PETTICOAT INFLUENCE: (A FOOTBALL STORY) BY P. G. WODEHOUSE
PETTICOAT INFLUENCE: (A FOOTBALL STORY)
P. G. WODEHOUSE
My brother Bob sometimes says that if he dies young or gets white hair at the age of thirty it will be all my fault. He says that I was bad at fifteen, worse at sixteen, while “present day,” as they put it in the biographies of celebrities, I am simply awful. This is very ungrateful of him, because I have always done my best to make him a credit to the family. He is just beginning his second year at Oxford, so, naturally, he wants repressing. Ever since I put my hair up — and that is nearly a year ago now — I have seen that I was the only person to do this. Father doesn’t notice things. Besides, Bob is always on his best behaviour with father.
Just at present, however, there was a sort of truce. I was very grateful to Bob because, you see, if it had not been for him I should not have thought of getting Saunders to make Mr. Simpson let father hit his bowling about in the match with the Cave men, and then father wouldn’t have taken me to London for the winter, and if I had had to stay at Much Middlefold all the winter I should have pined away. So that I had a great deal to thank Bob for, and I was very kind to him till he went back to Oxford for the winter term; and I was still on the lookout for a chance of paying back one good turn with another.
We had taken a jolly house in Sloane Street from October, and I was having the most perfect time. I’m afraid father was hating it, though. He said to me at dinner one night, “One thousand five hundred and twenty-three vehicles passed the window of the club this morning, Joan.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I counted them.”
“Father, what a waste of time!”
“Why, what else is there to do in London?” he said.
I could have told him millions of things, but I suppose if you don’t like London it isn’t any fun looking at the sort of sights I like to see.
The morning after this, when father had gone off to his club — to count cabs again, I suppose — I got a letter from Bob.
“DEAR KID” (he wrote), — “Just a line. Hope you’re having a good time in London. I can’t come down for Aunt Edith’s ball on your birthday, as they won’t let me. I tried it on, but the Dean was all against it. Look here, I want you to do something for me. The fact is, I’ve had a lot of expenses lately, with my twenty-firster and so on, and I’ve had rather to run up a few fairly warm bills here and there, so I shall probably have to touch the governor for a trifle over and above my allowance. What I want you to do is this keep an eye on him, and if you notice that he’s particularly bucked about anything one day, wire to me first thing. Then I’ll run down and strike while the iron’s hot. See? Don’t forget. — Yours ever, BOB.
“P.S. There’s just a chance that it may not be necessary after all. If everything goes well I may scrape into the ‘Varsity team, and if I can manage to get my Blue he will be so pleased that a rabbit could feed out of his hand.”
I wrote back that afternoon, promising to do all I could. But I said that at present father was not feeling very happy, as London never agreed with him very well, and he might not like to be worried for money for a week or two. He does not mind what he gives us as a rule, but sometimes he seems to take a gloomy view of things, and talks about extravagance, and what a bad habit it is to develop in one’s youth, when one ought to be learning the value of money.
Bob replied that he understood, and added that a friend of his, who had it from another man who had lunched with a cousin of the secretary of football, had told him that they were thinking of giving him a trial soon in the team.