The Jeeves Omnibus (329 page)

I had never seen a green bay tree, but I gathered what she meant.

‘Couldn’t Tuppy sue?’

‘He would have been bound to lose. A contract is a contract.’

I saw what she meant. It was not unlike that time when she was running that weekly paper of hers,
Milady’s Boudoir
, and I contributed to it an article, or piece as it is sometimes called, on What The Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing. She gave me a packet of cigarettes for it, and it then became her property. I didn’t actually get offers for it from France, Germany, Italy, Canada and the United States, but if I had had I couldn’t have accepted them. My pal Boko Littleworth, who makes a living by his pen, tells me I ought to have sold her only the first serial rights, but I didn’t think of it at the time. One makes these mistakes. What one needs, of course, is an agent.

All the same, I considered that L. P. Runkle ought to have stretched a point and let Tuppy’s father get something out of it. I put this to the ancestor, and she agreed with me.

‘Of course he ought. Moral obligation.’

‘It confirms one’s view that this Runkle is a stinker.’

‘The stinker supreme. And he tells me he has been tipped off that he’s going to get a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours.’

‘How can they knight a chap like that?’

‘Just the sort of chap they do knight. Prominent business man. Big deals. Services to Britain’s export trade.’

‘But a stinker.’

‘Unquestionably a stinker.’

‘Then what’s he doing here? You usually don’t go out of your way to entertain stinkers. Spode, yes. I can understand you letting him infest the premises, much as I disapprove of it. He’s making speeches on Ginger’s behalf, and according to you doing it rather well. But why Runkle?’

She said ‘Ah!’, and when I asked her reason for saying ‘Ah!’, she replied that she was thinking of her subtle cunning, and when I asked what she meant by subtle cunning, she said ‘Ah!’ again. It looked as if we might go on like this indefinitely, but a moment later, having toddled to the door and opened it and to the French window and peered out, she explained.

‘Runkle came here hoping to sell Tom an old silver what-not for his collection, and as Tom had vanished and he had come a long way I had to put him up for the night, and at dinner I suddenly had an inspiration. I thought if I got him to stay on and plied him day and night with Anatole’s cooking, he might get into mellowed mood.’

She had ceased to speak in riddles. This time I followed her.

‘So that you would be able to talk him into slipping Tuppy some of his ill-gotten gains?’

‘Exactly. I’m biding my time. When the moment comes, I shall act like lightning. I told him Tom would be back in a day or two, not that he will, because he won’t come within fifty miles of the place till I blow the All Clear, so Runkle consented to stay on.’

‘And how’s it working out?’

‘The prospects look good. He mellows more with every meal. Anatole gave us his Mignonette de poulet Petit Due last night, and he tucked into it like a tapeworm that’s been on a diet for weeks. There was no mistaking the gleam in his eyes as he downed the last mouthful. A few more dinners ought to do the trick.’

She left me shortly after this to go and dress for dinner. I, strong in the knowledge that I could get into the soup and fish in ten minutes, lingered on, plunged in thought.

Extraordinary how I kept doing that as of even date. It just shows what life is like now. I don’t suppose in the old days I would have been plunged in thought more than about once a month.

7

I NEED SCARCELY
say that Tuppy’s hard case, as outlined by the old blood relation, had got right in amongst me. You might suppose that a fellow capable of betting you you couldn’t swing yourself across the Drones swimming-bath by the rings and looping the last ring back deserved no consideration, but as I say the agony of that episode had long since abated and it pained me deeply to contemplate the spot he was in. For though I had affected to consider that the ancestor’s scheme for melting L. P. Runkle was the goods, I didn’t really believe it would work. You don’t get anywhere filling with rich foods a bloke who wears a Panama hat like his: the only way of inducing the L. P. Runkle type of man to part with cash is to kidnap him, take him to the cellar beneath the lonely mill and stick lighted matches between his toes. And even then he would probably give you a dud cheque.

The revelation of Tuppy’s hard-upness had come as quite a surprise. You know how it is with fellows you’re seeing all the time; if you think about their finances at all, you sort of assume they must be all right. It had never occurred to me that Tuppy might be seriously short of doubloons, but I saw now why there had been all this delay in assembling the bishop and assistant clergy and getting the show on the road. I presumed Uncle Tom would brass up if given the green light, he having the stuff in heaping sackfuls, but Tuppy has his pride and would quite properly jib at the idea of being supported by a father-in-law. Of course he really oughtn’t to have gone and signed Angela up with his bank balance in such a rocky condition, but love is love. Conquers all, as the fellow said.

Having mused on Tuppy for about five minutes, I changed gears and started musing on Angela, for whom I had always had a cousinly affection. A definitely nice young prune and just the sort to be a good wife, but of course the catch is that you can’t be a good wife if the other half of the sketch hasn’t enough
money
to marry you. Practically all you can do is hang around and twiddle your fingers and hope for the best. Weary waiting about sums it up, and the whole lay-out, I felt, must be g and wormwood for Angela, causing her to bedew her pillow with many a salty tear.

I always find when musing that the thing to do is to bury the face in the hands, because it seems to concentrate thought and keep the mind from wandering off elsewhere. I did this now, and was getting along fairly well, when I suddenly had that uncanny feeling that I was not alone. I sensed a presence, if you would prefer putting it that way, and I had not been mistaken. Removing the hands and looking up, I saw that Madeline Bassett was with me.

It was a nasty shock. I won’t say she was the last person I wanted to see, Spode of course heading the list of starters with L. P. Runkle in close attendance, but I would willingly have dispensed with her company. However, I rose courteously, and I don’t think there was anything in my manner to suggest that I would have liked to hit her with a brick, for I am pretty inscrutable at all times. Nevertheless, behind my calm front there lurked the uneasiness which always grips me when we meet.

Holding the mistaken view that I am hopelessly in love with her and more or less pining away into a decline, this Bassett never fails to look at me, when our paths cross, with a sort of tender pity, and she was letting me have it now. So melting indeed was her gaze that it was only by reminding myself that she was safely engaged to Spode that I was able to preserve my equanimity and sangfroid. When she had been betrothed to Gussie Fink-Nottle, the peril of her making a switch had always been present, Gussie being the sort of spectacled newt-collecting freak a girl might at any moment get second thoughts about, but there was something so reassuring in her being engaged to Spode. Because, whatever you might think of him, you couldn’t get away from it that he was the seventh Earl of Sidcup, and no girl who has managed to hook a seventh Earl with a castle in Shropshire and an income of twenty thousand pounds per annum is lightly going to change her mind about him.

Having given me the look, she spoke, and her voice was like treacle pouring out of a jug.

‘Oh, Bertie, how nice to see you again. How are you?’

‘I’m fine. How are
you
?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘That’s fine. How’s your father?’

‘He’s fine.’

I was sorry to hear this. My relations with Sir Watkyn Bassett were such that a more welcome piece of news would have been that he had contracted bubonic plague and wasn’t expected to recover.

‘I heard you were here,’ I said.

‘Yes, I’m here.’

‘So I heard. You’re looking well.’

‘Oh, I’m very, very well, and oh so happy.’

‘That’s good.’

‘I wake up each morning to the new day, and I know it’s going to be the best day that ever was. Today I danced on the lawn before breakfast, and then I went round the garden saying good morning to the flowers. There was a sweet black cat asleep on one of the flower beds. I picked it up and danced with it.’

I didn’t tell her so, but she couldn’t have made a worse social gaffe. If there is one thing Augustus, the cat to whom she referred, hates, it’s having his sleep disturbed. He must have cursed freely, though probably in a drowsy undertone. I suppose she thought he was purring.

She had paused, seeming to expect some comment on her fatheaded behaviour, so I said:

‘Euphoria.’

‘I what?’

‘That’s what it’s called, Jeeves tells me, feeling like that.’

‘Oh, I see. I just call it being happy, happy, happy.’

Having said which, she gave a start, quivered and put a hand up to her face as if she were having a screen test and had been told to register remorse.

‘Oh, Bertie!’

‘Hullo?’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Eh?’

‘It was so tactless of me to go on about my happiness. I should have remembered how different it was for you. I saw your face twist with pain as I came in and I can’t tell you how sorry I am to think that it is I who have caused it. Life is not easy, is it?’

‘Not very.’

‘Difficult.’

‘In spots.’

‘The only thing is to be brave.’

‘That’s about it.’

‘You must not lose courage. Who knows? Consolation may be waiting for you somewhere. Some day you will meet someone who will make you forget you ever loved me. No, not quite that. I think I shall always be a fragrant memory, always something deep in your heart that will be with you like a gentle, tender ghost as you watch the sunset on summer evenings while the little birds sing their off-to-bed songs in the shrubbery.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ I said, for one simply has to say the civil thing. ‘You look a bit damp,’ I added, changing the subject. ‘Was it raining when you were out?’

‘A little, but I didn’t mind. I was saying good-night to the flowers.’

‘Oh, you say good-night to them, too?’

‘Of course. Their poor little feelings would be so hurt if I didn’t.’

‘Wise of you to come in. Might have got lumbago.’

‘That was not why I came in. I saw you through the window, and I had a question to ask you. A very, very serious question.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘But it’s so difficult to know how to put it. I shall have to ask it as they do in books. You know what they say in books.’

‘What who say in books?’

‘Detectives and people like that. Bertie, are you going straight now?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You know what I mean. Have you given up stealing things?’

I laughed one of those gay debonair ones.

‘Oh, absolutely.’

‘I’m so glad. You don’t feel the urge any more? You’ve conquered the craving? I told Daddy it was just a kind of illness. I said you couldn’t help yourself.’

I remembered her submitting this theory to him … I was hiding behind a sofa at the time, a thing I have been compelled to do rather oftener than I could wish … and Sir Watkyn had replied in what I thought dubious taste that it was precisely my habit of helping myself to everything I could lay my hands on that he was criticizing.

Another girl might have left it at that, but not M. Bassett. She was all eager curiosity.

‘Did you have psychiatric treatment? Or was it will power?’

‘Just will power.’

‘How splendid. I’m so proud of you. It must have been a terrible struggle.’

‘Oh, so-so.’

‘I shall write to Daddy and tell him—’

Here she paused and put a hand to her left eye, and it was easy for a man of my discernment to see what had happened. The French window being open, gnats in fairly large numbers had been coming through and flitting to and fro. It’s a thing one always has to budget for in the English countryside. In America they have screens, of course, which make flying objects feel pretty nonplussed, but these have never caught on in England and the gnats have it more or less their own way. They horse around and now and then get into people’s eyes. One of these, it was evident, had now got into Madeline’s.

I would be the last to deny that Bertram Wooster has his limitations, but in one field of endeavour I am pre-eminent. In the matter of taking things out of eyes I yield to no one. I know what to say and what to do.

Counselling her not to rub it, I advanced handkerchief in hand.

I remember going into the technique of operations of this kind with Gussie Fink-Nottle at Totleigh when he had removed a fly from the eye of Stephanie Byng, now the Reverend Mrs Stinker Pinker, and we were in agreement that success could be achieved only by placing a hand under the patient’s chin in order to steady the head. Omit this preliminary and your efforts are bootless. My first move, accordingly, was to do so and it was characteristic of Spode that he should have chosen this moment to join us, just when we twain were in what you might call close juxtaposition.

I confess that there have been times when I have felt more at my ease. Spode, in addition to being constructed on the lines of a rather oversized gorilla, has a disposition like that of a short-tempered tiger of the jungle and a nasty mind which leads him to fall a ready prey to what I have heard Jeeves call the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on – viz. jealousy. Such a man, finding you steadying the head of the girl he loves, is always extremely likely to start trying to ascertain the colour of your insides, and to avert this I greeted him with what nonchalance I could muster.

‘Oh, hullo, Spode old chap, I mean Lord Sidcup old chap. Here we all are, what. Jeeves told me you were here, and Aunt Dahlia says you’ve been knocking the voting public base over apex with your oratory in the Conservative interest. Must be wonderful to be able to do that. It’s a gift, of course. Some have it, some haven’t. I couldn’t address a political meeting to please a dying grandmother. I should stand there opening and shutting my mouth like a goldfish. You, on the other hand, just clear your throat and the golden words come pouring out like syrup. I admire you enormously.’