The Jeeves Omnibus (233 page)

You know, sometimes it seems to me as if Fate were going out of its way to such an extent to snooter you that you wonder if it’s worth while continuing to struggle. The night being a trifle chillier than the
dickens
, I had donned for this expedition a dressing-gown. It was the tail of this infernal garment that had caught in the door and pipped me at the eleventh hour.

The next moment the door had opened, light was streaming through it, and the bloke with the voice had grabbed me by the arm.

It was Sir Roderick Glossop.

The next thing that happened was a bit of a lull in the proceedings. For about three and a quarter seconds or possibly more we just stood there, drinking each other in, so to speak, the old boy still attached with a limpet-like grip to my elbow. If I hadn’t been in a dressing-gown and he in pink pyjamas with a blue stripe, and if he hadn’t been glaring quite so much as if he were shortly going to commit a murder, the tableau would have looked rather like one of those advertisements you see in the magazines, where the experienced elder is patting the young man’s arm, and saying to him, ‘My boy, if you subscribe to the Mutt-Jeff Correspondence School of Oswego, Kan, as I did, you may some day, like me, become Third Assistant Vice-President of the Schenectady Consolidated Nail-File and Eyebrow Tweezer Corporation.’

‘You!’ said Sir Roderick finally. And in this connection I want to state that it’s all rot to say you can’t hiss a word that hasn’t an ‘s’ in it. The way he pushed out that ‘You!’ sounded like an angry cobra, and I am betraying no secrets when I mention that it did me no good whatsoever.

By rights, I suppose, at this point I ought to have said something. The best I could manage, however, was a faint, soft bleating sound. Even on ordinary social occasions, when meeting this bloke as man to man and with a clear conscience, I could never be completely at my ease: and now those eyebrows seemed to pierce me like a knife.

‘Come in here,’ he said, lugging me into the room. ‘We don’t want to wake the whole house. ‘Now,’ he said, depositing me on the carpet and closing the door and doing a bit of eyebrow work, ‘kindly inform me what is this latest manifestation of insanity?’

It seemed to me that a light and cheery laugh might help the thing along. So I had a pop at one.

‘Don’t gibber!’ said my genial host. And I’m bound to admit that the light and cheery hadn’t come out quite as I’d intended.

I pulled myself together with a strong effort.

‘Awfully sorry about all this,’ I said in a hearty sort of voice. ‘The fact is, I thought you were Tuppy.’

‘Kindly refrain from inflicting your idiotic slang on me. What do you mean by the adjective “tuppy”?’

‘It isn’t so much an adjective, don’t you know. More of a noun, I should think, if you examine it squarely. What I mean to say is, I thought you were your nephew.’

‘You thought I was my nephew? Why should I be my nephew?’

‘What I’m driving at is, I thought this was his room.’

‘My nephew and I changed rooms. I have a great dislike for sleeping on an upper floor. I am nervous about fire.’

For the first time since this interview had started, I braced up a trifle. The injustice of the whole thing stirred me to such an extent that for a moment I lost that sense of being a toad under the harrow which had been cramping my style up till now. I even went so far as to eye this pink-pyjamed poltroon with a good deal of contempt and loathing. Just because he had this craven fear of fire and this selfish preference for letting Tuppy be cooked instead of himself should the emergency occur, my nice-reasoned plans had gone up the spout. I gave him a look, and I think I may even have snorted a bit.

‘I should have thought that your man-servant would have informed you,’ said Sir Roderick, ‘that we contemplated making this change. I met him shortly before luncheon and told him to tell you.’

I reeled. Yes, it is not too much to say that I reeled. This extraordinary statement had taken me amidships without any preparation, and it staggered me. That Jeeves had been aware all along that this old crumb would be the occupant of the bed which I was proposing to prod with darning-needles and had let me rush upon my doom without a word of warning was almost beyond belief. You might say I was aghast. Yes, practically aghast.

‘You told Jeeves that you were going to sleep in this room?’ I gasped.

‘I did. I was aware that you and my nephew were on terms of intimacy, and I wished to spare myself the possibility of a visit from you. I confess that it never occurred to me that such a visit was to be anticipated at three o’clock in the morning. What the devil do you mean,’ he barked, suddenly hotting up, ‘by prowling about the house at this hour? And what is that thing in your hand?’

I looked down, and found that I was still grasping the stick. I give you my honest word that, what with the maelstrom of emotions into which his revelation about Jeeves had cast me, the discovery came as an absolute surprise.

‘This?’ I said. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘What do you mean, Oh yes? What is it?’

‘Well, it’s a long story –’

‘We have the night before us.’

‘It’s this way. I will ask you to picture me some weeks ago, perfectly peaceful and inoffensive, after dinner at the Drones, smoking a thoughtful cigarette and –’

I broke off. The man wasn’t listening. He was goggling in a rapt sort of way at the end of the bed, from which there had now begun to drip onto the carpet a series of drops.

‘Good heavens!’

‘– thoughtful cigarette and chatting pleasantly of this and that –’

I broke off again. He had lifted the sheets and was gazing at the corpse of the hot-water bottle.

‘Did you do this?’ he said in a low, strangled sort of voice.

‘Er – yes. As a matter of fact, yes. I was just going to tell you –’

‘And your aunt tried to persuade me that you were not insane!’

‘I’m not. Absolutely not. If you’ll just let me explain.’

‘I will do nothing of the kind.’

‘It all began –’

‘Silence!’

‘Right-ho.’

He did some deep-breathing exercises through the nose.

‘My bed is drenched!’

‘The way it all began –’

‘Be quiet!’ He heaved somewhat for awhile. ‘You wretched, miserable idiot,’ he said, ‘kindly inform me which bedroom you are supposed to be occupying?’

‘It’s on the floor above. The Clock Room.’

‘Thank you. I will find it.’

‘Eh?’

He gave me the eyebrow.

‘I propose,’ he said, ‘to pass the remainder of the night in your room, where, I presume, there is a bed in a condition to be slept in. You may bestow yourself as comfortably as you can here. I will wish you good-night.’

He buzzed off, leaving me flat.

Well, we Woosters are old campaigners. We can take the rough with the smooth. But to say that I liked the prospect now before me would be paltering with the truth. One glance at the bed told me that any idea of sleeping there was out. A goldfish could have done it, but not Bertram. After a bit of a look round, I decided that the best chance of getting a sort of night’s rest was to doss as well as I could in
the
arm-chair. I pinched a couple of pillows off the bed, shoved the hearth-rug over my knees, and sat down and started counting sheep.

But it wasn’t any good. The old lemon was sizzling much too much to admit of anything in the nature of slumber. This hideous revelation of the blackness of Jeeves’s treachery kept coming back to me every time I nearly succeeded in dropping off: and, what’s more, it seemed to get colder and colder as the long night wore on. I was just wondering if I would ever get to sleep again in this world when a voice at my elbow said ‘Good-morning, sir’ and I sat up with a jerk.

I could have sworn I hadn’t so much as dozed off for even a minute, but apparently I had. For the curtains were drawn back and daylight was coming in through the window and there was Jeeves standing beside me with a cup of tea on a tray.

‘Merry Christmas, sir!’

I reached out a feeble hand for the restoring brew. I swallowed a mouthful or two, and felt a little better. I was aching in every limb and the dome felt like lead, but I was now able to think with a certain amount of clearness, and I fixed the man with a stony eye and prepared to let him have it.

‘You think so, do you?’ I said. ‘Much, let me tell you, depends on what you mean by the adjective “merry”. If, moreover, you suppose that it is going to be merry for you, correct that impression, Jeeves,’ I said, taking another half-oz of tea and speaking in a cold, measured voice, ‘I wish to ask you one question. Did you or did you not know that Sir Roderick Glossop was sleeping in this room last night?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You admit it!’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And you didn’t tell me!’

‘No, sir. I thought it would be more judicious not to do so.’

‘Jeeves –’

‘If you will allow me to explain, sir.’

‘Explain!’

‘I was aware that my silence might lead to something in the nature of an embarrassing contretemps, sir –’

‘You thought that, did you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You were a good guesser,’ I said, sucking down further Bohea.

‘But it seemed to me, sir, that whatever might occur was all for the best.’

I would have put in a crisp word or two here, but he carried on without giving me the opp.

‘I thought that possibly, on reflection, sir, your views being what they are, you would prefer your relations with Sir Roderick Glossop and his family to be distant rather than cordial.’

‘My views? What do you mean, my views?’

‘As regards a matrimonial alliance with Miss Honoria Glossop, sir.’

Something like an electric shock seemed to zip through me. The man had opened up a new line of thought. I suddenly saw what he was driving at, and realized all in a flash that I had been wronging this faithful fellow. All the while I supposed he had been landing me in the soup, he had really been steering me away from it. It was like those stories one used to read as a kid about the traveller going along on a dark night and his dog grabs him by the leg of his trousers and he says ‘Down, sir! What are you doing, Rover?’ and the dog hangs on and he gets rather hot under the collar and curses a bit but the dog won’t let him go and then suddenly the moon shines through the clouds and he finds he’s been standing on the edge of a precipice and one more step would have – well, anyway, you get the idea: and what I’m driving at is that much the same sort of thing seemed to have been happening now.

It’s perfectly amazing how a fellow will let himself get off his guard and ignore the perils which surround him. I give you my honest word, it had never struck me till this moment that my Aunt Agatha had been scheming to get me in right with Sir Roderick so that I should eventually be received back into the fold, if you see what I mean, and subsequently pushed off on Honoria.

‘My God, Jeeves!’ I said, paling.

‘Precisely, sir.’

‘You think there was a risk?’

‘I do, sir. A very grave risk.’

A disturbing thought struck me.

‘But, Jeeves, on calm reflection won’t Sir Roderick have gathered by now that my objective was young Tuppy and that puncturing his hot-water bottle was just one of those things that occur when the Yule-Tide Spirit is abroad – one of those things that have to be overlooked and taken with the indulgent smile and the fatherly shake of the head? I mean to say, Young Blood and all that sort of thing? What I mean is he’ll realize that I wasn’t trying to snooter him, and then all the good work will have been wasted.’

‘No, sir. I fancy not. That might possibly have been Sir Roderick’s mental reaction, had it not been for the second incident.’

‘The second incident?’

‘During the night, sir, while Sir Roderick was occupying your bed, somebody entered the room, pierced his hot-water bottle with some sharp instrument, and vanished in the darkness.’

I could make nothing of this.

‘What! Do you think I walked in my sleep?’

‘No, sir. It was young Mr Glossop who did it. I encountered him this morning, sir, shortly before I came here. He was in cheerful spirits and enquired of me how you were feeling about the incident. Not being aware that his victim had been Sir Roderick.’

‘But, Jeeves, what an amazing coincidence!’

‘Sir?’

‘Why, young Tuppy getting exactly the same idea as I did. Or, rather, as Miss Wickham did. You can’t say that’s not rummy. A miracle, I call it.’

‘Not altogether, sir. It appears that he received the suggestion from the young lady.’

‘From Miss Wickham?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You mean to say that, after she had put me up to the scheme of puncturing Tuppy’s hot-water bottle, she went away and tipped Tuppy off to puncturing mine?’

‘Precisely, sir. She is a young lady with a keen sense of humour, sir.’

I sat there, you might say stunned. When I thought how near I had come to offering the heart and hand to a girl capable of double-crossing a strong man’s honest love like that, I shivered.

‘Are you cold, sir?’

‘No, Jeeves. Just shuddering.’

‘The occurrence, if I may take the liberty of saying so, sir, will perhaps lend colour to the view which I put forward yesterday that Miss Wickham, though in many respects a charming young lady –’

I raised a hand.

‘Say no more, Jeeves,’ I replied. ‘Love is dead.’

‘Very good, sir.’

I brooded for a while.

‘You’ve seen Sir Roderick this morning, then?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How did he seem?’

‘A trifle feverish, sir.’

‘Feverish?’

‘A little emotional, sir. He expressed a strong desire to meet you, sir.’

‘What would you advise?’

‘If you were to slip out by the back entrance as soon as you are dressed, sir, it would be possible for you to make your way across the field without being observed and reach the village, where you could hire an automobile to take you to London. I could bring on your effects later in your own car.’

‘But London, Jeeves? Is any man safe? My Aunt Agatha is in London.’

‘Yes, sir.’