his good fortune up to the present ... Her chin was square and determined, but its resoluteness was contradicted by a dimple and by the pleasant good-humour of the mouth; and a further softening of the face was effected by the nose, which seemed to have started out with the intention of being dignified and aristocratic but had defeated its purpose by tilting very slightly at the tip. This was a girl who would take chances, but would take them with a smile and laugh when she lost.

b) Jealous as _10__ was of all who inflicted gay badinage, however gentlemanly, on _O__, he never forgot that he was an artist. Never, even in his blackest moments, had he yielded to the temptation to dig the point of the scissors the merest fraction of an inch into a client's skull.

c) "Quite the worst blackguard I ever had the misfortune to know," he replied in an even tone. "Will you kindly give me a receipt for this? Then I need not detain you. You may return to the ball-game without any further delay. Possibly," he went on, "you may wonder why you have not received this money before. I persuaded _P__ to let me use my discretion in choosing the time when it should be handed over to you. I decided to wait until, in my opinion, you had sense enough to use it properly. I do not think that time has arrived. I do not think it will ever arrive. But as we are parting company and shall, I hope, never meet again, you had better have it now."

On offer this week are two bonus point opportunities:

A. What article of clothing is affectionately nicknamed with the first name which is the answer to Question #2 above (not the character called _2__)?"

B. Name three characters in the canon who have cousins named Egbert.

Round 350 - 2 April 2008

Collectors and the Collected

In Something Fresh [US title Something New] we learn that:

"It does not matter what a man collects; if Nature has given him the collector's mind he will become a fanatic on the subject of whatever collection he sets out to make. Mr Peters had collected dollars; he began to collect scarabs with precisely the same enthusiasm. He would have become just as enthusiastic about butterflies or old china if he had turned his thoughts to them; but it chanced that what he had taken up was the collecting of the scarab, and it gripped him more and more as the years went on."

This week we consider some of the more celebrated collections chronicled in the canon. Identify the collectors in the passages below.

1. "Did you ever hear of a _A__?"

"No"

"_A__? Dark man with an eyeglass. Used to play the saxaphone."

"No"

"Ah? I thought you might have met him. He trifled with the affections of my niece _B__. I horsewhipped him on the steps of the Drones Club. Is the name _C__ familiar to you?"

"No"

"_C__ trifled with the affections of my niece _D__. He was one of the Somersetshire _C__s. Wore a fair mustache and kept pigeons. I horsewhipped him on the steps of the Junior Bird-Fanciers. By the way, _E__, what is your club?"

"The United Jade-Collectors," quavered _E__.

"Has it steps?"

2. Once in, I set about the task of ornamenting my abode with much vigour.I had my own ideas of mural decoration. I papered the walls with editorial rejection forms, of which I was beginning to have representative collection. Properly arranged, these look very striking. There is a good deal of variety about them. The ones I liked best were those which I received, at the rate of three a week, bearing a very pleasing picture, in green, of the publishing offices at the top of the sheet of note-paper. Scattered about in sufficient quantities, these lend an air of distinction to a room. Pearson's Magazine also supplies a taking line in rejection forms. Punch's I never cared for very much. Neat, I grant you; but, to my mind, too cold. I like a touch of colour in a rejection form.

3. It was a sort of minor drawing-room, if you know what I mean, and it gave the impression of being over-furnished. This was due to the fact that it was stuffed to bursting-point with glass cases, these in their turn stuffed to bursting point with silver. It was evident that I was looking at the _F__ collection.

I paused. Something seemed to draw me through the French window. And the next moment there I was, vis-a-vis as the expression is, with my old pal _G__.

4. "He feared the wrath of that millionaire philatelist."

"Millionaire what?" asked _H__.

_I__, explained _J__, "collected stamps".

_H__ said he had always thought that a philatelist was a man who was kind to animals.

"No," said _J__, "a stamp collector. Though many philatelists, are, I believe, also kind to animals. _I__ had been devoted to this hobby for many years, ever since he had retired from business as a promoter of companies in the City of London. His collection was famous."

5. "Spiders have the most trying married lives. _K__ collects them and studies their habits. The moment the honeymoon is over, he says, the female spider eats the male spider."

"She does?"

"So _K__ tells me."

"Oh well, if there's nothing else in the house ..."

Bonus Point

Step 1: Identify a collector from the canon of each of the following items:
Prayer Rugs
Socks
Japanese Prints (at least two possible answers give the right letter)
Porcelain Vases
Snuff Boxes
Football Memorabilia (collector is a fan of Houndsditch Wednesday)
Every manner of valuable and valueless curio, with no central motive.

Step 2: For the full bonus point: You need one letter from the name of each of these seven collectors, the first letter of the surname for the untitled and the first letter of the title for earls and the like. Add to these 7 letters one more copy of the snuff box collector's initial and two more of the Japanese Print letter to give a list of 10 letters. Arrange them into a two-word phrase describing a festive occasion.