The Jeeves Omnibus (229 page)

‘What!’

‘Yes, sir. Purvis, the butler, chanced to overhear Mrs Gregson in conversation with Mr Filmer on the matter.’

‘Secretary to that superfatted bore! Jeeves, I could never have survived it.’

‘No, sir. I fancy you would not have found it agreeable. Mr Filmer is scarcely a congenial companion for you. Yet, had Mrs Gregson secured the position for you, you might have found it embarrassing to decline to accept it.’

‘Embarrassing is right!’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But I say, Jeeves, there’s just one point which you seem to have overlooked. Where exactly do I get off?’

‘Sir?’

‘I mean to say, Aunt Agatha sent word by Purvis just now that she wanted to see me. Probably she’s polishing up her hatchet at this very moment.’

‘It might be the most judicious plan not to meet her, sir.’

‘But how can I help it?’

‘There is a good, stout waterpipe running down the wall immediately outside this window, sir. And I could have the two-seater waiting outside the park gates in twenty minutes.’

I eyed him with reverence.

‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘you are always right. You couldn’t make it five, could you?’

‘Let us say ten, sir.’

‘Ten it is. Lay out some raiment suitable for travel, and leave the rest to me. Where is this waterpipe of which you speak so highly?’

I CHECKED THE
man with one of my glances. I was astounded and shocked.

‘Not another word, Jeeves,’ I said. ‘You have gone too far. Hats, yes. Socks, yes. Coats, trousers, shirts, ties, and spats, absolutely. On all these things I defer to your judgment. But when it comes to vases, no.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘You say that this vase is not in harmony with the appointments of the room – whatever that means, if anything. I deny this, Jeeves,
in toto
. I like this vase. I call it decorative, striking, and all in all, an exceedingly good fifteen bob’s worth.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘That’s that, then. If anybody rings up, I shall be closeted during the next hour with Mr Sipperley at the offices of
The Mayfair Gazette
.’

I beetled off with a fairish amount of restrained hauteur, for I was displeased with the man. On the previous afternoon, while sauntering along the Strand, I had found myself wedged into one of those sort of alcove places where fellows with voices like foghorns stand all day selling things by auction. And, though I was still vague as to how exactly it had happened, I had somehow become the possessor of a large china vase with crimson dragons on it. And not only dragons, but birds, dogs, snakes, and a thing that looked like a leopard. This menagerie was now stationed on a bracket over the door of my sitting room.

I liked the thing. It was bright and cheerful. It caught the eye. And that was why, when Jeeves, wincing a bit, had weighed in with some perfectly gratuitous art-criticism, I ticked him off with no little vim.
Ne sutor ultra
whatever-it-is, I would have said to him, if I’d thought of it. I mean to say, where does a valet get off, censoring vases? Does it fall within his province to knock the young master’s chinaware? Absolutely not, and so I told him.

I was still pretty heartily hipped when I reached the office of
The Mayfair Gazette
, and it would have been a relief to my feelings to have decanted my troubles on to old Sippy, who, being a very dear old pal of mine, would no doubt have understood and sympathized. But when the office-boy had slipped me through into the inner cubbyhole where the old lad performed his editorial duties, he seemed so preoccupied that I hadn’t the heart.

All these editor blokes, I understand, get pretty careworn after they’ve been at the job for awhile. Six months before, Sippy had been a cheery cove, full of happy laughter; but at that time he was what they call a freelance, bunging in a short story here and a set of verses there and generally enjoying himself. Ever since he had become editor of this rag, I had sensed a change, so to speak.

Today he looked more editorial than ever; so, shelving my own worries for the nonce, I endeavoured to cheer him up by telling him how much I had enjoyed his last issue. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t read it, but we Woosters do not shrink from subterfuge when it is a question of bracing up a buddy.

The treatment was effective. He showed animation and verve.

‘You really liked it?’

‘Red-hot, old thing.’

‘Full of good stuff, eh?’

‘Packed.’

‘That poem – “Solitude”?’

‘What a gem!’

‘A genuine masterpiece.’

‘Pure tabasco. Who wrote it?’

‘It was signed,’ said Sippy, a little coldly.

‘I keep forgetting names.’

‘It was written,’ said Sippy, ‘by Miss Gwendolen Moon. Have you ever met Miss Moon, Bertie?’

‘Not to my knowledge. Nice girl?’

‘My God!’ said Sippy.

I looked at him keenly. If you ask my Aunt Agatha she will tell you – in fact, she is quite likely to tell you even if you don’t ask her – that I am a vapid and irreflective chump. Barely sentient, was the way she once described me: and I’m not saying that in a broad, general sense she isn’t right. But there is one department of life in which I am Hawkshaw the detective in person. I can recognize Love’s Young Dream more quickly than any other bloke of my weight and age in the Metropolis. So many of my pals have copped it in the past few years that now I can spot it a mile off on a foggy day. Sippy was leaning
back
in his chair, chewing a piece of india-rubber with a far-off look in his eyes, and I formed my diagnosis instantly.

‘Tell me all, laddie,’ I said.

‘Bertie, I love her.’

‘Have you told her so?’

‘How can I?’

‘I don’t see why not. Quite easy to bring into the general conversation.’

Sippy groaned hollowly.

‘Do you know what it is, Bertie, to feel the humility of a worm?’

‘Rather! I do sometimes with Jeeves. But today he went too far. You will scarcely credit it, old man, but he had the crust to criticize a vase which –’

‘She is so far above me.’

‘Tall girl?’

‘Spiritually. She is all soul. And what am I? Earthy.’

‘Would you say that?’

‘I would. Have you forgotten that a year ago I did thirty days without the option for punching a policeman in the stomach on Boat Race night?’

‘But you were whiffed at the time.’

‘Exactly. What right has an inebriated jail-bird to aspire to a goddess?’

My heart bled for the poor old chap.

‘Aren’t you exaggerating things a trifle, old lad?’ I said. ‘Everybody who has had a gentle upbringing gets a bit sozzled on Boat Race night, and the better element nearly always have trouble with the gendarmes.’

He shook his head.

‘It’s no good, Bertie. You mean well, but words are useless. No, I can but worship from afar. When I am in her presence a strange dumbness comes over me. My tongue seems to get entangled with my tonsils. I could no more muster up the nerve to propose to her than … Come in!’ he shouted.

For, just as he was beginning to go nicely and display a bit of eloquence, a knock had sounded on the door. In fact, not so much a knock as a bang – or even a slosh. And there now entered a large, important-looking bird with penetrating eyes, a Roman nose, and high cheek-bones. Authoritative. That’s the word I want. I didn’t like his collar, and Jeeves would have had a thing or two to say about the sit of his trousers; but, nevertheless, he was authoritative. There was something compelling about the man. He looked like a traffic-policeman.

‘Ah, Sipperley!’ he said.

Old Sippy displayed a good deal of agitation. He had leaped from his chair, and was now standing in a constrained attitude, with a sort of pop-eyed expression on his face.

‘Pray be seated, Sipperley,’ said the cove. He took no notice of me. After one keen glance and a brief waggle of the nose in my direction, he had washed Bertram out of his life. ‘I have brought you another little offering – ha! Look it over at your leisure, my dear fellow.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Sippy.

‘I think you will enjoy it. But there is just one thing. I should be glad, Sipperley, if you would give it a leetle better display, a rather more prominent position in the paper than you accorded to my “Landmarks of Old Tuscany”. I am quite aware that in a weekly journal space is a desideratum, but one does not like one’s efforts to be – I can only say pushed away in a back corner among advertisements of bespoke tailors and places of amusement.’ He paused, and a nasty gleam came into his eyes. ‘You will bear this in mind, Sipperley?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Sippy.

‘I am greatly obliged, my dear fellow,’ said the cove, becoming genial again. ‘You must forgive my mentioning it. I would be the last person to attempt to dictate the – ha! – editorial policy, but – Well, good afternoon, Sipperley. I will call for your decision at three o’clock tomorrow.’

He withdrew, leaving a gap in the atmosphere about ten feet by six. When this had closed in, I sat up.

‘What was it?’ I said.

I was startled to observe poor old Sippy apparently go off his onion. He raised his hands over his head, clutched his hair, wrenched it about for a while, kicked a table with great violence, and then flung himself into his chair.

‘Curse him!’ said Sippy. ‘May he tread on a banana-skin on his way to chapel and sprain both ankles!’

‘Who was he?’

‘May he get a frog-in-the-throat and be unable to deliver the end-of-term sermon!’

‘Yes, but who was he?’

‘My old headmaster, Bertie,’ said Sippy.

‘Yes, but, my dear old soul –’

‘Headmaster of my old school.’ He gazed at me in a distraught sort of way. ‘Good Lord! Can’t you understand the position?’

‘Not by a jugful, laddie.’

Sippy sprang from his chair and took a turn or two up and down the carpet.

‘How do you feel,’ he said, ‘when you meet the headmaster of your old school?’

‘I never do. He’s dead.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you how I feel. I feel as if I were in the Lower Fourth again, and had been sent up by my form-master for creating a disturbance in school. That happened once, Bertie, and the memory still lingers. I can recall as if it were yesterday knocking at old Waterbury’s door and hearing him say, “Come in!” like a lion roaring at an early Christian, and going in and shuffling my feet on the mat and him looking at me and me explaining – and then, after what seemed a lifetime, bending over and receiving six of the juiciest on the old spot with a cane that bit like an adder. And whenever he comes into my office now the old wound begins to trouble me, and I just say, “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” and feel like a kid of fourteen.’

I began to grasp the posish. The whole trouble with these fellows like Sippy, who go in for writing, is that they develop the artistic temperament, and you never know when it is going to break out.

‘He comes in here with his pockets full of articles on “The Old School Cloisters” and “Some Little-Known Aspects of Tacitus”, and muck like that, and I haven’t the nerve to refuse them. And this is supposed to be a paper devoted to the lighter interests of Society.’

‘You must be firm, Sippy. Firm, old thing.’

‘How can I, when the sight of him makes me feel like a piece of chewed blotting-paper? When he looks at me over that nose, my morale goes blue at the roots and I am back at school again. It’s persecution, Bertie. And the next thing that’ll happen is that my proprietor will spot one of those articles, assume with perfect justice that, if I can print that sort of thing, I must be going off my chump, and fire me.’

I pondered. It was a tough problem.

‘How would it be –?’ I said.

‘That’s no good.’

‘Only a suggestion,’ I said.

‘Jeeves,’ I said, when I got home, ‘surge round!’

‘Sir?’

‘Burnish the old bean. I have a case that calls for one of your best efforts. Have you ever heard of a Miss Gwendolen Moon?’

‘Authoress of “Autumn Leaves”, “’Twas on an English June”, and other works. Yes, sir.’

‘Great Scott, Jeeves, you seem to know everything.’

‘Thank you very much, sir.’

‘Well, Mr Sipperley is in love with Miss Moon.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But fears to speak.’

‘It is often the way, sir.’

‘Deeming himself unworthy.’

‘Precisely, sir.’

‘Right! But that is not all. Tuck that away in a corner of the mind, Jeeves, and absorb the rest of the facts. Mr Sipperley, as you are aware, is the editor of a weekly paper devoted to the interests of the lighter Society. And now the headmaster of his old school has started calling at the office and unloading on him junk entirely unsuited to the lighter Society. All clear?’

‘I follow you perfectly, sir.’

‘And this drip Mr Sipperley is compelled to publish, much against his own wishes, purely because he lacks the nerve to tell the man to go to blazes. The whole trouble being, Jeeves, that he has got one of those things that fellows do get – it’s on the tip of my tongue.’

‘An inferiority complex, sir?’

‘Exactly. An inferiority complex. I have one myself with regard to my Aunt Agatha. You know me, Jeeves. You know that if it were a question of volunteers to man the lifeboat, I would spring to the task. If anyone said, “Don’t go down the coal-mine, daddy,” it would have not the slightest effect on my resolution –’

‘Undoubtedly, sir.’

‘And yet – and this is where I want you to follow me very closely, Jeeves – when I hear that my Aunt Agatha is out with her hatchet and moving in my direction, I run like a rabbit. Why? Because she gives me an inferiority complex. And so it is with Mr Sipperley. He would, if called upon, mount the deadly breach, and do it without a tremor; but he cannot bring himself to propose to Miss Moon, and he cannot kick his old headmaster in the stomach and tell him to take his beastly essays on “The Old School Cloisters” elsewhere, because he has an inferiority complex. So what about it, Jeeves?’

‘I fear I have no plan which I could advance with any confidence on the spur of the moment, sir.’