Uncle Dynamite Read Online Free PDF Page A

you’ve
changed your mind and it’s all off. I have a telegraph form in my study.’
    A look
of intense devoutness came over Pongo’s face.
    ‘For
your information, Uncle Fred, wild horses wouldn’t make me break my engagement.’
    ‘Most
unlikely they’ll ever try.’
    ‘I
worship that girl. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her. Well, to give you a
rough idea, I told her I was a teetotaller. And why? Purely because she
happened one day to express the hope that I wasn’t like so many of these modern
young suction pumps, always dropping in at bars and lowering a couple for the
tonsils. “Me?” I said. “Good Lord, no. I never touch the stuff.” That’ll show
you.’
    ‘So
when you get to Ashenden —’
    ‘—
They’ll uncork the barley water and bring on the lemonade. I know. I’ve
foreseen that. It’ll be agony, but I can take it. For her sake. I worship her,
I tell you. If H. Bostock isn’t an angel in human shape, then I don’t know an
angel in human shape when I see one. Until now I have never known what love
was.’
    ‘Well,
you have had ample opportunity of finding out. I have watched you with tender
solicitude through about fifty-seven romances, starting with that freckled child
with the missing front tooth at the dancing class, who blacked your eye with a
wooden dumb-bell when you kissed her in the cloak-room, and ending with this —‘
    Lord
Ickenham paused, and Pongo eyed him narrowly.
    ‘Well?
This what?’
    ‘This
gruesome combination of George Eliot, Boadicea and the late Mrs Carrie Nation,’
said Lord Ickenham. ‘This flashing-eyed governess. This twenty-minute egg with
whom no prudent man would allow himself to walk alone down a dark alley.’
    It was
enough. Pongo rose, a dignified figure.
    ‘Shall
we join the ladies?’ he said coldly.
    ‘There
aren’t any,’ said Lord Ickenham.
    ‘I
don’t know why I said that,’ said Pongo, annoyed. ‘What I meant was, let’s stop
talking bally rot and go and have a game of billiards.’

 
     
     
    3
     
    It was with a light heart
and a gay tra-la-la on his lips that Pongo Twistleton set out for Ashenden
Manor on the following afternoon, leaving Lord Ickenham, who was not embarking
on his metropolitan jaunt till a few hours later, waving benevolently from the
front steps.
    Nothing
so braces a young man in love as the consciousness of having successfully
resisted a Tempter who has tried to lure him into a course of action of which
the adored object would not approve: and as he recalled the splendid firmness
with which he had tied the can to his Uncle Fred’s suggestion of a pleasant and
instructive afternoon in London, Pongo felt spiritually uplifted.
    Pleasant
and instructive afternoon, forsooth! Few people have ever come nearer to saying
‘Faugh!’ than did Pongo as Lord Ickenham’s phrase shot through his wincing mind
like some loathsome serpent. The crust of the old buster, daring to suggest
pleasant and instructive afternoons to a man who had put that sort of thing
behind him once and for all. With a shudder of distaste he thrust the whole
degrading episode into the hinterland of his consciousness, and turned his
thoughts to a more agreeable theme, the coming meeting with Hermione’s parents.
    This,
he was convinced, was going to be a riot from the word Go. He had little data
about these two old geezers, of course, but he presumed that they were
intelligent old geezers, able to spot a good man when they saw one, and it
seemed, accordingly, pretty obvious that a fellow like himself — steady,
upright, impervious to avuncular wheedlings and true blue from soup to nuts —
would have them eating out of his hand in the first minute. ‘My dear, he’s charming!’ they would write to Hermione, and bluff Sir Aylmer, whom he pictured as a
sort of modern Cheeryble Brother, would say to Lady Bostock (gentle,
sweet-faced, motherly), as they toddled up to bed at the conclusion of a
delightful first evening, ‘Gad, my dear, nothing