Friday, January 17, 2014

Wyatt went off to the Argentine, bagged a gaucho


We interrupt our investiga-
tion of scowls in deference
to Friday's natural prefer-
ence for the happiest news.






















James Wyatt, our leader of
school from Mike at Wrykyn,
had been sent down by his
own hopeless step-father,
into a clerkship in the
dankest bank in the City;
Wodehousians will know, 
he shared this fate, also,
or possibly we'd have had
to read terribly good trans-
lations of Classical histor-
ies, his métier, instead of
the restive inventions of
timeless, not to say incur-
able, youth. With all of
Wrykyn, Mike was sorry, and
then a lamp flickered in a
nascent socket of his soul,
and he remembered that his
father owned enormous swaths
of Argentina. Couldn't Wyatt,
a very noble shot for Wrykyn
and also of cats by air-gun 
in the garden by moonlight, 
justify a turn on the pampas?




What a happy Friday it was,
at Mike's breakfast table as
the post arrived from Buenos
Aires, relating how Wyatt had
subdued a gaucho poacher with
a nifty shot to his ankle, af-
ter taking one for the family
firm, in the shoulder. As with
his air-gun and the cats, no-
body seemed to have been hurt
very much, and naturally a fel-
low needs to expect a few in-
dignities sometime, as an as-
pect of leading the school.



























Dashed inconvenient, though,
if the gaucho's nicks should
have kept him from the Somme,
as his age now would keep him
from Fallujah. Bad enough, to
have missed Belfast, if it came
to that. This was 1909; and for
our eternally oblivious scribe,
it stayed that way. One hasn't 
the heart to regret it. There's
plenty else, not to mention our
est taste for agony; but there
match his abundant innocence.




















P.G. Wodehouse
Mike at Wrykyn
op. cit.

iv  Mathias Lauridsen



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