A Benefit Match

By P.G. Wodehouse

2009

First Published

3.15

Average Rating

Number of Pages

0H33M

Audio Length

If I have one fault—which I am not prepared to admit—it is that I am too good-natured. I remember on one occasion, when staying in the country with a lady who had known me from boyhood, protesting in a restrained, gentlemanly manner when her youthful son began to claw me at breakfast. At breakfast, I’ll trouble you, and an early one at that! “Well, James,” she said, “I always thought that you were good- natured, whatever else you were!” A remark which, besides containing a nasty innuendo in the latter half of it, struck me as passing all existing records in Cool Cheek. And it stood as a record till the day that Jervis rang me up on the telephone and broached the matter of Mr. Morley-Davenport. It is no use to grumble, I suppose. One cannot alter one’s nature. There it is, and there’s an end of it. But personally I have always found it a minor curse. People ask me to do things, and expect me to oblige them, when they would not dream of making the same request of most of the men I know. And they thrive on it. Do a man a good turn once, as somebody says, and after that he thinks he has a right to come and sit on your lap and help himself out of your pockets. Looking back over the episodes which have arisen from this abuse of my angelic temperament, I recall the Adventure of a Ribbon I tried to match for an Aunt of Mine, the Curious Affair of the Vicar’s Garden- Party, and a host of Others, prominent among which is the Dark and Sinister Case of the BrOthers Barlow, the most recent of all my ordeals. It occurred only last summer. I was having tea at my club when the thing may be said to have begun. The club is described in Whitaker as “social and political,” and at that time it seemed to me to overdo both qualities. The political atmosphere at the moment was disturbed by a series of by-elections, and members, whom I did not know by sight, were developing a habit of sitting down beside me and saying: “Interesting contest, that at ——,” wherever the place might be. In this case it was at Stapleton, in Surrey. The Stapleton election, I gathered from an old gentleman who had cornered me and was giving me his views on the crisis, was in a most interesting condition. If Morley-Davenport—who was, I gathered, “our man”—could pull it off, it would be a most valuable thing for the party. On the Other hand, if he could not pull it off, as was not at all unlikely, it would be an equally damaging blow for the party

Avg Rating

3.15

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

15%

4 STARS

23%

3 STARS

23%

2 STARS

38%

1 STARS

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Author

P.G. Wodehouse

Author · 205 books

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career. An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend. Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).