The Jeeves Omnibus (182 page)

Bill was amazed. ‘Mine?’

‘Yours.’

‘But how could it be mine?’

‘That is the mystery which we have to solve. This Honest Patch Perkins, as he called himself, must have borrowed your car … with or without your permission.’

‘Incredulous!’

‘Incredible, m’lord.’

‘Thank you, Jeeves. Incredible! How would I know any Honest Patch Perkins?’

‘You don’t?’

‘Never heard of him in my life. Never laid eyes on him. What does he look like?’

‘He is tall … about your height … and wears a ginger moustache and a black patch over his left eye.’

‘No, dash it, that’s not possible … Oh, I see what you mean. A black patch over his left eye and a ginger moustache on the upper lip. I thought for a moment …’

‘And a check coat and a crimson tie with blue horseshoes on it.’

‘Good heavens! He must look the most ghastly outsider. Eh, Jeeves?’

‘Certainly far from
soigné
, m’lord.’

‘Very far from
soigné
. Oh, by the way, Jeeves, that reminds me. Bertie Wooster told me that you once made some such remark to him, and it gave him the idea for a ballad to be entitled ‘Way Down upon the
Soigné
River’. Did anything ever come of it, do you know?’

‘I fancy not, m’lord.’

‘Bertie wouldn’t have been equal to whacking it out, I suppose. But one can see a song hit there, handled by the right person.’

‘No doubt, m’lord.’

‘Cole Porter could probably do it.’

‘Quite conceivably, m’lord.’

‘Or Oscar Hammerstein.’

‘It should be well within the scope of Mr Hammerstein’s talents, m’lord.’

It was with a certain impatience that Captain Biggar called the meeting to order.

‘To hell with song hits and Cole Porters!’ he said, with an abruptness on which Emily Post would have frowned. ‘I’m not talking about Cole Porter, I’m talking about this bally bookie who was using your car today.’

Bill shook his head.

‘My dear old pursuer of pumas and what-have-you, you say you’re talking about bally bookies, but what you omit to add is that you’re talking through the back of your neck. Neat that, Jeeves.’

‘Yes, m’lord. Crisply put.’

‘Obviously what happened was that friend Biggar got the wrong number.’

‘Yes, m’lord.’

The red of Captain Biggar’s face deepened to purple. His proud spirit was wounded.

‘Are you telling me I don’t know the number of a car that I followed all the way from Epsom Downs to Southmoltonshire? That car was used today by this Honest Patch Perkins and his clerk, and I’m asking you if you lent it to him.’

‘My dear good bird, would I lend my car to a chap in a check suit and a crimson tie, not to mention a black patch and a ginger moustache? The thing’s not … what, Jeeves?’

‘Feasible, m’lord.’ Jeeves coughed. ‘Possibly the gentleman’s eyesight needs medical attention.’

Captain Biggar swelled portentously.

‘My eyesight?
My
eyesight? Do you know who you’re talking to? I am Bwana Biggar.’

‘I regret that the name is strange to me, sir. But I still maintain that you have made the pardonable mistake of failing to read the licence number correctly.’

Before speaking again, Captain Biggar was obliged to swallow once or twice, to restore his composure. He also took another nut.

‘Look,’ he said, almost mildly. ‘Perhaps you’re not up on these
things
. You haven’t been told who’s who and what’s what. I am Biggar the White Hunter, the most famous White Hunter in all Africa and Indonesia. I can stand without a tremor in the path of an onrushing rhino … and why? Because my eyesight is so superb that I know … I
know
I can get him in that one vulnerable spot before he has come within sixty paces. That’s the sort of eyesight mine is.’

Jeeves maintained his iron front.

‘I fear I cannot recede from my position, sir. I grant that you may have trained your vision for such a contingency as you have described, but, poorly informed as I am on the subject of the larger fauna of the East, I do not believe that rhinoceri are equipped with licence numbers.’

It seemed to Bill that the time had come to pour oil on the troubled waters and dish out a word of comfort.

‘This bookie of yours, Captain. I think I can strike a note of hope. We concede that he legged it with what appears to have been the swift abandon of a bat out of hell, but I believe that when the fields are white with daisies he’ll pay you. I get the impression that he’s simply trying to gain time.’

‘I’ll give him time,’ said the captain morosely. ‘I’ll see that he gets plenty. And when he has paid his debt to Society, I shall attend to him personally. A thousand pities we’re not out East. They understand these things there. If they know you for a straight shooter and the other chap’s a wrong ’un … well, there aren’t many questions asked.’

Bill started like a frightened fawn.

‘Questions about what?’

‘“Good riddance” sums up their attitude. The fewer there are of such vermin, the better for Anglo-Saxon prestige.’

‘I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.’

‘I don’t mind telling you that there are a couple of notches on my gun that aren’t for buffaloes … or lions … or elands …
or
rhinos.’

‘Really? What are they for?’

‘Cheaters.’

‘Ah, yes. Those are those leopard things that go as fast as race-horses.’

Jeeves had a correction to make.

‘Somewhat faster, m’lord. A half-mile in forty-five seconds.’

‘Great Scott! Pretty nippy, what? That’s travelling, Jeeves.’

‘Yes, m’lord.’

‘That’s a cheetah, that was, as one might say.’

Captain Biggar snorted impatiently.

‘Chea-
ters
was what I said. I’m not talking about cheetah, the animal … though I have shot some of those, too.’

‘Too?’

‘Too.’

‘I see,’ said Bill, gulping a little. ‘Too.’

Jeeves coughed.

‘Might I offer a suggestion, m’lord?’

‘Certainly, Jeeves. Offer several.’

‘An idea has just crossed my mind, m’lord. It has occurred to me that it is quite possible that this race-course character against whom Captain Biggar nurses a justifiable grievance may have substituted for his own licence plate a false one –’

‘By Jove, Jeeves, you’ve hit it!’

‘– and that by some strange coincidence he selected for this false plate the number of your lordship’s car.’

‘Exactly. That’s the solution. Odd we didn’t think of that before. It explains the whole thing, doesn’t it, Captain?’

Captain Biggar was silent. His thoughtful frown told that he was weighing the idea.

‘Of course it does,’ said Bill buoyantly. ‘Jeeves, your bulging brain, with its solid foundation of fish, has solved what but for you would have remained one of those historic mysteries you read about. If I had a hat on, I would raise it to you.’

‘I am happy to have given satisfaction, m’lord.’

‘You always do, Jeeves, you always do. It’s what makes you so generally esteemed.’

Captain Biggar nodded.

‘Yes, I suppose that might have happened. There seems to be no other explanation.’

‘Jolly, getting these things cleared up,’ said Bill. ‘More port, Captain?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Then suppose we join the ladies? They’re probably wondering what the dickens has happened to us and saying “He cometh not”, like … who, Jeeves?’

‘Mariana of the Moated Grange, m’lord. Her tears fell with the dews at even; her tears fell ere the dews were dried. She could not look on the sweet heaven either at morn or eventide.’

‘Oh, well, I don’t suppose our absence has hit them quite as hard as that. Still, it might be as well … Coming, Captain?’

‘I should first like to make a telephone call.’

‘You can do it from the living room.’

‘A private telephone call.’

‘Oh, right-ho. Jeeves, conduct Captain Biggar to your pantry and unleash him on the instrument.’

‘Very good, m’lord.’

Left alone, Bill lingered for some moments, the urge to join the ladies in the living room yielding to a desire to lower just one more glass of port by way of celebration. Honest Patch Perkins had, he felt, rounded a nasty corner.

The only thought that came to mar his contentment had to do with Jill. He was not quite sure of his standing with that lodestar of his life. At dinner, Mrs Spottsworth, seated on his right, had been chummy beyond his gloomiest apprehensions, and he fancied he had detected in Jill’s eye one of those cold, pensive looks which are the last sort of look a young man in love likes to see in the eye of his betrothed.

Fortunately, Mrs Spottsworth’s chumminess had waned as the meal proceeded and Captain Biggar started monopolizing the conversation. She had stopped talking about the old Cannes days and had sat lingering in rapt silence as the White Hunter told of antres vast and deserts idle and of the cannibals that each other eat, the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.

This to hear had Mrs Spottsworth seriously inclined, completely switching off the Cannes motif, so it might be that all was well.

Jeeves returned, and he greeted him effusively as one who had fought the good fight.

‘That was a brain wave of yours, Jeeves.’

‘Thank you, m’lord.’

‘It eased the situation considerably. His suspicions are lulled, don’t you think?’

‘One would be disposed to fancy so, m’lord.’

‘You know, Jeeves, even in these disturbed postwar days, with the social revolution turning handsprings on every side and Civilization, as you might say, in the melting pot, it’s still quite an advantage to be in big print in
Debrett’s Peerage
.’

‘Unquestionably so, m’lord. It gives a gentleman a certain standing.’

‘Exactly. People take it for granted that you’re respectable. Take an earl, for instance. He buzzes about, and people say “Ah, an Earl” and let it go at that. The last thing that occurs to them is that he may in his spare moments be putting on patches and false moustaches and standing on a wooden box in a check coat and a tie with blue horseshoes, shouting “Five to one the field, bar one!”’

‘Precisely, m’lord.’

‘A satisfactory state of things.’

‘Highly satisfactory, m’lord.’

‘There have been moments today, Jeeves, I don’t mind confessing, when it seemed to me that the only thing to do was to turn up the toes and say “This is the end”, but now it would take very little to start me singing like the Cherubim and Seraphim. It was the Cherubim and Seraphim who sang, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, m’lord. Hosanna, principally.’

‘I feel a new man. The odd sensation of having swallowed a quart of butterflies, which I got when there was a burst of red fire and a roll of drums from the orchestra and that White Hunter shot up through a trap at my elbow, has passed away completely.’

‘I am delighted to hear it, m’lord.’

‘I knew you would be, Jeeves, I knew you would be. Sympathy and understanding are your middle names. And now,’ said Bill, ‘to join the ladies in the living room and put the poor souls out of their suspense.’

ARRIVING IN THE
living room, he found that the number of ladies available for being joined there had been reduced to one – reading from left to right, Jill. She was sitting on the settee twiddling an empty coffee cup and staring before her with what are sometimes described as unseeing eyes. Her air was that of a girl who is brooding on something, a girl to whom recent happenings have given much food for thought.

‘Hullo there, darling,’ cried Bill with the animation of a shipwrecked mariner sighting a sail. After that testing session in the dining room, almost anything that was not Captain Biggar would have looked good to him, and she looked particularly good.

Jill glanced up.

‘Oh, hullo,’ she said.

It seemed to Bill that her manner was reserved, but he proceeded with undiminished exuberance.

‘Where’s everybody?’

‘Rory and Moke are in the library, looking in at the Derby Dinner.’

‘And Mrs Spottsworth?’

‘Rosie,’ said Jill in a toneless voice, ‘has gone to the ruined chapel. I believe she is hoping to get a word with the ghost of Lady Agatha.’

Bill started. He also gulped a little.

‘Rosie?’

‘I think that is what you call her, is it not?’

‘Why – er – yes.’

‘And she calls you Billiken. Is she a very old friend?’

‘No, no. I knew her slightly at Cannes one summer.’

‘From what I heard her saying at dinner about moonlight drives and bathing from the Eden Roc, I got the impression that you had been rather intimate.’

‘Good heavens, no. She was just an acquaintance, and a pretty mere one, at that.’

‘I see.’

There was a silence.

‘I wonder if you remember,’ said Jill, at length breaking it, ‘what I was saying this evening before dinner about people not hiding things from each other, if they are going to get married?’

‘Er – yes … Yes … I remember that.’

‘We agreed that it was the only way.’

‘Yes … Yes, that’s right. So we did.’

‘I told you about Percy, didn’t I? And Charles and Squiffy and Tom and Blotto,’ said Jill, mentioning other figures of Romance from the dead past. ‘I never dreamed of concealing the fact that I had been engaged before I met you. So why did you hide this Spottsworth from me?’

It seemed to Bill that, for a pretty good sort of chap who meant no harm to anybody and strove always to do the square thing by one and all, he was being handled rather roughly by Fate this summer day. The fellow – Shakespeare, he rather thought, though he would have to check with Jeeves – who had spoken of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune had known what he was talking about. Slings and arrows described it to a nicety.

‘I didn’t hide this Spottsworth from you!’ he cried passionately. ‘She just didn’t happen to come up. Lord love a duck, when you’re sitting with the girl you love, holding her little hand and whispering words of endearment in her ear, you can’t suddenly switch the conversation to an entirely different topic and say “Oh, by the way, there was a woman I met in Cannes some years ago, on the subject of whom I would now like to say a few words. Let me tell you all about the time we drove to St Tropez.”’