The Jeeves Omnibus (293 page)

‘I was the first in whom she confided. I got a good laugh out of that.’

‘More than Kipper did, because it hadn’t occurred to the cloth-headed young nitwit to confide in him. When he read the announcement, he reeled and everything went black. It knocked his faith in woman for a loop, and after seething for a while he sat down and wrote her a letter in the Thomas Otway vein.’

‘In the who’s vein?’

‘You are not familiar with Thomas Otway? Seventeenth-century dramatist, celebrated for making bitter cracks about the other sex. Wrote a play called
The Orphan
, which is full of them.’

‘So you do read something beside the comics?’

‘Well, actually I haven’t steeped myself to any great extent in Thos’s output, but Kipper told me about him. He held the view that women are a mess, and Kipper passed this information on to Bobbie in this letter of which I speak. It was a snorter.’

‘And you never thought of explaining to him, I suppose?’

‘Of course I did. But by that time she’d got the letter.’

‘Why didn’t the idiot tell her not to open it?’

‘It was his first move. “I’ve found a letter from you here, precious,” she said. “On no account open it, angel,” he said. So of course she opened it.’

She pursed the lips, nodded the loaf, and ate a moody piece of crumpet.

‘So that’s why he’s been going about looking like a dead fish. I suppose Roberta broke the engagement?’

‘In a speech lasting five minutes without a pause for breath.’

‘And you brought Jeeves along to mediate?’

‘That was the idea.’

‘But if things have gone as far as that …’

‘You doubt whether even Jeeves can heal the rift?’ I patted her on the top knot. ‘Dry the starting tear, old ancestor, it’s healed. I met her at a pub on the way here, and she told me that almost immediately after she had flipped her lid in the manner described she had a change of heart. She loves him still with a passion that’s more like boiling oil than anything, and when we parted she was tooling off to tell him so. By this time they must be like ham and eggs again. It’s a great burden off my mind, because, having parted brass rags with Kipper, she announced her intention of marrying me.’

‘A bit of luck for you, I should have thought.’

‘Far from it.’

‘Why? You were crazy about the girl once.’

‘But no longer. The fever has passed, the scales have fallen from my eyes, and we’re just good friends. The snag in this business of falling in love, aged relative, is that the parties of the first part so often get mixed up with the wrong parties of the second part, robbed of their cooler judgment by the parties of the second part’s glamour. Put it like this. The male sex is divided into rabbits and non-rabbits and the female sex into dashers and dormice, and the trouble is that the male rabbit has a way of getting attracted by the female dasher
(who
would be fine for the male non-rabbit) and realizing too late that he ought to have been concentrating on some mild, gentle dormouse with whom he could settle down peacefully and nibble lettuce.’

‘The whole thing, in short, a bit of a mix-up?’

‘Exactly. Take me and Bobbie. I yield to no one in my appreciation of her
espièglerie
, but I’m one of the rabbits and always have been while she is about as pronounced a dasher as ever dashed. What I like is the quiet life, and Roberta Wickham wouldn’t recognize the quiet life if you brought it to her on a plate with watercress round it. She’s all for not letting the sun go down without having started something calculated to stagger humanity. In a word, she needs the guiding hand, which is a thing I couldn’t supply her with. Whereas from Kipper she will get it in abundance, he being one of those tough non-rabbits for whom it is child’s play to make the little woman draw the line somewhere. That is why the union of these twain has my support and approval and why, when she told me all that in the pub, I felt like doing a buck-and-wing dance. Where is Kipper? I should like to shake him by the hand and pat his back.’

‘He went on a picnic with Wilbert and Phyllis.’

The significance of this did not escape me.

‘Tailing up stuff, eh? Right on the job, is he?’

‘Wilbert is constantly under his eye.’

‘And if ever a man needed to be constantly under an eye, it’s the above kleptomaniac.’

‘The what?’

‘Haven’t you been told? Wilbert’s a pincher.’

‘How do you mean, a pincher?’

‘He pinches things. Everything that isn’t nailed down is grist to his mill.’

‘Don’t be an ass.’

‘I’m not being an ass. He’s got Uncle Tom’s cow-creamer.’

‘I know.’

‘You know?’

‘Of course I know.’

Her … what’s the word? … phlegm, is it?… something beginning with a p … astounded me. I had expected to freeze her young – or, rather, middle-aged – blood and have her perm stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine, and she hadn’t moved a muscle.

‘Beshrew me,’ I said, ‘you take it pretty calmly.’

‘Well, what’s there to get excited about? Tom sold him the thing.’

‘What?’

‘Wilbert got in touch with him at Harrogate and put in his bid, and Tom phoned me to give it to him. Just shows how important that deal must be to Tom. I’d have thought he would rather have parted with his eyeteeth.’

I drew a deep breath, this time fortunately unmixed with gin and tonic. I was profoundly stirred.

‘You mean,’ I said, my voice quavering like that of a coloratura soprano, ‘that I went through that soul-shattering experience all for nothing?’

‘Who’s been shattering your soul, if any?’

‘Ma Cream. By popping in while I was searching Wilbert’s room for the loathsome object. Naturally I thought he’d swiped it and hidden it there.’

‘And she caught you?’

‘Not once, but twice.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She recommended me to take treatment from Roddy Glossop, of whose skill in ministering to the mentally afflicted she had heard such good reports. One sees what gave her the idea. I was half-way under the dressing-table at the moment, and no doubt she thought it odd.’

‘Bertie! How absolutely priceless!’

The adjective ‘priceless’ seemed to me an ill-chosen one, and I said so. But my words were lost in the gale of mirth into which she now exploded. I had never heard anyone laugh so heartily, not even Bobbie on the occasion when the rake jumped up and hit me on the tip of the nose.

‘I’d have given fifty quid to have been there,’ she said, when she was able to get the vocal cords working. ‘Half-way under the dressing-table, were you?’

‘The second time. When we first forgathered, I was sitting on the floor with a chair round my neck.’

‘Like an Elizabethan ruff, as worn by Thomas Botway.’

‘Otway,’ I said stiffly. As I have mentioned, I like to get things right. And I was about to tell her that what I had hoped for from a blood relation was sympathy and condolence rather than this crackling of thorns under a pot, as it is sometimes called, when the door opened and Bobbie came in.

The moment I cast an eye on her, it seemed to me that there was something strange about her aspect. Normally, this beasel presents to the world the appearance of one who is feeling that if it isn’t the best of all possible worlds, it’s quite good enough to be going on with till a better one comes along. Verve, I mean, and animation and all that
sort
of thing. But now there was a listlessness about her, not the listlessness of the cat Augustus but more that of the female in the picture in the Louvre, of whom Jeeves, on the occasion when he lugged me there to take a dekko at her, said that here was the head upon which all the ends of the world are come. He drew my attention, I remember, to the weariness of the eyelids. I got just the same impression of weariness from Bobbie’s eyelids.

Unparting her lips which were set in a thin line as if she had just been taking a suck at a lemon, she said:

‘I came to get that book of Mrs Cream’s that I was reading, Mrs. Travers.’

‘Help yourself, child,’ said the ancestor. ‘The more people in this joint reading her stuff, the better. It all goes to help the composition.’

‘So you got here all right, Bobbie,’ I said. ‘Have you seen Kipper?’

I wouldn’t say she snorted, but she certainly sniffed.

‘Bertie,’ she said in a voice straight from the Frigidaire, ‘will you do me a favour?’

‘Of course. What?’

‘Don’t mention that rat’s name in my presence,’ she said, and pushed off, the eyelids still weary.

She left me fogged and groping for the inner meaning, and I could see from Aunt Dahlia’s goggling eyes that the basic idea hadn’t got across with her either.

‘Well!’ she said. ‘What’s all this? I thought you told me she loved young Herring with a passion like boiling oil.’

‘That was her story.’

‘The oil seems to have gone off the boil. Yes, sir, if that was the language of love, I’ll eat my hat,’ said the blood relation, alluding, I took it, to the beastly straw contraption in which she does her gardening, concerning which I can only say that it is almost as foul as Uncle Tom’s Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, which has frightened more crows than any other lid in Worcestershire. ‘They must have had a fight.’

‘It does look like it,’ I agreed, ‘and I don’t understand how it can have happened considering that she left me with the love light in her eyes and can’t have been back here more than about half an hour. What, one asks oneself, in so short a time can have changed a girl full of love and ginger ale into a girl who speaks of the adored object as “that rat” and doesn’t want to hear his name mentioned? These are deep waters. Should I send for Jeeves?’

‘What on earth can Jeeves do?’

‘Well, now you put it that way, I’m bound to admit that I don’t know. It’s just that one drops into the habit of sending for Jeeves whenever things have gone agley, if that’s the word I’m thinking of. Scotch, isn’t it? Agley, I mean. It sounds Scotch to me. However, passing lightly over that, the thing to do when you want the low-down is to go to the fountainhead and get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Kipper can solve this mystery. I’ll pop along and find him.’

I was, however, spared the trouble of popping, for at this moment he entered left centre.

‘Oh, there you are, Bertie,’ he said. ‘I heard you were back. I was looking for you.’

He had spoken in a low, husky sort of way, like a voice from the tomb, and I now saw that he was exhibiting all the earmarks of a man who has recently had a bomb explode in his vicinity. His shoulders sagged and his eyes were glassy. He looked, in short, like the fellow who hadn’t started to take Old Doctor Gordon’s Bile Magnesia, and I snapped into it without preamble. This was no time for being tactful and pretending not to notice.

‘What’s all this strained-relations stuff between you and Bobbie, Kipper?’ I said, and when he said, ‘Oh, nothing,’ rapped the table sharply and told him to cut out the coy stuff and come clean.

‘Yes,’ said Aunt Dahlia. ‘What’s happened, young Herring?’

I think for a moment he was about to draw himself up with hauteur and say he would prefer, if we didn’t mind, not to discuss his private affairs, but when he was half-way up he caught Aunt Dahlia’s eye and returned to position one. Aunt Dahlia’s eye, while not in the same class as that of my Aunt Agatha, who is known to devour her young and conduct human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, has lots of authority. He subsided into a chair and sat there looking filleted.

‘Well, if you must know,’ he said, ‘she’s broken the engagement.’

This didn’t get us any farther. We had assumed as much. You don’t go calling people rats if love still lingers.

‘But it’s only an hour or so,’ I said, ‘since I left her outside a hostelry called the “Fox and Goose”, and she had just been giving you a rave notice. What came unstuck? What did you do to the girl?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘Come, come!’

‘Well, it was this way.’

There was a pause here while he said that he would give a hundred quid for a stiff whisky-and-soda, but as this would have involved all the delay of ringing for Pop Glossop and having it fetched from the lowest bin, Aunt Dahlia would have none of it. In lieu of the desired
refreshment
she offered him a cold crumpet, which he declined, and told him to get on with it.

‘Where I went wrong,’ he said, still speaking in that low, husky voice as if he had been a ghost suffering from catarrh, ‘was in getting engaged to Phyllis Mills.’

‘What?’ I cried.

‘What?’ cried Aunt Dahlia.

‘Egad!’ I said.

‘What on earth did you do that for?’ said Aunt Dahlia.

He shifted uneasily in his chair, like a man troubled with ants in the pants.

‘It seemed a good idea at the time,’ he said. ‘Bobbie had told me on the telephone that she never wanted to speak to me again in this world or the next, and Phyllis had been telling me that, while she shrank from Wilbert Cream because of his murky past, she found him so magnetic that she knew she wouldn’t be able to refuse him if he proposed, and I had been commissioned to stop him proposing, so I thought the simplest thing to do was to get engaged to her myself. So we talked it over, and having reached a thorough understanding that it was simply a ruse and nothing binding on either side, we announced it to Cream.’

‘Very shrewd,’ said Aunt Dahlia. ‘How did he take it?’

‘He reeled.’

‘Lot of reeling there’s been in this business,’ I said. ‘You reeled, if you recollect, when you remembered you’d written that letter to Bobbie.’

‘And I reeled again when she suddenly appeared from nowhere just as I was kissing Phyllis.’

I pursed the lips. Getting a bit French, this sequence, it seemed to me.

‘There was no need for you to do that.’

‘No need, perhaps, but I wanted to make it look natural to Cream.’

‘Oh, I see. Driving it home, as it were?’

‘That was the idea. Of course I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known that Bobbie had changed her mind and wanted things to be as they were before that telephone conversation. But I didn’t know. It’s just one of life’s little ironies. You get the same sort of thing in Thomas Hardy.’