The Jeeves Omnibus (303 page)

‘You have,’ I assured him. ‘What brings you to the metrop?’

‘I came up for a Harlequins committee meeting.’

‘And how were they all?’

‘Oh, fine.’

‘That’s good. I’ve been worrying myself sick about the Harlequins committee. Well, how have you been keeping, Stinker?’

‘I’ve been all right.’

‘Are you free for dinner?’

‘Sorry, I’ve got to get back to Totleigh.’

‘Too bad. Jeeves tells me Sir Watkyn and Madeline and Stiffy have been staying with my aunt at Brinkley.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have they returned?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how’s Stiffy?’

‘Oh, fine.’

‘And Bartholomew?’

‘Oh, fine.’

‘And your parishioners? Going strong, I trust?’

‘Oh yes, they’re fine.’

I wonder if anything strikes you about the slice of give-and-take I’ve just recorded. No? Oh, surely. I mean, here were we, Stinker Pinker and Bertram Wooster, buddies who had known each other virtually from the egg, and we were talking like a couple of strangers making conversation on a train. At least, he was, and more and more I became convinced that his bosom was full of the perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart, as I remember Jeeves putting it once.

I persevered in my efforts to uncork him.

‘Well, Stinker,’ I said, ‘what’s new? Has Pop Bassett given you that vicarage yet?’

This caused him to open up a bit. His manner became more animated.

‘No, not yet. He doesn’t seem able to make up his mind. One day he says he will, the next day he says he’s not so sure, he’ll have to think it over.’

I frowned. I disapproved of this shilly-shallying. I could see how it must be throwing a spanner into Stinker’s whole foreign policy, putting him in a spot and causing him alarm and despondency. He can’t marry Stiffy on a curate’s stipend, so they’ve got to wait till Pop Bassett gives him a vicarage which he has in his gift. And while I personally, though fond of the young gumboil, would run a mile in tight shoes to avoid marrying Stiffy, I knew him to be strongly in favour of signing her up.

‘Something always happens to put him off. I think he was about ready to close the deal before he went to stay at Brinkley, but most unfortunately I bumped into a valuable vase of his and broke it. It seemed to rankle rather.’

I heaved a sigh. It’s always what Jeeves would call most disturbing to hear that a chap with whom you have plucked the gowans fine, as the expression is, isn’t making out as well as could be wished. I was all set to follow this Pinker’s career with considerable interest, but the way things were shaping it began to look as if there wasn’t going to be a career to follow.

‘You move in a mysterious way your wonders to perform, Stinker. I believe you would bump into something if you were crossing the Gobi desert.’

‘I’ve never been in the Gobi desert.’

‘Well, don’t go. It isn’t safe. I suppose Stiffy’s sore about this … what’s the word? … Not vaseline … Vacillation, that’s it. She chafes, I imagine, at this vacillation on Bassett’s part and resents him letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would”, like the poor cat in the adage. Not my own, that, by the way. Jeeves’s. Pretty steamed up, is she?’

‘She is rather.’

‘I don’t blame her. Enough to upset any girl. Pop Bassett has no right to keep gumming up the course of true love like this.’

‘No.’

‘He needs a kick in the pants.’

‘Yes.’

‘If I were Stiffy, I’d put a toad in his bed or strychnine in his soup.’

‘Yes. And talking of Stiffy, Bertie –’

He broke off, and I eyed him narrowly. There could be no question to my mind that I had been right about that perilous stuff. His bosom was obviously chock full of it.

‘There’s something the matter, Stinker.’

‘No, there isn’t. Why do you say that?’

‘Your manner is strange. You remind me of a faithful dog looking up into its proprietor’s face as if it were trying to tell him something. Are you trying to tell me something?’

He swallowed once or twice, and his colour deepened, which took a bit of doing, for even when his soul is in repose he always looks like a clerical beetroot. It was as though the collar he buttons at the back was choking him. In a hoarse voice he said:

‘Bertie.’

‘Hullo?’

‘Bertie.’

‘Still here, old man, and hanging on your lips.’

‘Bertie, are you busy just now?’

‘Not more than usual.’

‘You could get away for a day or two?’

‘I suppose one might manage it.’

‘Then can you come to Totleigh?’

‘To stay with you, do you mean?’

‘No, to stay at Totleigh Towers.’

I stared at the man, wide-eyed as the expression is. Had it not been that I knew him to be abstemiousness itself, rarely indulging in anything stronger than a light lager, and not even that during Lent, I should have leaped to the conclusion that there beside me sat a curate who had been having a couple. My eyebrows rose till they nearly disarranged my front hair.

‘Stay
where
? Stinker, you’re not yourself, or you wouldn’t be gibbering like this. You can’t have forgotten the ordeal I passed through last time I went to Totleigh Towers.’

‘I know. But there’s something Stiffy wants you to do for her. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, but she said it was most important and that you would have to be on the spot to do it.’

I drew myself up. I was cold and resolute.

‘You’re crazy, Stinker!’

‘I don’t see why you say that.’

‘Then let me explain where your whole scheme falls to the ground. To begin with, is it likely that after what has passed between us Sir Watkyn B. would issue an invitation to one who has always been to him a pain in the neck to end all pains in the neck? If ever there was a man who was all in favour of me taking the high road while he took the low road, it is this same Bassett. His idea of a happy day is one spent with at least a hundred miles between him and Bertram.’

‘Madeline would invite you, if you sent her a wire asking if you could come for a day or two. She never consults Sir Watkyn about
guests.
It’s an understood thing that she has anyone she wants to at the house.’

This I knew to be true, but I ignored the suggestion and proceeded remorselessly.

‘In the second place, I know Stiffy. A charming girl whom, as I was telling Emerald Stoker, I am always prepared to clasp to my bosom, at least I would be if she wasn’t engaged to you, but one who is a cross between a ticking bomb and a poltergeist. She lacks that balanced judgment which we like to see in girls. She gets ideas, and if you care to call them bizarre ideas, it will be all right with me. I need scarcely remind you that when I last visited Totleigh Towers she egged you on to pinch Constable Eustace Oates’s helmet, the one thing a curate should shrink from doing if he wishes to rise to heights in the Church. She is, in short, about as loony a young shrimp as ever wore a wind-swept hair-do. What this commission is that she has in mind for me we cannot say, but going by the form book I see it as something totally unfit for human consumption. Didn’t she even hint at its nature?’

‘No. I asked, of course, but she said she would rather keep it under her hat till she saw you.’

‘She won’t see me.’

‘You won’t come to Totleigh?’

‘Not within fifty miles of the sewage dump.’

‘She’ll be terribly disappointed.’

‘You will administer spiritual solace. That’s your job. Tell her these things are sent to try us.’

‘She’ll probably cry.’

‘Nothing better for the nervous system. It does something, I forget what, to the glands. Ask any well-known Harley Street physician.’

I suppose he saw that my iron front was not to be shaken, for he made no further attempt to sell the idea to me. With a sigh that seemed to come up from the soles of the feet, he rose, said goodbye, knocked over the glass from which I had been refreshing myself and withdrew.

Knowing how loath Bertram Wooster always is to let a pal down and fail him in his hour of need, you are probably thinking that this distressing scene had left me shaken, but as a matter of fact it had bucked me up like a day at the seaside.

Let’s just review the situation. Ever since breakfast my guardian angel had been scaring the pants off me by practically saying in so many words that Totleigh Towers was all set to re-enter my life, and it was now clear that what he had had in mind had been the imminence
of
this plea to me to go there, he feeling that in a weak moment I might allow myself to be persuaded against my better judgment. The peril was now past. Totleigh Towers had made its spring and missed by a mile, and I no longer had a thing to worry about. It was with a light heart that I joined a group of pleasure-seekers who were playing Darts and cleaned them up with effortless skill. Three o’clock was approaching when I left the club en route for home, and it must have been getting on for half past when I hove alongside the apartment house where I have my abode.

There was a cab standing outside, laden with luggage. From its window Gussie Fink-Nottle’s head was poking out, and I remember thinking once again how mistaken Emerald Stoker had been about his appearance. Seeing him steadily, if not whole, I could detect in his aspect no trace of the lamb, but he was looking so like a halibut that if he hadn’t been wearing horn-rimmed spectacles, a thing halibuts seldom do, I might have supposed myself to be gazing on something a.w.o.l. from a fishmonger’s slab.

I gave him a friendly yodel, and he turned the spectacles in my direction.

‘Oh, hullo, Bertie,’ he said, ‘I’ve just been calling on you. I left a message with Jeeves. Your aunt told me to tell you she’s coming to London the day after tomorrow and she wants you to give her lunch.’

‘Yes, she was on the phone to that effect this morning. I suppose she thought you’d forget to notify me. Come in and have some orange juice,’ I said, for it is to that muck that he confines himself whilst making whoopee.

He looked at his watch, and his eyes lost the gleam that always comes into them when orange juice is mentioned.

‘I wish I could, but I can’t,’ he sighed. ‘I should miss my train. I’m off to Totleigh on the four o’clock at Paddington.’

‘Oh, really? Well, look out for a friend of yours, who’ll be on it. Emerald Stoker.’

‘Stoker? Stoker? Emerald Stoker?’

‘Girl with freckles. American. Looks like a Pekinese of the better sort. She tells me she met you at a studio party the other day, and you talked about newts.’

His face cleared.

‘Of course, yes. Now I’ve placed her. I didn’t get her name that day. Yes, we had a long talk about newts. She used to keep them herself as a child, only she called them guppies. A most delightful girl. I shall enjoy seeing her again. I don’t know when I’ve met a girl who attracted me more.’

‘Except, of course, Madeline.’

His face darkened. He looked like a halibut that’s taken offence at a rude remark from another halibut.

‘Madeline! Don’t talk to me about Madeline! Madeline makes me sick!’ he hissed. ‘Paddington!’ he shouted to the charioteer and was gone with the wind, leaving me gaping after him, all of a twitter.

AND I’LL TELL
you why I was all of a t. My critique of her when chatting with Emerald Stoker will have shown how allergic I was to this Bassett beazel. She was scarcely less of a pain in the neck to me than I was to her father or Roderick Spode. Nevertheless, there was a grave danger that I might have to take her for better or for worse, as the book of rules puts it.

The facts may be readily related. Gussie, enamoured of the Bassett, would have liked to let her in on the way he felt, but every time he tried to do so his nerve deserted him and he found himself babbling about newts. At a loss to know how to swing the deal, he got the idea of asking me to plead his cause, and when I pleaded it, the Bassett, as pronounced a fathead as ever broke biscuit, thought I was pleading mine. She said she was so sorry to cause me pain, but her heart belonged to Gussie. Which would have been fine, had she not gone on to say that if anything should ever happen to make her revise her conviction that he was a king among men and she was compelled to give him the heave-ho, I was the next in line, and while she could never love me with the same fervour she felt for Gussie, she would do her best to make me happy. I was, in a word, in the position of a Vice-President of the United States of America who, while feeling that he is all right so far, knows that he will be for it at a moment’s notice if anything goes wrong with the man up top.

Little wonder, then, that Gussie’s statement that Madeline made him sick smote me like a ton of bricks and had me indoors and bellowing for Jeeves before you could say What ho. As had so often happened before, I felt that my only course was to place myself in the hands of a higher power.

‘Sir?’ he said, manifesting himself.

‘A ghastly thing has happened, Jeeves! Disaster looms.’

‘Indeed, sir? I am sorry to hear that.’

There’s one thing you have to give Jeeves credit for. He lets the dead past bury its d. He and the young master may have had differences about Alpine hats with pink feathers in them, but when
he
sees the y.m. on the receiving end of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, he sinks his dudgeon and comes through with the feudal spirit at its best. So now, instead of being cold and distant and aloof, as a lesser man would have been, he showed the utmost agitation and concern. That is to say, he allowed one eyebrow to rise perhaps an eighth of an inch, which is as far as he ever goes in the way of expressing emotion.

‘What would appear to be the trouble, sir?’

I sank into a chair and mopped the frontal bone. Not for many a long day had I been in such a doodah.

‘I’ve just seen Gussie Fink-Nottle.’

‘Yes, sir. Mr. Fink-Nottle was here a moment ago.’

‘I met him outside. He was in a cab. And do you know what?’

‘No, sir.’

‘I happened to mention Miss Bassett’s name, and he said – follow this closely, Jeeves – he said – I quote – “Don’t talk to me about Madeline. Madeline makes me sick.” Close quotes.’