The Jeeves Omnibus (116 page)

It was outside this jeweller’s that the odd spectacle was in progress. A bloke of furtive aspect was shimmering to and fro on the threshold of the emporium, his demeanour rather like that of the cat in the adage, which, according to Jeeves, and I suppose he knows, let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’. He seemed, that is to say, desirous of entering, but was experiencing some difficulty in making the grade. He would have a sudden dash at it, and then draw back and stand shooting quick glances right and left, as if fearing the scrutiny of the public eye. Over in New York, during the days of Prohibition, I have seen fellows doing the same sort of thing outside speakeasies.

He was a massive bloke, and there was something in his appearance that seemed familiar. Then, as I narrowed my gaze and scanned him more closely, memory did its stuff. That beefy frame … That pumpkin shaped head … The face that looked like a slab of pink dough … It was none other than my old friend, Stilton Cheesewright. And what he was doing, pirouetting outside jewellery bins, was more than I could understand.

I started across the road with the idea of instituting a probe or quiz, and at the same moment he seemed to summon up a sudden burst of resolution. As I paused to disentangle myself from a passing bus, he picked up his feet, tossed his head in a mettlesome sort of way, and was through the door like a man dashing into a railway-station buffet with only two minutes for a gin and tonic before his train goes.

When I entered the establishment, he was leaning over the counter, his gaze riveted on some species of merchandise which was being shown him by the gentlemanly assistant. To prod him in the hindquarters with my umbrella was with me the work of an instant.

‘Ahoy, there, Stilton!’ I cried.

He spun round with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk.

‘Oh, hullo,’ he said.

There was a pause. At a moment like this, with old boyhood friends meeting again after long separation, I mean to say, you might have expected a good deal of animated what-ho-ing and an immediate picking up of the threads. Of this, however, there was a marked absence. The Auld Lang Syne spirit was strong in me, but not, or I was mistaken, equally strong in G. D’Arcy Cheesewright. I have met so many people in my time who have wished that Bertram was elsewhere that I have come to recognize the signs. And it was these signs that this former playmate was now exhibiting.

He drew me away from the counter, shielding it from my gaze with his person, like somebody trying to hide the body.

‘I wish you wouldn’t go spiking people in the backside with your beastly umbrella,’ he said, and one sensed the querulous note. ‘Gave me a nasty shock.’

I apologized gracefully, explaining that if you have an umbrella and are fortunate enough to catch an old acquaintance bending, you naturally do not let the opportunity slip, and endeavoured to set him at his ease with genial chit-chat. From the embarrassment he was displaying, I might have been some high official in the police force interrupting him in the middle of a smash and grab raid. His demeanour perplexed me.

‘Well, well, well, Stilton,’ I said. ‘Quite a while since we met.’

‘Yes,’ he responded, his air that of a man who was a bit sorry it hadn’t been longer.

‘How’s the boy?’

‘Oh, all right. How are you?’

‘Fine, thanks. As a matter of fact, I’m feeling unusually fizzy.’

‘That’s good.’

‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘Oh, I am. Well, goodbye, Bertie,’ he said, shaking me by the hand. ‘Nice to have seen you.’

I looked at him, amazed. Did he really imagine, I asked myself, that I was as easily got rid of as this? Why, experts have tried to get rid of Bertram Wooster and have been forced to admit defeat.

‘I’m not leaving you yet,’ I assured him.

‘Aren’t you?’ he said, wistfully.

‘No, no. Still here. Jeeves tells me you dropped in on me this morning.’

‘Yes.’

‘Accompanied by Nobby.’

‘Yes.’

‘You live at Steeple Bumpleigh, too, I hear.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a small world.’

‘Not so very.’

‘Jeeves thinks it is.’

‘Well, fairly small, perhaps,’ he agreed, making a concession. ‘You’re sure I’m not keeping you, Bertie?’

‘No, no.’

‘I thought you might have some date somewhere.’

‘Oh, no, not a thing.’

There was another pause. He hummed a few bars of a popular melody, but not rollickingly. He also shuffled his feet quite a bit.

‘Been there long?’

‘Where?’

‘Steeple Bumpleigh.’

‘Oh? No, not very long.’

‘Like it?’

‘Very much.’

‘What do you do there?’

‘Do?’

‘Come, come, you know what I mean by “do”. Boko Fittleworth, for instance, writes wholesome fiction for the masses there. My Uncle Percy relaxes there after the day’s shipping magnateing. What is your racket?’

A rather odd look came into his map, and he fixed me with a cold and challenging eye, as if daring me to start something. I remembered having seen the same defiant glitter behind the spectacles of a man I met in a country hotel once, just before he told me his name was Snodgrass. It was as if this old companion of mine were on the brink of some shameful confession.

Then he seemed to think better of it.

‘Oh, I mess about.’

‘Mess about?’

‘Yes. Just mess about. Doing this and that, you know.’

There seemed nothing to be gained by pursuing this line of inquiry. It was obvious that he did not intend to loosen up. I passed on, accordingly, to the point which had been puzzling me so much.

‘Well, flitting lightly over that,’ I said, ‘why were you hovering?’

‘Hovering?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Just now. Outside the shop.’

‘I wasn’t hovering.’

‘You were distinctly hovering. You reminded me of a girl Jeeves was speaking about the other day, who stood with reluctant feet where the brook and river met. And when I follow you in, I find you buzz-buzzing into the ear of the assistant, plainly making some furtive purchase. What are you buying, Stilton?’

Fixed by my penetrating eye, he came clean. I suppose he saw that further concealment was useless.

‘A ring,’ he said, in a low, hoarse voice.

‘What sort of a ring?’ I asked, pressing him.

‘An engagement ring,’ he muttered, twisting his fingers and in other ways showing that he was fully conscious of his position.

‘Are you engaged?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, well, well!’

I laughed heartily, as is my custom on these occasions, but on his inquiring in a throaty growl rather like the snarl of the Rocky Mountains timber wolf what the devil I was cackling about, cheesed the mirth. I had always found Stilton intimidating, when stirred. In a weak moment at Oxford, misled by my advisers, I once tried to do a bit of rowing, and Stilton was the bird who coached us from the towing path. I could still recall some of the things he had said about my stomach, which – rightly or wrongly – he considered that I was sticking out. It would seem that when you are a Volga boatman, you aren’t supposed to stick your stomach out.

‘I always laugh when people tell me they are engaged,’ I explained, more soberly.

It did not seem to mollify him – if ‘mollify’ is the word I want. He continued to glower.

‘You have no objection to my being engaged?’

‘No, no.’

‘Why shouldn’t I be engaged?’

‘Oh, quite.’

‘What do you mean by “Oh, quite”?’

I didn’t quite know what I had meant by ‘Oh, quite’, unless possibly ‘Oh, quite’. I explained this, trying to infuse into my manner a soothing what-is-it, for he appeared to be hotting up.

‘I hope you will be very, very happy,’ I said.

He thanked me, though not effusively.

‘Nice girl, I expect?’

‘Yes.’

The response was not what you would call lyrical, but we Woosters can read between the lines. His eyes were rolling in their sockets, and his face had taken on the colour and expression of a devout tomato. I could see that he loved like a thousand of bricks.

A thought struck me.

‘It isn’t Nobby?’

‘No. She’s engaged to Boko Fittleworth.’

‘What!’

‘Yes.’

‘I never knew that. He might have told me. Nobby and Boko have hitched up, have they?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, well, well! The laughing Love God has been properly up on his toes in and around Steeple Bumpleigh of late, what?’

‘Yes.’

‘Never an idle moment. Day and night shifts. Your betrothed, I take it, is a resident?’

‘Yes. Her name’s Craye. Florence Craye.’

‘What!’

The word escaped my lips in a sort of yowl, and he started and gave me the raised eyebrow. I suppose it always perplexes the young Romeo to some extent, when fellows begin yowling on being informed of the loved one’s identity.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, a rather strained note in his voice.

Well, of course, that yowl of mine, as you may well imagine, had been one of ecstasy and relief. I mean, if Florence was all tied up with him, the peril I had been envisaging could be considered to have blown a fuse and ceased to impend. Spinoza or no Spinoza, I felt, this let Bertram out. But I couldn’t very well tell him that.

‘Oh, nothing,’ I said.

‘You seem to know her.’

‘Oh, yes, we’ve met.’

‘I’ve never heard her speak of you.’

‘No?’

‘No. Have you known her long?’

‘A certain time.’

‘Do you know her well?’

‘Pretty well.’

‘When you say “Pretty well”, you mean-?’

‘Fairly well. Tolerably well.’

‘How did you come to know her?’

I was conscious of a growing embarrassment. A little more of this, I felt, and he would elicit the fact that his betrothed had once been very near to Bertram – a dashed sight nearer, as we have seen, than Bertram had liked: and no recently engaged bimbo cares to discover that he was not the little woman’s first choice. It sort of rubs the bloom off the thing. What he wants to feel is that she spent her time gazing out of the turret window in a yearning spirit till he came galloping up on the white horse.

I temporized, accordingly. I believe the word is ‘temporized’. I should have to check up with Jeeves.

‘Her ghastly father married my frightful aunt.’

‘Is Lady Worplesdon your aunt?’

‘And how!’

‘You didn’t know her before that?’

‘Well, yes. Slightly.’

‘I see.’

He was still giving me that searching look, like a G-man hobnobbing with a suspect, and I am not ashamed to confess that I wiped a bead of persp. from the brow with the ferrule of my umbrella. That embarrassment, to which I have referred, was still up and doing – in fact, more so than ever.

I could see now what I had failed to spot before, that in thinking of him as a Romeo I had made an incorrect diagnosis. The bird whose name ought to have sprung to my mind was Othello. In this Cheesewright, it was plain, I had run up against one of those touchy lovers who go about the place in a suspicious and red-eyed spirit, eager to hammer the stuffing out of such of the citizenry as they suppose to be or to have been in any sense matey with the adored object. It would, in short, require but a sketchy outline of the facts relating to self and Florence to unleash the cave man within him.

‘When I say “slightly”,’ I hastened to add, ‘I mean, of course, that we were just acquaintances.’

‘Just acquaintances, eh?’

‘Just.’

‘You simply happened to meet her once or twice?’

‘That’s right. You put it in a nutshell.’

‘I see. The reason I ask is that it seemed to me, when I told you she was engaged to me, that your manner was peculiar –’

‘It always is before lunch.’

‘You started –’

‘Touch of cramp.’

‘And uttered an exclamation. As if the news had come as an unpleasant shock to you.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘You’re sure it didn’t?’

‘Not a bit.’

‘In fact, you were mere acquaintances?’

‘Mere to the core.’

‘Still, it’s strange that she has never mentioned you.’

‘Well, pip-pip,’ I said, changing the subject, and withdrew.

IT WAS A
grave and thoughtful Bertram Wooster who started to amble back to the old flat. I was feeling a bit weak, too. During the recent scene I had run the gamut of the emotions, as I believe it is called, and that always takes it out of one.

My first reaction to Stilton’s revelation had, as I have indicated, been relief, and of course I was still rolling the eyes up to Heaven in silent thankfulness a goodish bit. But it is seldom that the Woosters think only of self, and I now found the contemplation of the dreadful thing which had come upon this man filling me almost to the brim with pity and terror. It seemed to me that a Save Stilton Cheesewright movement ought to be got under way immediately. For though he wasn’t what you would call absolutely one of my bosom pals, like Boko Fittleworth, one has one’s human feelings. I remembered how the iron had entered into my gizzard when I was faced with the prospect of being led to the altar by Florence Craye.

One could see, of course, how the tragedy had occurred. It was the poor blister’s pathetic desire to do his soul a bit of good that had landed him in this awful predicament. As is so often the case with these stolid, beefy birds, he had always had a yearning for higher things.

This whole business of jacking up the soul is one that varies according to what Jeeves calls the psychology of the individual, some being all for it, others not. You take me, for instance. I don’t say I’ve got much of a soul, but, such as it is, I’m perfectly satisfied with the little chap. I don’t want people fooling about with it. ‘Leave it alone,’ I say. ‘Don’t touch it. I like it the way it is.’

But with Stilton it was different. Buttonhole him and offer to give his soul a shot in the arm, and you found in him a receptive audience and a disciple ready to try anything once. Florence must have seemed to him just what the doctor ordered, and he had probably quite enjoyed thumbing the pages of
Types of Ethical Theory
, feeling, no doubt, that this was the stuff to give the troops.