Right Ho, Jeeves
by P. G. Wodehouse · English · Gutenberg #10554 · 424,520 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Right Ho, Jeeves
Author: P. G. Wodehouse
Release date: January 1, 2004 [eBook #10554]
Most recently updated: January 16, 2025
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RIGHT HO, JEEVES ***
RIGHT HO, JEEVES
By
P. G. WODEHOUSE
To
RAYMOND NEEDHAM, K.C.
WITH AFFECTION AND ADMIRATION
-1-
“Jeeves,” I said, “may I speak frankly?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“What I have to say may wound you.”
“Not at all, sir.”
“Well, then----”
No--wait. Hold the line a minute. I’ve gone off the rails.
I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always
come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult
problem of where to begin it. It’s a thing you don’t want to go wrong
over, because one false step and you’re sunk. I mean, if you fool about
too long at the start, trying to establish atmosphere, as they call it,
and all that sort of rot, you fail to grip and the customers walk out
on you.
Get off the mark, on the other hand, like a scalded cat, and your
public is at a loss. It simply raises its eyebrows, and can’t make out
what you’re talking about.
And in opening my report of the complex case of Gussie Fink-Nottle,
Madeline Bassett, my Cousin Angela, my Aunt Dahlia, my Uncle Thomas,
young Tuppy Glossop and the cook, Anatole, with the above spot of
dialogue, I see that I have made the second of these two floaters.
I shall have to hark back a bit. And taking it for all in all and
weighing this against that, I suppose the affair may be said to have
had its inception, if inception is the word I want, with that visit of
mine to Cannes. If I hadn’t gone to Cannes, I shouldn’t have met the
Bassett or bought that white mess jacket, and Angela wouldn’t have met
her shark, and Aunt Dahlia wouldn’t have played baccarat.
Yes, most decidedly, Cannes was the _point d’appui_.
Right ho, then. Let me marshal my facts.
I went to Cannes--leaving Jeeves behind, he having intimated that he
did not wish to miss Ascot--round about the beginning of June. With
me travelled my Aunt Dahlia and her daughter Angela. Tuppy Glossop,
Angela’s betrothed, was to have been of the party, but at the last
moment couldn’t get away. Uncle Tom, Aunt Dahlia’s husband, remained at
home, because he can’t stick the South of France at any price.
So there you have the layout--Aunt Dahlia, Cousin Angela and self off
to Cannes round about the beginning of June.
All pretty clear so far, what?
We stayed at Cannes about two months, and except for the fact that Aunt
Dahlia lost her shirt at baccarat and Angela nearly got inhaled by a
shark while aquaplaning, a pleasant time was had by all.
On July the twenty-fifth, looking bronzed and fit, I accompanied aunt
and child back to London. At seven p.m. on July the twenty-sixth we
alighted at Victoria. And at seven-twenty or thereabouts we parted
with mutual expressions of esteem--they to shove off in Aunt Dahlia’s
car to Brinkley Court, her place in Worcestershire, where they were
expecting to entertain Tuppy in a day or two; I to go to the flat, drop
my luggage, clean up a bit, and put on the soup and fish preparatory to
pushing round to the Drones for a bite of dinner.
And it was while I was at the flat, towelling the torso after a
much-needed rinse, that Jeeves, as we chatted of this and that--picking
up the threads, as it were--suddenly brought the name of Gussie
Fink-Nottle into the conversation.
As I recall it, the dialogue ran something as follows:
SELF: Well, Jeeves, here we are, what?
JEEVES: Yes, sir.
SELF: I mean to say, home again.
JEEVES: Precisely, sir.
SELF: Seems ages since I went away.
JEEVES: Yes, sir.
SELF: Have a good time at Ascot?
JEEVES: Most agreeable, sir.
SELF: Win anything?
JEEVES: Quite a satisfactory sum, thank you, sir.
SELF: Good. Well, Jeeves, what news on the Rialto? Anybody been phoning
or calling or anything during my abs.?
JEEVES: Mr. Fink-Nottle, sir, has been a frequent caller.
I stared. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that I gaped.
“Mr. Fink-Nottle?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You don’t mean Mr. Fink-Nottle?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But Mr. Fink-Nottle’s not in London?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I’m blowed.”
And I’ll tell you why I was blowed. I found it scarcely possible to
give credence to his statement. This Fink-Nottle, you see, was one of
those freaks you come across from time to time during life’s journey
who can’t stand London. He lived year in and year out, covered with
moss, in a remote village down in Lincolnshire, never coming up even
for the Eton and Harrow match. And when I asked him once if he didn’t
find the time hang a bit heavy on his hands, he said, no, because he
had a pond in his garden and studied the habits of newts.
I couldn’t imagine what could have brought the chap up to the great
city. I would have been prepared to bet that as long as the supply of
newts didn’t give out, nothing could have shifted him from that village
of his.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You got the name correctly? Fink-Nottle?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, it’s the most extraordinary thing. It must be five years since
he was in London. He makes no secret of the fact that the place gives
him the pip. Until now, he has always stayed glued to the country,
completely surrounded by newts.”
“Sir?”
“Newts, Jeeves. Mr. Fink-Nottle has a strong newt complex. You must
have heard of newts. Those little sort of lizard things that charge
about in ponds.”
“Oh, yes, sir. The aquatic members of the family Salamandridae which
constitute the genus Molge.”
“That’s right. Well, Gussie has always been a slave to them. He used to
keep them at school.”
“I believe young gentlemen frequently do, sir.”
“He kept them in his study in a kind of glass-tank arrangement, and
pretty niffy the whole thing was, I recall. I suppose one ought to have
been able to see what the end would be even then, but you know what
boys are. Careless, heedless, busy about our own affairs, we scarcely
gave this kink in Gussie’s character a thought. We may have exchanged
an occasional remark about it taking all sorts to make a world, but
nothing more. You can guess the sequel. The trouble spread.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Absolutely, Jeeves. The craving grew upon him. The newts got him.
Arrived at man’s estate, he retired to the depths of the country and
gave his life up to these dumb chums. I suppose he used to tell himself
that he could take them or leave them alone, and then found--too
late--that he couldn’t.”
“It is often the way, sir.”
“Too true, Jeeves. At any rate, for the last five years he has been
living at this place of his down in Lincolnshire, as confirmed a
species-shunning hermit as ever put fresh water in the tank every
second day and refused to see a soul. That’s why I was so amazed when
you told me he had suddenly risen to the surface like this. I still
can’t believe it. I am inclined to think that there must be some
mistake, and that this bird who has been calling here is some different
variety of Fink-Nottle. The chap I know wears horn-rimmed spectacles
and has a face like a fish. How does that check up with your data?”
“The gentleman who came to the flat wore horn-rimmed spectacles, sir.”
“And looked like something on a slab?”
“Possibly there was a certain suggestion of the piscine, sir.”
“Then it must be Gussie, I suppose. But what on earth can have brought
him up to London?”
“I am in a position to explain that, sir. Mr. Fink-Nottle confided to
me his motive in visiting the metropolis. He came because the young
lady is here.”
“Young lady?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You don’t mean he’s in love?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I’m dashed. I’m really dashed. I positively am dashed, Jeeves.”
And I was too. I mean to say, a joke’s a joke, but there are limits.
Then I found my mind turning to another aspect of this rummy affair.
Conceding the fact that Gussie Fink-Nottle, against all the ruling
of the form book, might have fallen in love, why should he have been
haunting my flat like this? No doubt the occasion was one of those when
a fellow needs a friend, but I couldn’t see what had made him pick on
me.
It wasn’t as if he and I were in any way bosom. We had seen a lot of
each other at one time, of course, but in the last two years I hadn’t
had so much as a post card from him.
I put all this to Jeeves:
“Odd, his coming to me. Still, if he did, he did. No argument about
that. It must have been a nasty jar for the poor perisher when he found
I wasn’t here.”
“No, sir. Mr. Fink-Nottle did not call to see you, sir.”
“Pull yourself together, Jeeves. You’ve just told me that this is what
he has been doing, and assiduously, at that.”
“It was I with whom he was desirous of establishing communication, sir.”
“You? But I didn’t know you had ever met him.”
“I had not had that pleasure until he called here, sir. But it appears
that Mr. Sipperley, a fellow student with whom Mr. Fink-Nottle had been
at the university, recommended him to place his affairs in my hands.”
The mystery had conked. I saw all. As I dare say you know, Jeeves’s
reputation as a counsellor has long been established among the
cognoscenti, and the first move of any of my little circle on
discovering themselves in any form of soup is always to roll round and
put the thing up to him. And when he’s got A out of a bad spot, A puts
B on to him. And then, when he has fixed up B, B sends C along. And so
on, if you get my drift, and so forth.
That’s how these big consulting practices like Jeeves’s grow. Old
Sippy, I knew, had been deeply impressed by the man’s efforts on his
behalf at the time when he was trying to get engaged to Elizabeth Moon,
so it was not to be wondered at that he should have advised Gussie to
apply. Pure routine, you might say.
“Oh, you’re acting for him, are you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now I follow. Now I understand. And what is Gussie’s trouble?”
“Oddly enough, sir, precisely the same as that of Mr. Sipperley when
I was enabled to be of assistance to him. No doubt you recall Mr.
Sipperley’s predicament, sir. Deeply attached to Miss Moon, he suffered
from a rooted diffidence which made it impossible for him to speak.”
I nodded.
“I remember. Yes, I recall the Sipperley case. He couldn’t bring
himself to the scratch. A marked coldness of the feet, was there not? I
recollect you saying he was letting--what was it?--letting something do
something. Cats entered into it, if I am not mistaken.”
“Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’, sir.”
“That’s right. But how about the cats?”
“Like the poor cat i’ the adage, sir.”
“Exactly. It beats me how you think up these things. And Gussie, you
say, is in the same posish?”
“Yes, sir. Each time he endeavours to formulate a proposal of marriage,
his courage fails him.”
“And yet, if he wants this female to be his wife, he’s got to say so,
what? I mean, only civil to mention it.”
“Precisely, sir.”
I mused.
“Well, I suppose this was inevitable, Jeeves. I wouldn’t have thought
that this Fink-Nottle would ever have fallen a victim to the divine
_p_, but, if he has, no wonder he finds the going sticky.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Look at the life he’s led.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t suppose he has spoken to a girl for years. What a lesson this
is to us, Jeeves, not to shut ourselves up in country houses and stare
into glass tanks. You can’t be the dominant male if you do that sort of
thing. In this life, you can choose between two courses. You can either
shut yourself up in a country house and stare into tanks, or you can be
a dasher with the sex. You can’t do both.”
“No, sir.”
I mused once more. Gussie and I, as I say, had rather lost touch, but
all the same I was exercised about the poor fish, as I am about all my
pals, close or distant, who find themselves treading upon Life’s banana
skins. It seemed to me that he was up against it.
I threw my mind back to the last time I had seen him. About two years
ago, it had been. I had looked in at his place while on a motor trip,
and he had put me right off my feed by bringing a couple of green
things with legs to the luncheon table, crooning over them like a
young mother and eventually losing one of them in the salad. That
picture, rising before my eyes, didn’t give me much confidence in the
unfortunate goof’s ability to woo and win, I must say. Especially if
the girl he had earmarked was one of these tough modern thugs, all
lipstick and cool, hard, sardonic eyes, as she probably was.
“Tell me, Jeeves,” I said, wishing to know the worst, “what sort of a
girl is this girl of Gussie’s?”
“I have not met the young lady, sir. Mr. Fink-Nottle speaks highly of
her attractions.”
“Seemed to like her, did he?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did he mention her name? Perhaps I know her.”
“She is a Miss Bassett, sir. Miss Madeline Bassett.”
“What?”
“Yes, sir.”
I was deeply intrigued.
“Egad, Jeeves! Fancy that. It’s a small world, isn’t it, what?”
“The young lady is an acquaintance of yours, sir?”
“I know her well. Your news has relieved my mind, Jeeves. It makes
the whole thing begin to seem far more like a practical working
proposition.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Absolutely. I confess that until you supplied this information I was
feeling profoundly dubious about poor old Gussie’s chances of inducing
any spinster of any parish to join him in the saunter down the aisle.
You will agree with me that he is not everybody’s money.”
“There may be something in what you say, sir.”
“Cleopatra wouldn’t have liked him.”
“Possibly not, sir.”
“And I doubt if he would go any too well with Tallulah Bankhead.”
“No, sir.”
“But when you tell me that the object of his affections is Miss
Bassett, why, then, Jeeves, hope begins to dawn a bit. He’s just the
sort of chap a girl like Madeline Bassett might scoop in with relish.”
This Bassett, I must explain, had been a fellow visitor of ours at
Cannes; and as she and Angela had struck up one of those effervescent
friendships which girls do strike up, I had seen quite a bit of her.
Indeed, in my moodier moments it sometimes seemed to me that I could
not move a step without stubbing my toe on the woman.
And what made it all so painful and distressing was that the more we
met, the less did I seem able to find to say to her.
You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing
right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their
personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents
of the brain to cauliflower. It was like that with this Bassett and
me; so much so that I have known occasions when for minutes at a
stretch Bertram Wooster might have been observed fumbling with the
tie, shuffling the feet, and behaving in all other respects in her
presence like the complete dumb brick. When, therefore, she took her
departure some two weeks before we did, you may readily imagine that,
in Bertram’s opinion, it was not a day too soon.
It was not her beauty, mark you, that thus numbed me. She was a pretty
enough girl in a droopy, blonde, saucer-eyed way, but not the sort of
breath-taker that takes the breath.
No, what caused this disintegration in a usually fairly fluent prattler
with the sex was her whole mental attitude. I don’t want to wrong
anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry,
but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite
the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly
asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars
are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.
As regards the fusing of her soul and mine, therefore, there was
nothing doing. But with Gussie, the posish was entirely different. The
thing that had stymied me--viz. that this girl was obviously all loaded
down with ideals and sentiment and what not--was quite in order as far
as he was concerned.
Gussie had always been one of those dreamy, soulful birds--you can’t
shut yourself up in the country and live only for newts, if you’re
not--and I could see no reason why, if he could somehow be induced to
get the low, burning words off his chest, he and the Bassett shouldn’t
hit it off like ham and eggs.
“She’s just the type for him,” I said.
“I am most gratified to hear it, sir.”
“And he’s just the type for her. In fine, a good thing and one to be
pushed along with the utmost energy. Strain every nerve, Jeeves.”
“Very good, sir,” replied the honest fellow. “I will attend to the
matter at once.”
Now up to this point, as you will doubtless agree, what you might call
a perfect harmony had prevailed. Friendly gossip between employer and
employed, and everything as sweet as a nut. But at this juncture, I
regret to say, there was an unpleasant switch. The atmosphere suddenly
changed, the storm clouds began to gather, and before we knew where we
were, the jarring note had come bounding on the scene. I have known
this to happen before in the Wooster home.
The first intimation I had that things were about to hot up was a
pained and disapproving cough from the neighbourhood of the carpet.
For, during the above exchanges, I should explain, while I, having
dried the frame, had been dressing in a leisurely manner, donning here
a sock, there a shoe, and gradually climbing into the vest, the shirt,
the tie, and the knee-length, Jeeves had been down on the lower level,
unpacking my effects.
He now rose, holding a white object. And at the sight of it, I realized
that another of our domestic crises had arrived, another of those
unfortunate clashes of will between two strong men, and that Bertram,
unless he remembered his fighting ancestors and stood up for his
rights, was about to be put upon.
I don’t know if you were at Cannes this summer. If you were, you will
recall that anybody with any pretensions to being the life and soul of
the party was accustomed to attend binges at the Casino in the ordinary
evening-wear trouserings topped to the north by a white mess-jacket
with brass buttons. And ever since I had stepped aboard the Blue Train
at Cannes station, I had been wondering on and off how mine would go
with Jeeves.
In the matter of evening costume, you see, Jeeves is hidebound and
reactionary. I had had trouble with him before about soft-bosomed
shirts. And while these mess-jackets had, as I say, been all the
rage--_tout ce qu’il y a de chic_--on the Côte d’Azur, I had never
concealed it from myself, even when treading the measure at the Palm
Beach Casino in the one I had hastened to buy, that there might be
something of an upheaval about it on my return.
I prepared to be firm.
“Yes, Jeeves?” I said. And though my voice was suave, a close observer
in a position to watch my eyes would have noticed a steely glint.
Nobody has a greater respect for Jeeves’s intellect than I have, but
this disposition of his to dictate to the hand that fed him had got, I
felt, to be checked. This mess-jacket was very near to my heart, and I
jolly well intended to fight for it with all the vim of grand old Sieur
de Wooster at the Battle of Agincourt.
“Yes, Jeeves?” I said. “Something on your mind, Jeeves?”
“I fear that you inadvertently left Cannes in the possession of a coat
belonging to some other gentleman, sir.”
I switched on the steely a bit more.
“No, Jeeves,” I said, in a level tone, “the object under advisement is
mine. I bought it out there.”
“You wore it, sir?”
“Every night.”
“But surely you are not proposing to wear it in England, sir?”
I saw that we had arrived at the nub.
“Yes, Jeeves.”
“But, sir----”
“You were saying, Jeeves?”
“It is quite unsuitable, sir.”
“I do not agree with you, Jeeves. I anticipate a great popular success
for this jacket. It is my intention to spring it on the public tomorrow
at Pongo Twistleton’s birthday party, where I confidently expect it
to be one long scream from start to finish. No argument, Jeeves. No
discussion. Whatever fantastic objection you may have taken to it, I
wear this jacket.”
“Very good, sir.”
He went on with his unpacking. I said no more on the subject. I had
won the victory, and we Woosters do not triumph over a beaten foe.
Presently, having completed my toilet, I bade the man a cheery farewell
and in generous mood suggested that, as I was dining out, why didn’t
he take the evening off and go to some improving picture or something.
Sort of olive branch, if you see what I mean.
He didn’t seem to think much of it.
“Thank you, sir, I will remain in.”
I surveyed him narrowly.
“Is this dudgeon, Jeeves?”
“No, sir, I am obliged to remain on the premises. Mr. Fink-Nottle
informed me he would be calling to see me this evening.”
“Oh, Gussie’s coming, is he? Well, give him my love.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And a whisky and soda, and so forth.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Right ho, Jeeves.”
I then set off for the Drones.
At the Drones I ran into Pongo Twistleton, and he talked so much about
this forthcoming merry-making of his, of which good reports had already
reached me through my correspondents, that it was nearing eleven when I
got home again.
And scarcely had I opened the door when I heard voices in the
sitting-room, and scarcely had I entered the sitting-room when I found
that these proceeded from Jeeves and what appeared at first sight to be
the Devil.
A closer scrutiny informed me that it was Gussie Fink-Nottle, dressed
as Mephistopheles.
-2-
“What-ho, Gussie,” I said.
You couldn’t have told it from my manner, but I was feeling more than a
bit nonplussed. The spectacle before me was enough to nonplus anyone.
I mean to say, this Fink-Nottle, as I remembered him, was the sort of
shy, shrinking goop who might have been expected to shake like an aspen
if invited to so much as a social Saturday afternoon at the vicarage.
And yet here he was, if one could credit one’s senses, about to take
part in a fancy-dress ball, a form of entertainment notoriously a
testing experience for the toughest.
And he was attending that fancy-dress ball, mark you--not, like every
other well-bred Englishman, as a Pierrot, but as Mephistopheles--this
involving, as I need scarcely stress, not only scarlet tights but a
pretty frightful false beard.
Rummy, you’ll admit. However, one masks one’s feelings. I betrayed no
vulgar astonishment, but, as I say, what-hoed with civil nonchalance.
He grinned through the fungus--rather sheepishly, I thought.
“Oh, hullo, Bertie.”
“Long time since I saw you. Have a spot?”
“No, thanks. I must be off in a minute. I just came round to ask Jeeves
how he thought I looked. How do you think I look, Bertie?”
Well, the answer to that, of course, was “perfectly foul”. But we
Woosters are men of tact and have a nice sense of the obligations of a
host. We do not tell old friends beneath our roof-tree that they are an
offence to the eyesight. I evaded the question.
“I hear you’re in London,” I said carelessly.
“Oh, yes.”
“Must be years since you came up.”
“Oh, yes.”
“And now you’re off for an evening’s pleasure.”
He shuddered a bit. He had, I noticed, a hunted air.
“Pleasure!”
“Aren’t you looking forward to this rout or revel?”
“Oh, I suppose it’ll be all right,” he said, in a toneless voice.
“Anyway, I ought to be off, I suppose. The thing starts round about
eleven. I told my cab to wait.... Will you see if it’s there, Jeeves?”
“Very good, sir.”
There was something of a pause after the door had closed. A certain
constraint. I mixed myself a beaker, while Gussie, a glutton for
punishment, stared at himself in the mirror. Finally I decided that it
would be best to let him know that I was abreast of his affairs. It
might be that it would ease his mind to confide in a sympathetic man
of experience. I have generally found, with those under the influence,
that what they want more than anything is the listening ear.
“Well, Gussie, old leper,” I said, “I’ve been hearing all about you.”
“Eh?”
“This little trouble of yours. Jeeves has told me everything.”
He didn’t seem any too braced. It’s always difficult to be sure, of
course, when a chap has dug himself in behind a Mephistopheles beard,
but I fancy he flushed a trifle.
“I wish Jeeves wouldn’t go gassing all over the place. It was supposed
to be confidential.”
I could not permit this tone.
“Dishing up the dirt to the young master can scarcely be described as
gassing all over the place,” I said, with a touch of rebuke. “Anyway,
there it is. I know all. And I should like to begin,” I said, sinking
my personal opinion that the female in question was a sloppy pest in
my desire to buck and encourage, “by saying that Madeline Bassett is a
charming girl. A winner, and just the sort for you.”
“You don’t know her?”
“Certainly I know her. What beats me is how you ever got in touch.
Where did you meet?”
“She was staying at a place near mine in Lincolnshire the week before
last.”
“Yes, but even so. I didn’t know you called on the neighbours.”
“I don’t. I met her out for a walk with her dog. The dog had got a
thorn in its foot, and when she tried to take it out, it snapped at
her. So, of course, I had to rally round.”
“You extracted the thorn?”
“Yes.”
“And fell in love at first sight?”
“Yes.”
“Well, dash it, with a thing like that to give you a send-off, why
didn’t you cash in immediately?”
“I hadn’t the nerve.”
“What happened?”
“We talked for a bit.”
“What about?”
“Oh, birds.”
“Birds? What birds?”
“The birds that happened to be hanging round. And the scenery, and all
that sort of thing. And she said she was going to London, and asked me
to look her up if I was ever there.”
“And even after that you didn’t so much as press her hand?”
“Of course not.”
Well, I mean, it looked as though there was no more to be said. If
a chap is such a rabbit that he can’t get action when he’s handed
the thing on a plate, his case would appear to be pretty hopeless.
Nevertheless, I reminded myself that this non-starter and I had been at
school together. One must make an effort for an old school friend.
“Ah, well,” I said, “we must see what can be done. Things may brighten.
At any rate, you will be glad to learn that I am behind you in this
enterprise. You have Bertram Wooster in your corner, Gussie.”
“Thanks, old man. And Jeeves, of course, which is the thing that really
matters.”
I don’t mind admitting that I winced. He meant no harm, I suppose, but
I’m bound to say that this tactless speech nettled me not a little.
People are always nettling me like that. Giving me to understand, I
mean to say, that in their opinion Bertram Wooster is a mere cipher
and that the only member of the household with brains and resources is
Jeeves.
It jars on me.
And tonight it jarred on me more than usual, because I was feeling
pretty dashed fed with Jeeves. Over that matter of the mess jacket, I
mean. True, I had forced him to climb down, quelling him, as described,
with the quiet strength of my personality, but I was still a trifle
shirty at his having brought the thing up at all. It seemed to me that
what Jeeves wanted was the iron hand.
“And what is he doing about it?” I inquired stiffly.
“He’s been giving the position of affairs a lot of thought.”
“He has, has he?”
“It’s on his advice that I’m going to this dance.”
“Why?”
“She is going to be there. In fact, it was she who sent me the ticket
of invitation. And Jeeves considered----”
“And why not as a Pierrot?” I said, taking up the point which had
struck me before. “Why this break with a grand old tradition?”
“He particularly wanted me to go as Mephistopheles.”
I started.
“He did, did he? He specifically recommended that definite costume?”
“Yes.”
“Ha!”
“Eh?”
“Nothing. Just ‘Ha!’”
And I’ll tell you why I said “Ha!” Here was Jeeves making heavy weather
about me wearing a perfectly ordinary white mess jacket, a garment not
only _tout ce qu’il y a de chic_, but absolutely _de rigueur_, and in
the same breath, as you might say, inciting Gussie Fink-Nottle to be a
blot on the London scene in scarlet tights. Ironical, what? One looks
askance at this sort of in-and-out running.
“What has he got against Pierrots?”
“I don’t think he objects to Pierrots as Pierrots. But in my case he
thought a Pierrot wouldn’t be adequate.”
“I don’t follow that.”
“He said that the costume of Pierrot, while pleasing to the eye, lacked
the authority of the Mephistopheles costume.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“Well, it’s a matter of psychology, he said.”
There was a time when a remark like that would have had me snookered.
But long association with Jeeves has developed the Wooster vocabulary
considerably. Jeeves has always been a whale for the psychology of the
individual, and I now follow him like a bloodhound when he snaps it out
of the bag.
“Oh, psychology?”
“Yes. Jeeves is a great believer in the moral effect of clothes. He
thinks I might be emboldened in a striking costume like this. He said
a Pirate Chief would be just as good. In fact, a Pirate Chief was his
first suggestion, but I objected to the boots.”
I saw his point. There is enough sadness in life without having fellows
like Gussie Fink-Nottle going about in sea boots.
“And are you emboldened?”
“Well, to be absolutely accurate, Bertie, old man, no.”
A gust of compassion shook me. After all, though we had lost touch a
bit of recent years, this man and I had once thrown inked darts at each
other.
“Gussie,” I said, “take an old friend’s advice, and don’t go within a
mile of this binge.”
“But it’s my last chance of seeing her. She’s off tomorrow to stay with
some people in the country. Besides, you don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
“That this idea of Jeeves’s won’t work. I feel a most frightful chump
now, yes, but who can say whether that will not pass off when I get
into a mob of other people in fancy dress. I had the same experience
as a child, one year during the Christmas festivities. They dressed me
up as a rabbit, and the shame was indescribable. Yet when I got to the
party and found myself surrounded by scores of other children, many
in costumes even ghastlier than my own, I perked up amazingly, joined
freely in the revels, and was able to eat so hearty a supper that I was
sick twice in the cab coming home. What I mean is, you can’t tell in
cold blood.”
I weighed this. It was specious, of course.
“And you can’t get away from it that, fundamentally, Jeeves’s idea is
sound. In a striking costume like Mephistopheles, I might quite easily
pull off something pretty impressive. Colour does make a difference.
Look at newts. During the courting season the male newt is brilliantly
coloured. It helps him a lot.”
“But you aren’t a male newt.”
“I wish I were. Do you know how a male newt proposes, Bertie? He just
stands in front of the female newt vibrating his tail and bending his
body in a semi-circle. I could do that on my head. No, you wouldn’t
find me grousing if I were a male newt.”
“But if you were a male newt, Madeline Bassett wouldn’t look at you.
Not with the eye of love, I mean.”
“She would, if she were a female newt.”
“But she isn’t a female newt.”
“No, but suppose she was.”
“Well, if she was, you wouldn’t be in love with her.”
“Yes, I would, if I were a male newt.”
A slight throbbing about the temples told me that this discussion had
reached saturation point.
“Well, anyway,” I said, “coming down to hard facts and cutting out all
this visionary stuff about vibrating tails and what not, the salient
point that emerges is that you are booked to appear at a fancy-dress
ball. And I tell you out of my riper knowledge of fancy-dress balls,
Gussie, that you won’t enjoy yourself.”
“It isn’t a question of enjoying yourself.”
“I wouldn’t go.”
“I must go. I keep telling you she’s off to the country tomorrow.”
I gave it up.
“So be it,” I said. “Have it your own way.... Yes, Jeeves?”
“Mr. Fink-Nottle’s cab, sir.”
“Ah? The cab, eh?... Your cab, Gussie.”
“Oh, the cab? Oh, right. Of course, yes, rather.... Thanks, Jeeves ...
Well, so long, Bertie.”
And giving me the sort of weak smile Roman gladiators used to give the
Emperor before entering the arena, Gussie trickled off. And I turned to
Jeeves. The moment had arrived for putting him in his place, and I was
all for it.
It was a little difficult to know how to begin, of course. I mean to
say, while firmly resolved to tick him off, I didn’t want to gash his
feelings too deeply. Even when displaying the iron hand, we Woosters
like to keep the thing fairly matey.
However, on consideration, I saw that there was nothing to be gained by
trying to lead up to it gently. It is never any use beating about the b.
“Jeeves,” I said, “may I speak frankly?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“What I have to say may wound you.”
“Not at all, sir.”
“Well, then, I have been having a chat with Mr. Fink-Nottle, and he has
been telling me about this Mephistopheles scheme of yours.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Now let me get it straight. If I follow your reasoning correctly,
you think that, stimulated by being upholstered throughout in scarlet
tights, Mr. Fink-Nottle, on encountering the adored object, will
vibrate his tail and generally let himself go with a whoop.”
“I am of opinion that he will lose much of his normal diffidence, sir.”
“I don’t agree with you, Jeeves.”
“No, sir?”
“No. In fact, not to put too fine a point upon it, I consider that of
all the dashed silly, drivelling ideas I ever heard in my puff this
is the most blithering and futile. It won’t work. Not a chance. All
you have done is to subject Mr. Fink-Nottle to the nameless horrors
of a fancy-dress ball for nothing. And this is not the first time
this sort of thing has happened. To be quite candid, Jeeves, I have
frequently noticed before now a tendency or disposition on your part to
become--what’s the word?”
“I could not say, sir.”
“Eloquent? No, it’s not eloquent. Elusive? No, it’s not elusive. It’s
on the tip of my tongue. Begins with an ‘e’ and means being a jolly
sight too clever.”
“Elaborate, sir?”
“That is the exact word I was after. Too elaborate, Jeeves--that is
what you are frequently prone to become. Your methods are not simple,
not straightforward. You cloud the issue with a lot of fancy stuff that
is not of the essence. All that Gussie needs is the elder-brotherly
advice of a seasoned man of the world. So what I suggest is that from
now onward you leave this case to me.”
“Very good, sir.”
“You lay off and devote yourself to your duties about the home.”
“Very good, sir.”
“I shall no doubt think of something quite simple and straightforward
yet perfectly effective ere long. I will make a point of seeing Gussie
tomorrow.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Right ho, Jeeves.”
But on the morrow all those telegrams started coming in, and I confess
that for twenty-four hours I didn’t give the poor chap a thought,
having problems of my own to contend with.
-3-
The first of the telegrams arrived shortly after noon, and Jeeves
brought it in with the before-luncheon snifter. It was from my Aunt
Dahlia, operating from Market Snodsbury, a small town of sorts a mile
or two along the main road as you leave her country seat.
It ran as follows:
_Come at once. Travers._
And when I say it puzzled me like the dickens, I am understating it;
if anything. As mysterious a communication, I considered, as was ever
flashed over the wires. I studied it in a profound reverie for the best
part of two dry Martinis and a dividend. I read it backwards. I read it
forwards. As a matter of fact, I have a sort of recollection of even
smelling it. But it still baffled me.
Consider the facts, I mean. It was only a few hours since this aunt
and I had parted, after being in constant association for nearly two
months. And yet here she was--with my farewell kiss still lingering on
her cheek, so to speak--pleading for another reunion. Bertram Wooster
is not accustomed to this gluttonous appetite for his society. Ask
anyone who knows me, and they will tell you that after two months of my
company, what the normal person feels is that that will about do for
the present. Indeed, I have known people who couldn’t stick it out for
more than a few days.
Before sitting down to the well-cooked, therefore, I sent this reply:
_Perplexed. Explain. Bertie._
To this I received an answer during the after-luncheon sleep:
_What on earth is there to be perplexed about, ass? Come at once.
Travers._
Three cigarettes and a couple of turns about the room, and I had my
response ready:
_How do you mean come at once? Regards. Bertie._
I append the comeback:
_I mean come at once, you maddening half-wit. What did you think I
meant? Come at once or expect an aunt’s curse first post tomorrow.
Love. Travers._
I then dispatched the following message, wishing to get everything
quite clear:
_When you say “Come” do you mean “Come to Brinkley Court”? And when
you say “At once” do you mean “At once”? Fogged. At a loss. All the
best. Bertie._
I sent this one off on my way to the Drones, where I spent a restful
afternoon throwing cards into a top-hat with some of the better
element. Returning in the evening hush, I found the answer waiting for
me:
_Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It doesn’t matter whether you
understand or not. You just come at once, as I tell you, and for
heaven’s sake stop this back-chat. Do you think I am made of money
that I can afford to send you telegrams every ten minutes. Stop
being a fathead and come immediately. Love. Travers._
It was at this point that I felt the need of getting a second opinion.
I pressed the bell.
“Jeeves,” I said, “a V-shaped rumminess has manifested itself from
the direction of Worcestershire. Read these,” I said, handing him the
papers in the case.
He scanned them.
“What do you make of it, Jeeves?”
“I think Mrs. Travers wishes you to come at once, sir.”
“You gather that too, do you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I put the same construction on the thing. But why, Jeeves? Dash it
all, she’s just had nearly two months of me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And many people consider the medium dose for an adult two days.”
“Yes, sir. I appreciate the point you raise. Nevertheless, Mrs. Travers
appears very insistent. I think it would be well to acquiesce in her
wishes.”
“Pop down, you mean?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I certainly can’t go at once. I’ve an important conference on at
the Drones tonight. Pongo Twistleton’s birthday party, you remember.”
“Yes, sir.”
There was a slight pause. We were both recalling the little
unpleasantness that had arisen. I felt obliged to allude to it.
“You’re all wrong about that mess jacket, Jeeves.”
“These things are matters of opinion, sir.”
“When I wore it at the Casino at Cannes, beautiful women nudged one
another and whispered: ‘Who is he?’”
“The code at Continental casinos is notoriously lax, sir.”
“And when I described it to Pongo last night, he was fascinated.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“So were all the rest of those present. One and all admitted that I had
got hold of a good thing. Not a dissentient voice.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“I am convinced that you will eventually learn to love this
mess-jacket, Jeeves.”
“I fear not, sir.”
I gave it up. It is never any use trying to reason with Jeeves on these
occasions. “Pig-headed” is the word that springs to the lips. One sighs
and passes on.
“Well, anyway, returning to the agenda, I can’t go down to Brinkley
Court or anywhere else yet awhile. That’s final. I’ll tell you what,
Jeeves. Give me form and pencil, and I’ll wire her that I’ll be with
her some time next week or the week after. Dash it all, she ought to
be able to hold out without me for a few days. It only requires will
power.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right ho, then. I’ll wire ‘Expect me tomorrow fortnight’ or words to
some such effect. That ought to meet the case. Then if you will toddle
round the corner and send it off, that will be that.”
“Very good, sir.”
And so the long day wore on till it was time for me to dress for
Pongo’s party.
Pongo had assured me, while chatting of the affair on the previous
night, that this birthday binge of his was to be on a scale calculated
to stagger humanity, and I must say I have participated in less fruity
functions. It was well after four when I got home, and by that time I
was about ready to turn in. I can just remember groping for the bed
and crawling into it, and it seemed to me that the lemon had scarcely
touched the pillow before I was aroused by the sound of the door
opening.
I was barely ticking over, but I contrived to raise an eyelid.
“Is that my tea, Jeeves?”
“No, sir. It is Mrs. Travers.”
And a moment later there was a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and
the relative had crossed the threshold at fifty m.p.h. under her own
steam.
-4-
It has been well said of Bertram Wooster that, while no one views his
flesh and blood with a keener and more remorselessly critical eye,
he is nevertheless a man who delights in giving credit where credit
is due. And if you have followed these memoirs of mine with the
proper care, you will be aware that I have frequently had occasion to
emphasise the fact that Aunt Dahlia is all right.
She is the one, if you remember, who married old Tom Travers _en
secondes noces_, as I believe the expression is, the year Bluebottle
won the Cambridgeshire, and once induced me to write an article on What
the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing for that paper she runs--_Milady’s
Boudoir_. She is a large, genial soul, with whom it is a pleasure
to hob-nob. In her spiritual make-up there is none of that subtle
gosh-awfulness which renders such an exhibit as, say, my Aunt Agatha
the curse of the Home Counties and a menace to one and all. I have
the highest esteem for Aunt Dahlia, and have never wavered in my
cordial appreciation of her humanity, sporting qualities and general
good-eggishness.
This being so, you may conceive of my astonishment at finding her at
my bedside at such an hour. I mean to say, I’ve stayed at her place
many a time and oft, and she knows my habits. She is well aware that
until I have had my cup of tea in the morning, I do not receive. This
crashing in at a moment when she knew that solitude and repose were of
the essence was scarcely, I could not but feel, the good old form.
Besides, what business had she being in London at all? That was what
I asked myself. When a conscientious housewife has returned to her
home after an absence of seven weeks, one does not expect her to start
racing off again the day after her arrival. One feels that she ought
to be sticking round, ministering to her husband, conferring with the
cook, feeding the cat, combing and brushing the Pomeranian--in a word,
staying put. I was more than a little bleary-eyed, but I endeavoured,
as far as the fact that my eyelids were more or less glued together
would permit, to give her an austere and censorious look.
She didn’t seem to get it.
“Wake up, Bertie, you old ass!” she cried, in a voice that hit me
between the eyebrows and went out at the back of my head.
If Aunt Dahlia has a fault, it is that she is apt to address a
_vis-à-vis_ as if he were somebody half a mile away whom she had
observed riding over hounds. A throwback, no doubt, to the time
when she counted the day lost that was not spent in chivvying some
unfortunate fox over the countryside.
I gave her another of the austere and censorious, and this time it
registered. All the effect it had, however, was to cause her to descend
to personalities.
“Don’t blink at me in that obscene way,” she said. “I wonder, Bertie,”
she proceeded, gazing at me as I should imagine Gussie would have gazed
at some newt that was not up to sample, “if you have the faintest
conception how perfectly loathsome you look? A cross between an orgy
scene in the movies and some low form of pond life. I suppose you were
out on the tiles last night?”
“I attended a social function, yes,” I said coldly. “Pongo Twistleton’s
birthday party. I couldn’t let Pongo down. _Noblesse oblige_.”
“Well, get up and dress.”
I felt I could not have heard her aright.
“Get up and dress?”
“Yes.”
I turned on the pillow with a little moan, and at this juncture Jeeves
entered with the vital oolong. I clutched at it like a drowning man
at a straw hat. A deep sip or two, and I felt--I won’t say restored,
because a birthday party like Pongo Twistleton’s isn’t a thing you get
restored after with a mere mouthful of tea, but sufficiently the old
Bertram to be able to bend the mind on this awful thing which had come
upon me.
And the more I bent same, the less could I grasp the trend of the
scenario.
“What is this, Aunt Dahlia?” I inquired.
“It looks to me like tea,” was her response. “But you know best. You’re
drinking it.”
If I hadn’t been afraid of spilling the healing brew, I have little
doubt that I should have given an impatient gesture. I know I felt like
it.
“Not the contents of this cup. All this. Your barging in and telling me
to get up and dress, and all that rot.”
“I’ve barged in, as you call it, because my telegrams seemed to produce
no effect. And I told you to get up and dress because I want you to get
up and dress. I’ve come to take you back with me. I like your crust,
wiring that you would come next year or whenever it was. You’re coming
now. I’ve got a job for you.”
“But I don’t want a job.”
“What you want, my lad, and what you’re going to get are two very
different things. There is man’s work for you to do at Brinkley Court.
Be ready to the last button in twenty minutes.”
“But I can’t possibly be ready to any buttons in twenty minutes. I’m
feeling awful.”
She seemed to consider.
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose it’s only humane to give you a day or two
to recover. All right, then, I shall expect you on the thirtieth at the
latest.”
“But, dash it, what is all this? How do you mean, a job? Why a job?
What sort of a job?”
“I’ll tell you if you’ll only stop talking for a minute. It’s quite an
easy, pleasant job. You will enjoy it. Have you ever heard of Market
Snodsbury Grammar School?”
“Never.”
“It’s a grammar school at Market Snodsbury.”
I told her a little frigidly that I had divined as much.
“Well, how was I to know that a man with a mind like yours would grasp
it so quickly?” she protested. “All right, then. Market Snodsbury
Grammar School is, as you have guessed, the grammar school at Market
Snodsbury. I’m one of the governors.”
“You mean one of the governesses.”
“I don’t mean one of the governesses. Listen, ass. There was a board
of governors at Eton, wasn’t there? Very well. So there is at Market
Snodsbury Grammar School, and I’m a member of it. And they left the
arrangements for the summer prize-giving to me. This prize-giving takes
place on the last--or thirty-first--day of this month. Have you got
that clear?”
I took another oz. of the life-saving and inclined my head. Even after
a Pongo Twistleton birthday party, I was capable of grasping simple
facts like these.
“I follow you, yes. I see the point you are trying to make, certainly.
Market ... Snodsbury ... Grammar School ... Board of governors ...
Prize-giving.... Quite. But what’s it got to do with me?”
“You’re going to give away the prizes.”
I goggled. Her words did not appear to make sense. They seemed the
mere aimless vapouring of an aunt who has been sitting out in the sun
without a hat.
“Me?”
“You.”
I goggled again.
“You don’t mean me?”
“I mean you in person.”
I goggled a third time.
“You’re pulling my leg.”
“I am not pulling your leg. Nothing would induce me to touch your
beastly leg. The vicar was to have officiated, but when I got home
I found a letter from him saying that he had strained a fetlock and
must scratch his nomination. You can imagine the state I was in. I
telephoned all over the place. Nobody would take it on. And then
suddenly I thought of you.”
I decided to check all this rot at the outset. Nobody is more eager to
oblige deserving aunts than Bertram Wooster, but there are limits, and
sharply defined limits, at that.
“So you think I’m going to strew prizes at this bally Dotheboys Hall of
yours?”
“I do.”
“And make a speech?”
“Exactly.”
I laughed derisively.
“For goodness’ sake, don’t start gargling now. This is serious.”
“I was laughing.”
“Oh, were you? Well, I’m glad to see you taking it in this merry
spirit.”
“Derisively,” I explained. “I won’t do it. That’s final. I simply will
not do it.”
“You will do it, young Bertie, or never darken my doors again. And you
know what that means. No more of Anatole’s dinners for you.”
A strong shudder shook me. She was alluding to her _chef_, that superb
artist. A monarch of his profession, unsurpassed--nay, unequalled--at
dishing up the raw material so that it melted in the mouth of the
ultimate consumer, Anatole had always been a magnet that drew me to
Brinkley Court with my tongue hanging out. Many of my happiest moments
had been those which I had spent champing this great man’s roasts and
ragouts, and the prospect of being barred from digging into them in the
future was a numbing one.
“No, I say, dash it!”
“I thought that would rattle you. Greedy young pig.”
“Greedy young pigs have nothing to do with it,” I said with a touch of
hauteur. “One is not a greedy young pig because one appreciates the
cooking of a genius.”
“Well, I will say I like it myself,” conceded the relative. “But not
another bite of it do you get, if you refuse to do this simple, easy,
pleasant job. No, not so much as another sniff. So put that in your
twelve-inch cigarette-holder and smoke it.”
I began to feel like some wild thing caught in a snare.
“But why do you want me? I mean, what am I? Ask yourself that.”
“I often have.”
“I mean to say, I’m not the type. You have to have some terrific nib
to give away prizes. I seem to remember, when I was at school, it was
generally a prime minister or somebody.”
“Ah, but that was at Eton. At Market Snodsbury we aren’t nearly so
choosy. Anybody in spats impresses us.”
“Why don’t you get Uncle Tom?”
“Uncle Tom!”
“Well, why not? He’s got spats.”
“Bertie,” she said, “I will tell you why not Uncle Tom. You remember me
losing all that money at baccarat at Cannes? Well, very shortly I shall
have to sidle up to Tom and break the news to him. If, right after
that, I ask him to put on lavender gloves and a topper and distribute
the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School, there will be a divorce
in the family. He would pin a note to the pincushion and be off like a
rabbit. No, my lad, you’re for it, so you may as well make the best of
it.”
“But, Aunt Dahlia, listen to reason. I assure you, you’ve got hold
of the wrong man. I’m hopeless at a game like that. Ask Jeeves about
the time I got lugged in to address a girls’ school. I made the most
colossal ass of myself.”
“And I confidently anticipate that you will make an equally colossal
ass of yourself on the thirty-first of this month. That’s why I want
you. The way I look at it is that, as the thing is bound to be a frost,
anyway, one may as well get a hearty laugh out of it. I shall enjoy
seeing you distribute those prizes, Bertie. Well, I won’t keep you, as,
no doubt, you want to do your Swedish exercises. I shall expect you in
a day or two.”
And with these heartless words she beetled off, leaving me a prey to
the gloomiest emotions. What with the natural reaction after Pongo’s
party and this stunning blow, it is not too much to say that the soul
was seared.
And I was still writhing in the depths, when the door opened and Jeeves
appeared.
“Mr. Fink-Nottle to see you, sir,” he announced.
-5-
I gave him one of my looks.
“Jeeves,” I said, “I had scarcely expected this of you. You are aware
that I was up to an advanced hour last night. You know that I have
barely had my tea. You cannot be ignorant of the effect of that hearty
voice of Aunt Dahlia’s on a man with a headache. And yet you come
bringing me Fink-Nottles. Is this a time for Fink or any other kind of
Nottle?”
“But did you not give me to understand, sir, that you wished to see Mr.
Fink-Nottle to advise him on his affairs?”
This, I admit, opened up a new line of thought. In the stress of my
emotions, I had clean forgotten about having taken Gussie’s interests
in hand. It altered things. One can’t give the raspberry to a client.
I mean, you didn’t find Sherlock Holmes refusing to see clients just
because he had been out late the night before at Doctor Watson’s
birthday party. I could have wished that the man had selected some
more suitable hour for approaching me, but as he appeared to be a sort
of human lark, leaving his watery nest at daybreak, I supposed I had
better give him an audience.
“True,” I said. “All right. Bung him in.”
“Very good, sir.”
“But before doing so, bring me one of those pick-me-ups of yours.”
“Very good, sir.”
And presently he returned with the vital essence.
I have had occasion, I fancy, to speak before now of these pick-me-ups
of Jeeves’s and their effect on a fellow who is hanging to life by a
thread on the morning after. What they consist of, I couldn’t tell you.
He says some kind of sauce, the yolk of a raw egg and a dash of red
pepper, but nothing will convince me that the thing doesn’t go much
deeper than that. Be that as it may, however, the results of swallowing
one are amazing.
For perhaps the split part of a second nothing happens. It is as though
all Nature waited breathless. Then, suddenly, it is as if the Last
Trump had sounded and Judgment Day set in with unusual severity.
Bonfires burst out in all in parts of the frame. The abdomen becomes
heavily charged with molten lava. A great wind seems to blow through
the world, and the subject is aware of something resembling a steam
hammer striking the back of the head. During this phase, the ears ring
loudly, the eyeballs rotate and there is a tingling about the brow.
And then, just as you are feeling that you ought to ring up your lawyer
and see that your affairs are in order before it is too late, the whole
situation seems to clarify. The wind drops. The ears cease to ring.
Birds twitter. Brass bands start playing. The sun comes up over the
horizon with a jerk.
And a moment later all you are conscious of is a great peace.
As I drained the glass now, new life seemed to burgeon within me. I
remember Jeeves, who, however much he may go off the rails at times in
the matter of dress clothes and in his advice to those in love, has
always had a neat turn of phrase, once speaking of someone rising on
stepping-stones of his dead self to higher things. It was that way with
me now. I felt that the Bertram Wooster who lay propped up against the
pillows had become a better, stronger, finer Bertram.
“Thank you, Jeeves,” I said.
“Not at all, sir.”
“That touched the exact spot. I am now able to cope with life’s
problems.”
“I am gratified to hear it, sir.”
“What madness not to have had one of those before tackling Aunt Dahlia!
However, too late to worry about that now. Tell me of Gussie. How did
he make out at the fancy-dress ball?”
“He did not arrive at the fancy-dress ball, sir.”
I looked at him a bit austerely.
“Jeeves,” I said, “I admit that after that pick-me-up of yours I feel
better, but don’t try me too high. Don’t stand by my sick bed talking
absolute rot. We shot Gussie into a cab and he started forth, headed
for wherever this fancy-dress ball was. He must have arrived.”
“No, sir. As I gather from Mr. Fink-Nottle, he entered the cab
convinced in his mind that the entertainment to which he had been
invited was to be held at No. 17, Suffolk Square, whereas the actual
rendezvous was No. 71, Norfolk Terrace. These aberrations of memory are
not uncommon with those who, like Mr. Fink-Nottle, belong essentially
to what one might call the dreamer-type.”
“One might also call it the fatheaded type.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well?”
“On reaching No. 17, Suffolk Square, Mr. Fink-Nottle endeavoured to
produce money to pay the fare.”
“What stopped him?”
“The fact that he had no money, sir. He discovered that he had left
it, together with his ticket of invitation, on the mantelpiece of his
bedchamber in the house of his uncle, where he was residing. Bidding
the cabman to wait, accordingly, he rang the door-bell, and when the
butler appeared, requested him to pay the cab, adding that it was all
right, as he was one of the guests invited to the dance. The butler
then disclaimed all knowledge of a dance on the premises.”
“And declined to unbelt?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Upon which----”
“Mr. Fink-Nottle directed the cabman to drive him back to his uncle’s
residence.”
“Well, why wasn’t that the happy ending? All he had to do was go in,
collect cash and ticket, and there he would have been, on velvet.”
“I should have mentioned, sir, that Mr. Fink-Nottle had also left his
latchkey on the mantelpiece of his bedchamber.”
“He could have rung the bell.”
“He did ring the bell, sir, for some fifteen minutes. At the
expiration of that period he recalled that he had given permission to
the caretaker--the house was officially closed and all the staff on
holiday--to visit his sailor son at Portsmouth.”
“Golly, Jeeves!”
“Yes, sir.”
“These dreamer types do live, don’t they?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What happened then?”
“Mr. Fink-Nottle appears to have realized at this point that his
position as regards the cabman had become equivocal. The figures on
the clock had already reached a substantial sum, and he was not in a
position to meet his obligations.”
“He could have explained.”
“You cannot explain to cabmen, sir. On endeavouring to do so, he found
the fellow sceptical of his bona fides.”
“I should have legged it.”
“That is the policy which appears to have commended itself to Mr.
Fink-Nottle. He darted rapidly away, and the cabman, endeavouring to
detain him, snatched at his overcoat. Mr. Fink-Nottle contrived to
extricate himself from the coat, and it would seem that his appearance
in the masquerade costume beneath it came as something of a shock to
the cabman. Mr. Fink-Nottle informs me that he heard a species of
whistling gasp, and, looking round, observed the man crouching against
the railings with his hands over his face. Mr. Fink-Nottle thinks
he was praying. No doubt an uneducated, superstitious fellow, sir.
Possibly a drinker.”
“Well, if he hadn’t been one before, I’ll bet he started being one
shortly afterwards. I expect he could scarcely wait for the pubs to
open.”
“Very possibly, in the circumstances he might have found a restorative
agreeable, sir.”
“And so, in the circumstances, might Gussie too, I should think. What
on earth did he do after that? London late at night--or even in the
daytime, for that matter--is no place for a man in scarlet tights.”
“No, sir.”
“He invites comment.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can see the poor old bird ducking down side-streets, skulking in
alley-ways, diving into dust-bins.”
“I gathered from Mr. Fink-Nottle’s remarks, sir, that something very
much on those lines was what occurred. Eventually, after a trying
night, he found his way to Mr. Sipperley’s residence, where he was able
to secure lodging and a change of costume in the morning.”
I nestled against the pillows, the brow a bit drawn. It is all very
well to try to do old school friends a spot of good, but I could not
but feel that in espousing the cause of a lunkhead capable of mucking
things up as Gussie had done, I had taken on a contract almost too big
for human consumption. It seemed to me that what Gussie needed was not
so much the advice of a seasoned man of the world as a padded cell in
Colney Hatch and a couple of good keepers to see that he did not set
the place on fire.
Indeed, for an instant I had half a mind to withdraw from the case and
hand it back to Jeeves. But the pride of the Woosters restrained me.
When we Woosters put our hands to the plough, we do not readily sheathe
the sword. Besides, after that business of the mess-jacket, anything
resembling weakness would have been fatal.
“I suppose you realize, Jeeves,” I said, for though one dislikes to rub
it in, these things have to be pointed out, “that all this was your
fault?”
“Sir?”
“It’s no good saying ‘Sir?’ You know it was. If you had not insisted
on his going to that dance--a mad project, as I spotted from the
first--this would not have happened.”
“Yes, sir, but I confess I did not anticipate----”
“Always anticipate everything, Jeeves,” I said, a little sternly. “It
is the only way. Even if you had allowed him to wear a Pierrot costume,
things would not have panned out as they did. A Pierrot costume has
pockets. However,” I went on more kindly, “we need not go into that
now. If all this has shown you what comes of going about the place in
scarlet tights, that is something gained. Gussie waits without, you
say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then shoot him in, and I will see what I can do for him.”
-6-
Gussie, on arrival, proved to be still showing traces of his grim
experience. The face was pale, the eyes gooseberry-like, the ears
drooping, and the whole aspect that of a man who has passed through the
furnace and been caught in the machinery. I hitched myself up a bit
higher on the pillows and gazed at him narrowly. It was a moment, I
could see, when first aid was required, and I prepared to get down to
cases.
“Well, Gussie.”
“Hullo, Bertie.”
“What ho.”
“What ho.”
These civilities concluded, I felt that the moment had come to touch
delicately on the past.
“I hear you’ve been through it a bit.”
“Yes.”
“Thanks to Jeeves.”
“It wasn’t Jeeves’s fault.”
“Entirely Jeeves’s fault.”
“I don’t see that. I forgot my money and latchkey----”
“And now you’d better forget Jeeves. For you will be interested to
hear, Gussie,” I said, deeming it best to put him in touch with the
position of affairs right away, “that he is no longer handling your
little problem.”
This seemed to slip it across him properly. The jaws fell, the ears
drooped more limply. He had been looking like a dead fish. He now
looked like a deader fish, one of last year’s, cast up on some lonely
beach and left there at the mercy of the wind and tides.
“What!”
“Yes.”
“You don’t mean that Jeeves isn’t going to----”
“No.”
“But, dash it----”
I was kind, but firm.
“You will be much better off without him. Surely your terrible
experiences of that awful night have told you that Jeeves needs a rest.
The keenest of thinkers strikes a bad patch occasionally. That is what
has happened to Jeeves. I have seen it coming on for some time. He has
lost his form. He wants his plugs decarbonized. No doubt this is a
shock to you. I suppose you came here this morning to seek his advice?”
“Of course I did.”
“On what point?”
“Madeline Bassett has gone to stay with these people in the country,
and I want to know what he thinks I ought to do.”
“Well, as I say, Jeeves is off the case.”
“But, Bertie, dash it----”
“Jeeves,” I said with a certain asperity, “is no longer on the case. I
am now in sole charge.”
“But what on earth can you do?”
I curbed my resentment. We Woosters are fair-minded. We can make
allowances for men who have been parading London all night in scarlet
tights.
“That,” I said quietly, “we shall see. Sit down and let us confer. I am
bound to say the thing seems quite simple to me. You say this girl has
gone to visit friends in the country. It would appear obvious that you
must go there too, and flock round her like a poultice. Elementary.”
“But I can’t plant myself on a lot of perfect strangers.”
“Don’t you know these people?”
“Of course I don’t. I don’t know anybody.”
I pursed the lips. This did seem to complicate matters somewhat.
“All that I know is that their name is Travers, and it’s a place called
Brinkley Court down in Worcestershire.”
I unpursed my lips.
“Gussie,” I said, smiling paternally, “it was a lucky day for you
when Bertram Wooster interested himself in your affairs. As I foresaw
from the start, I can fix everything. This afternoon you shall go to
Brinkley Court, an honoured guest.”
He quivered like a _mousse_. I suppose it must always be rather a
thrilling experience for the novice to watch me taking hold.
“But, Bertie, you don’t mean you know these Traverses?”
“They are my Aunt Dahlia.”
“My gosh!”
“You see now,” I pointed out, “how lucky you were to get me behind you.
You go to Jeeves, and what does he do? He dresses you up in scarlet
tights and one of the foulest false beards of my experience, and sends
you off to fancy-dress balls. Result, agony of spirit and no progress.
I then take over and put you on the right lines. Could Jeeves have got
you into Brinkley Court? Not a chance. Aunt Dahlia isn’t his aunt. I
merely mention these things.”
“By Jove, Bertie, I don’t know how to thank you.”
“My dear chap!”
“But, I say.”
“Now what?”
“What do I do when I get there?”
“If you knew Brinkley Court, you would not ask that question. In those
romantic surroundings you can’t miss. Great lovers through the ages
have fixed up the preliminary formalities at Brinkley. The place is
simply ill with atmosphere. You will stroll with the girl in the shady
walks. You will sit with her on the shady lawns. You will row on the
lake with her. And gradually you will find yourself working up to a
point where----”
“By Jove, I believe you’re right.”
“Of course, I’m right. I’ve got engaged three times at Brinkley. No
business resulted, but the fact remains. And I went there without the
foggiest idea of indulging in the tender pash. I hadn’t the slightest
intention of proposing to anybody. Yet no sooner had I entered those
romantic grounds than I found myself reaching out for the nearest girl
in sight and slapping my soul down in front of her. It’s something in
the air.”
“I see exactly what you mean. That’s just what I want to be able to
do--work up to it. And in London--curse the place--everything’s in such
a rush that you don’t get a chance.”
“Quite. You see a girl alone for about five minutes a day, and if you
want to ask her to be your wife, you’ve got to charge into it as if you
were trying to grab the gold ring on a merry-go-round.”
“That’s right. London rattles one. I shall be a different man
altogether in the country. What a bit of luck this Travers woman
turning out to be your aunt.”
“I don’t know what you mean, turning out to be my aunt. She has been my
aunt all along.”
“I mean, how extraordinary that it should be your aunt that Madeline’s
going to stay with.”
“Not at all. She and my Cousin Angela are close friends. At Cannes she
was with us all the time.”
“Oh, you met Madeline at Cannes, did you? By Jove, Bertie,” said the
poor lizard devoutly, “I wish I could have seen her at Cannes. How
wonderful she must have looked in beach pyjamas! Oh, Bertie----”
“Quite,” I said, a little distantly. Even when restored by one of
Jeeves’s depth bombs, one doesn’t want this sort of thing after a
hard night. I touched the bell and, when Jeeves appeared, requested
him to bring me telegraph form and pencil. I then wrote a well-worded
communication to Aunt Dahlia, informing her that I was sending my
friend, Augustus Fink-Nottle, down to Brinkley today to enjoy her
hospitality, and handed it to Gussie.
“Push that in at the first post office you pass,” I said. “She will
find it waiting for her on her return.”
Gussie popped along, flapping the telegram and looking like a close-up
of Joan Crawford, and I turned to Jeeves and gave him a précis of my
operations.
“Simple, you observe, Jeeves. Nothing elaborate.”
“No, sir.”
“Nothing far-fetched. Nothing strained or bizarre. Just Nature’s
remedy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“This is the attack as it should have been delivered. What do you call
it when two people of opposite sexes are bunged together in close
association in a secluded spot, meeting each other every day and seeing
a lot of each other?”
“Is ‘propinquity’ the word you wish, sir?”
“It is. I stake everything on propinquity, Jeeves. Propinquity, in
my opinion, is what will do the trick. At the moment, as you are
aware, Gussie is a mere jelly when in the presence. But ask yourself
how he will feel in a week or so, after he and she have been helping
themselves to sausages out of the same dish day after day at the
breakfast sideboard. Cutting the same ham, ladling out communal kidneys
and bacon--why----”
I broke off abruptly. I had had one of my ideas.
“Golly, Jeeves!”
“Sir?”
“Here’s an instance of how you have to think of everything. You heard
me mention sausages, kidneys and bacon and ham.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, there must be nothing of that. Fatal. The wrong note entirely.
Give me that telegraph form and pencil. I must warn Gussie without
delay. What he’s got to do is to create in this girl’s mind the
impression that he is pining away for love of her. This cannot be done
by wolfing sausages.”
“No, sir.”
“Very well, then.”
And, taking form and _p._, I drafted the following:
_Fink-Nottle
Brinkley Court,
Market Snodsbury
Worcestershire
Lay off the sausages. Avoid the ham.
Bertie._
“Send that off, Jeeves, instanter.”
“Very good, sir.”
I sank back on the pillows.
“Well, Jeeves,” I said, “you see how I am taking hold. You notice the
grip I am getting on this case. No doubt you realize now that it would
pay you to study my methods.”
“No doubt, sir.”
“And even now you aren’t on to the full depths of the extraordinary
sagacity I’ve shown. Do you know what brought Aunt Dahlia up here this
morning? She came to tell me I’d got to distribute the prizes at some
beastly seminary she’s a governor of down at Market Snodsbury.”
“Indeed, sir? I fear you will scarcely find that a congenial task.”
“Ah, but I’m not going to do it. I’m going to shove it off on to
Gussie.”
“Sir?”
“I propose, Jeeves, to wire to Aunt Dahlia saying that I can’t get
down, and suggesting that she unleashes him on these young Borstal
inmates of hers in my stead.”
“But if Mr. Fink-Nottle should decline, sir?”
“Decline? Can you see him declining? Just conjure up the picture in
your mind, Jeeves. Scene, the drawing-room at Brinkley; Gussie wedged
into a corner, with Aunt Dahlia standing over him making hunting
noises. I put it to you, Jeeves, can you see him declining?”
“Not readily, sir. I agree. Mrs. Travers is a forceful personality.”
“He won’t have a hope of declining. His only way out would be to slide
off. And he can’t slide off, because he wants to be with Miss Bassett.
No, Gussie will have to toe the line, and I shall be saved from a job
at which I confess the soul shuddered. Getting up on a platform and
delivering a short, manly speech to a lot of foul school-kids! Golly,
Jeeves. I’ve been through that sort of thing once, what? You remember
that time at the girls’ school?”
“Very vividly, sir.”
“What an ass I made of myself!”
“Certainly I have seen you to better advantage, sir.”
“I think you might bring me just one more of those dynamite specials of
yours, Jeeves. This narrow squeak has made me come over all faint.”
I suppose it must have taken Aunt Dahlia three hours or so to get
back to Brinkley, because it wasn’t till well after lunch that her
telegram arrived. It read like a telegram that had been dispatched in a
white-hot surge of emotion some two minutes after she had read mine.
As follows:
_Am taking legal advice to ascertain whether strangling an idiot
nephew counts as murder. If it doesn’t look out for yourself.
Consider your conduct frozen limit. What do you mean by planting
your loathsome friends on me like this? Do you think Brinkley Court
is a leper colony or what is it? Who is this Spink-Bottle? Love.
Travers._
I had expected some such initial reaction. I replied in temperate vein:
_Not Bottle. Nottle. Regards. Bertie._
Almost immediately after she had dispatched the above heart cry, Gussie
must have arrived, for it wasn’t twenty minutes later when I received
the following:
_Cipher telegram signed by you has reached me here. Runs “Lay off
the sausages. Avoid the ham.” Wire key immediately. Fink-Nottle._
I replied:
_Also kidneys. Cheerio. Bertie._
I had staked all on Gussie making a favourable impression on his
hostess, basing my confidence on the fact that he was one of those
timid, obsequious, teacup-passing, thin-bread-and-butter-offering
yes-men whom women of my Aunt Dahlia’s type nearly always like at
first sight. That I had not overrated my acumen was proved by her next
in order, which, I was pleased to note, assayed a markedly larger
percentage of the milk of human kindness.
As follows:
_Well, this friend of yours has got here, and I must say that for
a friend of yours he seems less sub-human than I had expected. A
bit of a pop-eyed bleater, but on the whole clean and civil, and
certainly most informative about newts. Am considering arranging
series of lectures for him in neighbourhood. All the same I like
your nerve using my house as a summer-hotel resort and shall have
much to say to you on subject when you come down. Expect you
thirtieth. Bring spats. Love. Travers._
To this I riposted:
_On consulting engagement book find impossible come Brinkley Court.
Deeply regret. Toodle-oo. Bertie._
Hers in reply stuck a sinister note:
_Oh, so it’s like that, is it? You and your engagement book,
indeed. Deeply regret my foot. Let me tell you, my lad, that you
will regret it a jolly sight more deeply if you don’t come down.
If you imagine for one moment that you are going to get out of
distributing those prizes, you are very much mistaken. Deeply
regret Brinkley Court hundred miles from London, as unable hit you
with a brick. Love. Travers._
I then put my fortune to the test, to win or lose it all. It was not a
moment for petty economies. I let myself go regardless of expense:
_No, but dash it, listen. Honestly, you don’t want me. Get
Fink-Nottle distribute prizes. A born distributor, who will do you
credit. Confidently anticipate Augustus Fink-Nottle as Master of
Revels on thirty-first inst. would make genuine sensation. Do not
miss this great chance, which may never occur again. Tinkerty-tonk.
Bertie._
There was an hour of breathless suspense, and then the joyful tidings
arrived:
_Well, all right. Something in what you say, I suppose. Consider
you treacherous worm and contemptible, spineless cowardly custard,
but have booked Spink-Bottle. Stay where you are, then, and I hope
you get run over by an omnibus. Love. Travers._
The relief, as you may well imagine, was stupendous. A great weight
seemed to have rolled off my mind. It was as if somebody had been
pouring Jeeves’s pick-me-ups into me through a funnel. I sang as I
dressed for dinner that night. At the Drones I was so gay and cheery
that there were several complaints. And when I got home and turned into
the old bed, I fell asleep like a little child within five minutes of
inserting the person between the sheets. It seemed to me that the whole
distressing affair might now be considered definitely closed.
Conceive my astonishment, therefore, when waking on the morrow and
sitting up to dig into the morning tea-cup, I beheld on the tray
another telegram.
My heart sank. Could Aunt Dahlia have slept on it and changed her mind?
Could Gussie, unable to face the ordeal confronting him, have legged
it during the night down a water-pipe? With these speculations racing
through the bean, I tore open the envelope And as I noted contents I
uttered a startled yip.
“Sir?” said Jeeves, pausing at the door.
I read the thing again. Yes, I had got the gist all right. No, I had
not been deceived in the substance.
“Jeeves,” I said, “do you know what?”
“No, sir.”
“You know my cousin Angela?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know young Tuppy Glossop?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They’ve broken off their engagement.”
“I am sorry to hear that, sir.”
“I have here a communication from Aunt Dahlia, specifically stating
this. I wonder what the row was about.”
“I could not say, sir.”
“Of course you couldn’t. Don’t be an ass, Jeeves.”
“No, sir.”
I brooded. I was deeply moved.
“Well, this means that we shall have to go down to Brinkley today. Aunt
Dahlia is obviously all of a twitter, and my place is by her side.
You had better pack this morning, and catch that 12.45 train with the
luggage. I have a lunch engagement, so will follow in the car.”
“Very good, sir.”
I brooded some more.
“I must say this has come as a great shock to me, Jeeves.”
“No doubt, sir.”
“A very great shock. Angela and Tuppy.... Tut, tut! Why, they seemed
like the paper on the wall. Life is full of sadness, Jeeves.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Still, there it is.”
“Undoubtedly, sir.”
“Right ho, then. Switch on the bath.”
“Very good, sir.”
-7-
I meditated pretty freely as I drove down to Brinkley in the old
two-seater that afternoon. The news of this rift or rupture of Angela’s
and Tuppy’s had disturbed me greatly.
The projected match, you see, was one on which I had always looked
with kindly approval. Too often, when a chap of your acquaintance is
planning to marry a girl you know, you find yourself knitting the brow
a bit and chewing the lower lip dubiously, feeling that he or she, or
both, should be warned while there is yet time.
But I have never felt anything of this nature about Tuppy and Angela.
Tuppy, when not making an ass of himself, is a soundish sort of egg.
So is Angela a soundish sort of egg. And, as far as being in love was
concerned, it had always seemed to me that you wouldn’t have been far
out in describing them as two hearts that beat as one.
True, they had had their little tiffs, notably on the occasion when
Tuppy--with what he said was fearless honesty and I considered thorough
goofiness--had told Angela that her new hat made her look like a
Pekingese. But in every romance you have to budget for the occasional
dust-up, and after that incident I had supposed that he had learned his
lesson and that from then on life would be one grand, sweet song.
And now this wholly unforeseen severing of diplomatic relations had
popped up through a trap.
I gave the thing the cream of the Wooster brain all the way down,
but it continued to beat me what could have caused the outbreak of
hostilities, and I bunged my foot sedulously on the accelerator in
order to get to Aunt Dahlia with the greatest possible speed and learn
the inside history straight from the horse’s mouth. And what with
all six cylinders hitting nicely, I made good time and found myself
closeted with the relative shortly before the hour of the evening
cocktail.
She seemed glad to see me. In fact, she actually said she was glad to
see me--a statement no other aunt on the list would have committed
herself to, the customary reaction of these near and dear ones to the
spectacle of Bertram arriving for a visit being a sort of sick horror.
“Decent of you to rally round, Bertie,” she said.
“My place was by your side, Aunt Dahlia,” I responded.
I could see at a g. that the unfortunate affair had got in amongst her
in no uncertain manner. Her usually cheerful map was clouded, and the
genial smile conspic. by its a. I pressed her hand sympathetically, to
indicate that my heart bled for her.
“Bad show this, my dear old flesh and blood,” I said. “I’m afraid
you’ve been having a sticky time. You must be worried.”
She snorted emotionally. She looked like an aunt who has just bitten
into a bad oyster.
“Worried is right. I haven’t had a peaceful moment since I got back
from Cannes. Ever since I put my foot across this blasted threshold,”
said Aunt Dahlia, returning for the nonce to the hearty _argot_ of the
hunting field, “everything’s been at sixes and sevens. First there was
that mix-up about the prize-giving.”
She paused at this point and gave me a look. “I had been meaning to
speak freely to you about your behaviour in that matter, Bertie,” she
said. “I had some good things all stored up. But, as you’ve rallied
round like this, I suppose I shall have to let you off. And, anyway, it
is probably all for the best that you evaded your obligations in that
sickeningly craven way. I have an idea that this Spink-Bottle of yours
is going to be good. If only he can keep off newts.”
“Has he been talking about newts?”
“He has. Fixing me with a glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner. But
if that was the worst I had to bear, I wouldn’t mind. What I’m worrying
about is what Tom says when he starts talking.”
“Uncle Tom?”
“I wish there was something else you could call him except ‘Uncle
Tom’,” said Aunt Dahlia a little testily. “Every time you do it, I
expect to see him turn black and start playing the banjo. Yes, Uncle
Tom, if you must have it. I shall have to tell him soon about losing
all that money at baccarat, and, when I do, he will go up like a
rocket.”
“Still, no doubt Time, the great healer----”
“Time, the great healer, be blowed. I’ve got to get a cheque for five
hundred pounds out of him for _Milady’s Boudoir_ by August the third at
the latest.”
I was concerned. Apart from a nephew’s natural interest in an aunt’s
refined weekly paper, I had always had a soft spot in my heart for
_Milady’s Boudoir_ ever since I contributed that article to it on What
the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing. Sentimental, possibly, but we old
journalists do have these feelings.
“Is the _Boudoir_ on the rocks?”
“It will be if Tom doesn’t cough up. It needs help till it has turned
the corner.”
“But wasn’t it turning the corner two years ago?”
“It was. And it’s still at it. Till you’ve run a weekly paper for
women, you don’t know what corners are.”
“And you think the chances of getting into uncle--into my uncle by
marriage’s ribs are slight?”
“I’ll tell you, Bertie. Up till now, when these subsidies were
required, I have always been able to come to Tom in the gay, confident
spirit of an only child touching an indulgent father for chocolate
cream. But he’s just had a demand from the income-tax people for an
additional fifty-eight pounds, one and threepence, and all he’s been
talking about since I got back has been ruin and the sinister trend of
socialistic legislation and what will become of us all.”
I could readily believe it. This Tom has a peculiarity I’ve noticed in
other very oofy men. Nick him for the paltriest sum, and he lets out
a squawk you can hear at Land’s End. He has the stuff in gobs, but he
hates giving up.
“If it wasn’t for Anatole’s cooking, I doubt if he would bother to
carry on. Thank God for Anatole, I say.”
I bowed my head reverently.
“Good old Anatole,” I said.
“Amen,” said Aunt Dahlia.
Then the look of holy ecstasy, which is always the result of letting
the mind dwell, however briefly, on Anatole’s cooking, died out of her
face.
“But don’t let me wander from the subject,” she resumed. “I was telling
you of the way hell’s foundations have been quivering since I got home.
First the prize-giving, then Tom, and now, on top of everything else,
this infernal quarrel between Angela and young Glossop.”
I nodded gravely. “I was frightfully sorry to hear of that. Terrible
shock. What was the row about?”
“Sharks.”
“Eh?”
“Sharks. Or, rather, one individual shark. The brute that went for the
poor child when she was aquaplaning at Cannes. You remember Angela’s
shark?”
Certainly I remembered Angela’s shark. A man of sensibility does not
forget about a cousin nearly being chewed by monsters of the deep. The
episode was still green in my memory.
In a nutshell, what had occurred was this: You know how you aquaplane.
A motor-boat nips on ahead, trailing a rope. You stand on a board,
holding the rope, and the boat tows you along. And every now and then
you lose your grip on the rope and plunge into the sea and have to swim
to your board again.
A silly process it has always seemed to me, though many find it
diverting.
Well, on the occasion referred to, Angela had just regained her board
after taking a toss, when a great beastly shark came along and cannoned
into it, flinging her into the salty once more. It took her quite a bit
of time to get on again and make the motor-boat chap realize what was
up and haul her to safety, and during that interval you can readily
picture her embarrassment.
According to Angela, the finny denizen kept snapping at her ankles
virtually without cessation, so that by the time help arrived, she was
feeling more like a salted almond at a public dinner than anything
human. Very shaken the poor child had been, I recall, and had talked of
nothing else for weeks.
“I remember the whole incident vividly,” I said. “But how did that
start the trouble?”
“She was telling him the story last night.”
“Well?”
“Her eyes shining and her little hands clasped in girlish excitement.”
“No doubt.”
“And instead of giving her the understanding and sympathy to which
she was entitled, what do you think this blasted Glossop did? He sat
listening like a lump of dough, as if she had been talking about the
weather, and when she had finished, he took his cigarette holder out of
his mouth and said, ‘I expect it was only a floating log’!”
“He didn’t!”
“He did. And when Angela described how the thing had jumped and snapped
at her, he took his cigarette holder out of his mouth again, and said,
‘Ah! Probably a flatfish. Quite harmless. No doubt it was just trying
to play.’ Well, I mean! What would you have done if you had been
Angela? She has pride, sensibility, all the natural feelings of a good
woman. She told him he was an ass and a fool and an idiot, and didn’t
know what he was talking about.”
I must say I saw the girl’s viewpoint. It’s only about once in a
lifetime that anything sensational ever happens to one, and when it
does, you don’t want people taking all the colour out of it. I remember
at school having to read that stuff where that chap, Othello, tells the
girl what a hell of a time he’d been having among the cannibals and
what not. Well, imagine his feelings if, after he had described some
particularly sticky passage with a cannibal chief and was waiting for
the awestruck “Oh-h! Not really?”, she had said that the whole thing
had no doubt been greatly exaggerated and that the man had probably
really been a prominent local vegetarian.
Yes, I saw Angela’s point of view.
“But don’t tell me that when he saw how shirty she was about it, the
chump didn’t back down?”
“He didn’t. He argued. And one thing led to another until, by easy
stages, they had arrived at the point where she was saying that she
didn’t know if he was aware of it, but if he didn’t knock off starchy
foods and do exercises every morning, he would be getting as fat as
a pig, and he was talking about this modern habit of girls putting
make-up on their faces, of which he had always disapproved. This
continued for a while, and then there was a loud pop and the air was
full of mangled fragments of their engagement. I’m distracted about it.
Thank goodness you’ve come, Bertie.”
“Nothing could have kept me away,” I replied, touched. “I felt you
needed me.”
“Yes.”
“Quite.”
“Or, rather,” she said, “not you, of course, but Jeeves. The minute
all this happened, I thought of him. The situation obviously cries out
for Jeeves. If ever in the whole history of human affairs there was a
moment when that lofty brain was required about the home, this is it.”
I think, if I had been standing up, I would have staggered. In fact,
I’m pretty sure I would. But it isn’t so dashed easy to stagger when
you’re sitting in an arm-chair. Only my face, therefore, showed how
deeply I had been stung by these words.
Until she spoke them, I had been all sweetness and light--the
sympathetic nephew prepared to strain every nerve to do his bit. I now
froze, and the face became hard and set.
“Jeeves!” I said, between clenched teeth.
“Oom beroofen,” said Aunt Dahlia.
I saw that she had got the wrong angle.
“I was not sneezing. I was saying ‘Jeeves!’”
“And well you may. What a man! I’m going to put the whole thing up to
him. There’s nobody like Jeeves.”
My frigidity became more marked.
“I venture to take issue with you, Aunt Dahlia.”
“You take what?”
“Issue.”
“You do, do you?”
“I emphatically do. Jeeves is hopeless.”
“What?”
“Quite hopeless. He has lost his grip completely. Only a couple of days
ago I was compelled to take him off a case because his handling of it
was so footling. And, anyway, I resent this assumption, if assumption
is the word I want, that Jeeves is the only fellow with brain. I object
to the way everybody puts things up to him without consulting me and
letting me have a stab at them first.”
She seemed about to speak, but I checked her with a gesture.
“It is true that in the past I have sometimes seen fit to seek Jeeves’s
advice. It is possible that in the future I may seek it again. But I
claim the right to have a pop at these problems, as they arise, in
person, without having everybody behave as if Jeeves was the only
onion in the hash. I sometimes feel that Jeeves, though admittedly not
unsuccessful in the past, has been lucky rather than gifted.”
“Have you and Jeeves had a row?”
“Nothing of the kind.”
“You seem to have it in for him.”
“Not at all.”
And yet I must admit that there was a modicum of truth in what she
said. I had been feeling pretty austere about the man all day, and I’ll
tell you why.
You remember that he caught that 12.45 train with the luggage, while
I remained on in order to keep a luncheon engagement. Well, just
before I started out to the tryst, I was pottering about the flat, and
suddenly--I don’t know what put the suspicion into my head, possibly
the fellow’s manner had been furtive--something seemed to whisper to me
to go and have a look in the wardrobe.
And it was as I had suspected. There was the mess-jacket still on its
hanger. The hound hadn’t packed it.
Well, as anybody at the Drones will tell you, Bertram Wooster is a
pretty hard chap to outgeneral. I shoved the thing in a brown-paper
parcel and put it in the back of the car, and it was on a chair in the
hall now. But that didn’t alter the fact that Jeeves had attempted to
do the dirty on me, and I suppose a certain what-d’you-call-it had
crept into my manner during the above remarks.
“There has been no breach,” I said. “You might describe it as a passing
coolness, but no more. We did not happen to see eye to eye with regard
to my white mess-jacket with the brass buttons and I was compelled to
assert my personality. But----”
“Well, it doesn’t matter, anyway. The thing that matters is that you
are talking piffle, you poor fish. Jeeves lost his grip? Absurd. Why,
I saw him for a moment when he arrived, and his eyes were absolutely
glittering with intelligence. I said to myself ‘Trust Jeeves,’ and I
intend to.”
“You would be far better advised to let me see what I can accomplish,
Aunt Dahlia.”
“For heaven’s sake, don’t you start butting in. You’ll only make
matters worse.”
“On the contrary, it may interest you to know that while driving here I
concentrated deeply on this trouble of Angela’s and was successful in
formulating a plan, based on the psychology of the individual, which I
am proposing to put into effect at an early moment.”
“Oh, my God!”
“My knowledge of human nature tells me it will work.”
“Bertie,” said Aunt Dahlia, and her manner struck me as febrile, “lay
off, lay off! For pity’s sake, lay off. I know these plans of yours. I
suppose you want to shove Angela into the lake and push young Glossop
in after her to save her life, or something like that.”
“Nothing of the kind.”
“It’s the sort of thing you would do.”
“My scheme is far more subtle. Let me outline it for you.”
“No, thanks.”
“I say to myself----”
“But not to me.”
“Do listen for a second.”
“I won’t.”
“Right ho, then. I am dumb.”
“And have been from a child.”
I perceived that little good could result from continuing the
discussion. I waved a hand and shrugged a shoulder.
“Very well, Aunt Dahlia,” I said, with dignity, “if you don’t want to
be in on the ground floor, that is your affair. But you are missing an
intellectual treat. And, anyway, no matter how much you may behave like
the deaf adder of Scripture which, as you are doubtless aware, the more
one piped, the less it danced, or words to that effect, I shall carry
on as planned. I am extremely fond of Angela, and I shall spare no
effort to bring the sunshine back into her heart.”
“Bertie, you abysmal chump, I appeal to you once more. Will you please
lay off? You’ll only make things ten times as bad as they are already.”
I remember reading in one of those historical novels once about a
chap--a buck he would have been, no doubt, or a macaroni or some
such bird as that--who, when people said the wrong thing, merely
laughed down from lazy eyelids and flicked a speck of dust from the
irreproachable Mechlin lace at his wrists. This was practically what
I did now. At least, I straightened my tie and smiled one of those
inscrutable smiles of mine. I then withdrew and went out for a saunter
in the garden.
And the first chap I ran into was young Tuppy. His brow was furrowed,
and he was moodily bunging stones at a flowerpot.
-8-
I think I have told you before about young Tuppy Glossop. He was the
fellow, if you remember, who, callously ignoring the fact that we had
been friends since boyhood, betted me one night at the Drones that I
could swing myself across the swimming bath by the rings--a childish
feat for one of my lissomeness--and then, having seen me well on the
way, looped back the last ring, thus rendering it necessary for me to
drop into the deep end in formal evening costume.
To say that I had not resented this foul deed, which seemed to me
deserving of the title of the crime of the century, would be paltering
with the truth. I had resented it profoundly, chafing not a little at
the time and continuing to chafe for some weeks.
But you know how it is with these things. The wound heals. The agony
abates.
I am not saying, mind you, that had the opportunity presented itself
of dropping a wet sponge on Tuppy from some high spot or of putting
an eel in his bed or finding some other form of self-expression of a
like nature, I would not have embraced it eagerly; but that let me out.
I mean to say, grievously injured though I had been, it gave me no
pleasure to feel that the fellow’s bally life was being ruined by the
loss of a girl whom, despite all that had passed, I was convinced he
still loved like the dickens.
On the contrary, I was heart and soul in favour of healing the breach
and rendering everything hotsy-totsy once more between these two young
sundered blighters. You will have gleaned that from my remarks to Aunt
Dahlia, and if you had been present at this moment and had seen the
kindly commiserating look I gave Tuppy, you would have gleaned it still
more.
It was one of those searching, melting looks, and was accompanied by
the hearty clasp of the right hand and the gentle laying of the left on
the collar-bone.
“Well, Tuppy, old man,” I said. “How are you, old man?”
My commiseration deepened as I spoke the words, for there had been no
lighting up of the eye, no answering pressure of the palm, no sign
whatever, in short, of any disposition on his part to do Spring dances
at the sight of an old friend. The man seemed sandbagged. Melancholy,
as I remember Jeeves saying once about Pongo Twistleton when he was
trying to knock off smoking, had marked him for her own. Not that I was
surprised, of course. In the circs., no doubt, a certain moodiness was
only natural.
I released the hand, ceased to knead the shoulder, and, producing the
old case, offered him a cigarette.
He took it dully.
“Are you here, Bertie?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Just passing through, or come to stay?”
I thought for a moment. I might have told him that I had arrived at
Brinkley Court with the express intention of bringing Angela and
himself together once more, of knitting up the severed threads, and
so on and so forth; and for perhaps half the time required for the
lighting of a gasper I had almost decided to do so. Then, I reflected,
better, on the whole, perhaps not. To broadcast the fact that I
proposed to take him and Angela and play on them as on a couple of
stringed instruments might have been injudicious. Chaps don’t always
like being played on as on a stringed instrument.
“It all depends,” I said. “I may remain. I may push on. My plans are
uncertain.”
He nodded listlessly, rather in the manner of a man who did not give a
damn what I did, and stood gazing out over the sunlit garden. In build
and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog, and his aspect now
was that of one of these fine animals who has just been refused a slice
of cake. It was not difficult for a man of my discernment to read what
was in his mind, and it occasioned me no surprise, therefore, when his
next words had to do with the subject marked with a cross on the agenda
paper.
“You’ve heard of this business of mine, I suppose? Me and Angela?”
“I have, indeed, Tuppy, old man.”
“We’ve bust up.”
“I know. Some little friction, I gather, _in re_ Angela’s shark.”
“Yes. I said it must have been a flatfish.”
“So my informant told me.”
“Who did you hear it from?”
“Aunt Dahlia.”
“I suppose she cursed me properly?”
“Oh, no.”
“Beyond referring to you in one passage as ‘this blasted Glossop’, she
was, I thought, singularly temperate in her language for a woman who at
one time hunted regularly with the Quorn. All the same, I could see,
if you don’t mind me saying so, old man, that she felt you might have
behaved with a little more tact.”
“Tact!”
“And I must admit I rather agreed with her. Was it nice, Tuppy, was
it quite kind to take the bloom off Angela’s shark like that? You
must remember that Angela’s shark is very dear to her. Could you not
see what a sock on the jaw it would be for the poor child to hear it
described by the man to whom she had given her heart as a flatfish?”
I saw that he was struggling with some powerful emotion.
“And what about my side of the thing?” he demanded, in a voice choked
with feeling.
“Your side?”
“You don’t suppose,” said Tuppy, with rising vehemence, “that I
would have exposed this dashed synthetic shark for the flatfish it
undoubtedly was if there had not been causes that led up to it. What
induced me to speak as I did was the fact that Angela, the little
squirt, had just been most offensive, and I seized the opportunity to
get a bit of my own back.”
“Offensive?”
“Exceedingly offensive. Purely on the strength of my having let fall
some casual remark--simply by way of saying something and keeping the
conversation going--to the effect that I wondered what Anatole was
going to give us for dinner, she said that I was too material and ought
not always to be thinking of food. Material, my elbow! As a matter of
fact, I’m particularly spiritual.”
“Quite.”
“I don’t see any harm in wondering what Anatole was going to give us
for dinner. Do you?”
“Of course not. A mere ordinary tribute of respect to a great artist.”
“Exactly.”
“All the same----”
“Well?”
“I was only going to say that it seems a pity that the frail craft
of love should come a stinker like this when a few manly words of
contrition----”
He stared at me.
“You aren’t suggesting that I should climb down?”
“It would be the fine, big thing, old egg.”
“I wouldn’t dream of climbing down.”
“But, Tuppy----”
“No. I wouldn’t do it.”
“But you love her, don’t you?”
This touched the spot. He quivered noticeably, and his mouth twisted.
Quite the tortured soul.
“I’m not saying I don’t love the little blighter,” he said, obviously
moved. “I love her passionately. But that doesn’t alter the fact that I
consider that what she needs most in this world is a swift kick in the
pants.”
A Wooster could scarcely pass this. “Tuppy, old man!”
“It’s no good saying ‘Tuppy, old man’.”
“Well, I do say ‘Tuppy, old man’. Your tone shocks me. One raises the
eyebrows. Where is the fine, old, chivalrous spirit of the Glossops.”
“That’s all right about the fine, old, chivalrous spirit of the
Glossops. Where is the sweet, gentle, womanly spirit of the Angelas?
Telling a fellow he was getting a double chin!”
“Did she do that?”
“She did.”
“Oh, well, girls will be girls. Forget it, Tuppy. Go to her and make it
up.”
He shook his head.
“No. It is too late. Remarks have been passed about my tummy which it
is impossible to overlook.”
“But, Tummy--Tuppy, I mean--be fair. You once told her her new hat made
her look like a Pekingese.”
“It did make her look like a Pekingese. That was not vulgar abuse.
It was sound, constructive criticism, with no motive behind it but
the kindly desire to keep her from making an exhibition of herself in
public. Wantonly to accuse a man of puffing when he goes up a flight of
stairs is something very different.”
I began to see that the situation would require all my address and
ingenuity. If the wedding bells were ever to ring out in the little
church of Market Snodsbury, Bertram had plainly got to put in some
shrewdish work. I had gathered, during my conversation with Aunt
Dahlia, that there had been a certain amount of frank speech between
the two contracting parties, but I had not realized till now that
matters had gone so far.
The pathos of the thing gave me the pip. Tuppy had admitted in so many
words that love still animated the Glossop bosom, and I was convinced
that, even after all that occurred, Angela had not ceased to love him.
At the moment, no doubt, she might be wishing that she could hit him
with a bottle, but deep down in her I was prepared to bet that there
still lingered all the old affection and tenderness. Only injured pride
was keeping these two apart, and I felt that if Tuppy would make the
first move, all would be well.
I had another whack at it.
“She’s broken-hearted about this rift, Tuppy.”
“How do you know? Have you seen her?”
“No, but I’ll bet she is.”
“She doesn’t look it.”
“Wearing the mask, no doubt. Jeeves does that when I assert my
authority.”
“She wrinkles her nose at me as if I were a drain that had got out of
order.”
“Merely the mask. I feel convinced she loves you still, and that a
kindly word from you is all that is required.”
I could see that this had moved him. He plainly wavered. He did a sort
of twiddly on the turf with his foot. And, when he spoke, one spotted
the tremolo in the voice:
“You really think that?”
“Absolutely.”
“H’m.”
“If you were to go to her----”
He shook his head.
“I can’t do that. It would be fatal. Bing, instantly, would go my
prestige. I know girls. Grovel, and the best of them get uppish.” He
mused. “The only way to work the thing would be by tipping her off in
some indirect way that I am prepared to open negotiations. Should I
sigh a bit when we meet, do you think?”
“She would think you were puffing.”
“That’s true.”
I lit another cigarette and gave my mind to the matter. And first crack
out of the box, as is so often the way with the Woosters, I got an
idea. I remembered the counsel I had given Gussie in the matter of the
sausages and ham.
“I’ve got it, Tuppy. There is one infallible method of indicating to a
girl that you love her, and it works just as well when you’ve had a row
and want to make it up. Don’t eat any dinner tonight. You can see how
impressive that would be. She knows how devoted you are to food.”
He started violently.
“I am not devoted to food!”
“No, no.”
“I am not devoted to food at all.”
“Quite. All I meant----”
“This rot about me being devoted to food,” said Tuppy warmly, “has got
to stop. I am young and healthy and have a good appetite, but that’s
not the same as being devoted to food. I admire Anatole as a master of
his craft, and am always willing to consider anything he may put before
me, but when you say I am devoted to food----”
“Quite, quite. All I meant was that if she sees you push away your
dinner untasted, she will realize that your heart is aching, and will
probably be the first to suggest blowing the all clear.”
Tuppy was frowning thoughtfully.
“Push my dinner away, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Push away a dinner cooked by Anatole?”
“Yes.”
“Push it away untasted?”
“Yes.”
“Let us get this straight. Tonight, at dinner, when the butler offers
me a _ris de veau à la financiere_, or whatever it may be, hot from
Anatole’s hands, you wish me to push it away untasted?”
“Yes.”
He chewed his lip. One could sense the struggle going on within. And
then suddenly a sort of glow came into his face. The old martyrs
probably used to look like that.
“All right.”
“You’ll do it?”
“I will.”
“Fine.”
“Of course, it will be agony.”
I pointed out the silver lining.
“Only for the moment. You could slip down tonight, after everyone is in
bed, and raid the larder.”
He brightened.
“That’s right. I could, couldn’t I?”
“I expect there would be something cold there.”
“There is something cold there,” said Tuppy, with growing cheerfulness.
“A steak-and-kidney pie. We had it for lunch today. One of Anatole’s
ripest. The thing I admire about that man,” said Tuppy reverently,
“the thing that I admire so enormously about Anatole is that, though a
Frenchman, he does not, like so many of these _chefs_, confine himself
exclusively to French dishes, but is always willing and ready to weigh
in with some good old simple English fare such as this steak-and-kidney
pie to which I have alluded. A masterly pie, Bertie, and it wasn’t more
than half finished. It will do me nicely.”
“And at dinner you will push, as arranged?”
“Absolutely as arranged.”
“Fine.”
“It’s an excellent idea. One of Jeeves’s best. You can tell him from
me, when you see him, that I’m much obliged.”
The cigarette fell from my fingers. It was as though somebody had
slapped Bertram Wooster across the face with a wet dish-rag.
“You aren’t suggesting that you think this scheme I have been sketching
out is Jeeves’s?”
“Of course it is. It’s no good trying to kid me, Bertie. You wouldn’t
have thought of a wheeze like that in a million years.”
There was a pause. I drew myself up to my full height; then, seeing
that he wasn’t looking at me, lowered myself again.
“Come, Glossop,” I said coldly, “we had better be going. It is time we
were dressing for dinner.”
-9-
Tuppy’s fatheaded words were still rankling in my bosom as I went up to
my room. They continued rankling as I shed the form-fitting, and had
not ceased to rankle when, clad in the old dressing-gown, I made my way
along the corridor to the _salle de bain_.
It is not too much to say that I was piqued to the tonsils.
I mean to say, one does not court praise. The adulation of the
multitude means very little to one. But, all the same, when one has
taken the trouble to whack out a highly juicy scheme to benefit an
in-the-soup friend in his hour of travail, it’s pretty foul to find
him giving the credit to one’s personal attendant, particularly if
that personal attendant is a man who goes about the place not packing
mess-jackets.
But after I had been splashing about in the porcelain for a bit,
composure began to return. I have always found that in moments of
heart-bowed-downness there is nothing that calms the bruised spirit
like a good go at the soap and water. I don’t say I actually sang in
the tub, but there were times when it was a mere spin of the coin
whether I would do so or not.
The spiritual anguish induced by that tactless speech had become
noticeably lessened.
The discovery of a toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property
of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new
and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn’t
played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel
experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I
may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the
sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner
calculated to divert the most careworn. Ten minutes of this and I was
enabled to return to the bedchamber much more the old merry Bertram.
Jeeves was there, laying out the dinner disguise. He greeted the young
master with his customary suavity.
“Good evening, sir.”
I responded in the same affable key.
“Good evening, Jeeves.”
“I trust you had a pleasant drive, sir.”
“Very pleasant, thank you, Jeeves. Hand me a sock or two, will you?”
He did so, and I commenced to don.
“Well, Jeeves,” I said, reaching for the underlinen, “here we are again
at Brinkley Court in the county of Worcestershire.”
“Yes, sir.”
“A nice mess things seem to have gone and got themselves into in this
rustic joint.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The rift between Tuppy Glossop and my cousin Angela would appear to be
serious.”
“Yes, sir. Opinion in the servants’ hall is inclined to take a grave
view of the situation.”
“And the thought that springs to your mind, no doubt, is that I shall
have my work cut out to fix things up?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You are wrong, Jeeves. I have the thing well in hand.”
“You surprise me, sir.”
“I thought I should. Yes, Jeeves, I pondered on the matter most of
the way down here, and with the happiest results. I have just been in
conference with Mr. Glossop, and everything is taped out.”
“Indeed, sir? Might I inquire----”
“You know my methods, Jeeves. Apply them. Have you,” I asked, slipping
into the shirt and starting to adjust the cravat, “been gnawing on the
thing at all?”
“Oh, yes, sir. I have always been much attached to Miss Angela, and I
felt that it would afford me great pleasure were I to be able to be of
service to her.”
“A laudable sentiment. But I suppose you drew blank?”
“No, sir. I was rewarded with an idea.”
“What was it?”
“It occurred to me that a reconciliation might be effected between Mr.
Glossop and Miss Angela by appealing to that instinct which prompts
gentlemen in time of peril to hasten to the rescue of----”
I had to let go of the cravat in order to raise a hand. I was shocked.
“Don’t tell me you were contemplating descending to that old
he-saved-her-from-drowning gag? I am surprised, Jeeves. Surprised
and pained. When I was discussing the matter with Aunt Dahlia on my
arrival, she said in a sniffy sort of way that she supposed I was going
to shove my Cousin Angela into the lake and push Tuppy in to haul her
out, and I let her see pretty clearly that I considered the suggestion
an insult to my intelligence. And now, if your words have the meaning I
read into them, you are mooting precisely the same drivelling scheme.
Really, Jeeves!”
“No, sir. Not that. But the thought did cross my mind, as I walked
in the grounds and passed the building where the fire-bell hangs,
that a sudden alarm of fire in the night might result in Mr. Glossop
endeavouring to assist Miss Angela to safety.”
I shivered.
“Rotten, Jeeves.”
“Well, sir----”
“No good. Not a bit like it.”
“I fancy, sir----”
“No, Jeeves. No more. Enough has been said. Let us drop the subj.”
I finished tying the tie in silence. My emotions were too deep for
speech. I knew, of course, that this man had for the time being lost
his grip, but I had never suspected that he had gone absolutely to
pieces like this. Remembering some of the swift ones he had pulled
in the past, I shrank with horror from the spectacle of his present
ineptitude. Or is it ineptness? I mean this frightful disposition of
his to stick straws in his hair and talk like a perfect ass. It was
the old, old story, I supposed. A man’s brain whizzes along for years
exceeding the speed limit, and something suddenly goes wrong with the
steering-gear and it skids and comes a smeller in the ditch.
“A bit elaborate,” I said, trying to put the thing in as kindly a light
as possible. “Your old failing. You can see that it’s a bit elaborate?”
“Possibly the plan I suggested might be considered open to that
criticism, sir, but _faute de mieux_----”
“I don’t get you, Jeeves.”
“A French expression, sir, signifying ‘for want of anything better’.”
A moment before, I had been feeling for this wreck of a once fine
thinker nothing but a gentle pity. These words jarred the Wooster
pride, inducing asperity.
“I understand perfectly well what _faute de mieux_ means, Jeeves. I did
not recently spend two months among our Gallic neighbours for nothing.
Besides, I remember that one from school. What caused my bewilderment
was that you should be employing the expression, well knowing that
there is no bally _faute de mieux_ about it at all. Where do you get
that _faute-de-mieux_ stuff? Didn’t I tell you I had everything taped
out?”
“Yes, sir, but----”
“What do you mean--but?”
“Well, sir----”
“Push on, Jeeves. I am ready, even anxious, to hear your views.”
“Well, sir, if I may take the liberty of reminding you of it, your
plans in the past have not always been uniformly successful.”
There was a silence--rather a throbbing one--during which I put on my
waistcoat in a marked manner. Not till I had got the buckle at the back
satisfactorily adjusted did I speak.
“It is true, Jeeves,” I said formally, “that once or twice in the past
I may have missed the bus. This, however, I attribute purely to bad
luck.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“On the present occasion I shall not fail, and I’ll tell you why I
shall not fail. Because my scheme is rooted in human nature.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“It is simple. Not elaborate. And, furthermore, based on the psychology
of the individual.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Jeeves,” I said, “don’t keep saying ‘Indeed, sir?’ No doubt nothing is
further from your mind than to convey such a suggestion, but you have
a way of stressing the ‘in’ and then coming down with a thud on the
‘deed’ which makes it virtually tantamount to ‘Oh, yeah?’ Correct this,
Jeeves.”
“Very good, sir.”
“I tell you I have everything nicely lined up. Would you care to hear
what steps I have taken?”
“Very much, sir.”
“Then listen. Tonight at dinner I have recommended Tuppy to lay off the
food.”
“Sir?”
“Tut, Jeeves, surely you can follow the idea, even though it is
one that would never have occurred to yourself. Have you forgotten
that telegram I sent to Gussie Fink-Nottle, steering him away from
the sausages and ham? This is the same thing. Pushing the food away
untasted is a universally recognized sign of love. It cannot fail to
bring home the gravy. You must see that?”
“Well, sir----”
I frowned.
“I don’t want to seem always to be criticizing your methods of
voice production, Jeeves,” I said, “but I must inform you that that
‘Well, sir’ of yours is in many respects fully as unpleasant as your
‘Indeed, sir?’ Like the latter, it seems to be tinged with a definite
scepticism. It suggests a lack of faith in my vision. The impression I
retain after hearing you shoot it at me a couple of times is that you
consider me to be talking through the back of my neck, and that only a
feudal sense of what is fitting restrains you from substituting for it
the words ‘Says you!’”
“Oh, no, sir.”
“Well, that’s what it sounds like. Why don’t you think this scheme will
work?”
“I fear Miss Angela will merely attribute Mr. Glossop’s abstinence to
indigestion, sir.”
I hadn’t thought of that, and I must confess it shook me for a moment.
Then I recovered myself. I saw what was at the bottom of all this.
Mortified by the consciousness of his own ineptness--or ineptitude--the
fellow was simply trying to hamper and obstruct. I decided to knock the
stuffing out of him without further preamble.
“Oh?” I said. “You do, do you? Well, be that as it may, it doesn’t
alter the fact that you’ve put out the wrong coat. Be so good, Jeeves,”
I said, indicating with a gesture the gent’s ordinary dinner jacket or
_smoking_, as we call it on the Côte d’Azur, which was suspended from
the hanger on the knob of the wardrobe, “as to shove that bally black
thing in the cupboard and bring out my white mess-jacket with the brass
buttons.”
He looked at me in a meaning manner. And when I say a meaning manner,
I mean there was a respectful but at the same time uppish glint in his
eye and a sort of muscular spasm flickered across his face which wasn’t
quite a quiet smile and yet wasn’t quite not a quiet smile. Also the
soft cough.
“I regret to say, sir, that I inadvertently omitted to pack the garment
to which you refer.”
The vision of that parcel in the hall seemed to rise before my eyes,
and I exchanged a merry wink with it. I may even have hummed a bar or
two. I’m not quite sure.
“I know you did, Jeeves,” I said, laughing down from lazy eyelids and
nicking a speck of dust from the irreproachable Mechlin lace at my
wrists. “But I didn’t. You will find it on a chair in the hall in a
brown-paper parcel.”
The information that his low manoeuvres had been rendered null and void
and that the thing was on the strength after all, must have been the
nastiest of jars, but there was no play of expression on his finely
chiselled to indicate it. There very seldom is on Jeeves’s f-c. In
moments of discomfort, as I had told Tuppy, he wears a mask, preserving
throughout the quiet stolidity of a stuffed moose.
“You might just slide down and fetch it, will you?”
“Very good, sir.”
“Right ho, Jeeves.”
And presently I was sauntering towards the drawing-room with the good
old j. nestling snugly abaft the shoulder blades.
And Dahlia was in the drawing-room. She glanced up at my entrance.
“Hullo, eyesore,” she said. “What do you think you’re made up as?”
I did not get the purport.
“The jacket, you mean?” I queried, groping.
“I do. You look like one of the chorus of male guests at Abernethy
Towers in Act 2 of a touring musical comedy.”
“You do not admire this jacket?”
“I do not.”
“You did at Cannes.”
“Well, this isn’t Cannes.”
“But, dash it----”
“Oh, never mind. Let it go. If you want to give my butler a laugh, what
does it matter? What does anything matter now?”
There was a death-where-is-thy-sting-fullness about her manner which
I found distasteful. It isn’t often that I score off Jeeves in the
devastating fashion just described, and when I do I like to see happy,
smiling faces about me.
“Tails up, Aunt Dahlia,” I urged buoyantly.
“Tails up be dashed,” was her sombre response. “I’ve just been talking
to Tom.”
“Telling him?”
“No, listening to him. I haven’t had the nerve to tell him yet.”
“Is he still upset about that income-tax money?”
“Upset is right. He says that Civilisation is in the melting-pot and
that all thinking men can read the writing on the wall.”
“What wall?”
“Old Testament, ass. Belshazzar’s feast.”
“Oh, that, yes. I’ve often wondered how that gag was worked. With
mirrors, I expect.”
“I wish I could use mirrors to break it to Tom about this baccarat
business.”
I had a word of comfort to offer here. I had been turning the thing
over in my mind since our last meeting, and I thought I saw where
she had got twisted. Where she made her error, it seemed to me, was
in feeling she had got to tell Uncle Tom. To my way of thinking, the
matter was one on which it would be better to continue to exercise a
quiet reserve.
“I don’t see why you need mention that you lost that money at baccarat.”
“What do you suggest, then? Letting _Milady’s Boudoir_ join
Civilisation in the melting-pot. Because that is what it will
infallibly do unless I get a cheque by next week. The printers have
been showing a nasty spirit for months.”
“You don’t follow. Listen. It’s an understood thing, I take it, that
Uncle Tom foots the _Boudoir_ bills. If the bally sheet has been
turning the corner for two years, he must have got used to forking out
by this time. Well, simply ask him for the money to pay the printers.”
“I did. Just before I went to Cannes.”
“Wouldn’t he give it to you?”
“Certainly he gave it to me. He brassed up like an officer and a
gentleman. That was the money I lost at baccarat.”
“Oh? I didn’t know that.”
“There isn’t much you do know.”
A nephew’s love made me overlook the slur.
“Tut!” I said.
“What did you say?”
“I said ‘Tut!’”
“Say it once again, and I’ll biff you where you stand. I’ve enough to
endure without being tutted at.”
“Quite.”
“Any tutting that’s required, I’ll attend to myself. And the same
applies to clicking the tongue, if you were thinking of doing that.”
“Far from it.”
“Good.”
I stood awhile in thought. I was concerned to the core. My heart, if
you remember, had already bled once for Aunt Dahlia this evening. It
now bled again. I knew how deeply attached she was to this paper of
hers. Seeing it go down the drain would be for her like watching a
loved child sink for the third time in some pond or mere.
And there was no question that, unless carefully prepared for the
touch, Uncle Tom would see a hundred _Milady’s Boudoirs_ go phut rather
than take the rap.
Then I saw how the thing could be handled. This aunt, I perceived, must
fall into line with my other clients. Tuppy Glossop was knocking off
dinner to melt Angela. Gussie Fink-Nottle was knocking off dinner to
impress the Bassett. Aunt Dahlia must knock off dinner to soften Uncle
Tom. For the beauty of this scheme of mine was that there was no limit
to the number of entrants. Come one, come all, the more the merrier,
and satisfaction guaranteed in every case.
“I’ve got it,” I said. “There is only one course to pursue. Eat less
meat.”
She looked at me in a pleading sort of way. I wouldn’t swear that
her eyes were wet with unshed tears, but I rather think they were,
certainly she clasped her hands in piteous appeal.
“Must you drivel, Bertie? Won’t you stop it just this once? Just for
tonight, to please Aunt Dahlia?”
“I’m not drivelling.”
“I dare say that to a man of your high standards it doesn’t come under
the head of drivel, but----”
I saw what had happened. I hadn’t made myself quite clear.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Have no misgivings. This is the real
Tabasco. When I said ‘Eat less meat’, what I meant was that you
must refuse your oats at dinner tonight. Just sit there, looking
blistered, and wave away each course as it comes with a weary gesture
of resignation. You see what will happen. Uncle Tom will notice your
loss of appetite, and I am prepared to bet that at the conclusion of
the meal he will come to you and say ‘Dahlia, darling’--I take it he
calls you ‘Dahlia’--‘Dahlia darling,’ he will say, ‘I noticed at dinner
tonight that you were a bit off your feed. Is anything the matter,
Dahlia, darling?’ ‘Why, yes, Tom, darling,’ you will reply. ‘It is kind
of you to ask, darling. The fact is, darling, I am terribly worried.’
‘My darling,’ he will say----”
Aunt Dahlia interrupted at this point to observe that these Traverses
seemed to be a pretty soppy couple of blighters, to judge by their
dialogue. She also wished to know when I was going to get to the point.
I gave her a look.
“‘My darling,’ he will say tenderly, ‘is there anything I can do?’ To
which your reply will be that there jolly well is--viz. reach for his
cheque-book and start writing.”
I was watching her closely as I spoke, and was pleased to note respect
suddenly dawn in her eyes.
“But, Bertie, this is positively bright.”
“I told you Jeeves wasn’t the only fellow with brain.”
“I believe it would work.”
“It’s bound to work. I’ve recommended it to Tuppy.”
“Young Glossop?”
“In order to soften Angela.”
“Splendid!”
“And to Gussie Fink-Nottle, who wants to make a hit with the Bassett.”
“Well, well, well! What a busy little brain it is.”
“Always working, Aunt Dahlia, always working.”
“You’re not the chump I took you for, Bertie.”
“When did you ever take me for a chump?”
“Oh, some time last summer. I forget what gave me the idea. Yes,
Bertie, this scheme is bright. I suppose, as a matter of fact, Jeeves
suggested it.”
“Jeeves did not suggest it. I resent these implications. Jeeves had
nothing to do with it whatsoever.”
“Well, all right, no need to get excited about it. Yes, I think it will
work. Tom’s devoted to me.”
“Who wouldn’t be?”
“I’ll do it.”
And then the rest of the party trickled in, and we toddled down to
dinner.
Conditions being as they were at Brinkley Court--I mean to say, the
place being loaded down above the Plimsoll mark with aching hearts
and standing room only as regarded tortured souls--I hadn’t expected
the evening meal to be particularly effervescent. Nor was it. Silent.
Sombre. The whole thing more than a bit like Christmas dinner on
Devil’s Island.
I was glad when it was over.
What with having, on top of her other troubles, to rein herself back
from the trough, Aunt Dahlia was a total loss as far as anything in the
shape of brilliant badinage was concerned. The fact that he was fifty
quid in the red and expecting Civilisation to take a toss at any moment
had caused Uncle Tom, who always looked a bit like a pterodactyl with a
secret sorrow, to take on a deeper melancholy. The Bassett was a silent
bread crumbler. Angela might have been hewn from the living rock. Tuppy
had the air of a condemned murderer refusing to make the usual hearty
breakfast before tooling off to the execution shed.
And as for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would
have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming him on sight.
This was the first glimpse I had had of Gussie since we parted at
my flat, and I must say his demeanour disappointed me. I had been
expecting something a great deal more sparkling.
At my flat, on the occasion alluded to, he had, if you recall,
practically given me a signed guarantee that all he needed to touch
him off was a rural setting. Yet in this aspect now I could detect no
indication whatsoever that he was about to round into mid-season form.
He still looked like a cat in an adage, and it did not take me long to
realise that my very first act on escaping from this morgue must be to
draw him aside and give him a pep talk.
If ever a chap wanted the clarion note, it looked as if it was this
Fink-Nottle.
In the general exodus of mourners, however, I lost sight of him,
and, owing to the fact that Aunt Dahlia roped me in for a game of
backgammon, it was not immediately that I was able to institute a
search. But after we had been playing for a while, the butler came in
and asked her if she would speak to Anatole, so I managed to get away.
And some ten minutes later, having failed to find scent in the house, I
started to throw out the drag-net through the grounds, and flushed him
in the rose garden.
He was smelling a rose at the moment in a limp sort of way, but removed
the beak as I approached.
“Well, Gussie,” I said.
I had beamed genially upon him as I spoke, such being my customary
policy on meeting an old pal; but instead of beaming back genially, he
gave me a most unpleasant look. His attitude perplexed me. It was as
if he were not glad to see Bertram. For a moment he stood letting this
unpleasant look play upon me, as it were, and then he spoke.
“You and your ‘Well, Gussie’!”
He said this between clenched teeth, always an unmatey thing to do, and
I found myself more fogged than ever.
“How do you mean--me and my ‘Well, Gussie’?”
“I like your nerve, coming bounding about the place, saying ‘Well,
Gussie.’ That’s about all the ‘Well, Gussie’ I shall require from you,
Wooster. And it’s no good looking like that. You know what I mean. That
damned prize-giving! It was a dastardly act to crawl out as you did and
shove it off on to me. I will not mince my words. It was the act of a
hound and a stinker.”
Now, though, as I have shown, I had devoted most of the time on the
journey down to meditating upon the case of Angela and Tuppy, I had
not neglected to give a thought or two to what I was going to say when
I encountered Gussie. I had foreseen that there might be some little
temporary unpleasantness when we met, and when a difficult interview is
in the offing Bertram Wooster likes to have his story ready.
So now I was able to reply with a manly, disarming frankness. The
sudden introduction of the topic had given me a bit of a jolt, it is
true, for in the stress of recent happenings I had rather let that
prize-giving business slide to the back of my mind; but I had speedily
recovered and, as I say, was able to reply with a manly d.f.
“But, my dear chap,” I said, “I took it for granted that you would
understand that that was all part of my schemes.”
He said something about my schemes which I did not catch.
“Absolutely. ‘Crawling out’ is entirely the wrong way to put it. You
don’t suppose I didn’t want to distribute those prizes, do you? Left to
myself, there is nothing I would find a greater treat. But I saw that
the square, generous thing to do was to step aside and let you take it
on, so I did so. I felt that your need was greater than mine. You don’t
mean to say you aren’t looking forward to it?”
He uttered a coarse expression which I wouldn’t have thought he would
have known. It just shows that you can bury yourself in the country and
still somehow acquire a vocabulary. No doubt one picks up things from
the neighbours--the vicar, the local doctor, the man who brings the
milk, and so on.
“But, dash it,” I said, “can’t you see what this is going to do for
you? It will send your stock up with a jump. There you will be, up on
that platform, a romantic, impressive figure, the star of the whole
proceedings, the what-d’you-call-it of all eyes. Madeline Bassett will
be all over you. She will see you in a totally new light.”
“She will, will she?”
“Certainly she will. Augustus Fink-Nottle, the newts’ friend, she
knows. She is acquainted with Augustus Fink-Nottle, the dogs’
chiropodist. But Augustus Fink-Nottle, the orator--that’ll knock her
sideways, or I know nothing of the female heart. Girls go potty over a
public man. If ever anyone did anyone else a kindness, it was I when I
gave this extraordinary attractive assignment to you.”
He seemed impressed by my eloquence. Couldn’t have helped himself, of
course. The fire faded from behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, and in
its place appeared the old fish-like goggle.
“’Myes,” he said meditatively. “Have you ever made a speech, Bertie?”
“Dozens of times. It’s pie. Nothing to it. Why, I once addressed a
girls’ school.”
“You weren’t nervous?”
“Not a bit.”
“How did you go?”
“They hung on my lips. I held them in the hollow of my hand.”
“They didn’t throw eggs, or anything?”
“Not a thing.”
He expelled a deep breath, and for a space stood staring in silence at
a passing slug.
“Well,” he said, at length, “it may be all right. Possibly I am letting
the thing prey on my mind too much. I may be wrong in supposing it
the fate that is worse than death. But I’ll tell you this much: the
prospect of that prize-giving on the thirty-first of this month has
been turning my existence into a nightmare. I haven’t been able to
sleep or think or eat ... By the way, that reminds me. You never
explained that cipher telegram about the sausages and ham.”
“It wasn’t a cipher telegram. I wanted you to go light on the food, so
that she would realize you were in love.”
He laughed hollowly.
“I see. Well, I’ve been doing that, all right.”
“Yes, I was noticing at dinner. Splendid.”
“I don’t see what’s splendid about it. It’s not going to get me
anywhere. I shall never be able to ask her to marry me. I couldn’t find
nerve to do that if I lived on wafer biscuits for the rest of my life.”
“But, dash it, Gussie. In these romantic surroundings. I should have
thought the whispering trees alone----”
“I don’t care what you would have thought. I can’t do it.”
“Oh, come!”
“I can’t. She seems so aloof, so remote.”
“She doesn’t.”
“Yes, she does. Especially when you see her sideways. Have you seen her
sideways, Bertie? That cold, pure profile. It just takes all the heart
out of one.”
“It doesn’t.”
“I tell you it does. I catch sight of it, and the words freeze on my
lips.”
He spoke with a sort of dull despair, and so manifest was his lack
of ginger and the spirit that wins to success that for an instant,
I confess, I felt a bit stymied. It seemed hopeless to go on trying
to steam up such a human jellyfish. Then I saw the way. With that
extraordinary quickness of mine, I realized exactly what must be done
if this Fink-Nottle was to be enabled to push his nose past the judges’
box.
“She must be softened up,” I said.
“Be what?”
“Softened up. Sweetened. Worked on. Preliminary spadework must be put
in. Here, Gussie, is the procedure I propose to adopt: I shall now
return to the house and lug this Bassett out for a stroll. I shall talk
to her of hearts that yearn, intimating that there is one actually
on the premises. I shall pitch it strong, sparing no effort. You,
meanwhile, will lurk on the outskirts, and in about a quarter of an
hour you will come along and carry on from there. By that time, her
emotions having been stirred, you ought to be able to do the rest on
your head. It will be like leaping on to a moving bus.”
I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts
about a fellow named Pig-something--a sculptor he would have been, no
doubt--who made a statue of a girl, and what should happen one morning
but that the bally thing suddenly came to life. A pretty nasty shock
for the chap, of course, but the point I’m working round to is that
there were a couple of lines that went, if I remember correctly:
_She starts. She moves. She seems to feel
The stir of life along her keel._
And what I’m driving at is that you couldn’t get a better description
of what happened to Gussie as I spoke these heartening words. His brow
cleared, his eyes brightened, he lost that fishy look, and he gazed
at the slug, which was still on the long, long trail with something
approaching bonhomie. A marked improvement.
“I see what you mean. You will sort of pave the way, as it were.”
“That’s right. Spadework.”
“It’s a terrific idea, Bertie. It will make all the difference.”
“Quite. But don’t forget that after that it will be up to you. You will
have to haul up your slacks and give her the old oil, or my efforts
will have been in vain.”
Something of his former Gawd-help-us-ness seemed to return to him. He
gasped a bit.
“That’s true. What the dickens shall I say?”
I restrained my impatience with an effort. The man had been at school
with me.
“Dash it, there are hundreds of things you can say. Talk about the
sunset.”
“The sunset?”
“Certainly. Half the married men you meet began by talking about the
sunset.”
“But what can I say about the sunset?”
“Well, Jeeves got off a good one the other day. I met him airing the
dog in the park one evening, and he said, ‘Now fades the glimmering
landscape on the sight, sir, and all the air a solemn stillness holds.’
You might use that.”
“What sort of landscape?”
“Glimmering. _G_ for ‘gastritis,’ _l_ for ‘lizard’----”
“Oh, glimmering? Yes, that’s not bad. Glimmering landscape ... solemn
stillness.... Yes, I call that pretty good.”
“You could then say that you have often thought that the stars are
God’s daisy chain.”
“But I haven’t.”
“I dare say not. But she has. Hand her that one, and I don’t see how
she can help feeling that you’re a twin soul.”
“God’s daisy chain?”
“God’s daisy chain. And then you go on about how twilight always makes
you sad. I know you’re going to say it doesn’t, but on this occasion it
has jolly well got to.”
“Why?”
“That’s just what she will ask, and you will then have got her going.
Because you will reply that it is because yours is such a lonely life.
It wouldn’t be a bad idea to give her a brief description of a typical
home evening at your Lincolnshire residence, showing how you pace the
meadows with a heavy tread.”
“I generally sit indoors and listen to the wireless.”
“No, you don’t. You pace the meadows with a heavy tread, wishing that
you had someone to love you. And then you speak of the day when she
came into your life.”
“Like a fairy princess.”
“Absolutely,” I said with approval. I hadn’t expected such a hot one
from such a quarter. “Like a fairy princess. Nice work, Gussie.”
“And then?”
“Well, after that it’s easy. You say you have something you want to say
to her, and then you snap into it. I don’t see how it can fail. If I
were you, I should do it in this rose garden. It is well established
that there is no sounder move than to steer the adored object into rose
gardens in the gloaming. And you had better have a couple of quick ones
first.”
“Quick ones?”
“Snifters.”
“Drinks, do you mean? But I don’t drink.”
“What?”
“I’ve never touched a drop in my life.”
This made me a bit dubious, I must confess. On these occasions it is
generally conceded that a moderate skinful is of the essence.
However, if the facts were as he had stated, I supposed there was
nothing to be done about it.
“Well, you’ll have to make out as best you can on ginger pop.”
“I always drink orange juice.”
“Orange juice, then. Tell me, Gussie, to settle a bet, do you really
like that muck?”
“Very much.”
“Then there is no more to be said. Now, let’s just have a run through,
to see that you’ve got the lay-out straight. Start off with the
glimmering landscape.”
“Stars God’s daisy chain.”
“Twilight makes you feel sad.”
“Because mine lonely life.”
“Describe life.”
“Talk about the day I met her.”
“Add fairy-princess gag. Say there’s something you want to say to her.
Heave a couple of sighs. Grab her hand. And give her the works. Right.”
And confident that he had grasped the scenario and that everything
might now be expected to proceed through the proper channels, I picked
up the feet and hastened back to the house.
It was not until I had reached the drawing-room and was enabled to
take a square look at the Bassett that I found the debonair gaiety
with which I had embarked on this affair beginning to wane a trifle.
Beholding her at close range like this, I suddenly became cognisant of
what I was in for. The thought of strolling with this rummy specimen
undeniably gave me a most unpleasant sinking feeling. I could not
but remember how often, when in her company at Cannes, I had gazed
dumbly at her, wishing that some kindly motorist in a racing car would
ease the situation by coming along and ramming her amidships. As I
have already made abundantly clear, this girl was not one of my most
congenial buddies.
However, a Wooster’s word is his bond. Woosters may quail, but they do
not edge out. Only the keenest ear could have detected the tremor in
the voice as I asked her if she would care to come out for half an hour.
“Lovely evening,” I said.
“Yes, lovely, isn’t it?”
“Lovely. Reminds me of Cannes.”
“How lovely the evenings were there!”
“Lovely,” I said.
“Lovely,” said the Bassett.
“Lovely,” I agreed.
That completed the weather and news bulletin for the French Riviera.
Another minute, and we were out in the great open spaces, she cooing
a bit about the scenery, and self replying, “Oh, rather, quite,” and
wondering how best to approach the matter in hand.
-10-
How different it all would have been, I could not but reflect, if
this girl had been the sort of girl one chirrups cheerily to over the
telephone and takes for spins in the old two-seater. In that case, I
would simply have said, “Listen,” and she would have said, “What?” and
I would have said, “You know Gussie Fink-Nottle,” and she would have
said, “Yes,” and I would have said, “He loves you,” and she would have
said either, “What, that mutt? Well, thank heaven for one good laugh
today,” or else, in more passionate vein, “Hot dog! Tell me more.”
I mean to say, in either event the whole thing over and done with in
under a minute.
But with the Bassett something less snappy and a good deal more
glutinous was obviously indicated. What with all this daylight-saving
stuff, we had hit the great open spaces at a moment when twilight had
not yet begun to cheese it in favour of the shades of night. There was
a fag-end of sunset still functioning. Stars were beginning to peep
out, bats were fooling round, the garden was full of the aroma of those
niffy white flowers which only start to put in their heavy work at the
end of the day--in short, the glimmering landscape was fading on the
sight and all the air held a solemn stillness, and it was plain that
this was having the worst effect on her. Her eyes were enlarged, and
her whole map a good deal too suggestive of the soul’s awakening for
comfort.
Her aspect was that of a girl who was expecting something fairly fruity
from Bertram.
In these circs., conversation inevitably flagged a bit. I am never
at my best when the situation seems to call for a certain soupiness,
and I’ve heard other members of the Drones say the same thing about
themselves. I remember Pongo Twistleton telling me that he was out in a
gondola with a girl by moonlight once, and the only time he spoke was
to tell her that old story about the chap who was so good at swimming
that they made him a traffic cop in Venice.
Fell rather flat, he assured me, and it wasn’t much later when the girl
said she thought it was getting a little chilly and how about pushing
back to the hotel.
So now, as I say, the talk rather hung fire. It had been all very well
for me to promise Gussie that I would cut loose to this girl about
aching hearts, but you want a cue for that sort of thing. And when,
toddling along, we reached the edge of the lake and she finally spoke,
conceive my chagrin when I discovered that what she was talking about
was stars.
Not a bit of good to me.
“Oh, look,” she said. She was a confirmed Oh-looker. I had noticed this
at Cannes, where she had drawn my attention in this manner on various
occasions to such diverse objects as a French actress, a Provençal
filling station, the sunset over the Estorels, Michael Arlen, a man
selling coloured spectacles, the deep velvet blue of the Mediterranean,
and the late mayor of New York in a striped one-piece bathing suit.
“Oh, look at that sweet little star up there all by itself.”
I saw the one she meant, a little chap operating in a detached sort of
way above a spinney.
“Yes,” I said.
“I wonder if it feels lonely.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t think so.”
“A fairy must have been crying.”
“Eh?”
“Don’t you remember? ‘Every time a fairy sheds a tear, a wee bit star
is born in the Milky Way.’ Have you ever thought that, Mr. Wooster?”
I never had. Most improbable, I considered, and it didn’t seem to me to
check up with her statement that the stars were God’s daisy chain. I
mean, you can’t have it both ways.
However, I was in no mood to dissect and criticize. I saw that I had
been wrong in supposing that the stars were not germane to the issue.
Quite a decent cue they had provided, and I leaped on it Promptly:
“Talking of shedding tears----”
But she was now on the subject of rabbits, several of which were
messing about in the park to our right.
“Oh, look. The little bunnies!”
“Talking of shedding tears----”
“Don’t you love this time of the evening, Mr. Wooster, when the sun has
gone to bed and all the bunnies come out to have their little suppers?
When I was a child, I used to think that rabbits were gnomes, and that
if I held my breath and stayed quite still, I should see the fairy
queen.”
Indicating with a reserved gesture that this was just the sort of loony
thing I should have expected her to think as a child, I returned to the
point.
“Talking of shedding tears,” I said firmly, “it may interest you to
know that there is an aching heart in Brinkley Court.”
This held her. She cheesed the rabbit theme. Her face, which had
been aglow with what I supposed was a pretty animation, clouded. She
unshipped a sigh that sounded like the wind going out of a rubber duck.
“Ah, yes. Life is very sad, isn’t it?”
“It is for some people. This aching heart, for instance.”
“Those wistful eyes of hers! Drenched irises. And they used to dance
like elves of delight. And all through a foolish misunderstanding about
a shark. What a tragedy misunderstandings are. That pretty romance
broken and over just because Mr. Glossop would insist that it was a
flatfish.”
I saw that she had got the wires crossed.
“I’m not talking about Angela.”
“But her heart is aching.”
“I know it’s aching. But so is somebody else’s.”
She looked at me, perplexed.
“Somebody else? Mr. Glossop’s, you mean?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Mrs. Travers’s?”
The exquisite code of politeness of the Woosters prevented me clipping
her one on the ear-hole, but I would have given a shilling to be able
to do it. There seemed to me something deliberately fat-headed in the
way she persisted in missing the gist.
“No, not Aunt Dahlia’s, either.”
“I’m sure she is dreadfully upset.”
“Quite. But this heart I’m talking about isn’t aching because of
Tuppy’s row with Angela. It’s aching for a different reason altogether.
I mean to say--dash it, you know why hearts ache!”
She seemed to shimmy a bit. Her voice, when she spoke, was whispery:
“You mean--for love?”
“Absolutely. Right on the bull’s-eye. For love.”
“Oh, Mr. Wooster!”
“I take it you believe in love at first sight?”
“I do, indeed.”
“Well, that’s what happened to this aching heart. It fell in love at
first sight, and ever since it’s been eating itself out, as I believe
the expression is.”
There was a silence. She had turned away and was watching a duck out
on the lake. It was tucking into weeds, a thing I’ve never been able
to understand anyone wanting to do. Though I suppose, if you face it
squarely, they’re no worse than spinach. She stood drinking it in for a
bit, and then it suddenly stood on its head and disappeared, and this
seemed to break the spell.
“Oh, Mr. Wooster!” she said again, and from the tone of her voice, I
could see that I had got her going.
“For you, I mean to say,” I proceeded, starting to put in the fancy
touches. I dare say you have noticed on these occasions that the
difficulty is to plant the main idea, to get the general outline of the
thing well fixed. The rest is mere detail work. I don’t say I became
glib at this juncture, but I certainly became a dashed glibber than I
had been.
“It’s having the dickens of a time. Can’t eat, can’t sleep--all for
love of you. And what makes it all so particularly rotten is that
it--this aching heart--can’t bring itself up to the scratch and tell
you the position of affairs, because your profile has gone and given
it cold feet. Just as it is about to speak, it catches sight of you
sideways, and words fail it. Silly, of course, but there it is.”
I heard her give a gulp, and I saw that her eyes had become moistish.
Drenched irises, if you care to put it that way.
“Lend you a handkerchief?”
“No, thank you. I’m quite all right.”
It was more than I could say for myself. My efforts had left me weak.
I don’t know if you suffer in the same way, but with me the act of
talking anything in the nature of real mashed potatoes always induces a
sort of prickly sensation and a hideous feeling of shame, together with
a marked starting of the pores.
I remember at my Aunt Agatha’s place in Hertfordshire once being put on
the spot and forced to enact the role of King Edward III saying goodbye
to that girl of his, Fair Rosamund, at some sort of pageant in aid of
the Distressed Daughters of the Clergy. It involved some rather warmish
medieval dialogue, I recall, racy of the days when they called a spade
a spade, and by the time the whistle blew, I’ll bet no Daughter of the
Clergy was half as distressed as I was. Not a dry stitch.
My reaction now was very similar. It was a highly liquid Bertram who,
hearing his _vis-à-vis_ give a couple of hiccups and start to speak
bent an attentive ear.
“Please don’t say any more, Mr. Wooster.”
Well, I wasn’t going to, of course.
“I understand.”
I was glad to hear this.
“Yes, I understand. I won’t be so silly as to pretend not to know what
you mean. I suspected this at Cannes, when you used to stand and stare
at me without speaking a word, but with whole volumes in your eyes.”
If Angela’s shark had bitten me in the leg, I couldn’t have leaped
more convulsively. So tensely had I been concentrating on Gussie’s
interests that it hadn’t so much as crossed my mind that another and an
unfortunate construction could be placed on those words of mine. The
persp., already bedewing my brow, became a regular Niagara.
My whole fate hung upon a woman’s word. I mean to say, I couldn’t
back out. If a girl thinks a man is proposing to her, and on that
understanding books him up, he can’t explain to her that she has got
hold of entirely the wrong end of the stick and that he hadn’t the
smallest intention of suggesting anything of the kind. He must simply
let it ride. And the thought of being engaged to a girl who talked
openly about fairies being born because stars blew their noses, or
whatever it was, frankly appalled me.
She was carrying on with her remarks, and as I listened I clenched my
fists till I shouldn’t wonder if the knuckles didn’t stand out white
under the strain. It seemed as if she would never get to the nub.
“Yes, all through those days at Cannes I could see what you were trying
to say. A girl always knows. And then you followed me down here, and
there was that same dumb, yearning look in your eyes when we met this
evening. And then you were so insistent that I should come out and walk
with you in the twilight. And now you stammer out those halting words.
No, this does not come as a surprise. But I am sorry----”
The word was like one of Jeeves’s pick-me-ups. Just as if a glassful of
meat sauce, red pepper, and the yolk of an egg--though, as I say, I am
convinced that these are not the sole ingredients--had been shot into
me, I expanded like some lovely flower blossoming in the sunshine. It
was all right, after all. My guardian angel had not been asleep at the
switch.
“--but I am afraid it is impossible.”
She paused.
“Impossible,” she repeated.
I had been so busy feeling saved from the scaffold that I didn’t get on
to it for a moment that an early reply was desired.
“Oh, right ho,” I said hastily.
“I’m sorry.”
“Quite all right.”
“Sorrier than I can say.”
“Don’t give it another thought.”
“We can still be friends.”
“Oh, rather.”
“Then shall we just say no more about it; keep what has happened as a
tender little secret between ourselves?”
“Absolutely.”
“We will. Like something lovely and fragrant laid away in lavender.”
“In lavender--right.”
There was a longish pause. She was gazing at me in a divinely
pitying sort of way, much as if I had been a snail she had happened
accidentally to bring her short French vamp down on, and I longed to
tell her that it was all right, and that Bertram, so far from being the
victim of despair, had never felt fizzier in his life. But, of course,
one can’t do that sort of thing. I simply said nothing, and stood there
looking brave.
“I wish I could,” she murmured.
“Could?” I said, for my attensh had been wandering.
“Feel towards you as you would like me to feel.”
“Oh, ah.”
“But I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“Absolutely O.K. Faults on both sides, no doubt.”
“Because I am fond of you, Mr.--no, I think I must call you Bertie. May
I?”
“Oh, rather.”
“Because we are real friends.”
“Quite.”
“I do like you, Bertie. And if things were different--I wonder----”
“Eh?”
“After all, we are real friends.... We have this common memory.... You
have a right to know.... I don’t want you to think----Life is such a
muddle, isn’t it?”
To many men, no doubt, these broken utterances would have appeared
mere drooling and would have been dismissed as such. But the Woosters
are quicker-witted than the ordinary and can read between the lines. I
suddenly divined what it was that she was trying to get off the chest.
“You mean there’s someone else?”
She nodded.
“You’re in love with some other bloke?”
She nodded.
“Engaged, what?”
This time she shook the pumpkin.
“No, not engaged.”
Well, that was something, of course. Nevertheless, from the way she
spoke, it certainly looked as if poor old Gussie might as well scratch
his name off the entry list, and I didn’t at all like the prospect of
having to break the bad news to him. I had studied the man closely, and
it was my conviction that this would about be his finish.
Gussie, you see, wasn’t like some of my pals--the name of Bingo Little
is one that springs to the lips--who, if turned down by a girl, would
simply say, “Well, bung-oh!” and toddle off quite happily to find
another. He was so manifestly a bird who, having failed to score in the
first chukker, would turn the thing up and spend the rest of his life
brooding over his newts and growing long grey whiskers, like one of
those chaps you read about in novels, who live in the great white house
you can just see over there through the trees and shut themselves off
from the world and have pained faces.
“I’m afraid he doesn’t care for me in that way. At least, he has said
nothing. You understand that I am only telling you this because----”
“Oh, rather.”
“It’s odd that you should have asked me if I believed in love at first
sight.” She half closed her eyes. “‘Who ever loved that loved not at
first sight?’” she said in a rummy voice that brought back to me--I
don’t know why--the picture of my Aunt Agatha, as Boadicea, reciting
at that pageant I was speaking of. “It’s a silly little story. I was
staying with some friends in the country, and I had gone for a walk
with my dog, and the poor wee mite got a nasty thorn in his little foot
and I didn’t know what to do. And then suddenly this man came along----”
Harking back once again to that pageant, in sketching out for you my
emotions on that occasion, I showed you only the darker side of the
picture. There was, I should now mention, a splendid aftermath when,
having climbed out of my suit of chain mail and sneaked off to the
local pub, I entered the saloon bar and requested mine host to start
pouring. A moment later, a tankard of their special home-brewed was
in my hand, and the ecstasy of that first gollup is still green in my
memory. The recollection of the agony through which I had passed was
just what was needed to make it perfect.
It was the same now. When I realized, listening to her words, that she
must be referring to Gussie--I mean to say, there couldn’t have been a
whole platoon of men taking thorns out of her dog that day; the animal
wasn’t a pin-cushion--and became aware that Gussie, who an instant
before had, to all appearances, gone so far back in the betting as
not to be worth a quotation, was the big winner after all, a positive
thrill permeated the frame and there escaped my lips a “Wow!” so crisp
and hearty that the Bassett leaped a liberal inch and a half from terra
firma.
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
I waved a jaunty hand.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. Just remembered there’s a letter I have to
write tonight without fail. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll be going
in. Here,” I said, “comes Gussie Fink-Nottle. He will look after you.”
And, as I spoke, Gussie came sidling out from behind a tree.
I passed away and left them to it. As regards these two, everything
was beyond a question absolutely in order. All Gussie had to do was
keep his head down and not press. Already, I felt, as I legged it back
to the house, the happy ending must have begun to function. I mean to
say, when you leave a girl and a man, each of whom has admitted in set
terms that she and he loves him and her, in close juxtaposition in the
twilight, there doesn’t seem much more to do but start pricing fish
slices.
Something attempted, something done, seemed to me to have earned
two-penn’orth of wassail in the smoking-room.
I proceeded thither.
-11-
The makings were neatly laid out on a side-table, and to pour into a
glass an inch or so of the raw spirit and shoosh some soda-water on
top of it was with me the work of a moment. This done, I retired to
an arm-chair and put my feet up, sipping the mixture with carefree
enjoyment, rather like Caesar having one in his tent the day he
overcame the Nervii.
As I let the mind dwell on what must even now be taking place in that
peaceful garden, I felt bucked and uplifted. Though never for an
instant faltering in my opinion that Augustus Fink-Nottle was Nature’s
final word in cloth-headed guffins, I liked the man, wished him well,
and could not have felt more deeply involved in the success of his
wooing if I, and not he, had been under the ether.
The thought that by this time he might quite easily have completed the
preliminary _pourparlers_ and be deep in an informal discussion of
honeymoon plans was very pleasant to me.
Of course, considering the sort of girl Madeline Bassett was--stars and
rabbits and all that, I mean--you might say that a sober sadness would
have been more fitting. But in these matters you have got to realize
that tastes differ. The impulse of right-thinking men might be to run a
mile when they saw the Bassett, but for some reason she appealed to the
deeps in Gussie, so that was that.
I had reached this point in my meditations, when I was aroused by the
sound of the door opening. Somebody came in and started moving like a
leopard toward the side-table and, lowering the feet, I perceived that
it was Tuppy Glossop.
The sight of him gave me a momentary twinge of remorse, reminding me,
as it did, that in the excitement of getting Gussie fixed up I had
rather forgotten about this other client. It is often that way when
you’re trying to run two cases at once.
However, Gussie now being off my mind, I was prepared to devote my
whole attention to the Glossop problem.
I had been much pleased by the way he had carried out the task assigned
him at the dinner-table. No easy one, I can assure you, for the
browsing and sluicing had been of the highest quality, and there had
been one dish in particular--I allude to the _nonnettes de poulet Agnès
Sorel_--which might well have broken down the most iron resolution. But
he had passed it up like a professional fasting man, and I was proud of
him.
“Oh, hullo, Tuppy,” I said, “I wanted to see you.”
He turned, snifter in hand, and it was easy to see that his privations
had tried him sorely. He was looking like a wolf on the steppes of
Russia which has seen its peasant shin up a high tree.
“Yes?” he said, rather unpleasantly. “Well, here I am.”
“Well?”
“How do you mean----well?”
“Make your report.”
“What report?”
“Have you nothing to tell me about Angela?”
“Only that she’s a blister.”
I was concerned.
“Hasn’t she come clustering round you yet?”
“She has not.”
“Very odd.”
“Why odd?”
“She must have noted your lack of appetite.”
He barked raspingly, as if he were having trouble with the tonsils of
the soul.
“Lack of appetite! I’m as hollow as the Grand Canyon.”
“Courage, Tuppy! Think of Gandhi.”
“What about Gandhi?”
“He hasn’t had a square meal for years.”
“Nor have I. Or I could swear I hadn’t. Gandhi, my left foot.”
I saw that it might be best to let the Gandhi _motif_ slide. I went
back to where we had started.
“She’s probably looking for you now.”
“Who is? Angela?”
“Yes. She must have noticed your supreme sacrifice.”
“I don’t suppose she noticed it at all, the little fathead. I’ll bet it
didn’t register in any way whatsoever.”
“Come, Tuppy,” I urged, “this is morbid. Don’t take this gloomy view.
She must at least have spotted that you refused those _nonnettes de
poulet Agnès Sorel_. It was a sensational renunciation and stuck out
like a sore thumb. And the _cèpes à la Rossini_----”
A hoarse cry broke from his twisted lips:
“Will you stop it, Bertie! Do you think I am made of marble? Isn’t it
bad enough to have sat watching one of Anatole’s supremest dinners flit
by, course after course, without having you making a song about it?
Don’t remind me of those _nonnettes_. I can’t stand it.”
I endeavoured to hearten and console.
“Be brave, Tuppy. Fix your thoughts on that cold steak-and-kidney pie
in the larder. As the Good Book says, it cometh in the morning.”
“Yes, in the morning. And it’s now about half-past nine at night. You
would bring that pie up, wouldn’t you? Just when I was trying to keep
my mind off it.”
I saw what he meant. Hours must pass before he could dig into that pie.
I dropped the subject, and we sat for a pretty good time in silence.
Then he rose and began to pace the room in an overwrought sort of way,
like a zoo lion who has heard the dinner-gong go and is hoping the
keeper won’t forget him in the general distribution. I averted my gaze
tactfully, but I could hear him kicking chairs and things. It was plain
that the man’s soul was in travail and his blood pressure high.
Presently he returned to his seat, and I saw that he was looking at me
intently. There was that about his demeanour that led me to think that
he had something to communicate.
Nor was I wrong. He tapped me significantly on the knee and spoke:
“Bertie.”
“Hullo?”
“Shall I tell you something?”
“Certainly, old bird,” I said cordially. “I was just beginning to feel
that the scene could do with a bit more dialogue.”
“This business of Angela and me.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been putting in a lot of solid thinking about it.”
“Oh, yes?”
“I have analysed the situation pitilessly, and one thing stands out as
clear as dammit. There has been dirty work afoot.”
“I don’t get you.”
“All right. Let me review the facts. Up to the time she went to Cannes
Angela loved me. She was all over me. I was the blue-eyed boy in every
sense of the term. You’ll admit that?”
“Indisputably.”
“And directly she came back we had this bust-up.”
“Quite.”
“About nothing.”
“Oh, dash it, old man, nothing? You were a bit tactless, what, about
her shark.”
“I was frank and candid about her shark. And that’s my point. Do you
seriously believe that a trifling disagreement about sharks would make
a girl hand a man his hat, if her heart were really his?”
“Certainly.”
It beats me why he couldn’t see it. But then poor old Tuppy has never
been very hot on the finer shades. He’s one of those large, tough,
football-playing blokes who lack the more delicate sensibilities, as
I’ve heard Jeeves call them. Excellent at blocking a punt or walking
across an opponent’s face in cleated boots, but not so good when it
comes to understanding the highly-strung female temperament. It simply
wouldn’t occur to him that a girl might be prepared to give up her
life’s happiness rather than waive her shark.
“Rot! It was just a pretext.”
“What was?”
“This shark business. She wanted to get rid of me, and grabbed at the
first excuse.”
“No, no.”
“I tell you she did.”
“But what on earth would she want to get rid of you for?”
“Exactly. That’s the very question I asked myself. And here’s the
answer: Because she has fallen in love with somebody else. It sticks
out a mile. There’s no other possible solution. She goes to Cannes all
for me, she comes back all off me. Obviously during those two months,
she must have transferred her affections to some foul blister she met
out there.”
“No, no.”
“Don’t keep saying ‘No, no’. She must have done. Well, I’ll tell
you one thing, and you can take this as official. If ever I find
this slimy, slithery snake in the grass, he had better make all the
necessary arrangements at his favourite nursing-home without delay,
because I am going to be very rough with him. I propose, if and when
found, to take him by his beastly neck, shake him till he froths, and
pull him inside out and make him swallow himself.”
With which words he biffed off; and I, having given him a minute or two
to get out of the way, rose and made for the drawing-room. The tendency
of females to roost in drawing-rooms after dinner being well marked, I
expected to find Angela there. It was my intention to have a word with
Angela.
To Tuppy’s theory that some insinuating bird had stolen the girl’s
heart from him at Cannes I had given, as I have indicated, little
credence, considering it the mere unbalanced apple sauce of a bereaved
man. It was, of course, the shark, and nothing but the shark, that had
caused love’s young dream to go temporarily off the boil, and I was
convinced that a word or two with the cousin at this juncture would set
everything right.
For, frankly, I thought it incredible that a girl of her natural
sweetness and tender-heartedness should not have been moved to her
foundations by what she had seen at dinner that night. Even Seppings,
Aunt Dahlia’s butler, a cold, unemotional man, had gasped and
practically reeled when Tuppy waved aside those _nonnettes de poulet
Agnès Sorel_, while the footman, standing by with the potatoes, had
stared like one seeing a vision. I simply refused to consider the
possibility of the significance of the thing having been lost on a nice
girl like Angela. I fully expected to find her in the drawing-room with
her heart bleeding freely, all ripe for an immediate reconciliation.
In the drawing-room, however, when I entered, only Aunt Dahlia met the
eye. It seemed to me that she gave me rather a jaundiced look as I hove
in sight, but this, having so recently beheld Tuppy in his agony, I
attributed to the fact that she, like him, had been going light on the
menu. You can’t expect an empty aunt to beam like a full aunt.
“Oh, it’s you, is it?” she said.
Well, it was, of course.
“Where’s Angela?” I asked.
“Gone to bed.”
“Already?”
“She said she had a headache.”
“H’m.”
I wasn’t so sure that I liked the sound of that so much. A girl who
has observed the sundered lover sensationally off his feed does not
go to bed with headaches if love has been reborn in her heart. She
sticks around and gives him the swift, remorseful glance from beneath
the drooping eyelashes and generally endeavours to convey to him that,
if he wants to get together across a round table and try to find a
formula, she is all for it too. Yes, I am bound to say I found that
going-to-bed stuff a bit disquieting.
“Gone to bed, eh?” I murmured musingly.
“What did you want her for?”
“I thought she might like a stroll and a chat.”
“Are you going for a stroll?” said Aunt Dahlia, with a sudden show of
interest. “Where?”
“Oh, hither and thither.”
“Then I wonder if you would mind doing something for me.”
“Give it a name.”
“It won’t take you long. You know that path that runs past the
greenhouses into the kitchen garden. If you go along it, you come to a
pond.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, will you get a good, stout piece of rope or cord and go down
that path till you come to the pond----”
“To the pond. Right.”
“--and look about you till you find a nice, heavy stone. Or a fairly
large brick would do.”
“I see,” I said, though I didn’t, being still fogged. “Stone or brick.
Yes. And then?”
“Then,” said the relative, “I want you, like a good boy, to fasten the
rope to the brick and tie it around your damned neck and jump into the
pond and drown yourself. In a few days I will send and have you fished
up and buried because I shall need to dance on your grave.”
I was more fogged than ever. And not only fogged--wounded and
resentful. I remember reading a book where a girl “suddenly fled from
the room, afraid to stay for fear dreadful things would come tumbling
from her lips; determined that she would not remain another day in this
house to be insulted and misunderstood.” I felt much about the same.
Then I reminded myself that one has got to make allowances for a woman
with only about half a spoonful of soup inside her, and I checked the
red-hot crack that rose to the lips.
“What,” I said gently, “is this all about? You seem pipped with
Bertram.”
“Pipped!”
“Noticeably pipped. Why this ill-concealed animus?”
A sudden flame shot from her eyes, singeing my hair.
“Who was the ass, who was the chump, who was the dithering idiot who
talked me, against my better judgment, into going without my dinner? I
might have guessed----”
I saw that I had divined correctly the cause of her strange mood.
“It’s all right, Aunt Dahlia. I know just how you’re feeling. A bit
on the hollow side, what? But the agony will pass. If I were you, I’d
sneak down and raid the larder after the household have gone to bed.
I am told there’s a pretty good steak-and-kidney pie there which will
repay inspection. Have faith, Aunt Dahlia,” I urged. “Pretty soon Uncle
Tom will be along, full of sympathy and anxious inquiries.”
“Will he? Do you know where he is now?”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“He is in the study with his face buried in his hands, muttering about
civilization and melting pots.”
“Eh? Why?”
“Because it has just been my painful duty to inform him that Anatole
has given notice.”
I own that I reeled.
“What?”
“Given notice. As the result of that drivelling scheme of yours. What
did you expect a sensitive, temperamental French cook to do, if you
went about urging everybody to refuse all food? I hear that when the
first two courses came back to the kitchen practically untouched, his
feelings were so hurt that he cried like a child. And when the rest of
the dinner followed, he came to the conclusion that the whole thing was
a studied and calculated insult, and decided to hand in his portfolio.”
“Golly!”
“You may well say ‘Golly!’ Anatole, God’s gift to the gastric juices,
gone like the dew off the petal of a rose, all through your idiocy.
Perhaps you understand now why I want you to go and jump in that pond.
I might have known that some hideous disaster would strike this house
like a thunderbolt if once you wriggled your way into it and started
trying to be clever.”
Harsh words, of course, as from aunt to nephew, but I bore her no
resentment. No doubt, if you looked at it from a certain angle, Bertram
might be considered to have made something of a floater.
“I am sorry.”
“What’s the good of being sorry?”
“I acted for what I deemed the best.”
“Another time try acting for the worst. Then we may possibly escape
with a mere flesh wound.”
“Uncle Tom’s not feeling too bucked about it all, you say?”
“He’s groaning like a lost soul. And any chance I ever had of getting
that money out of him has gone.”
I stroked the chin thoughtfully. There was, I had to admit, reason in
what she said. None knew better than I how terrible a blow the passing
of Anatole would be to Uncle Tom.
I have stated earlier in this chronicle that this curious object of
the seashore with whom Aunt Dahlia has linked her lot is a bloke who
habitually looks like a pterodactyl that has suffered, and the reason
he does so is that all those years he spent in making millions in the
Far East put his digestion on the blink, and the only cook that has
ever been discovered capable of pushing food into him without starting
something like Old Home Week in Moscow under the third waistcoat button
is this uniquely gifted Anatole. Deprived of Anatole’s services,
all he was likely to give the wife of his b. was a dirty look. Yes,
unquestionably, things seemed to have struck a somewhat rocky patch,
and I must admit that I found myself, at moment of going to press, a
little destitute of constructive ideas.
Confident, however, that these would come ere long, I kept the stiff
upper lip.
“Bad,” I conceded. “Quite bad, beyond a doubt. Certainly a nasty jar
for one and all. But have no fear, Aunt Dahlia, I will fix everything.”
I have alluded earlier to the difficulty of staggering when you’re
sitting down, showing that it is a feat of which I, personally, am not
capable. Aunt Dahlia, to my amazement, now did it apparently without an
effort. She was well wedged into a deep arm-chair, but, nevertheless,
she staggered like billy-o. A sort of spasm of horror and apprehension
contorted her face.
“If you dare to try any more of your lunatic schemes----”
I saw that it would be fruitless to try to reason with her. Quite
plainly, she was not in the vein. Contenting myself, accordingly, with
a gesture of loving sympathy, I left the room. Whether she did or
did not throw a handsomely bound volume of the Works of Alfred, Lord
Tennyson, at me, I am not in a position to say. I had seen it lying on
the table beside her, and as I closed the door I remember receiving the
impression that some blunt instrument had crashed against the woodwork,
but I was feeling too pre-occupied to note and observe.
I blame myself for not having taken into consideration the possible
effects of a sudden abstinence on the part of virtually the whole
strength of the company on one of Anatole’s impulsive Provençal
temperament. These Gauls, I should have remembered, can’t take it.
Their tendency to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation
is well known. No doubt the man had put his whole soul into those
_nonnettes de poulet_, and to see them come homing back to him must
have gashed him like a knife.
However, spilt milk blows nobody any good, and it is useless to dwell
upon it. The task now confronting Bertram was to put matters right, and
I was pacing the lawn, pondering to this end, when I suddenly heard a
groan so lost-soulish that I thought it must have proceeded from Uncle
Tom, escaped from captivity and come to groan in the garden.
Looking about me, however, I could discern no uncles. Puzzled, I was
about to resume my meditations, when the sound came again. And peering
into the shadows I observed a dim form seated on one of the rustic
benches which so liberally dotted this pleasance and another dim form
standing beside same. A second and more penetrating glance and I had
assembled the facts.
These dim forms were, in the order named, Gussie Fink-Nottle and
Jeeves. And what Gussie was doing, groaning all over the place like
this, was more than I could understand.
Because, I mean to say, there was no possibility of error. He wasn’t
singing. As I approached, he gave an encore, and it was beyond question
a groan. Moreover, I could now see him clearly, and his whole aspect
was definitely sand-bagged.
“Good evening, sir,” said Jeeves. “Mr. Fink-Nottle is not feeling well.”
Nor was I. Gussie had begun to make a low, bubbling noise, and I
could no longer disguise it from myself that something must have gone
seriously wrong with the works. I mean, I know marriage is a pretty
solemn business and the realization that he is in for it frequently
churns a chap up a bit, but I had never come across a case of a
newly-engaged man taking it on the chin so completely as this.
Gussie looked up. His eye was dull. He clutched the thatch.
“Goodbye, Bertie,” he said, rising.
I seemed to spot an error.
“You mean ‘Hullo,’ don’t you?”
“No, I don’t. I mean goodbye. I’m off.”
“Off where?”
“To the kitchen garden. To drown myself.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“I’m not an ass.... Am I an ass, Jeeves?”
“Possibly a little injudicious, sir.”
“Drowning myself, you mean?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You think, on the whole, not drown myself?”
“I should not advocate it, sir.”
“Very well, Jeeves. I accept your ruling. After all, it would be
unpleasant for Mrs. Travers to find a swollen body floating in her
pond.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And she has been very kind to me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you have been very kind to me, Jeeves.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“So have you, Bertie. Very kind. Everybody has been very kind to me.
Very, very kind. Very kind indeed. I have no complaints to make. All
right, I’ll go for a walk instead.”
I followed him with bulging eyes as he tottered off into the dark.
“Jeeves,” I said, and I am free to admit that in my emotion I bleated
like a lamb drawing itself to the attention of the parent sheep, “what
the dickens is all this?”
“Mr. Fink-Nottle is not quite himself, sir. He has passed through a
trying experience.”
I endeavoured to put together a brief synopsis of previous events.
“I left him out here with Miss Bassett.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I had softened her up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He knew exactly what he had to do. I had coached him thoroughly in
lines and business.”
“Yes, sir. So Mr. Fink-Nottle informed me.”
“Well, then----”
“I regret to say, sir, that there was a slight hitch.”
“You mean, something went wrong?”
“Yes, sir.”
I could not fathom. The brain seemed to be tottering on its throne.
“But how could anything go wrong? She loves him, Jeeves.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“She definitely told me so. All he had to do was propose.”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, didn’t he?”
“No, sir.”
“Then what the dickens did he talk about?”
“Newts, sir.”
“Newts?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Newts?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But why did he want to talk about newts?”
“He did not want to talk about newts, sir. As I gather from Mr.
Fink-Nottle, nothing could have been more alien to his plans.”
I simply couldn’t grasp the trend.
“But you can’t force a man to talk about newts.”
“Mr. Fink-Nottle was the victim of a sudden unfortunate spasm of
nervousness, sir. Upon finding himself alone with the young lady, he
admits to having lost his morale. In such circumstances, gentlemen
frequently talk at random, saying the first thing that chances to enter
their heads. This, in Mr. Fink-Nottle’s case, would seem to have been
the newt, its treatment in sickness and in health.”
The scales fell from my eyes. I understood. I had had the same sort
of thing happen to me in moments of crisis. I remember once detaining
a dentist with the drill at one of my lower bicuspids and holding him
up for nearly ten minutes with a story about a Scotchman, an Irishman,
and a Jew. Purely automatic. The more he tried to jab, the more I said
“Hoots, mon,” “Begorrah,” and “Oy, oy”. When one loses one’s nerve, one
simply babbles.
I could put myself in Gussie’s place. I could envisage the scene. There
he and the Bassett were, alone together in the evening stillness. No
doubt, as I had advised, he had shot the works about sunsets and fairy
princesses, and so forth, and then had arrived at the point where he
had to say that bit about having something to say to her. At this, I
take it, she lowered her eyes and said, “Oh, yes?”
He then, I should imagine, said it was something very important; to
which her response would, one assumes, have been something on the lines
of “Really?” or “Indeed?” or possibly just the sharp intake of the
breath. And then their eyes met, just as mine met the dentist’s, and
something suddenly seemed to catch him in the pit of the stomach and
everything went black and he heard his voice starting to drool about
newts. Yes, I could follow the psychology.
Nevertheless, I found myself blaming Gussie. On discovering that he was
stressing the newt note in this manner, he ought, of course, to have
tuned out, even if it had meant sitting there saying nothing. No matter
how much of a twitter he was in, he should have had sense enough to
see that he was throwing a spanner into the works. No girl, when she
has been led to expect that a man is about to pour forth his soul in a
fervour of passion, likes to find him suddenly shelving the whole topic
in favour of an address on aquatic Salamandridae.
“Bad, Jeeves.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And how long did this nuisance continue?”
“For some not inconsiderable time, I gather, sir. According to Mr.
Fink-Nottle, he supplied Miss Bassett with very full and complete
information not only with respect to the common newt, but also the
crested and palmated varieties. He described to her how newts, during
the breeding season, live in the water, subsisting upon tadpoles,
insect larvae, and crustaceans; how, later, they make their way to the
land and eat slugs and worms; and how the newly born newt has three
pairs of long, plumlike, external gills. And he was just observing
that newts differ from salamanders in the shape of the tail, which
is compressed, and that a marked sexual dimorphism prevails in most
species, when the young lady rose and said that she thought she would
go back to the house.”
“And then----”
“She went, sir.”
I stood musing. More and more, it was beginning to be borne in upon
me what a particularly difficult chap Gussie was to help. He seemed
to so marked an extent to lack snap and finish. With infinite toil,
you manoeuvred him into a position where all he had to do was charge
ahead, and he didn’t charge ahead, but went off sideways, missing the
objective completely.
“Difficult, Jeeves.”
“Yes, sir.”
In happier circs., of course, I would have canvassed his views on
the matter. But after what had occurred in connection with that
mess-jacket, my lips were sealed.
“Well, I must think it over.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Burnish the brain a bit and endeavour to find the way out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, good night, Jeeves.”
“Good night, sir.”
He shimmered off, leaving a pensive Bertram Wooster standing motionless
in the shadows. It seemed to me that it was hard to know what to do for
the best.
-12-
I don’t know if it has happened to you at all, but a thing I’ve noticed
with myself is that, when I’m confronted by a problem which seems for
the moment to stump and baffle, a good sleep will often bring the
solution in the morning.
It was so on the present occasion.
The nibs who study these matters claim, I believe, that this has got
something to do with the subconscious mind, and very possibly they may
be right. I wouldn’t have said off-hand that I had a subconscious mind,
but I suppose I must without knowing it, and no doubt it was there,
sweating away diligently at the old stand, all the while the corporeal
Wooster was getting his eight hours.
For directly I opened my eyes on the morrow, I saw daylight. Well, I
don’t mean that exactly, because naturally I did. What I mean is that I
found I had the thing all mapped out. The good old subconscious m. had
delivered the goods, and I perceived exactly what steps must be taken
in order to put Augustus Fink-Nottle among the practising Romeos.
I should like you, if you can spare me a moment of your valuable time,
to throw your mind back to that conversation he and I had had in the
garden on the previous evening. Not the glimmering landscape bit, I
don’t mean that, but the concluding passages of it. Having done so, you
will recall that when he informed me that he never touched alcoholic
liquor, I shook the head a bit, feeling that this must inevitably
weaken him as a force where proposing to girls was concerned.
And events had shown that my fears were well founded.
Put to the test, with nothing but orange juice inside him, he had
proved a complete bust. In a situation calling for words of molten
passion of a nature calculated to go through Madeline Bassett like
a red-hot gimlet through half a pound of butter, he had said not a
syllable that could bring a blush to the cheek of modesty, merely
delivering a well-phrased but, in the circumstances, quite misplaced
lecture on newts.
A romantic girl is not to be won by such tactics. Obviously, before
attempting to proceed further, Augustus Fink-Nottle must be induced to
throw off the shackling inhibitions of the past and fuel up. It must be
a primed, confident Fink-Nottle who squared up to the Bassett for Round
No. 2.
Only so could the _Morning Post_ make its ten bob, or whatever it is,
for printing the announcement of the forthcoming nuptials.
Having arrived at this conclusion I found the rest easy, and by the
time Jeeves brought me my tea I had evolved a plan complete in every
detail. This I was about to place before him--indeed, I had got as far
as the preliminary “I say, Jeeves”--when we were interrupted by the
arrival of Tuppy.
He came listlessly into the room, and I was pained to observe that
a night’s rest had effected no improvement in the unhappy wreck’s
appearance. Indeed, I should have said, if anything, that he was
looking rather more moth-eaten than when I had seen him last. If you
can visualize a bulldog which has just been kicked in the ribs and had
its dinner sneaked by the cat, you will have Hildebrand Glossop as he
now stood before me.
“Stap my vitals, Tuppy, old corpse,” I said, concerned, “you’re looking
pretty blue round the rims.”
Jeeves slid from the presence in that tactful, eel-like way of his, and
I motioned the remains to take a seat.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
He came to anchor on the bed, and for awhile sat picking at the
coverlet in silence.
“I’ve been through hell, Bertie.”
“Through where?”
“Hell.”
“Oh, hell? And what took you there?”
Once more he became silent, staring before him with sombre eyes.
Following his gaze, I saw that he was looking at an enlarged photograph
of my Uncle Tom in some sort of Masonic uniform which stood on
the mantelpiece. I’ve tried to reason with Aunt Dahlia about this
photograph for years, placing before her two alternative suggestions:
(a) To burn the beastly thing; or (b) if she must preserve it, to shove
me in another room when I come to stay. But she declines to accede. She
says it’s good for me. A useful discipline, she maintains, teaching me
that there is a darker side to life and that we were not put into this
world for pleasure only.
“Turn it to the wall, if it hurts you, Tuppy,” I said gently.
“Eh?”
“That photograph of Uncle Tom as the bandmaster.”
“I didn’t come here to talk about photographs. I came for sympathy.”
“And you shall have it. What’s the trouble? Worrying about Angela,
I suppose? Well, have no fear. I have another well-laid plan for
encompassing that young shrimp. I’ll guarantee that she will be weeping
on your neck before yonder sun has set.”
He barked sharply.
“A fat chance!”
“Tup, Tushy!”
“Eh?”
“I mean ‘Tush, Tuppy.’ I tell you I will do it. I was just going to
describe this plan of mine to Jeeves when you came in. Care to hear it?”
“I don’t want to hear any of your beastly plans. Plans are no good.
She’s gone and fallen in love with this other bloke, and now hates my
gizzard.”
“Rot.”
“It isn’t rot.”
“I tell you, Tuppy, as one who can read the female heart, that this
Angela loves you still.”
“Well, it didn’t look much like it in the larder last night.”
“Oh, you went to the larder last night?”
“I did.”
“And Angela was there?”
“She was. And your aunt. Also your uncle.”
I saw that I should require foot-notes. All this was new stuff to me.
I had stayed at Brinkley Court quite a lot in my time, but I had no
idea the larder was such a social vortex. More like a snack bar on a
race-course than anything else, it seemed to have become.
“Tell me the whole story in your own words,” I said, “omitting no
detail, however apparently slight, for one never knows how important
the most trivial detail may be.”
He inspected the photograph for a moment with growing gloom.
“All right,” he said. “This is what happened. You know my views about
that steak-and-kidney pie.”
“Quite.”
“Well, round about one a.m. I thought the time was ripe. I stole from
my room and went downstairs. The pie seemed to beckon me.”
I nodded. I knew how pies do.
“I got to the larder. I fished it out. I set it on the table. I found
knife and fork. I collected salt, mustard, and pepper. There were
some cold potatoes. I added those. And I was about to pitch in when
I heard a sound behind me, and there was your aunt at the door. In a
blue-and-yellow dressing gown.”
“Embarrassing.”
“Most.”
“I suppose you didn’t know where to look.”
“I looked at Angela.”
“She came in with my aunt?”
“No. With your uncle, a minute or two later. He was wearing mauve
pyjamas and carried a pistol. Have you ever seen your uncle in pyjamas
and a pistol?”
“Never.”
“You haven’t missed much.”
“Tell me, Tuppy,” I asked, for I was anxious to ascertain this, “about
Angela. Was there any momentary softening in her gaze as she fixed it
on you?”
“She didn’t fix it on me. She fixed it on the pie.”
“Did she say anything?”
“Not right away. Your uncle was the first to speak. He said to your
aunt, ‘God bless my soul, Dahlia, what are you doing here?’ To which
she replied, ‘Well, if it comes to that, my merry somnambulist, what
are you?’ Your uncle then said that he thought there must be burglars
in the house, as he had heard noises.”
I nodded again. I could follow the trend. Ever since the scullery
window was found open the year Shining Light was disqualified in the
Cesarewitch for boring, Uncle Tom has had a marked complex about
burglars. I can still recall my emotions when, paying my first visit
after he had bars put on all the windows and attempting to thrust the
head out in order to get a sniff of country air, I nearly fractured
my skull on a sort of iron grille, as worn by the tougher kinds of
mediaeval prison.
“‘What sort of noises?’ said your aunt. ‘Funny noises,’ said your
uncle. Whereupon Angela--with a nasty, steely tinkle in her voice, the
little buzzard--observed, ‘I expect it was Mr. Glossop eating.’ And
then she did give me a look. It was the sort of wondering, revolted
look a very spiritual woman would give a fat man gulping soup in a
restaurant. The kind of look that makes a fellow feel he’s forty-six
round the waist and has great rolls of superfluous flesh pouring down
over the back of his collar. And, still speaking in the same unpleasant
tone, she added, ‘I ought to have told you, father, that Mr. Glossop
always likes to have a good meal three or four times during the night.
It helps to keep him going till breakfast. He has the most amazing
appetite. See, he has practically finished a large steak-and-kidney pie
already’.”
As he spoke these words, a feverish animation swept over Tuppy. His
eyes glittered with a strange light, and he thumped the bed violently
with his fist, nearly catching me a juicy one on the leg.
“That was what hurt, Bertie. That was what stung. I hadn’t so much as
started on that pie. But that’s a woman all over.”
“The eternal feminine.”
“She continued her remarks. ‘You’ve no idea,’ she said, ‘how Mr.
Glossop loves food. He just lives for it. He always eats six or seven
meals a day, and then starts in again after bedtime. I think it’s
rather wonderful.’ Your aunt seemed interested, and said it reminded
her of a boa constrictor. Angela said, didn’t she mean a python? And
then they argued as to which of the two it was. Your uncle, meanwhile,
poking about with that damned pistol of his till human life wasn’t safe
in the vicinity. And the pie lying there on the table, and me unable to
touch it. You begin to understand why I said I had been through hell.”
“Quite. Can’t have been at all pleasant.”
“Presently your aunt and Angela settled their discussion, deciding that
Angela was right and that it was a python that I reminded them of. And
shortly after that we all pushed back to bed, Angela warning me in a
motherly voice not to take the stairs too quickly. After seven or eight
solid meals, she said, a man of my build ought to be very careful,
because of the danger of apoplectic fits. She said it was the same with
dogs. When they became very fat and overfed, you had to see that they
didn’t hurry upstairs, as it made them puff and pant, and that was
bad for their hearts. She asked your aunt if she remembered the late
spaniel, Ambrose; and your aunt said, ‘Poor old Ambrose, you couldn’t
keep him away from the garbage pail’; and Angela said, ‘Exactly, so do
please be careful, Mr. Glossop.’ And you tell me she loves me still!”
I did my best to encourage.
“Girlish banter, what?”
“Girlish banter be dashed. She’s right off me. Once her ideal, I am now
less than the dust beneath her chariot wheels. She became infatuated
with this chap, whoever he was, at Cannes, and now she can’t stand the
sight of me.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“My dear Tuppy, you are not showing your usual good sense in this
Angela-chap-at-Cannes matter. If you will forgive me saying so, you
have got an _idée fixe_.”
“A what?”
“An _idée fixe_. You know. One of those things fellows get. Like Uncle
Tom’s delusion that everybody who is known even slightly to the police
is lurking in the garden, waiting for a chance to break into the house.
You keep talking about this chap at Cannes, and there never was a
chap at Cannes, and I’ll tell you why I’m so sure about this. During
those two months on the Riviera, it so happens that Angela and I were
practically inseparable. If there had been somebody nosing round her, I
should have spotted it in a second.”
He started. I could see that this had impressed him.
“Oh, she was with you all the time at Cannes, was she?”
“I don’t suppose she said two words to anybody else, except, of course,
idle conv. at the crowded dinner table or a chance remark in a throng
at the Casino.”
“I see. You mean that anything in the shape of mixed bathing and
moonlight strolls she conducted solely in your company?”
“That’s right. It was quite a joke in the hotel.”
“You must have enjoyed that.”
“Oh, rather. I’ve always been devoted to Angela.”
“Oh, yes?”
“When we were kids, she used to call herself my little sweetheart.”
“She did?”
“Absolutely.”
“I see.”
He sat plunged in thought, while I, glad to have set his mind at rest,
proceeded with my tea. And presently there came the banging of a gong
from the hall below, and he started like a war horse at the sound of
the bugle.
“Breakfast!” he said, and was off to a flying start, leaving me to
brood and ponder. And the more I brooded and pondered, the more did it
seem to me that everything now looked pretty smooth. Tuppy, I could
see, despite that painful scene in the larder, still loved Angela with
all the old fervour.
This meant that I could rely on that plan to which I had referred to
bring home the bacon. And as I had found the way to straighten out the
Gussie-Bassett difficulty, there seemed nothing more to worry about.
It was with an uplifted heart that I addressed Jeeves as he came in to
remove the tea tray.
-13-
“Jeeves,” I said.
“Sir?”
“I’ve just been having a chat with young Tuppy, Jeeves. Did you happen
to notice that he wasn’t looking very roguish this morning?”
“Yes, sir. It seemed to me that Mr. Glossop’s face was sicklied o’er
with the pale cast of thought.”
“Quite. He met my cousin Angela in the larder last night, and a rather
painful interview ensued.”
“I am sorry, sir.”
“Not half so sorry as he was. She found him closeted with a
steak-and-kidney pie, and appears to have been a bit caustic about fat
men who lived for food alone.”
“Most disturbing, sir.”
“Very. In fact, many people would say that things had gone so far
between these two nothing now could bridge the chasm. A girl who could
make cracks about human pythons who ate nine or ten meals a day and
ought to be careful not to hurry upstairs because of the danger of
apoplectic fits is a girl, many people would say, in whose heart love
is dead. Wouldn’t people say that, Jeeves?”
“Undeniably, sir.”
“They would be wrong.”
“You think so, sir?”
“I am convinced of it. I know these females. You can’t go by what they
say.”
“You feel that Miss Angela’s strictures should not be taken too much
_au pied de la lettre_, sir?”
“Eh?”
“In English, we should say ‘literally’.”
“Literally. That’s exactly what I mean. You know what girls are. A tiff
occurs, and they shoot their heads off. But underneath it all the old
love still remains. Am I correct?”
“Quite correct, sir. The poet Scott----”
“Right ho, Jeeves.”
“Very good, sir.”
“And in order to bring that old love whizzing to the surface once more,
all that is required is the proper treatment.”
“By ‘proper treatment,’ sir, you mean----”
“Clever handling, Jeeves. A spot of the good old snaky work. I see what
must be done to jerk my Cousin Angela back to normalcy. I’ll tell you,
shall I?”
“If you would be so kind, sir.”
I lit a cigarette, and eyed him keenly through the smoke. He waited
respectfully for me to unleash the words of wisdom. I must say for
Jeeves that--till, as he is so apt to do, he starts shoving his oar in
and cavilling and obstructing--he makes a very good audience. I don’t
know if he is actually agog, but he looks agog, and that’s the great
thing.
“Suppose you were strolling through the illimitable jungle, Jeeves, and
happened to meet a tiger cub.”
“The contingency is a remote one, sir.”
“Never mind. Let us suppose it.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Let us now suppose that you sloshed that tiger cub, and let us suppose
further that word reached its mother that it was being put upon. What
would you expect the attitude of that mother to be? In what frame of
mind do you consider that that tigress would approach you?”
“I should anticipate a certain show of annoyance, sir.”
“And rightly. Due to what is known as the maternal instinct, what?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very good, Jeeves. We will now suppose that there has recently been
some little coolness between this tiger cub and this tigress. For some
days, let us say, they have not been on speaking terms. Do you think
that that would make any difference to the vim with which the latter
would leap to the former’s aid?”
“No, sir.”
“Exactly. Here, then, in brief, is my plan, Jeeves. I am going to draw
my Cousin Angela aside to a secluded spot and roast Tuppy properly.”
“Roast, sir?”
“Knock. Slam. Tick-off. Abuse. Denounce. I shall be very terse about
Tuppy, giving it as my opinion that in all essentials he is more like
a wart hog than an ex-member of a fine old English public school. What
will ensue? Hearing him attacked, my Cousin Angela’s womanly heart will
be as sick as mud. The maternal tigress in her will awake. No matter
what differences they may have had, she will remember only that he
is the man she loves, and will leap to his defence. And from that to
falling into his arms and burying the dead past will be but a step. How
do you react to that?”
“The idea is an ingenious one, sir.”
“We Woosters are ingenious, Jeeves, exceedingly ingenious.”
“Yes, sir.”
“As a matter of fact, I am not speaking without a knowledge of the form
book. I have tested this theory.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Yes, in person. And it works. I was standing on the Eden rock at
Antibes last month, idly watching the bathers disport themselves in the
water, and a girl I knew slightly pointed at a male diver and asked
me if I didn’t think his legs were about the silliest-looking pair of
props ever issued to human being. I replied that I did, indeed, and
for the space of perhaps two minutes was extraordinarily witty and
satirical about this bird’s underpinning. At the end of that period, I
suddenly felt as if I had been caught up in the tail of a cyclone.
“Beginning with a _critique_ of my own limbs, which she said, justly
enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect
my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating
asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best
you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never
actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum. Subsequent
investigation proved that she was engaged to the fellow with the legs
and had had a slight disagreement with him the evening before on the
subject of whether she should or should not have made an original call
of two spades, having seven, but without the ace. That night I saw them
dining together with every indication of relish, their differences made
up and the lovelight once more in their eyes. That shows you, Jeeves.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I expect precisely similar results from my Cousin Angela when I start
roasting Tuppy. By lunchtime, I should imagine, the engagement will be
on again and the diamond-and-platinum ring glittering as of yore on her
third finger. Or is it the fourth?”
“Scarcely by luncheon time, sir. Miss Angela’s maid informs me that
Miss Angela drove off in her car early this morning with the intention
of spending the day with friends in the vicinity.”
“Well, within half an hour of whatever time she comes back, then. These
are mere straws, Jeeves. Do not let us chop them.”
“No, sir.”
“The point is that, as far as Tuppy and Angela are concerned, we may
say with confidence that everything will shortly be
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