Tales for Our Time is a unique feature of The Mark Steyn Club - and, I'm pleased to say, one of our most popular: our nightly audio serialisations of classic literature from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, via some neglected but highly pertinent gems such as Conan Doyle's tale of proto-jihadists preying on foolish westerners, The Tragedy of the Korosko.
Our current caper is The Girl on the Boat, a comic novel of 1922 by P G Wodehouse. Thank you for all your perceptive comments about this Tale. Following my note on the Sam/Webster relationship echoing Bertie/Jeeves, James, a First Week Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, writes:
I was also struck by the Sam/Webster relationship... Felt like Wodehouse was making some final tests for the magic formula of Bertie and Jeeves. The plot to kidnap Pinky-Boodles also seems to presage some of the various plots to kidnap the Empress of Blandings.
On the other hand, Alysia, a First Weekend Founding Member from South Carolina, finds the secondary romance of more interest:
When this Tale started, I could never have imagined being so caught up in Eustace and Jane's star-crossed love story! They face a peril worthy of one of Webster's romances.
There's more Eustace and Jane in tonight's episode. But downstairs Sam wearies of knocking over vases in the dark, and decides to risk the light switch:
He declined to go on stumbling about in this darkness any longer. He groped his way with infinite care to the door, on the wall adjoining which, he presumed, the electric-light switch would be. It was nearly ten years since he had last been inside Windles, and it never occurred to him that in this progressive age even a woman like his Aunt Adeline, of whom he could believe almost anything, would still be using candles and oil-lamps as a means of illumination. His only doubt was whether the switch was where it was in most houses, near the door.
It is odd to reflect that, as his searching fingers touched the knob, a delicious feeling of relief came to Samuel Marlowe. This misguided young man actually felt at that moment that his troubles were over. He positively smiled as he placed a thumb on the knob and shoved.
He shoved strongly and sharply, and instantaneously there leaped at him out of the darkness a blare of music which appeared to his disordered mind quite solid. It seemed to wrap itself round him. It was all over the place. In a single instant the world had become one vast bellow of Tosti's "Good-bye."
Ah, the old orchestrion! Sir Paolo Tosti's most famous composition (that's him at top right) was still more or less ubiquitous a century ago. It has faded somewhat since, but not at Tales for Our Time. This is the second of our Tales in which it figures: for the first, see here.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Twenty-One of our tale simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
I'll be right back here tomorrow with Part Twenty-Two of The Girl on the Boat. If you're minded to join us in The Mark Steyn Club in this our eighth season, you're more than welcome. You can find more information here. And, if you have a chum you think might enjoy Tales for Our Time (so far, we've covered H G Wells, Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, Kipling, Kafka, Gogol, Baroness Orczy, Victor Hugo, Louisa May Alcott, O Henry, John Buchan, Scott Fitzgerald and more), we have a special Gift Membership that makes a perfect birthday present.
