A Wodehouse Miscellany | Page 5

my hands, "I am a confirmed soda-fiend."
He gave me a long lecture and a longer list of instructions. I must take air and exercise
and I must become a total abstainer from sundaes of all descriptions. I must avoid
limeade like the plague, and if anybody offered me a Bulgarzoon I was to knock him
down and shout for the nearest policeman.
I learned then for the first time what a bitterly hard thing it is for a man in a large and
wicked city to keep from soda when once he has got the habit. Everything was against me.
The old convivial circle began to shun me. I could not join in their revels and they began
to look on me as a grouch. In the end, I fell, and in one wild orgy undid all the good of a
month's abstinence. I was desperate then. I felt that nothing could save me, and I might as
well give up the struggle. I drank two pin-ap-o-lades, three grapefruit-olas and an
egg-zoolak, before pausing to take breath.
And then, the next day, I met May, the girl who effected my reformation. She was a
clergyman's daughter who, to support her widowed mother, had accepted a non-speaking
part in a musical comedy production entitled "Oh Joy! Oh Pep!" Our acquaintance
ripened, and one night I asked her out to supper.
I look on that moment as the happiest of my life. I met her at the stage door, and

conducted her to the nearest soda-fountain. We were inside and I was buying the checks
before she realized where she was, and I shall never forget her look of mingled pain and
horror.
"And I thought you were a live one!" she murmured.
It seemed that she had been looking forward to a little lobster and champagne. The idea
was absolutely new to me. She quickly convinced me, however, that such was the only
refreshment which she would consider, and she recoiled with unconcealed aversion from
my suggestion of a Mocha Malted and an Eva Tanguay. That night I tasted wine for the
first time, and my reformation began.
It was hard at first, desperately hard. Something inside me was trying to pull me back to
the sundaes for which I craved, but I resisted the impulse. Always with her divinely
sympathetic encouragement, I gradually acquired a taste for alcohol. And suddenly, one
evening, like a flash it came upon me that I had shaken off the cursed yoke that held me
down: that I never wanted to see the inside of a drugstore again. Cocktails, at first
repellent, have at last become palatable to me. I drink highballs for breakfast. I am saved.

IN DEFENSE OF ASTIGMATISM
This is peculiarly an age where novelists pride themselves on the breadth of their outlook
and the courage with which they refuse to ignore the realities of life; and never before
have authors had such scope in the matter of the selection of heroes. In the days of the
old-fashioned novel, when the hero was automatically Lord Blank or Sir Ralph Asterisk,
there were, of course, certain rules that had to be observed, but today--why, you can
hardly hear yourself think for the uproar of earnest young novelists proclaiming how free
and unfettered they are. And yet, no writer has had the pluck to make his hero wear
glasses.
In the old days, as I say, this was all very well. The hero was a young lordling, sprung
from a line of ancestors who had never done anything with their eyes except wear a
piercing glance before which lesser men quailed. But now novelists go into every class of
society for their heroes, and surely, at least an occasional one of them must have been
astigmatic. Kipps undoubtedly wore glasses; so did Bunker Bean; so did Mr. Polly,
Clayhanger, Bibbs, Sheridan, and a score of others. Then why not say so?
Novelists are moving with the times in every other direction. Why not in this?
It is futile to advance the argument that glasses are unromantic. They are not. I know,
because I wear them myself, and I am a singularly romantic figure, whether in my rimless,
my Oxford gold-bordered, or the plain gent's spectacles which I wear in the privacy of
my study.
Besides, everybody wears glasses nowadays. That is the point I wish to make. For
commercial reasons, if for no others, authors ought to think seriously of this matter of
goggling their heroes. It is an admitted fact that the reader of a novel likes to put himself
in the hero's place--to imagine, while reading, that he is the hero. What an audience the
writer of the first romance to star a spectacled hero will have. All over the country