P. G. Wodehouse Read Online Free PDF

me that we
shall not have to wait long. (Applause.) Jealousy is beginning to
spring up between the Russians and the Germans. It will be our task to
aggravate this feeling. With our perfect organisation this should be
easy. Sooner or later this smouldering jealousy is going to burst into
flame. Any day now," he proceeded, warming as he spoke, "there may be
the dickens of a dust-up between these Johnnies, and then we've got 'em
where the hair's short. See what I mean, you chaps? It's like this. Any
moment they may start scrapping and chaw each other up, and then we'll
simply sail in and knock what's left endways."
    A shout of applause went up from the assembled scouts.
    "What I am anxious to impress upon you men," concluded Clarence, in
more measured tones, "is that our hour approaches. England looks to us,
and it is for us to see that she does not look in vain. Sedulously
feeding the growing flame of animosity between the component parts of
the invading horde, we may contrive to bring about that actual
disruption. Till that day, see to it that you prepare yourselves for
war. Men, I have finished."
    "What the Chief Scout means," said Scout-master Wagstaff, "is no
rotting about and all that sort of rot. Jolly well keep yourselves fit,
and then, when the time comes, we'll give these Russian and German
blighters about the biggest hiding they've ever heard of. Follow the
idea? Very well, then. Mind you don't go mucking the show up."
    "Een gonyama-gonyama!" shouted the new thoroughly roused troops.
"Invooboo! Yah bo! Yah bo! Invooboo!"
    The voice of Young England—of Young England alert and at its post!

Chapter 2 - An Important Engagement
*
    Historians, when they come to deal with the opening years of the
twentieth century, will probably call this the Music-Hall Age. At the
time of the great invasion the music-halls dominated England. Every
town and every suburb had its Hall, most of them more than one. The
public appetite for sight-seeing had to be satisfied somehow, and the
music-hall provided the easiest way of doing it. The Halls formed a
common place on which the celebrity and the ordinary man could meet. If
an impulsive gentleman slew his grandmother with a coal-hammer, only a
small portion of the public could gaze upon his pleasing features at
the Old Bailey. To enable the rest to enjoy the intellectual treat, it
was necessary to engage him, at enormous expense, to appear at a
music-hall. There, if he happened to be acquitted, he would come on the
stage, preceded by an asthmatic introducer, and beam affably at the
public for ten minutes, speaking at intervals in a totally inaudible
voice, and then retire; to be followed by some enterprising lady who
had endeavoured, unsuccessfully, to solve the problem of living at the
rate of ten thousand a year on an income of nothing, or who had
performed some other similarly brainy feat.
    It was not till the middle of September that anyone conceived what one
would have thought the obvious idea of offering music-hall engagements
to the invading generals.
    The first man to think of it was Solly Quhayne, the rising young agent.
Solly was the son of Abraham Cohen, an eminent agent of the Victorian
era. His brothers, Abe Kern, Benjamin Colquhoun, Jack Coyne, and Barney
Cowan had gravitated to the City; but Solly had carried on the old
business, and was making a big name for himself. It was Solly who had
met Blinky Bill Mullins, the prominent sand-bagger, as he emerged from
his twenty years' retirement at Dartmoor, and booked him solid for a
thirty-six months' lecturing tour on the McGinnis circuit. It was to
him, too, that Joe Brown, who could eat eight pounds of raw meat in
seven and a quarter minutes, owed his first chance of displaying his
gifts to the wider public of the vaudeville stage.
    The idea of securing the services of the invading generals came to him
in a flash.
    "S'elp me!" he cried. "I believe they'd go big; put 'em on where you
like."
    Solly was a man of action. Within a