Welcome to Part Twenty of The Girl on the Boat, P G Wodehouse's comic romp of 1922 and the latest entry to our series Tales for Our Time.
Thank you for all your kind comments about this sixty-ninth caper. April, a First Hour Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, writes:
Hi, Mark!
Comedy is difficult, so I hope this effort isn't too taxing for you. The introduction to Pinky Boodles at the beginning of the story cracked me up...
Now Pinky Boodles is in peril? But I trust my laughter will continue. Thanks for this.
Comedy is mostly "difficult" if the script's a stinker, which isn't usually a problem with Wodehouse, April. So I've had a ball reading this one.
In tonight's episode, the narrator feels it's time to right the ship:
If there is one thing more than another which weighs upon the mind of a story-teller as he chronicles the events which he has set out to describe, it is the thought that the reader may be growing impatient with him for straying from the main channel of his tale and devoting himself to what are, after all, minor developments. This story, for instance, opened with Mrs. Horace Hignett, the world-famous writer on Theosophy, going over to America to begin a lecturing-tour; and no one realises more keenly than I do that I have left Mrs. Hignett flat. I have thrust that great thinker into the background and concentrated my attention on the affairs of one who is both her mental and her moral inferior, Samuel Marlowe. I seem at this point to see the reader—a great brute of a fellow with beetling eyebrows and a jaw like the ram of a battleship, the sort of fellow who is full of determination and will stand no nonsense—rising to remark that he doesn't care what happened to Samuel Marlowe and that what he wants to know is, how Mrs. Hignett made out on her lecturing-tour. Did she go big in Buffalo? Did she have 'em tearing up the seats in Schenectady? Was she a riot in Chicago and a cyclone in St Louis? Those are the points on which he desires information, or give him his money back.
If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club you can hear Part Twenty of our serialisation of The Girl on the Boat simply by clicking here and logging-in. All previous episodes can be found here.
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