The Jeeves Omnibus (270 page)

There was a cupboard on the other side of the room, and she nipped across and flung open the door.

‘Quick!’ she hissed, and it’s all rot to say you can’t hiss a word that hasn’t an ‘s’ in it. She did it on her head.

‘In here!’

The suggestion struck me as a good one. I popped in and she closed the door behind me.

Well, actually, the fingers being, I suppose, nerveless, she didn’t, but left it ajar. I was able, consequently, to follow the ensuing conversation as clearly as if it had been coming over the wireless.

Stilton began it.

‘Here are your letters,’ he said stiffly.

‘Thank you,’ she said stiffly.

‘Don’t mention it,’ he said stiffly.

‘Put them on the dressing-table,’ she said stiffly.

‘Right ho!’ he said stiffly.

I don’t know when I’ve known a bigger night for stiff speakers.

After a brief interval, during which I presumed that he was depositing the correspondence as directed, Stilton resumed.

‘You got my telegram?’

‘Of course I got your telegram.’

‘You notice I have shaved my moustache?’

‘I do.’

‘It was my first move on finding out about your underhanded skulduggery.’

‘What do you mean, my underhanded skulduggery?’

‘If you don’t call it underhanded skulduggery, sneaking off to night clubs with the louse Wooster, it would be extremely entertaining to be informed how you would describe it.’

‘You know perfectly well that I wanted atmosphere for my book.’

‘Ho!’

‘And don’t say “Ho”.’

‘I will say “Ho”!’ retorted Stilton with spirit. ‘Your book, my foot! I don’t believe there is any book. I don’t believe you’ve ever written a book.’

‘Indeed? How about
Spindrift
, now in its fifth edition and soon to be translated into the Scandinavian?’

‘Probably the work of the louse Gorringe.’

I imagine that at this coarse insult Florence’s eyes flashed fire. The voice in which she spoke certainly suggested it.

‘Mr. Cheesewright, you have had a couple!’

‘Nothing of the kind.’

‘Then you must be insane, and I wish you would have the courtesy to take that pumpkin head of yours out of here.’

I rather think, though I can’t be sure, that at these words Stilton ground his teeth. Certainly there was a peculiar sound, as if a coffee mill had sprung into action. The voice that filtered through to my cosy retreat quivered hoarsely.

‘My head is not like a pumpkin!’

‘It is, too, like a pumpkin.’

‘It is not like a pumpkin at all. I have this on the authority of Bertie Wooster, who says it is more like the dome of St. Paul’s.’ He broke off, and there was a smacking sound. He had apparently smitten his brow. ‘Wooster!’ he cried, emitting an animal snarl. ‘I didn’t come here to talk about my head, I came to talk about Wooster, the slithery serpent who slinks behind chaps’ backs, stealing fellows’ girls from them. Wooster the home-wrecker! Wooster the snake in the grass from whom no woman is safe! Wooster the modern Don what’s-his-name! You’ve been conducting a clandestine intrigue with him right along. You thought you were fooling me, didn’t you? You thought I didn’t see through your pitiful … your pitiful … Dammit, what’s the word?… your pitiful … No, it’s gone.’

‘I wish you would follow its excellent example.’

‘Subterfuges! I knew I’d get it. Do you think I didn’t see through your pitiful subterfuges? All that bilge about wanting me to grow a moustache. Do you think I’m not on to it that the whole of that moustache sequence was just a ruse to enable you to break it off with me and switch over to the grass snake Wooster? “How can I get rid of this Cheesewright?” you said to yourself. “Ha, I have it!” you said to yourself. “I’ll tell him he’s got to grow a moustache. He’ll say like hell he’ll grow any bally moustache. And then I’ll say Ho! You won’t, won’t you? All right, then all is over between us. That’ll fix it.” It
must
have been a nasty shock to you when I yielded to your request. Upset your plans quite a bit, I imagine? You hadn’t bargained for that, had you?’

Florence spoke in a voice that would have frozen an Eskimo.

‘The door is just behind you, Mr. Cheesewright. It opens if you turn the handle.’

He came right back at her.

‘Never mind the door. I’m talking about you and the leper Wooster. I suppose you will now hitch on to him, or what’s left of him after I’ve finished stepping on his face. Am I right?’

‘You are.’

‘It is your intention to marry this human gumboil?’

‘It is.’

‘Ho!’

Well, I don’t know how you would have behaved in my place, hearing these words and realizing for the first time that the evil had spread as far as this. You would probably have started violently, as I did. No doubt I ought to have spotted the impending doom, but for some reason or other, possibly because I had been devoting so much thought to Stilton, I hadn’t. This abrupt announcement of my betrothal to a girl of whom I took the gravest view shook me to my depths, with the result, as I say, that I started violently.

And, of course, the one place where it is unwise to start violently, if you wish to remain unobserved and incognito, is a cupboard in a female’s bedroom. What exactly it was that now rained down on me, dislodged by my sudden movement, I cannot say, but I think it was hat-boxes. Whatever it was, it sounded in the stilly night like coal being lowered down a chute into a cellar, and I heard a sharp exclamation. A moment later a hand wrenched open the door and a suffused face glared in on me as I brushed the hat-boxes, if they were hat-boxes, from my hair.

‘Ho!’ said Stilton, speaking with difficulty like a cat with a fishbone in its throat. ‘Come on out of there, serpent,’ he added, attaching himself to my left ear and pulling vigorously.

I emerged like a cork out of a bottle.

IT IS ALWAYS
a bit difficult to know just what to say on occasions like this. I said, ‘Oh, there you are, Stilton. Nice evening’, but it seemed to be the wrong thing, for he merely quivered as if he had got a beetle down his back and increased the incandescence of his gaze. I saw that it was going to require quite a good deal of suavity and tact on my part to put us all at our ease.

‘You are doubtless surprised –’ I began, but he held up a hand as if he had been back in the Force directing the traffic. He then spoke in a quiet, if rumbling, voice.

‘You will find me waiting in the corridor, Wooster,’ he said, and strode out.

I understood the spirit which had prompted the words. It was the
preux chevalier
in him coming to the surface. You can stir up a Cheesewright till he froths at the mouth, but you cannot make him forget that he is an Old Etonian and a pukka Sahib. Old Etonians do not brawl in the presence of the other sex. Nor do pukka Sahibs. They wait till they are alone with the party of the second part in some secluded nook.

I thoroughly approved of this fineness of feeling, for it had left me sitting on top of the world. It would now, I saw, be possible for me to avoid anything in the nature of unpleasantness by executing one of those subtle rearward movements which great Generals keep up their sleeves for moments when things are beginning to get too hot. You think you have got one of these Generals cornered and are all ready to swoop on him, and it is with surprise and chagrin that, just as you are pulling up your socks and putting a final polish on your weapons, you observe that he isn’t there. He has withdrawn on his strategic railway, taking his troops with him.

With that ladder waiting in readiness for me, I was in a similarly agreeable position. Corridors meant nothing to me. I didn’t need to go into any corridors. All I had to do was slide through the window, place my foot on the top rung and carry on with a light heart to terra firma.

But there is one circumstance which can dish the greatest of Generals – viz. if, toddling along to the station to buy his ticket, he finds that since he last saw it the strategic railway has been blown up. That is the time when you will find him scratching his head and chewing the lower lip. And it was a disaster of this nature that now dished me. Approaching the window and glancing out, I saw that the ladder was no longer there. At some point in the course of the recent conversations it had vanished, leaving not a wrack behind.

What had become of it was a mystery I found myself unable to solve, but that was a thing that could be gone into later. At the moment it was plain that the cream of the Wooster brain must be given to a more urgent matter – to wit, the question of how I was to get out of the room without passing through the door and finding myself alone in a confined space with Stilton, the last person in his present frame of mind with whom a man of slender physique would wish to be alone in confined spaces. I put this to Florence, and she agreed, like Sherlock Holmes, that the problem was one which undoubtedly presented certain points of interest.

‘You can’t stay here all night,’ she said.

I admitted the justice of this, but added that I didn’t at the moment see what the dickens else I could do.

‘You wouldn’t care to knot your sheets and lower me to the ground with them?’

‘No, I wouldn’t. Why don’t you jump?’

‘And smash myself to hash?’

‘You might not.’

‘On the other hand, I might.’

‘Well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’

I gave her a look. It seemed to me the silliest thing I had ever heard a girl say, and I have heard girls say some pretty silly things in my time. I was on the point of saying ‘You and your bally omelettes!’ when something seemed to go off with a pop in my brain and it was as though I had swallowed a brimming dose of some invigorating tonic, the sort of pick-me-up that makes a bedridden invalid rise from his couch and dance the Carioca. Bertram was himself again. With a steady hand I opened the door. And when Stilton advanced on me like a mass murderer about to do his stuff, I quelled him with the power of the human eye.

‘Just a moment, Stilton,’ I said suavely. ‘Before you give rein, if that’s the expression I want, to your angry passions, don’t forget you’ve drawn me in the Drones Club Darts sweep.’

It was enough. Halting abruptly, as if he had walked into a lamp-post, he stood goggling like a cat in an adage. Cats in adages, Jeeves tells me, let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’, and I could see with the naked eye that this was what Stilton was doing.

Flicking a speck of dust from my sleeve and smiling a quiet smile, I proceeded to rub it in.

‘You appreciate the position of affairs?’ I said. ‘By drawing my name, you have set yourself apart from ordinary men. To make it clear to the meanest intelligence … I allude to yours, my dear Cheesewright … where the ordinary man, seeing me strolling along Piccadilly, merely says “Ah, there goes Bertie Wooster”, you, having drawn me in the sweep, say “There goes my fifty-six pounds ten shillings”, and you probably run after me to tell me to be very careful when crossing the street because the traffic nowadays is so dangerous.’

He raised a hand and fingered his chin. I could see that my words were not being wasted. Shooting my cuffs, I resumed.

‘In what sort of condition shall I be to win that Darts tourney and put nearly sixty quid in your pocket, if you pull the strong-arm stuff you are contemplating? Try that one on your bazooka, my dear Cheesewright.’

It was a tense struggle, of course, but it didn’t last long. Reason prevailed. With a low grunt which spoke eloquently of the overwrought soul, he stepped back, and with a cheery ‘Well, good night, old man’ and a benevolent wave of the hand I left him and made my way to my room.

As I entered it, Aunt Dahlia in a maroon dressing-gown rose from the chair in which she had been sitting and fixed me with a blazing eye, struggling for utterance.

‘Well!’ she said, choking on the word like a Pekingese on a chump chop too large for its frail strength. After which, speech failing her, she merely stood and gargled.

I must say that this struck me as in the circs a bit thick. I mean, if anyone was entitled to have blazing eyes and trouble with the vocal cords, it was, as I saw it, me. I mean, consider the facts. Owing to this woman’s cloth-headed blundering when issuing divisional orders, I was slated to walk down the aisle with Florence Craye and had been subjected to an ordeal which might well have done permanent damage to the delicate nerve centres. I was strongly of the opinion that so far from being glared and gargled at I was in a position to demand a categorical explanation and to see that I got it.

As I cleared my throat in order to put this to her, she mastered her emotion sufficiently to be able to speak.

‘Well!’ she said, looking like a female minor prophet about to curse the sins of the people. ‘May I trespass on your valuable time long enough to ask you what in the name of everything bloodsome you think you’re playing at, young piefaced Bertie? It is now some twenty minutes past one o’clock in the morning, and not a spot of action on your part. Do you expect me to sit up all night waiting for you to get around to a simple, easy task which a crippled child of six could have had all done and washed up in a quarter of an hour? I suppose this is just the shank of the evening to you dissipated Londoners, but we rustics like to get our sleep. What’s the idea? Why the delay? What on earth have you been doing all this while, you revolting young piece of cheese?’

I laughed a hollow, mirthless laugh. Getting quite the wrong angle on it, she begged me to postpone my farmyard imitations to a more suitable moment. I told myself that I must be calm … calm.

‘Before replying to your questions, aged relative,’ I said, holding myself in with a strong effort, ‘let me put one to you. Would you mind informing me in a few simple words why you told me that your window was the end one on the left?’

‘It is the end one on the left.’

‘Pardon me.’

‘Looking from the house.’

‘Oh, looking
from
the house?’ A great light dawned on me. ‘I thought you meant looking
at
the house.’

‘Looking at the house it would of course be …’ She broke off with a startled yowl, staring at me with quite a good deal of that wild surmise stuff. ‘Don’t tell me you got into the wrong room?’