The Jeeves Omnibus (184 page)

‘I’ll do my best,’ he said. ‘But I shall have very little raw material to work with. And now, old girl, I imagine that Spaniard will have blown over by this time, so let us rejoin the Derby diners. For some reason or other – why, one cannot tell – I’ve got a liking for a beast called Oratory.’

MRS SPOTTSWORTH HAD LEFT
the ruined chapel. After a vigil of some twenty-five minutes she had wearied of waiting for Lady Agatha to manifest herself. Like many very rich women, she tended to be impatient and to demand quick service. When in the mood for spectres, she wanted them hot off the griddle. Returning to the garden, she had found a rustic seat and was sitting there smoking a cigarette and enjoying the beauty of the night.

It was one of those lovely nights which occur from time to time in an English June, mitigating the rigours of the island summer and causing manufacturers of raincoats and umbrellas to wonder uneasily if they have been mistaken in supposing England to be an earthly Paradise for men of their profession.

A silver moon was riding in the sky, and a gentle breeze blew from the west, bringing with it the heart-stirring scent of stock and tobacco plant. Shy creatures of the night rustled in the bushes at her side and, to top the whole thing off, somewhere in the woods beyond the river a nightingale had begun to sing with the full-throated zest of a bird conscious of having had a rave notice from the poet Keats and only a couple of nights ago a star spot on the programme of the BBC.

It was a night made for romance, and Mrs Spottsworth recognized it as such. Although in her
vers libre
days in Greenwich Village she had gone in almost exclusively for starkness and squalor, even then she had been at heart a sentimentalist. Left to herself, she would have turned out stuff full of moons, Junes, loves, doves, blisses and kisses. It was simply that the editors of the poetry magazines seemed to prefer rat-ridden tenements, the smell of cooking cabbage, and despair, and a girl had to eat.

Fixed now as solidly financially as any woman in America and freed from the necessity of truckling to the tastes of editors, she was able to take the wraps off her romantic self, and as she sat on the rustic seat, looking at the moon and listening to the nightingale, a stylist like the late Gustave Flaubert, tireless in his quest of the
mot juste
, would have had no hesitation in describing her mood as mushy.

To this mushiness Captain Biggar’s conversation at dinner had contributed largely. We have given some indication of its trend, showing it ranging freely from cannibal chiefs to dart-blowing headhunters, from headhunters to alligators, and its effect on Mrs Spottsworth had been very similar to that of Othello’s reminiscences on Desdemona. In short, long before the last strawberry had been eaten, the final nut consumed, she was convinced that this was the mate for her and resolved to spare no effort in pushing the thing along. In the matter of marrying again, both A.B. Spottsworth and Clifton Bessemer had given her the green light, and there was consequently no obstacle in her path.

There appeared, however, to be one in the path leading to the rustic seat, for at this moment there floated to her through the silent night the sound of a strong man tripping over a flowerpot. It was followed by some pungent remarks in Swahili, and Captain Biggar limped up, rubbing his shin.

Mrs Spottsworth was all womanly sympathy.

‘Oh, dear. Have you hurt yourself, Captain?’

‘A mere scratch, dear lady,’ he assured her.

He spoke bluffly, and only somebody like Sherlock Holmes or Monsieur Poirot could have divined that at the sound of her voice his soul had turned a double somersault, leaving him quivering with an almost Bill Rowcester-like intensity.

His telephone conversation concluded, the White Hunter had prudently decided to avoid the living room and head straight for the great open spaces, where he could be alone. To join the ladies, he had reasoned, would be to subject himself to the searing torture of having to sit and gaze at the woman he worshipped, a process which would simply rub in the fact of how unattainable she was. He recognized himself as being in the unfortunate position of the moth in Shelley’s well-known poem that allowed itself to become attracted by a star, and it seemed to him that the smartest move a level-headed moth could make would be to minimize the anguish by shunning the adored object’s society. It was, he felt, what Shelley would have advised.

And here he was, alone with her in the night, a night complete with moonlight, nightingales, gentle breezes and the scent of stock and tobacco plant.

It was a taut, tense Captain Biggar, a Captain Biggar telling himself he must be strong, who accepted his companion’s invitation to join her on the rustic seat. The voices of Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar seemed to ring in his ears. ‘Chin up, old boy,’ said
Tubby
in his right ear. ‘Remember the code,’ said the Subahdar in his left.

He braced himself for the coming tête-à-tête.

Mrs Spottsworth, a capital conversationalist, began it by saying what a beautiful night it was, to which the Captain replied ‘Top hole’. ‘The moon,’ said Mrs Spottsworth, indicating it and adding that she always thought a night when there was a full moon was so much nicer than a night when there was not a full moon. ‘Oh, rather,’ said the captain. Then, after Mrs Spottsworth had speculated as to whether the breeze was murmuring lullabies to the sleeping flowers and the captain had regretted his inability to inform her on this point, he being a stranger in these parts, there was a silence.

It was broken by Mrs Spottsworth, who gave a little cry of concern. ‘Oh, dear!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’ve dropped my pendant. The clasp is so loose.’

Captain Biggar appreciated her emotion.

‘Bad show,’ he agreed. ‘It must be on the ground somewhere. I’ll have a look-see.’

‘I wish you would. It’s not valuable – I don’t suppose it cost more than ten thousand dollars – but it has a sentimental interest. One of my husbands gave it to me, I never can remember which. Oh, have you found it? Thank you ever so much. Will you put it on for me?’

As Captain Biggar did so, his fingers, spine and stomach muscles trembled. It is almost impossible to clasp a pendant round its owner’s neck without touching that neck in spots, and he touched his companion’s in several. And every time he touched it, something seemed to go through him like a knife. It was as though the moon, the nightingale, the breeze, the stock and the tobacco plant were calling to him to cover this neck with burning kisses.

Only Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar, forming a solid bloc in opposition, restrained him.

‘Straight bat, old boy!’ said Tubby Frobisher.

‘Remember you’re a white man,’ said the Subahdar.

He clenched his fists and was himself again.

‘It must be jolly,’ he said, recovering his bluffness, ‘to be rich enough to think ten thousand dollars isn’t anything to write home about.’

Mrs Spottsworth felt like an actor receiving a cue.

‘Do you think that rich women are happy, Captain Biggar?’

The captain said that all those he had met – and in his capacity
of
White Hunter he had met quite a number – had seemed pretty bobbish.

‘They wore the mask.’

‘Eh?’

‘They smiled to hide the ache in their hearts,’ explained Mrs Spottsworth.

The captain said he remembered one of them, a large blonde of the name of Fish, dancing the can-can one night in her step-ins, and Mrs Spottsworth said that no doubt she was just trying to show a brave front to the world.

‘Rich women are so lonely, Captain Biggar.’

‘Are
you
lonely?’

‘Very, very lonely.’

‘Oh, ah,’ said the captain.

It was not what he would have wished to say. He would have preferred to pour out his soul in a torrent of impassioned words. But what could a fellow do, with Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar watching his every move?

A woman who has told a man in the moonlight, with nightingales singing their heads off in the background, that she is very, very lonely and has received in response the words ‘Oh, ah’ is scarcely to be blamed for feeling a momentary pang of discouragement. Mrs Spottsworth had once owned a large hound dog of lethargic temperament who could be induced to go out for his nightly airing only by a succession of sharp kicks. She was beginning to feel now as she had felt when her foot thudded against this languorous animal’s posterior. The same depressing sense of trying in vain to move an immovable mass. She loved the White Hunter. She admired him. But when you set out to kindle the spark of passion in him, you certainly had a job on your hands. In a moment of bitterness she told herself that she had known oysters on the half-shell with more of the divine fire in them.

However, she persevered.

‘How strange our meeting again like this,’ she said softly.

‘Very odd.’

‘We were a whole world apart, and we met in an English inn.’

‘Quite a coincidence.’

‘Not a coincidence. It was destined. Shall I tell you what brought you to that inn?’

‘I wanted a spot of beer.’

‘Fate,’ said Mrs Spottsworth. ‘Destiny. I beg your pardon?’

‘I was only saying that, come right down to it, there’s no beer like English beer.’

‘The same Fate, the same Destiny,’ continued Mrs Spottsworth, who at another moment would have hotly contested this statement, for she thought English beer undrinkable, ‘that brought us together in Kenya. Do you remember the day we met in Kenya?’

Captain Biggar writhed. It was like asking Joan of Arc if she happened to recall the time she saw that heavenly vision of hers. ‘How about it, boys?’ he inquired silently, looking pleadingly from right to left. ‘Couldn’t you stretch a point?’ But Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar shook their heads.

‘The code, old man,’ said Tubby Frobisher.

‘Play the game, old boy,’ said the Subahdar.

‘Do you?’ asked Mrs Spottsworth.

‘Oh, rather,’ said Captain Biggar.

‘I had the strangest feeling, when I saw you that day, that we had met before in some previous existence.’

‘A bit unlikely, what?’

Mrs Spottsworth closed her eyes.

‘I seemed to see us in some dim, prehistoric age. We were clad in skins. You hit me over the head with your club and dragged me by my hair to your cave.’

‘Oh, no, dash it, I wouldn’t do a thing like that.’

Mrs Spottsworth opened her eyes, and enlarging them to their fullest extent allowed them to play on his like searchlights.

‘You did it because you loved me,’ she said in a low, vibrant whisper. ‘And I –’

She broke off. Something tall and willowy had loomed up against the skyline, and a voice with perhaps just a quaver of nervousness in it was saying ‘Hullo-ullo-ullo-ullo-ullo’.

‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere, Rosie,’ said Bill. ‘When I found you weren’t at the ruined chapel … Oh, hullo, Captain.’

‘Hullo,’ said Captain Biggar dully, and tottered off. Lost in the shadows a few paces down the path, he halted and brushed away the beads of perspiration which had formed on his forehead.

He was breathing heavily, like a buffalo in the mating season. It had been a near thing, a very near thing. Had this interruption been postponed even for another minute, he knew that he must have sinned against the code and taken the irrevocable step which would have made his name a mockery and a byword in the Anglo-Malay Club at Kuala Lumpur. A pauper with a bank balance of a few meagre pounds, he would have been proposing marriage to a woman with millions.

More and more, as the moments went by, he had found himself being swept off his feet, his ears becoming deafer and deafer to the muttered warnings of Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar. Her eyes he might have resisted. Her voice, too, and the skin he had loved to touch. But when it came to eyes, voice, skin, moonlight, gentle breezes from the west and nightingales, the mixture was too rich.

Yes, he felt as he stood there heaving like a stage sea, he had been saved, and it might have been supposed that his prevailing emotion would have been a prayerful gratitude to Fate or Destiny for its prompt action. But, oddly enough, it was not. The first spasm of relief had died quickly away, to be succeeded by a rising sensation of nausea. And what caused this nausea was the fact that, being still within earshot of the rustic seat, he could hear all that Bill was saying. And Bill, having seated himself beside Mrs Spottsworth, had begun to coo.

Too little has been said in this chronicle of the ninth Earl of Rowcester’s abilities in this direction. When we heard him promising his sister Monica to contact Mrs Spottsworth and coo to her like a turtle dove, we probably formed in our minds the picture of one of those run-of-the-mill turtle doves whose cooing, though adequate, does not really amount to anything much. We would have done better to envisage something in the nature of a turtle dove of stellar quality, what might be called the Turtle Dove Supreme. A limited young man in many respects, Bill Rowcester could, when in mid-season form, touch heights in the way of cooing which left his audience, if at all impressionable, gasping for air.

These heights he was touching now, for the thought that this woman had it in her power to take England’s leading white elephant off his hands, thus stabilizing his financial position and enabling him to liquidate Honest Patch Perkins’ honourable obligations, lent him an eloquence which he had not achieved since May Week dances at Cambridge. The golden words came trickling from his lips like syrup.

Captain Biggar was not fond of syrup, and he did not like the thought of the woman he loved being subjected to all this goo. For a moment he toyed with the idea of striding up and breaking Bill’s spine in three places, but once more found his aspirations blocked by the code. He had eaten Bill’s meat and drunk Bill’s drink … both excellent, especially the roast duck … and that made the feller immune to assault. For when a feller has accepted a feller’s hospitality, a feller can’t go about breaking the feller’s spine, no matter what the feller may have done. The code is rigid on that point.