Uncle Dynamite

Uncle Dynamite Read Online Free PDF

Book: Uncle Dynamite Read Online Free PDF
Author: P.G. Wodehouse
Tags: Uncle Fred
much wrong with that young
chap, what?’ — or possibly ‘What, what?’ He looked forward with bright
confidence to grappling them to his soul with hoops of steel.
    It was
consequently with some annoyance that he found on reaching his destination that
there was going to be a slight delay before this desirable state of affairs
could be consummated. The first essential preliminary to grappling a
householder and his wife to your soul with hoops of steel is that you should be
able to get into the house they are holding, and this, he discovered, presented
unforeseen difficulties.
    Ashenden
Manor was one of those solidly built edifices which date from the days when a
home was not so much a place for putting on the old slippers and lighting the
pipe, as a fortress to be defended against uncouth intruders with battering
rams. Its front door was stout and massive, and at the moment tightly closed. Furthermore,
the bell appeared to be out of order. He leaned against the button with his
full weight for a while, but it soon became clear that this was going to get
him nowhere, and the necessity of taking alternative action presented itself.
    It was
at this point that he observed not far from where he stood an open French window,
and it seemed to him that he had found a formula. A bit irregular, perhaps, to
start your first visit to a place by strolling in through windows, but a
kindly, hearty old boy like Sir Aylmer Bostock would overlook that. Abandoning
the front door, accordingly, as a lost cause, he stepped through, and an
instant later was experiencing the unpleasant shock which always came to people
who found themselves for the first time in the room where the ex-Governor kept
the African curios which he had collected during his years of honourable exile.
Sir Aylmer Bostock’s collection of African curios was probably the most
hideous, futile and valueless that even an ex-Governor had ever brought home
with him, and many of its items seemed to take Pongo into a different and a
dreadful world.
    And he
had picked up and started to scrutinize the nearest to hand, a peculiar sort of
what-not executed in red mud by an artist apparently under the influence of trade
gin, and was wondering why even an untutored African should have been chump
enough to waste on an effort like this hours which might have been more
profitably employed in chasing crocodiles or beaning the neighbours with his
knobkerrie, when a voice, having in it many of the qualities of the Last Trump,
suddenly split the air.
    ‘REGINALD!’
    Starting
violently, Pongo dropped the what-not. It crashed to the floor and became a
mere macédoine. A moment later, a burly figure appeared in the doorway,
preceded by a large white moustache.
     
    At about the moment when
Pongo at Ickenham Hall was springing to the wheel of his Buffy-Porson and
pressing a shapely foot on the self-starter, Sir Aylmer Bostock had gone to his
wife’s bedroom on the first floor of Ashenden Manor to mend a broken slat in
the Venetian blind. He was a man who liked to attend to these little domestic
chores himself, and he wanted to have it ready when the midday train brought Lady Bostock back from London , where she had been spending a week
with her daughter Hermione.
    In
predicting that this old schoolmate of his would feel chagrined at Bill
Oakshott’s failure to co-operate in the civic welcome which he had gone to such
trouble to arrange for him, Lord Ickenham had shown sound judgment of character.
When an ex-Governor, accustomed for years to seeing his official receptions go
like clockwork, tastes in a black hour the bitterness of failure and
anti-climax, pique is bound to supervene. Fists will be clenched, oaths
breathed, lower lips bitten. And this is particularly so if the ex-Governor is
one whose mental attitude, even under the most favourable conditions,
resembles, as did Sir Aylmer Bostock’s, that of a trapped cinnamon bear. As he
worked, his brow was dark, his moustache bristling, and from
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