The Jeeves Omnibus (331 page)

It was, consequently, a somewhat damped Bertram Wooster whom the maid ushered into the drawing-room, and my pep was in no way augmented by the first sight I had of mine hostess. Mrs McCorkadale was what I would call a grim woman. Not so grim as my Aunt Agatha, perhaps, for that could hardly be expected, but certainly well up in the class of Jael the wife of Heber and the Madame Whoever-it-was who used to sit and knit at the foot of the guillotine during the French Revolution. She had a beaky nose, tight thin lips, and her eye could have been used for splitting logs in the teak forests of Borneo. Seeing her steadily and seeing her whole, as the expression is, one marvelled at the intrepidity of Mr McCorkadale in marrying her – a man obviously whom nothing could daunt.

However, I had come there to be jolly and genial, and jolly and genial I was resolved to be. Actors will tell you that on these occasions, when the soul is a-twitter and the nervous system not like mother makes it, the thing to do is to take a deep breath. I took three, and immediately felt much better.

‘Good morning, good morning, good morning,’ I said. ‘Good morning,’ I added, rubbing it in, for it was my policy to let there be no stint.

‘Good morning,’ she replied, and one might have totted things up as so far, so good. But if I said she said it cordially, I would be deceiving my public. The impression I got was that the sight of me hurt her in some sensitive spot. The woman, it was plain, shared Spode’s view of what was needed to make England a land fit for heroes to live in.

Not being able to uncork the story and finding the way her eye was going through me like a dose of salts more than a little trying to my already dented sangfroid, I might have had some difficulty in getting the conversation going, but fortunately I was full of good material just waiting to be decanted. Over an after-dinner smoke on the previous night Ginger had filled me in on what his crowd proposed to do when they got down to it. They were going, he said, to cut taxes to the bone, straighten out our foreign policy, double our export trade, have two cars in the garage and two chickens in the pot for everyone and give the pound the shot in the arm it had been clamouring for for years. Than which, we both agreed, nothing could be sweeter, and I saw no reason to suppose that the McCorkadale gargoyle would not feel the same. I began, therefore, by asking her if she had a vote, and she said Yes, of course, and I said Well,
that
was fine, because if she hadn’t had, the point of my arguments would have been largely lost.

‘An excellent thing, I’ve always thought, giving women the vote,’ I proceeded heartily, and she said – rather nastily, it seemed to me – that she was glad I approved. ‘When you cast yours, if cast is the word I want, I strongly advise you to cast it in favour of Ginger Winship.’

‘On what do you base that advice?’

She couldn’t have given me a better cue. She had handed it to me on a plate with watercress round it. Like a flash I went into my sales talk, mentioning Ginger’s attitude towards taxes, our foreign policy, our export trade, cars in the garage, chickens in the pot and first aid for the poor old pound, and was shocked to observe an entire absence of enthusiasm on her part. Not a ripple appeared on the stern and rockbound coast of her map. She looked like Aunt Agatha listening to the boy Wooster trying to explain away a drawing-room window broken by a cricket ball.

I pressed her closely, or do I mean keenly.

‘You want taxes cut, don’t you?’

‘I do.’

‘And our foreign policy bumped up?’

‘Certainly.’

‘And our exports doubled and a stick of dynamite put under the pound? I’ll bet you do. Then vote for Ginger Winship, the man who with his hand on the helm of the ship of state will steer England to prosperity and happiness, bringing back once more the spacious days of Good Queen Bess.’ This was a line of talk that Jeeves had roughed out for my use. There was also some rather good stuff about this sceptred isle and this other Eden, demi-something, but I had forgotten it. ‘You can’t say that wouldn’t be nice,’ I said.

A moment before, I wouldn’t have thought it possible that she could look more like Aunt Agatha than she had been doing, but she now achieved this breathtaking feat. She sniffed, if not snorted, and spoke as follows:

‘Young man, don’t be idiotic. Hand on the helm of the ship of state, indeed! If Mr Winship performs the miracle of winning this election, which he won’t, he will be an ordinary humble back-bencher, doing nothing more notable than saying “Hear, hear” when his superiors are speaking and “Oh” and “Question” when the opposition have the floor. As,’ she went on, ‘I shall if I win this election, as I intend to.’

I blinked. A sharp ‘Whatwasthatyousaid?’ escaped my lips, and she proceeded to explain or, as Jeeves would say, elucidate.

‘You are not very quick at noticing things, are you? I imagine not, or you would have seen that Market Snodsbury is liberally plastered with posters bearing the words “Vote for McCorkadale”. An abrupt way of putting it, but one that is certainly successful in conveying its meaning.’

It was a blow, I confess, and I swayed beneath it like an aspen, if aspens are those things that sway. The Woosters can take a good deal, but only so much. My most coherent thought at the moment was that it was just like my luck, when I sallied forth as a canvasser, to collide first crack out of the box with the rival candidate. I also had the feeling that if Jeeves had taken on Number One instead of Number Two, he would probably have persuaded Ma McCorkadale to vote against herself.

I suppose if you had asked Napoleon how he had managed to get out of Moscow, he would have been a bit vague about it, and it was the same with me. I found myself on the front steps with only a sketchy notion of how I had got there, and I was in the poorest of shapes. To try to restore the shattered system I lit a cigarette and had begun to puff, when a cheery voice hailed me and I became aware that some foreign substance was sharing my doorstep. ‘Hullo, Wooster old chap’ it was saying and, the mists clearing from before my eyes, I saw that it was Bingley.

I gave the blighter a distant look. Knowing that this blot on the species resided in Market Snodsbury, I had foreseen that I might run into him sooner or later, so I was not surprised to see him. But I certainly wasn’t pleased. The last thing I wanted in the delicate state to which the McCorkadale had reduced me was conversation with a man who set cottages on fire and chased the hand that fed him hither and thither with a carving knife.

He was as unduly intimate, forward, bold, intrusive and deficient in due respect as he had been at the Junior Ganymede. He gave my back a cordial slap and would, I think, have prodded me in the ribs if it had occurred to him. You wouldn’t have thought that carving knives had ever come between us.

‘And what are
you
doing in these parts, cocky?’ he asked.

I said I was visiting my aunt Mrs Travers, who had a house in the vicinity, and he said he knew the place, though he had never met the old geezer to whom I referred.

‘I’ve seen her around. Red-faced old girl, isn’t she?’

‘Fairly vermilion.’

‘High blood pressure, probably.’

‘Or caused by going in a lot for hunting. It chaps the cheeks.’

‘Different from a barmaid. She cheeks the chaps.’

If he had supposed that his crude humour would get so much as a simper out of me, he was disappointed. I preserved the cold aloofness of a Wednesday matinée audience, and he proceeded.

‘Yes, that might be it. She looks a sport. Making a long stay?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, for the length of my visits to the old ancestor is always uncertain. So much depends on whether she throws me out or not. ‘Actually I’m here to canvass for the Conservative candidate. He’s a pal of mine.’

He whistled sharply. He had been looking repulsive and cheerful; he now looked repulsive and grave. Seeming to realize that he had omitted a social gesture, he prodded me in the ribs.

‘You’re wasting your time, Wooster, old man,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t an earthly.’

‘No?’ I quavered. It was simply one man’s opinion, of course, but the earnestness with which he had spoken was unquestionably impressive. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Never you mind what makes me think it. Take my word for it. If you’re sensible, you’ll phone your bookie and have a big bet on McCorkadale. You’ll never regret it. You’ll come to me later and thank me for the tip with tears in your—’

At some point in this formal interchange of thoughts by spoken word, as Jeeves’s
Dictionary of Synonyms
puts it, he must have pressed the bell, for at this moment the door opened and my old buddy the maid appeared. Quickly adding the word ‘eyes’, he turned to her.

‘Mrs McCorkadale in, dear?’ he asked, and having been responded to in the affirmative he left me, and I headed for home. I ought, of course, to have carried on along River Row, taking the odd numbers while Jeeves attended to the even, but I didn’t feel in the vein.

I was uneasy. You might say, if you happened to know the word, that the prognostications of a human wart like Bingley deserved little credence, but he had spoken with such conviction, so like someone who has heard something, that I couldn’t pass them off with a light laugh.

Brooding tensely, I reached the old homestead and found the ancestor lying on a chaise longue, doing the
Observer
crossword puzzle.

9

THERE WAS A
time when this worthy housewife, tackling the
Observer
crossword puzzle, would snort and tear her hair and fill the air with strange oaths picked up from cronies on the hunting field, but consistent inability to solve more than about an eighth of the clues has brought a sort of dull resignation and today she merely sits and stares at it, knowing that however much she licks the end of her pencil little or no business will result.

As I came in, I heard her mutter, soliloquizing like someone in Shakespeare, ‘Measured tread of saint round St Paul’s, for God’s sake’, seeming to indicate that she had come up against a hot one, and I think it was a relief to her to become aware that her favourite nephew was at her side and that she could conscientiously abandon her distasteful task, for she looked up and greeted me cheerily. She wears tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles for reading which make her look like a fish in an aquarium. She peered at me through these.

‘Hullo, my bounding Bertie.’

‘Good morning, old ancestor.’

‘Up already?’

‘I have been up some time.’

‘Then why aren’t you out canvassing? And why are you looking like something the cat brought in?’

I winced. I had not intended to disclose the recent past, but with an aunt’s perception she had somehow spotted that in some manner I had passed through the furnace and she would go on probing and questioning till I came clean. Any capable aunt can give Scotland Yard inspectors strokes and bisques in the matter of interrogating a suspect, and I knew that all attempts at concealment would be fruitless. Or is it bootless? I would have to check with Jeeves.

‘I am looking like something the cat brought in because I am feeling like something the c b in,’ I said. ‘Aged relative, I have
a
strange story to relate. Do you know a local blister of the name of Mrs McCorkadale?’

‘Who lives in River Row?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘She’s a barrister.’

‘She looks it.’

‘You’ve met her?’

‘I’ve met her.’

‘She’s Ginger’s opponent in this election.’

‘I know. Is Mr McCorkadale still alive?’

‘Died years ago. He got run over by a municipal tram.’

‘I don’t blame him. I’d have done the same myself in his place. It’s the only course to pursue when you’re married to a woman like that.’

‘How did you meet her?’

‘I called on her to urge her to vote for Ginger,’ I said, and in a few broken words I related my strange story.

It went well. In fact, it went like a breeze. Myself, I was unable to see anything humorous in it, but there was no doubt about it entertaining the blood relation. She guffawed more liberally than I had ever heard a woman guffaw. If there had been an aisle, she would have rolled in it. I couldn’t help feeling how ironical it was that, having failed so often to be well received when telling a funny story, I should have aroused such gales of mirth with one that was so essentially tragic.

While she was still giving her impersonation of a hyena which has just heard a good one from another hyena, Spode came in, choosing the wrong moment as usual. One never wants to see Spode, but least of all when someone is having a hearty laugh at your expense.

‘I’m looking for the notes for my speech tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Hullo, what’s the joke?’

Convulsed as she was, it was not easy for the ancestor to articulate, but she managed a couple of words.

‘It’s Bertie.’

‘Oh?’ said Spode, looking at me as if he found it difficult to believe that any word or act of mine could excite mirth and not horror and disgust.

‘He’s just been calling on Mrs McCorkadale.’

‘Oh?’

‘And asking her to vote for Ginger Winship.’

‘Oh?’ said Spode again. I have already indicated that he was
a
compulsive Oh-sayer. ‘Well, it is what I would have expected of him,’ and with another look in which scorn and animosity were nicely blended and a word to the effect that he might have left those notes in the summerhouse by the lake he removed his distasteful presence.

That he and I were not on Damon and Pythias terms seemed to have impressed itself on the aged relative. She switched off the hyena sound effects.

‘Not a bonhomous type, Spode.’

‘No.’

‘He doesn’t like you.’

‘No.’

‘And I don’t think he likes me.’

‘No,’ I said, and it occurred to me, for the Woosters are essentially fairminded, that it was hardly for me to criticize Spode’s Oh’s when my No’s were equally frequent. Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye, Wooster? I found myself asking myself, it having been one of the many good things I had picked up in my researches when I won that Scripture Knowledge prize.