Expecting Jeeves (3 page)

“In this drawer. They'd slid under some paper.”

“Oh!” said Aunt Agatha, and there was a bit of a silence.

I dug out my entire stock of manly courage, breathed a short prayer, and let her have it right in the thorax.

“I must say, Aunt Agatha, dash it,” I said, crisply, “I think you have been a little hasty, what? I mean to say, giving this poor man here so much anxiety and worry and generally biting him in the gizzard. You've been very, very unjust to this poor man!”

“Yes, yes,” chipped in the poor man.

“And this unfortunate girl, what about her? Where does she get off? You've accused her of pinching the things on absolutely no evidence. I think she would be jolly well advised to bring an action for—for whatever it is, and soak you for substantial damages.”

“
Mais oui, mais oui, c'est trop fort!
” shouted the Bandit Chief, backing me up like a good 'un. And the chambermaid looked up inquiringly, as if the sun was breaking through the clouds.

“I shall recompense her,” said Aunt Agatha, feebly.

“If you take my tip, you jolly well will, and that eftsoones or right speedily. She's got a cast-iron case, and if I were her I wouldn't take a cent under twenty quid. But what gives me the pip most is the way you've abused this poor man here and tried to give his hotel a bad name——”

“Yes, by dam'! It's too bad!” cried the whiskered marvel. “You careless old woman! You give my hotel bad names, would you or wasn't it? To-morrow you leave my hotel.”

And more to the same effect, all good, ripe stuff. And presently, having said his say, he withdrew, taking the chambermaid with him, the latter with a crisp tenner clutched in a vice-like grip. I suppose she and the bandit split it outside. A French hotel-manager wouldn't be likely to let real money wander away from him without counting himself in on the division.

I
turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down-express in the small of the back.

“There was something you wished to speak to me about?” I said.

“No, no. Go away, go away.”

“You said in your note——”

“Yes, yes, never mind. Please go away, Bertie. I wish to be alone.”

“Oh, right-ho!” I said. “Right-ho! right-ho!” And back to the good old suite.

“Ten o'clock, a clear night, and all's well, Jeeves,” I said, breezing in.

“I am gratified to hear it, sir.”

“If twenty quid would be any use to you, Jeeves——?”

“I am much obliged, sir.”

There was a pause. And then—well, it was a wrench, but I did it. I unstripped the cummerbund and handed it over.

“Do you wish me to press this, sir?”

I gave the thing one last longing look. It had been very dear to me.

“No,” I said, “take it away; give it to the deserving poor. I shall never wear it again.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” said Jeeves.

Scoring
off Jeeves

IT gave me a nasty jar, I can tell you. You see, what happened was this. Once a year Jeeves takes a couple of weeks” vacation and biffs off to the sea or somewhere to restore his tissues. Pretty rotten for me, of course, while he's away. But it has to be stuck, so I stick it; and I must admit that he usually manages to get hold of a fairly decent fellow to look after me in his absence.

Well, the time had come round again, and Jeeves was in the kitchen giving the understudy a few tips about his duties. I happened to want a stamp or something, or a bit of string or something, and I toddled down the passage to ask him for it. The silly ass had left the kitchen door open; and I hadn't gone two steps when his voice caught me squarely in the eardrum.

“You will find Mr. Wooster,” he was saying to the substitute chappie, “an exceedingly pleasant and amiable young gentleman, but not intelligent. By no means intelligent. Mentally he is negligible—quite negligible.”

Well, I mean to say, what!

I suppose, strictly speaking, I ought to have charged in and ticked the blighter off properly in no uncertain voice. But I doubt whether it's humanly possible to tick Jeeves off. Personally, I didn't even have a dash at it. I merely called for my hat and stick in a marked manner and legged it. But the memory rankled, if you know what I mean. We Woosters do not lightly forget. At least, we do—some things—appointments, and people's birthdays, and letters to post, and all that—but not an absolute bally insult like the above. I brooded like the dickens.

I was still brooding when I dropped in at the oyster-bar at Buck's for a quick bracer. I needed a bracer rather particularly at the moment, because I was on my way to lunch with my Aunt
Agatha.
A pretty frightful ordeal, believe me or believe me not. Practically the nearest thing to being disembowelled. I had just had one quick and another rather slower, and was feeling about as cheerio as was possible under the circs, when a muffled voice hailed me from the north-east, and, turning round, I saw young Bingo Little propped up in a corner, wrapping himself round a sizable chunk of bread and cheese.

“Hallo-allo-allo!” I said. “Haven't seen you for ages. You've not been in here lately, have you?”

“No. I've been living out in the country.”

“Eh?” I said, for Bingo's loathing for the country was well known. “Whereabouts?”

“Down in Hampshire, at a place called Ditteredge.”

“No, really? I know some people who've got a house there. The Glossops. Have you met them?”

“Why, that's where I'm staying!” said young Bingo. “I'm tutoring the Glossop kid.”

“What for?” I said. I couldn't seem to see young Bingo as a tutor. Though, of course, he did get a degree of sorts at Oxford, and I suppose you can always fool some of the people some of the time.

“What for? For money, of course! An absolute sitter came unstitched in the second race at Haydock Park,” said young Bingo, with some bitterness, “and I dropped my entire month's allowance. I hadn't the nerve to touch my uncle for any more, so it was a case of buzzing round to the agents and getting a job. I've been down there three weeks.”

“I haven't met the Glossop kid.”

“Don't!” advised Bingo, briefly.

“The only one of the family I really know is the girl.” I had hardly spoken these words when the most extraordinary change came over young Bingo's face. His eyes bulged, his cheeks flushed, and his Adam's apple hopped about like one of those india-rubber balls on the top of the fountain in a shooting-gallery.

“Oh, Bertie!” he said, in a strangled sort of voice.

I looked at the poor fish anxiously. I knew that he was always falling in love with someone, but it didn't seem possible that
even
he could have fallen in love with Honoria Glossop. To me the girl was simply nothing more nor less than a pot of poison. One of those dashed large, brainy, strenuous, dynamic girls you see so many of these days. She had been at Girton, where, in addition to enlarging her brain to the most frightful extent, she had gone in for every kind of sport and developed the physique of a middle-weight catch-as-catch-can wrestler. I'm not sure she didn't box for the 'Varsity while she was up. The effect she had on me whenever she appeared was to make me want to slide into a cellar, and lie low till they blew the All-Clear.

Yet here was young Bingo obviously all for her. There was no mistaking it. The love-light was in the blighter's eyes.

“I worship her, Bertie! I worship the very ground she treads on!” continued the patient, in a loud, penetrating voice. One or two fellows had come in, and McGarry, the chappie behind the bar, was listening with his ears flapping. But there's no reticence about Bingo. He always reminds me of the hero of a musical comedy who takes the centre of the stage, gathers the boys round him in a circle, and tells them all about his love at the top of his voice.

“Have you told her?”

“No. I haven't had the nerve. But we walk together in the garden most evenings, and it sometimes seems to me that there is a look in her eyes.”

“I know that look. Like a sergeant-major.”

“Nothing of the kind! Like a tender goddess.”

“Half a second, old thing,” I said. “Are you sure we're talking about the same girl? The one I mean is Honoria. Perhaps there's a younger sister or something I've not heard of?”

“Her name is Honoria,” bawled Bingo, reverently.

“And she strikes you as a tender goddess?”

“She does.”

“God bless you!” I said.

“She walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies; and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes. Another bit of bread and cheese,” he said to the lad behind the bar.

“You're keeping your strength up,” I said.

“
This is my lunch. I've got to meet Oswald at Waterloo at one-fifteen, to catch the train back. I brought him up to town to see the dentist.”

“Oswald? Is that the kid?”

“Yes. Pestilential to a degree.”

“Pestilential! That reminds me, I'm lunching with my Aunt Agatha. I'll have to pop off now, or I'll be late.”

In Society circles, I believe, my Aunt Agatha has a fairly fruity reputation as a hostess. But then, I take it she doesn't ballyrag her other guests the way she does me. I don't think I can remember a single meal with her since I was a kid of tender years at which she didn't turn the conversation sooner or later to the subject of my frightfulness. To-day, she started in on me with the fish.

“Bertie,” she said—in part and chattily—“it is young men like you who make the person with the future of the race at heart despair!”

“What-ho!” I said.

“Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in selfish idleness a life which might have been made useful, helpful, and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone——” She fixed me with a glittering eye. “Bertie, you must marry!'”

“No, dash it all!”

“Yes! You should be breeding children to——”

“No, really, I say, please!” I said, blushing richly. Aunt Agatha belongs to two or three of these women's clubs, and she keeps forgetting she isn't in the smoking-room.

“You want somebody strong, self-reliant, and sensible, to counterbalance the deficiencies and weaknesses of your own character. And by great good luck I have found the very girl. She is of excellent family—plenty of money, though that does not matter in your case. She has met you; and, while there is naturally much in you of which she disapproves, she does not dislike you. I know this, for I have sounded her—guardedly, of course—and I am sure that you have only to make the first advances——”

“
Who is it?” I would have said it long before, but the shock had made me swallow a bit of roll the wrong way, and I had only just finished turning purple and trying to get a bit of air back into the old windpipe. “Who is it?”

“Sir Roderick Glossop's daughter, Honoria.”

“No, no!” I cried, paling beneath the tan.

“Don't be silly, Bertie. She is just the wife for you.”

“Yes, but look here——”

“She will mould you.”

“But I don't want to be moulded.”

Aunt Agatha gave me the kind of look she used to give me when I was a kid and had been found in the jam cupboard.

“Bertie! I hope you are not going to be troublesome.”

“Well, but I mean——”

“Lady Glossop has very kindly invited you to Ditteredge Hall for a few days. I told her you would be delighted to come down to-morrow.”

“I'm sorry, but I've got a dashed important engagement tomorrow.”

“What engagement?”

“Well—er——”

“You have no engagement. And, even if you had, you must put it off. I shall be very seriously annoyed, Bertie, if you do not go to Ditteredge Hall to-morrow.”

“Oh, right-o!” I said.

A man may be down, but he is never out. It wasn't two minutes after I had parted from Aunt Agatha before the old fighting spirit of the Woosters reasserted itself. Ghastly as the peril was which loomed before me, I was conscious of a rummy sort of exhilaration. It was a tight corner, but the tighter the corner, I felt, the more juicily should I score off Jeeves when I got myself out of it without a bit of help from him. Ordinarily, of course, I should have consulted him and trusted to him to solve the difficulty; but after what I had heard him saying in the kitchen, I was dashed if I was going to demean myself. When I got home I addressed the man with light abandon.

“Jeeves,” I said, “I'm in a bit of a difficulty.”

“I'm sorry to hear that, sir.”

“
Yes, quite a bad hole. In fact, you might say on the brink of a precipice, and faced by an awful doom.”

“If I could be of any assistance, sir——”

“Oh, no. No, no. Thanks very much, but no, no. I won't trouble you. I've no doubt I shall be able to get out of it all right by myself.”

“Very good, sir.”

So that was that. I'm bound to say I'd have welcomed a bit more curiosity from the fellow, but that is Jeeves all over. Cloaks his emotions, if you know what I mean. Wears the mask and what not.

Honoria was away when I got to Ditteredge on the following afternoon. Her mother told me that she was staying with some people named Braythwayt in the neighbourhood, and would be back next day, bringing the daughter of the house with her for a visit. She said I would find Oswald out in the grounds, and such is a mother's love that she spoke as if that were a bit of a boost for the grounds and an inducement to go there.

Rather decent, the grounds at Ditteredge. A couple of terraces, a bit of lawn with a cedar on it, a bit of shrubbery, and finally a small but goodish lake with a stone bridge running across it. Directly I'd worked my way round the shrubbery I spotted young Bingo leaning against the bridge smoking a cigarette. Sitting on the stonework, fishing, was a species of kid whom I took to be Oswald the Plague-Spot.