The Coming of Bill
by P. G. Wodehouse
1920
Contents
BOOK ONE
Chapter I A Pawn of Fate
Chapter II Ruth States Her Intentions
Chapter III The Mates Meet
Chapter IV Troubled Waters
Chapter V Wherein Opposites Agree
Chapter VI Breaking the News
Chapter VII Sufficient Unto Themselves
Chapter VIII Suspense
Chapter IX The White Hope is Turned Down
Chapter X An Interlude of Peace
Chapter XI Stung to Action
Chapter XII A Climax
BOOK TWO
Chapter I Empty-handed
Chapter II An Unknown Path
Chapter III The Misadventure of Steve
Chapter IV The Widening Gap
Chapter V The Real Thing
Chapter VI The Outcasts
Chapter VII Cutting the Tangled Knot
Chapter VIII Steve to the Rescue
Chapter IX At One in the Morning
Chapter X Accepting the Gifts of the Gods
Chapter XI Mr. Penway on the Grill
Chapter XII Dolls with Souls
Chapter XIII Pastures New
Chapter XIV The Sixty-First Street Cyclone
Chapter XV Mrs. Porter's Waterloo
Chapter XVI The White-Hope Link
BOOK ONE
Chapter I A Pawn of Fate
Mrs. Lora Delane Porter dismissed the hireling who had brought her
automobile around from the garage and seated herself at the wheel. It
was her habit to refresh her mind and improve her health by a daily
drive between the hours of two and four in the afternoon.
The world knows little of its greatest women, and it is possible that
Mrs. Porter's name is not familiar to you. If this is the case, I am
pained, but not surprised. It happens only too often that the uplifter
of the public mind is baulked by a disinclination on the part of the
public mind to meet him or her half-way. The uplifter does his share.
He produces the uplifting book. But the public, instead of standing
still to be uplifted, wanders off to browse on coloured supplements and
magazine stories.
If you are ignorant of Lora Delane Porter's books that is your affair.
Perhaps you are more to be pitied than censured. Nature probably gave
you the wrong shape of forehead. Mrs. Porter herself would have put
it down to some atavistic tendency or pre-natal influence. She put
most things down to that. She blamed nearly all the defects of the
modern world, from weak intellects to in-growing toe-nails, on
long-dead ladies and gentlemen who, safe in the family vault, imagined
that they had established their alibi. She subpoenaed grandfathers
and even great-grandfathers to give evidence to show that the reason
Twentieth-Century Willie squinted or had to spend his winters in
Arizona was their own shocking health 'way back in the days beyond
recall.
Mrs. Porter's mind worked backward and forward. She had one eye on the
past, the other on the future. If she was strong on heredity, she was
stronger on the future of the race. Most of her published works dealt
with this subject. A careful perusal of them would have enabled the
rising generation to select its ideal wife or husband with perfect
ease, and, in the event of Heaven blessing the union, her little
volume, entitled "The Hygienic Care of the Baby," which was all about
germs and how to avoid them, would have insured the continuance of the
direct succession.
Unfortunately, the rising generation did not seem disposed to a careful
perusal of anything except the baseball scores and the beauty hints in
the Sunday papers, and Mrs. Porter's public was small. In fact, her
only real disciple, as she sometimes told herself in her rare moods of
discouragement, was her niece, Ruth Bannister, daughter of John
Bannister, the millionaire. It was not so long ago, she reflected with
pride, that she had induced Ruth to refuse to marry Basil Milbank, a
considerable feat, he being a young man of remarkable personal
attractions and a great match in every way. Mrs. Porter's objection to
him was that his father had died believing to the last that he was a
teapot.
There is nothing evil or degrading in believing oneself a teapot, but
it argues a certain inaccuracy of the thought processes; and Mrs.
Porter had used all her influence with Ruth to make her reject Basil.
It was her success that first showed her how great that influence was.
She had come now to look on Ruth's destiny as something for which she
was personally responsible, a fact which was noted and resented by
others, in particular Ruth's brother Bailey, who regarded his aunt with
a dislike and suspicion akin to that which a stray dog feels towards
the boy who saunters towards him with a tin can in his hand.
To Bailey, his strong-minded relative was a perpetual menace, a sort of
perambulating yellow peril, and the fact that she often alluded to him
as a worm consolidated his distaste for her.
* * * * *
Mrs. Porter released the clutch and set out on her drive. She rarely
had a settled route for these outings of hers, preferring to zigzag
about New York, livening up the great city at random. She always drove
herself and, having, like a good suffragist, a contempt for male
prohibitions, took an honest pleasure in exceeding a man-made speed
limit.
One hesitates to apply the term "joy-rider" to so eminent a leader of
contemporary thought as the authoress of "The Dawn of Better Things,"
"Principles of Selection," and "What of To-morrow?" but candour compels
the admission that she was a somewhat reckless driver. Perhaps it was
due to some atavistic tendency. One of her ancestors may have been a
Roman charioteer or a coach-racing maniac of the Regency days. At any
rate, after a hard morning's work on her new book she felt that her
mind needed cooling, and found that the rush of air against her face
effected this satisfactorily. The greater the rush, the quicker the
cooling. However, as the alert inhabitants of ManhattanIsland, a hardy
race trained from infancy to dodge taxicabs and ambulance wagons, had
always removed themselves from her path with their usual agility, she
had never yet had an accident.
But then she had never yet met George Pennicut. And George, pawn of
fate, was even now waiting round the corner to upset her record.
George, man of all work to Kirk Winfield, one of the youngest and least
efficient of New York's artist colony, was English. He had been in
America some little time, but not long enough to accustom his rather
unreceptive mind to the fact that, whereas in his native land vehicles
kept to the left, in the country of his adoption they kept to the
right; and it was still his bone-headed practice, when stepping off the
sidewalk, to keep a wary look-out in precisely the wrong direction.