The Jeeves Omnibus (265 page)

‘I’ll bet you cribbed.’

‘Not at all. My triumph was due to sheer merit. But, getting back to it, how did you induce Uncle Tom to scare the moths from his pocket-book? It must have required quite a scuttleful of wifely wiles on your part?’

I wouldn’t like to say of a loved aunt that she giggled, but unquestionably the sound that proceeded from her lips closely resembled a giggle.

‘Oh, I managed.’

‘But how?’

‘Never mind how, you pestilential young Nosy Parker. I managed.’

‘I see,’ I said, letting it go. Something told me she did not wish to spill the data. ‘And how is the Trotter deal coming along?’

I seemed to have touched an exposed nerve. The giggle died on her lips, and her face – always, as I have said, on the reddish side – deepened in colour to a rich mauve.

‘Blister his blighted insides!’ she said, speaking with the explosive heat which had once made fellow-members of the Quorn and Pytchley leap convulsively in their saddles. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with the son of Belial. Here he is, with nine of Anatole’s lunches and eight of Anatole’s dinners tucked away among the gastric juices, and he refuses to get down to brass tacks. He hums –’

‘What on earth does he do that for?’

‘– and haws. He evades the issue. I strain every nerve to make him talk turkey, but I can’t pin him down. He doesn’t say Yes and he doesn’t say No.’

‘There’s a song called that … or, rather, “She didn’t say Yes and she didn’t say No”. I sing it a good deal in my bath. It goes like this.’

I started to render the refrain in a pleasant light baritone, but desisted on receiving Agatha Christie abaft the frontal bone. The old relative seemed to have fired from the hip like somebody in a Western B. picture.

‘Don’t try me too high, Bertie dear,’ she said gently, and fell into what looked like a reverie. ‘Do you know what I think is the trouble?’ she went on, coming out of it. ‘I believe Ma Trotter is responsible for this non-co-operation of his. For some reason she doesn’t want him to put the deal through, and has told him he mustn’t. It’s the only explanation I can think of. When I met him at Agatha’s, he spoke as if it were just a matter of arranging terms, but these last few days he has come over all coy, as if acting under orders from up top. When you stood them dinner that night, did he strike you as being crushed beneath her heel?’

‘Very much so. He wept with delight when she gave him a smile and trembled with fear at her frown. But why would she object to him buying the
Boudoir
?’

‘Don’t ask me. It’s a complete mystery.’

‘You haven’t put her back up somehow since she got here?’

‘Certainly not. I’ve been fascinating.’

‘And yet there it is, what?’

‘Exactly. There it blasted well is, curse it!’

I heaved a sympathetic sigh. Mine is a tender heart, easily wrung, and the spectacle of this good old egg mourning over what might have been had wrung it like a ton of bricks.

‘Too bad,’ I said. ‘One had hoped for better things.’

‘One had,’ she assented. ‘I was so sure that Morehead serial would have brought home the bacon.’

‘Of course, he may be just thinking it over.’

‘That’s true.’

‘A fellow thinking it over would naturally hum.’

‘And haw?’

‘And, possibly, also haw. You could scarcely expect him to do less.’

We would no doubt have proceeded to go more deeply into the matter, subjecting this humming and hawing of L.G. Trotter’s to a close analysis, but at this moment the door opened and a careworn face peered in, a face disfigured on either side by short whiskers and in the middle by tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles.

‘I say,’ said the face, contorted with anguish, ‘have you seen Florence?’

Aunt Dahlia replied that she had not been privileged to do so since lunch.

‘I thought she might be with you.’

‘She isn’t.’

‘Oh,’ said the face, still running the gamut of the emotions, and began to recede.

‘Hey!’ cried Aunt Dahlia, arresting it as it was about to disappear. She went to the desk and picked up a buff envelope. ‘This telegram came for her just now. Will you give it to her if you see her. And while you’re here, meet my nephew Bertie Wooster, the pride of Piccadilly.’

Well, I hadn’t expected him on learning of my identity to dance about the room on the tips of his toes, and he didn’t. He gave me a long, reproachful look, similar in its essentials to that which a black beetle gives a cook when the latter is sprinkling insect powder on it.

‘I have corresponded with Mr. Wooster,’ he said coldly. ‘We have also spoken on the telephone.’

He turned and was gone, gazing at me reproachfully to the last. It was plain that the Gorringes did not lightly forget.

‘That was Percy,’ said Aunt Dahlia.

I replied that I had divined as much.

‘Did you notice how he looked when he said “Florence”? Like a dying duck in a thunderstorm.’

‘And did you notice,’ I inquired in my turn, ‘how he looked when you said “Bertie Wooster”? Like someone finding a dead mouse in his pint of beer. Not a bonhomous bird. Not my type.’

‘No. You would scarcely suppose that even a mother could view him without nausea, would you? And yet he is the apple of Ma Trotter’s eye. She loves him as much as she hates Mrs. Alderman Blenkinsop. Did she touch on Mrs. Alderman Blenkinsop at that dinner of yours?’

‘At several points during the meal. Who is she?’

‘Her bitterest social rival up in Liverpool.’

‘Do they have social rivals up in Liverpool?’

‘You bet they do, in droves. I gather that it is nip and tuck between the Trotter and the Blenkinsop as to who shall be the uncrowned queen of Liverpudlian society. Sometimes one gets her nose in front, sometimes the other. It’s like what one used to read about the death struggles for supremacy in New York’s Four Hundred in the old days. But why am I telling you all this? You ought to be out there in the sunset, racing after Percy and bucking him up with your off-colour stories. You have a fund of off-colour stories, I presume?’

‘Oh, rather.’

‘Then get going, laddie. Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our English dead. Yoicks! Tally-ho! Hark for’ard!’ she added, reverting to the argot of the hunting field.

Well, when Aunt Dahlia tells you to get going, you get going, if you know what’s good for you. But I was in no cheery mood as I made my way into the great open spaces. That look of Percy’s had told me he was going to be a hard audience. It had had in it much of the austerity which I had noticed in Stilton Cheesewright’s Uncle Joseph during our get-together at Vinton Street police court.

It was with not a little satisfaction, accordingly, that I found on arriving in the open no signs of him. Relieved, I abandoned the chase and started to stroll hither and thither, taking the air. And I hadn’t taken much of it, when there he was, rounding a rhododendron bush in my very path.

IF IT HADN’T
been for the whiskers, I don’t believe I would have recognized him. It was only about ten minutes since he had shoved his face in at the door of Aunt Dahlia’s lair, but in that brief interval his whole aspect had changed. No longer the downcast duck in a thunderstorm from whom I had so recently parted, he had become gay and bobbish. His air was jaunty, his smile bright, and there was in his demeanour more than a suggestion of a man who might at any moment break into a tap dance. It was as if he had spent a considerable time watching that trick of Freddie Widgeon’s with the two corks and the bit of string.

‘Hullo there, Wooster,’ he cried buoyantly, and you would have supposed that finding Bertram in his midst had just about made his day. ‘Taking a stroll, eh?’

I said Yes I was taking a stroll, and he beamed as though feeling that I could have pursued no wiser and more admirable course. ‘Sensible chap, Wooster,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘He takes strolls.’

There was a short intermission here, during which he looked at me lovingly and slid his feet about a bit in the manner of one trying out dance steps. Then he said it was a beautiful evening, and I endorsed this.

‘The sunset,’ he said, indicating it.

‘Very fruity,’ I agreed, for the whole horizon was aflame with glorious Technicolor.

‘Seeing it,’ he said, ‘I am reminded of a poem I wrote the other day for
Parnassus
. Just a little thing I dashed off. You might care to hear it.’

‘Oh, rather.’

‘It’s called “Caliban at Sunset”.’

‘What at sunset?’

‘Caliban.’

He cleared his throat, and began:

I stood with a man

Watching the sun go down.

The air was full of murmurous summer scents

And a brave breeze sang like a bugle

From a sky that smouldered in the west,

A sky of crimson, amethyst and gold and sepia

And blue as blue as were the eyes of Helen

When she sat

Gazing from some high tower in Ilium

Upon the Grecian tents darkling below.

And he,

This man who stood beside me,

Gaped like some dull, half-witted animal

And said,

‘I say,

Doesn’t that sunset remind you

Of a slice

Of underdone roast beef?’

He opened his eyes, which he had closed in order to render the
morceau
more effectively.

‘Bitter, of course.’

‘Oh, frightfully bitter.’

‘I was feeling bitter when I wrote it. I think you know a man named Cheesewright. It was he I had in mind. Actually, we had never stood watching a sunset together, but I felt it was just the sort of thing he would have said if he had been watching a sunset, if you see what I mean. Am I right?’

‘Quite right.’

‘A soulless clod, don’t you think?’

‘Soulless to the core.’

‘No finer feelings?’

‘None.’

‘Would I be correct in describing him as a pumpkin-headed oaf?’

‘Quite correct.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she is well out of it.’

‘She?’

‘Florence.’

‘Oh, ah. Well out of what?’

He eyed me speculatively, heaving gently like a saucepan of porridge about to reach the height of its fever. I am a man who can observe and deduce, and it was plain to me, watching him sizzle, that something had happened pretty recently in his affairs which had churned him up like a seidlitz powder, leaving him with but two
alternatives
– (
a
) to burst where he stood and (
b
) to decant his pent-up emotions on the first human being who came along. No doubt he would have preferred this human being to have been of a non-Wooster nature, but one imagines that he was saying to himself that you can’t have everything and that he was in no position to pick and choose.

He decided on Alternative B.

‘Wooster,’ he said, placing a hand on my shoulder, ‘may I ask you a question? Has your aunt told you that I love Florence Craye?’

‘She did mention it, yes.’

‘I thought she might have done. She is not what I would call a reticent woman, though of course with many excellent qualities. I was forced to take her into my confidence soon after my arrival here, because she asked me why the devil I was going about looking like a dead codfish.’

‘Or like Hamlet?’

‘Hamlet or a dead codfish. The point is immaterial. I confessed to her that it was because I loved Florence with a consuming passion and had discovered that she was engaged to the oaf Cheesewright. It had been, I explained, as if I had received a crushing blow on the head.’

‘Like Sir Eustace Willoughby.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘In
The Mystery of the Pink Crayfish
. He was conked on the bean in his library one night, and if you ask me it was the butler who did it. But I interrupted you.’

‘You did.’

‘I’m sorry. You were saying it was as if you had received a crushing blow on the head.’

‘Exactly. I reeled beneath the shock.’

‘Must have been a nasty jar.’

‘It was. I was stunned. But now … You remember that telegram your aunt gave me to give to Florence?’

‘Ah, yes, the telegram.’

‘It was from Cheesewright, breaking the engagement.’

I had no means of knowing, of course, what his form was when reeling beneath shocks, but I doubted whether he could have put up a performance topping mine as I heard these words. The sunset swayed before my eyes as if it were doing the shimmy, and a bird close by which was getting outside its evening worm looked for an instant like two birds, both flickering.

‘What!’ I gurgled, rocking on my base.

‘Yes.’

‘He’s broken the engagement?’

‘Precisely.’

‘Oh, golly! Why?’

He shook his head.

‘Ah, that I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that I found Florence in the stable yard tickling a cat behind the ear, and I came up and said “Here’s a telegram for you”, and she said “Really? I suppose it’s from D’Arcy”. I shuddered at the name, and while I was shuddering, she opened the envelope. It was a long telegram, but she had not read more than the first words when she uttered a sharp cry. “Bad news?” I queried. Her eyes flashed, and a cold, proud look came into her face. “Not at all,” she replied. “Splendid news. D’Arcy Cheesewright has broken the engagement.”’

‘Gosh!’

‘You may well say “Gosh!”’

‘She didn’t tell you any more than that?’

‘No. She said one or two incisive things about Cheesewright with which I thoroughly concurred and strode off in the direction of the kitchen garden. And I came away, walking, as you may well imagine, on air. I deprecate the modern tendency to use slang, but I am not ashamed to confess that what I was saying to myself was the word “Whoopee!” Excuse me, Wooster, I must now leave you. I can’t keep still.’

And with these words he pranced off like a mustang, leaving me to face the changed conditions alone.

It was with a brooding sense of peril that I did so. And if you are saying ‘But why, Wooster? Surely everything is pretty smooth? What matter if the girl’s nuptials with Cheesewright have been cancelled, when here is Percy Gorringe all ready and eager to take up the white man’s burden?’ I reply ‘Ah, but you’ve not seen Percy Gorringe’. I mean to say, I couldn’t picture Florence, however much on the rebound, accepting the addresses of a man who voluntarily wore side-whiskers and wrote poems about sunsets. Far more likely, it seemed to me, that having a vacant date on her hands she would once again reach out for the old and tried – viz. poor old Bertram. It was what she had done before, and these things tend to become a habit.