mandarine

I am slowly but steadily becoming addicted to audiobooks. In the meantime, the supply of free, public domain or otherwise copyleft audiobooks is skyrocketing, and this certainly fuels my addiction beyond the reasonable.

In the recent weeks, I have been ‘reading’ (all from www.Librivox.org):

• Pollyanna by Eleanor Porter
• A Tales of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (that one at LoudLit.org)
• Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingt Jours, by Jules Verne
• A truckload of short stories

As I was lying awake in the dark earlier tonight around midnight, I picked up my mp3 player (which I always keep within my reach in case I need a shot of my unfortunately legal addicting substance), and started the next short story in the collection. It was The Clicking of Cuthbert, by P.G. Wodehouse. I only knew the name of Wodehouse, without much background information, so I did not know this would be no lullaby sort of a short story (unlike the Nathaniel Hawthorne piece entitled “The Artist of the Beautiful”, which came just before in the collection).

I ended up waking my wife three times when I could no longer hold back my bursts of laughter. Let me share a couple of passages. This is the story of golf champion Cuthbert Banks who, for the love of Adeline, joins her mother’s Literary Society — apparently to no avail.

I do not know if you have had any experience of suburban literary societies, but the one that flourished under the eye of Mrs. Willoughby Smethurst at Wood Hills was rather more so than the average. With my feeble powers of narrative, I cannot hope to make clear to you all that Cuthbert Banks endured in the next few weeks. And, even if I could, I doubt if I should do so. It is all very well to excite pity and terror, as Aristotle recommends, but there are limits. In the ancient Greek tragedies it was an ironclad rule that all the real rough stuff should take place off-stage, and I shall follow this admirable principle. It will suffice if I say merely that J. Cuthbert Banks had a thin time. After attending eleven debates and fourteen lectures on _vers libre_ Poetry, the Seventeenth-Century Essayists, the Neo-Scandinavian Movement in Portuguese Literature, and other subjects of a similar nature, he grew so enfeebled that, on the rare occasions when he had time for a visit to the links, he had to take a full iron for his mashie shots.

A little later, the Society chooses to invite a famous Russian novelist.

This Vladimir Brusiloff to whom I have referred was the famous Russian novelist, and, owing to the fact of his being in the country on a lecturing tour at the moment, there had been something of a boom in his works. The Wood Hills Literary Society had been studying them for weeks, and never since his first entrance into intellectual circles had Cuthbert Banks come nearer to throwing in the towel. Vladimir specialized in grey studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide. It was tough going for a man whose deepest reading hitherto had been Vardon on the Push-Shot, and there can be no greater proof of the magic of love than the fact that Cuthbert stuck it without a cry. But the strain was terrible and I am inclined to think that he must have cracked, had it not been for the daily reports in the papers of the internecine strife which was proceeding so briskly in Russia. Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must eventually give out.
One morning, as he tottered down the road for the short walk which was now almost the only exercise to which he was equal, Cuthbert met Adeline. A spasm of anguish flitted through all his nerve-centres as he saw that she was accompanied by Raymond Parsloe Devine [his rival].
“Good morning, Mr. Banks,” said Adeline.

“Good morning,” said Cuthbert hollowly.

“Such good news about Vladimir Brusiloff.”

“Dead?” said Cuthbert, with a touch of hope.

Then they meet and a miracle happens: this Brusiloff and Cuthbert Banks share the same passion about golf:

Mr. Brusiloff drew his chair closer. “Let me tell you one vairy funny story about putting. It was one day I play at Nijni-Novgorod with the pro. against Lenin and Trotsky, and Trotsky had a two-inch putt for the hole. But, just as he addresses the ball, someone in the crowd he tries to assassinate Lenin with a rewolwer–you know that is our great national sport, trying to assassinate Lenin with rewolwers–and the bang puts Trotsky off his stroke and he goes five yards past the hole, and then Lenin, who is rather shaken, you understand, he misses again himself, and we win the hole and match and I clean up three hundred and ninety-six thousand roubles, or fifteen shillings in your money.

Epilogue

Friday after next, I’ll be attending a meeting at the local literary society, or whatever it should be called. Their main role is to manage the village’s library, and I am developing their website. I hope the debates will be lighter than those described by Wodehouse, because, contrary to Cuthbert Banks, I am not in mad love with any of the members.

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