The Jeeves Omnibus (20 page)

This bin or depository for the widows of deceased Lords Chuffnell was a medium-sized sort of shack standing in what the advertisements described as spacious and commodious grounds. You entered by a five-barred gate set in a box hedge and approached by a short gravel drive – unless you were planning to break in through a lower window, in which case you sneaked along a grass border, skipping silently from tree to tree.

This is what I did, though at a casual glance it didn’t seem really necessary. The place looked deserted. Still, so far, of course, I had only seen the front of it: and if the gardener in charge had changed his policy of going down to the local pub for a refresher at this hour and was still on the premises, he would be round at the back. It was thither, therefore, that I now directed the footsteps, making them as snaky as possible.

I can’t say I liked the prospect before me. Jeeves had spoken airily – or glibly – of busting in and making myself at home for the night; but my experience has been that whenever I try to do a bit of burgling something always goes wrong. I had not yet forgotten that time Bingo Little persuaded me to break into his house and pinch the dictaphone record of the mushy article his wife,
née
Rosie M. Banks, the well-known female novelist, had written about him for
my
Aunt Dahlia’s paper,
Milady’s Boudoir
. Pekingese, parlourmaids, and policemen had entered into the affair, you may remember, causing me despondency and alarm: and I didn’t want anything of that nature happening again.

So it was with a pretty goodish amount of caution that I now sidled round to the back: and when the first thing the eye fell on was the kitchen door standing ajar, I did not rush in with the vim I would have displayed a year or so earlier, before Life had made me the grim, suspicious man I am today: but stood there cocking a wary eye at it. It might be all right. On the other hand, it might not be all right. Time alone could tell.

The next moment, I was dashed glad I had held off, because I suddenly heard someone whistling in the house, and I saw what that meant. It meant that the gardener bloke, instead of going down to the ‘Chuffnell Arms’ for a snifter, had decided to stay home and have a quiet evening among his books. So much for Jeeves’s authoritative inside information.

I drew back into the shadows like a leopard, feeling pretty peeved. I felt that Jeeves had no right to say that fellows went down to the village for a spot at such and such a time when they didn’t.

And then suddenly something happened that threw an entirely new light on the position of affairs, and I saw that I had misjudged the honest fellow. The whistling stopped, there was a single, brief hiccough, and then from inside came the sound of somebody singing ‘Lead, Kindly Light’.

The occupant of the Dower House was no mere gardener. It was Moscow’s Pride, the unspeakable Brinkley, who lurked therein.

The situation seemed to me to call for careful, unhurried thought.

The whole trouble with fellows like Brinkley is that in dealing with them you cannot go by the form book. They are such in-and-out performers. Tonight, for instance, within the space of little more than an hour, I had seen this man ravening to and fro with a carving knife and also tolerantly submitting to having himself kicked by Chuffy practically the whole length of the Chuffnell Hall drive. It all seemed to be a question of what mood he happened to be in at the time. If, therefore, I was compelled to ask myself, I were to walk boldly into the Dower House now, which manifestation of this many-sided man would greet me? Should I find a deferential lover of peace whom it would be both simple and agreeable to take by the slack of the trousers and bung out? Or should I have to spend the remainder
of
the night racing up and down the stairs with him a short head behind me?

And, arising out of this, what had become of that carving knife of his? As far as I could ascertain, he did not appear to have it on his person during the interview with Chuffy. But then, on the other hand, he might simply have left it somewhere and collected it again by now.

Reviewing the matter from every angle, I decided to remain where I was; and the next moment the trend of events showed that the decision had been a wise one. He had just got as far as that bit about ‘The night is dark’ and seemed to be going strong, though a little uncertain in the lower register, when he suddenly broke off. And the next thing I heard was a most frightful outbreak of shoutings and clumpings and bangings. What had set him off, I could not, of course, say; but the sounds left little room for doubt that for some reason or other the fellow had abruptly returned to what I might call the carving-knife phase.

One of the advantages of being in the country, if you belong, like Brinkley, to the more aggressive type of loony, is that you have great freedom of movement. The sort of row he was making now, if made in, let us say, Grosvenor Square or Cadogan Terrace, would infallibly have produced posses of policemen within the first two minutes. Windows would have been raised, whistles blown. But in the peaceful seclusion of the Dower House, Chuffnell Regis, he was granted the widest scope for self-expression. Except for the Hall, there wasn’t another house within a mile: and even the Hall was too far away for the ghastly uproar he was making to be more than a faint murmur.

As to what he thought he was chasing, there again one could make no certain pronouncement. It might be that the gardener-caretaker had not gone to the village, after all, and was now wishing that he had. Or it might be, of course, that a fellow in Brinkley’s sozzled condition did not require a definite object of the chase, but simply chased rainbows, so to speak, for the sake of the exercise.

I was inclining to this latter view, and wondering a little wistfully if there mightn’t be a chance of him falling downstairs and breaking his neck, when I found that I had been wrong. For some minutes the noise had grown somewhat fainter, activities seemed to have shifted to some distant part of the house; but now it suddenly hotted up again. I heard feet clattering downstairs. Then there was a terrific crash. And immediately after that the back door was burst open, and
out
shot a human form. It whizzed rapidly in my direction, tripped over something, and came a purler almost at my feet. And I was about to commend my soul to God and jump on its gizzard, hoping for the best, when something in the tone of the comments it was making – a sort of educated profanity which seemed to give evidence of a better bringing-up than Brinkley could possibly have had – made me pause.

I bent down. My diagnosis had been correct. It was Sir Roderick Glossop.

I was just going to introduce myself and institute inquiries, when the back door swung open again and another figure appeared.

‘And stay out!’ it observed, with a good deal of bitterness.

The voice was Brinkley’s. It was some small pleasure to me at a none too festive time to note that he was rubbing his left shin.

The door slammed, and I heard the bolts shot. The next moment, a tenor voice rendering ‘Rock of Ages’ showed that, as far as Brinkley was concerned, the episode was concluded.

Sir Roderick had scrambled to his feet, and was standing puffing a good bit, as if touched in the wind. I was not surprised, for the going had been fast.

It struck me as a good moment to start the dialogue.

‘What ho, what ho!’ I said.

It seemed to be rather my fate on this particular night to stir up my fellow man, not to mention my fellow scullerymaid. But, judging by results, the magnetic force of my personality appeared to be a bit on the wane. I mean to say, while the scullerymaid had had hysterics and Chuffy had jumped a foot, this Glossop merely quivered like something in aspic when joggled on the dish. But this, of course, may have been because that was all he was physically able to do. These breathers with Brinkley take it out of a man.

‘It’s all right,’ I continued, anxious to set him at his ease and remove the impression that what was murmuring in his ear was some fearful creature of the night. ‘Only B. Wooster –’

‘Mr Wooster!’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Good God!’ he said, becoming a little more tranquil, though still far from the life and soul of the party. ‘Woof!’

And there the matter rested, while he took in a supply of life-giving air. I remained silent. We Woosters do not intrude at such a time.

Presently the puffing died away to a soft whiffle. He took about
another
minute and a half off. And, when he spoke, there was something so subdued, so what you might call quavering, about his voice that I came within a toucher of placing a kindly arm round his shoulder and telling him to cheer up.

‘No doubt you are wondering, Mr Wooster, what is the explanation of all this?’

I still wasn’t quite equal to the kindly arm, but I did bestow a sort of encouraging pat.

‘Not a bit,’ I said. ‘Not a bit. I know all. I am abreast of the whole situation. I heard what had happened at the Hall, and directly I saw you shoot out of that door I knew what must have occurred here. You were planning to spend the night in the Dower House, weren’t you?’

‘I was. If you have really been apprised of what took place at Chuffnell Hall, Mr Wooster, you are aware that I am in the unfortunate position of –’

‘– being blacked out. I know. So am I.’

‘You!’

‘Yes. It’s a long story, and I couldn’t tell you, anyway, because it’s by way of being secret history, but you can take it from me that we are both in the same fix.’

‘But this is astonishing!’

‘You can’t go back to your hotel, and I can’t get up to London till we have taken the make-up off.’

‘Good God!’

‘It seems to bring us very close together, what?’

He breathed deeply.

‘Mr Wooster, we have had our differences in the past. The fault may have been mine. I cannot say. But in this crisis we must forget them and – er –’

‘Stick together?’

‘Precisely.’

‘We will,’ I said cordially. ‘Speaking for myself, I decided to let the dead past bury its dead when I heard that you had been giving little Seabury one or two on the spot indicated.’

I heard him snort.

‘You are aware what that abominable boy did to me, Mr Wooster?’

‘Rather. And what you did to him. I am thoroughly posted up to the time you left the Hall. What happened after that?’

‘Almost immediately after I had done so, the realization of my terrible position came upon me.’

‘Nasty jar, I imagine?’

‘The shock was of the severest. I was at a complete loss. The only course it seemed possible to pursue was to seek refuge somewhere for the night. And, knowing the Dower House to be unoccupied, I repaired thither.’ He shuddered. ‘Mr Wooster, that house is – I speak in all seriousness – an Inferno.’

He puffed awhile.

‘I am not alluding to the presence on the premises of what appeared to me to be a dangerous lunatic. I mean that the whole place is congested with living organisms. Mice, Mr Wooster! And small dogs. And I think I saw a monkey.’

‘Eh?’

‘I remember now that Lady Chuffnell informed me that her son had started to maintain an establishment of these creatures, but at the moment it had slipped my mind, and the experience came upon me without warning or preparation.’

‘Of course, yes. Seabury breeds things. I remember him telling me. And you were snootered by the menagerie?’

He stirred in the darkness. I fancy he was mopping the b.

‘Shall I tell you of my experiences beneath that roof, Mr Wooster?’

‘Do,’ I said cordially. ‘We have the night before us.’

He handkerchiefed the brow once more.

‘It was a nightmare. I had scarcely entered the place when a voice addressed me from a dark corner of the kitchen, which was the room in which I first found myself. “I see you, you old muddler,” was the phrase it employed.’

‘Dashed familiar.’

‘I need scarcely tell you what consternation it occasioned me. I bit my tongue severely. Then, divining that the speaker was merely a parrot, I hastened from the room. I had scarcely reached the stairs when I observed a hideous form. A little, short, broad, bow-legged individual with long arms and a dark wizened face. He was wearing clothes of some description and he walked rapidly, lurching from side to side and gibbering. In my present cool frame of mind I realize that it must have been a monkey, but at the time –’

‘What a home!’ I said sympathetically. ‘Add little Seabury, and what a home! How about the mice?’

‘They came later. Allow me, if you will, to adhere to the chronological sequence of my misadventures, or I shall be unable to relate the story coherently. The room in which I next found myself appeared to be completely filled with small dogs. They pounced
upon
me, snuffling and biting at me. I escaped and entered another room. Here at last, I was saying to myself, even in this sinister and ill-omened house there must be peace. Mr Wooster, I had hardly framed the thought when something ran up my right trouser leg. I sprang to one side, and in so doing upset what appeared to be a box or cage of some kind. I found myself in a sea of mice. I detest the creatures. I endeavoured to brush them off. They clung the more. I fled from the room, and I had scarcely reached the stairs when this lunatic appeared and pursued me. He pursued me up and down stairs, Mr Wooster!’

I nodded understandingly.

‘We all go through it,’ I said. ‘I had the same experience.’

‘You?’

‘Rather. He nearly got me with a carving knife.’

‘As far as I could discern, the weapon he carried was more of the order of a chopper.’

‘He varies,’ I explained. ‘Now the carving knife, anon the chopper. Versatile chap. It’s the artistic temperament, I suppose.’

‘You speak as if you knew this man.’

‘I do more than know him. I employ him. He’s my valet.’

‘Your valet?’

‘Fellow named Brinkley. He won’t be my valet long, mind you. If he ever simmers down enough for me to get near him and give him the sack. Ironical, that, when you come to think of it,’ I said, for I was in philosophic mood. ‘I mean, do you realize that I’m giving this chap a salary all this time? In other words, he’s actually being paid to chivvy me about with carving knives. If that’s not Life,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘what is?’