The Jeeves Omnibus (356 page)

‘Be very careful not to lose it. It has Reginald’s autograph in it,’ and glancing at the title page I saw that this was indeed so, which would have bucked Aunt Agatha up no little, but in addition to inscribing the slim volume with his own foul name the blighter had inscribed Vanessa’s. ‘To Vanessa, the fairest of the fair, from a devoted admirer,’ he had written, dishing my plans completely. That was when my heart got heavy again. For though she hadn’t definitely said so, something told me that later on I would be expected to pass an examination on the little opus, and failure would have the worst effects.

Having said she must be off, she naturally stayed on for another half-hour, much of which time was devoted to pointing out additional defects in my spiritual make-up which had occurred to her since our last meeting. It just showed how strong the missionary spirit can be in women that she could contemplate the idea of teaming up with a dubious character like B. Wooster. Her best friends would have warned her against it. ‘Cast him into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth,’ they would have said. ‘No good trying to patch him up, he’s hopeless.’

It was my membership of the Drones Club that now formed the basis of her observations. She didn’t like the Drones Club, and she made it quite clear that at the conclusion of the honeymoon I would cross its threshold only over her dead body.

So, reckoning up the final score, the Bertram Wooster who signed the charge sheet in the vestry after the wedding ceremony would be a non-smoker, a teetotaller (for I knew it would come to that) and an ex-member of the Drones, in other words a mere shell of his former self. Little wonder that, as I listened to her, I gulped as Plank’s native bearer must have done when they were getting ready to bury him before sundown.

The prospect appalled me, and while it was appalling me Vanessa moved to the door, this time apparently really intending to be off. And she had opened the door, Bertram much too much of a shell of his former self to open it for her, when she started back with a gasping cry.

‘Father!’ she cried gaspingly. ‘He’s coming up the garden path.’

‘He’s coming up the garden
path
?’ I said. I was at a loss to imagine why Pop Cook should be calling on me. I mean to say we weren’t on those terms.

‘He’s stopped to tie his boot lace,’ she cried, gaspingly as before, and that concluded her share of the dialogue. With no
further
words she bounded into the kitchen like a fox pursued by both the Quorn and the Pytchley, slamming the door behind her.

I could appreciate her emotion. She was aware of her parent’s distaste for the last of the Woosters, a distaste so marked that he turned mauve and swallowed his lunch the wrong way at the mention of my name, and
chez
me was the last place he would wish to find her. Orlo Porter had thought the worst on learning of what he called her clandestine visits to the Wooster home, and a father would, of course, think worse than Orlo. Pure though I was as the driven s., a fat chance I had of persuading him that I wasn’t a modern Casa something. Not Casabianca. That was the chap who stood on the burning deck. Casanova. I knew I’d get it.

And what he would do to Vanessa in his wrath would be plenty. She was, as I have made clear, a proud beauty, but a father of the calibre of Pop Cook can make even a proud beauty wish she had thought twice before blotting her copy-book. He may not be able any longer to whale the tar out of her with his walking stick as in the good old days, but he can cut off her pocket money and send her to stay with her grandmother at Tunbridge Wells, where she will have to look after seven cats and attend divine service three times on Sunday. Yes, one could understand her being perturbed on seeing him tying up his boot lace outside Wee Nooke, which, I forgot to mention earlier, was the name of my G.H.Q. (It had been built, I learned subsequently, for a female cousin of Mrs Briscoe’s who painted water colours.)

And if she was perturbed, I was on the perturbed side, too. It was with some trepidation – in fact, quite a lot of it – that I awaited my visitor’s arrival, a trepidation that was not diminished when I saw that he had brought his hunting crop with him.

I hadn’t taken to him much at our previous meeting, and I had the feeling that I wasn’t going to get very fond of him now, but I will say this for him, that he didn’t waste time. He was a man of quick, decisive speech who had no use for tedious preliminaries but came to the point at once. I suppose you have to in order to run a big business successfully.

‘Well, Mr Wooster, as I understand you are calling yourself now, it may interest you to know that Major Plank, who had lost his memory, recovered it last night, and he told me all about you.’

It was a nasty knock, and the fact that I had been expecting it didn’t make it any better. Oddly enough, I felt no animosity towards Cook, holding Plank the bloke responsible for this awkward situation. Roaming through Africa knee-deep in poisonous snakes of every description and with more man-eating pumas around than you could shake a stick at, he could so easily have passed away, regretted by all. Instead of which, he survived and went about making life tough for harmless typical young men about town who simply wanted to be left alone to restore their delicate health.

Cook was continuing, and getting nastier every moment.

‘You are a notorious crook, known to your associates as Alpine Joe, and your latest crime was to try to sell Major Plank a valuable statuette which you had stolen from Sir Watkyn Bassett of Totleigh Towers. You were arrested by Inspector Witherspoon of Scotland Yard, fortunately before you had accomplished your nefarious ends. I presume from the fact that you are at large that you have served your sentence, and you are now in the pay of Colonel Briscoe, who has employed you to steal my cat. Have you anything to say?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘No, you haven’t,’ he said.

‘I can explain everything,’ I said.

‘No, you can’t,’ he said.

And, by Jove, I suddenly realized I couldn’t. It would have involved a long character analysis of Sir Watkyn Bassett, another of my Uncle Tom, a third of Stephanie (Stiffy) Byng, now Mrs Stinker Pinker, a fourth of Jeeves, and would have taken about two hours and a quarter, provided he listened attentively and didn’t interrupt, which of course he would have done.

Matters, therefore, seemed to be at what you might call a deadlock, and the thought had suggested itself to me that my best plan would be to leave his presence and start running and keep on running till I reached the northern fringe of Scotland, when a noise like an explosion in a gas works broke in on my reverie, and I saw that he was holding the slim volume which Vanessa, the silly ass, had omitted to take off-stage with her.

‘This book!’ he yowled.

I did my best.

‘Ah, yes,’ I said, ‘Reggie Sprockett’s latest. I always keep up with his work. A brilliant young poet of whom the critics expect great things. These, in case you are interested, are whimsical
essays.
They are superb. Not only the style, but the thought in these little gems …’

My voice died away. I had been about to urge him to buy a copy, but I saw that he was not in the mood. He was staring at the opening page with its inscription, and I knew that words would be wasted, as the expression is.

He gave the hunting crop a twitch.

‘My daughter has been here.’

‘She did look in.’

‘Ha!’

I knew what that ‘Ha!’ meant. It was short for ‘I shall now thrash you within an inch of your life.’ A moment later he used the longer version, as if in doubt as to whether he had made himself clear.

If you were to come to me and say ‘Wooster, to settle a bet, which would you estimate is to be preferred, having your insides torn out by somebody’s bare hands or being thrashed within an inch of your life?’, I would find it difficult to decide. Both are things you’d rather have happen to another chap. But I think I would give my vote in favour of the last-named, always provided the other fellow was doing it in a small room, for there he would find that he had set himself a testing task. The dimensions of the sitting-room of Wee Nooke did not permit of a full swing. Cook had to confine himself to chip shots, which an agile person like myself had little difficulty in eluding.

I eluded them, therefore, with no great expenditure of physical effort, but I would be deceiving my public if I said that I was enjoying the episode. It offends one’s pride when one has to leap like a lamb in Springtime at the bidding of an elderly little gawd-help-us with whom it is impossible to reason. And it was plain that Cook in his present frame of mind wouldn’t recognize reason if you served it up to him in an individual plate with watercress round it.

That, of course, was what prevented me fulfilling myself in the encounter, the fact that he
was
an elderly little gawd-help-us. It was the combination of age and size that kept me from giving of my best. I might – indeed I would – have dotted in the eye a small young gawd-help-us or a gawd-help-us of riper years of the large economy size, but I couldn’t possibly get tough with an undersized little squirt who would never see fifty-five again. The chivalry of the Woosters couldn’t ever contemplate such an action.

I thought once or twice of adopting the policy which had occurred to me at the outset – viz. running up to the north of Scotland. I had often wondered, when I read about fellows getting horsewhipped on the steps of their club, why they didn’t just go up the steps and into the club, knowing that the chap behind the horsewhip wasn’t a member and wouldn’t have a chance of getting past the hall porter.

But the catch was that running up to Scotland would mean turning my back, a fatal move. So we just carried on with our rhythmic dance till my guardian angel, who until now had just been sitting there, decided – and about time, too – to take a hand in the proceedings. As might have been expected in a cottage called Wee Nooke, there was a grandfather clock over against the wall, and he now arranged that Cook should bump into this and come a purler. And while he was still on the floor I acted with the true Wooster resource.

I have stated that the previous owner of Wee Nooke expressed herself as a rule in water colours, but on one occasion she had changed her act. Over the mantelpiece there hung a large oil painting depicting a bloke in a three-cornered hat and riding breeches in conference with a girl in a bonnet and what looked like muslin, and as it caught my eye I suddenly remembered Gussie Fink-Nottle and the portrait at Aunt Dahlia’s place in Worcestershire.

Gussie – stop me if you’ve heard this before – while closely pursued by Spode, now Lord Sidcup, who, if memory serves me aright, wanted to break his neck, had taken refuge in my bedroom and was on the point of having his neck broken when he plucked a picture from the wall and brought it down on Spode’s head. The head came through the canvas, and Spode, momentarily bewildered at finding himself wearing a portrait of one of Uncle Tom’s ancestors round his neck like an Elizabethan ruff, gave me the opportunity of snatching a sheet from the bed and enveloping him in it, rendering him null and void, as the expression is.

I went through a precisely similar routine now, first applying the picture and then the tablecloth. After which I withdrew and went off to the Goose and Grasshopper to see Orlo.

16

ANYBODY NOT IN
possession of the facts would probably have been appalled at my rashness in placing myself within disembowelling range of Orlo Porter, feeling that I was tempting fate, and in about two ticks would be wishing I hadn’t.

But I, strong in the knowledge that Orlo P. had been reduced to the level of a fifth-rate power, was able to approach the coming interview in a bumps-a-daisy spirit which might quite easily have led to my bursting into song.

Orlo, as I had predicted, was in the bar having a gin and ginger. He lowered the beaker as I drew near and regarded me in a squiggle-eyed manner like a fastidious luncher observing a caterpillar in his salad.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said.

I conceded this, for he was right. No argument about it. Assured that he wasn’t looking squiggle-eyed at the wrong chap, he proceeded.

‘What do you want?’

‘A word with you.’

‘So you have come to gloat?’

‘Certainly not, Porter,’ I said, ‘when you hear what I have to say, you will start skipping like the high hills, not that I’ve ever seen high hills skip, or low hills for that matter. Porter, what would you say if I told you all your troubles, all the little odds and ends that are bothering you now, would be over ’ere yonder sun had set?’

‘It has set.’

‘Oh, has it? I didn’t notice.’

‘And it is getting on for dinner time. So if you will kindly get the hell out of here—’

‘Not till I have spoken.’

‘Are you going to speak some
more
?’

‘Lots more. Let us examine the position you and I are in calmly, and in a judicial spirit. Vanessa Cook has told me she
will
marry me, and you are probably looking on me as a snake in the grass. Well, let me tell you that any resemblance between me and a snake in the grass is purely coincidental. I couldn’t issue a
nolle prosequi
, could I, when she said that? Of course not. But all the while I was right-hoing I felt I was behaving like a louse.’

‘You are a louse.’

‘No, that’s where you make your error, Porter. I am a man of sensibility, and a man of sensibility does not marry a girl who’s in love with somebody else. He gives her up.’

He finished his gin and ginger, and choked on it as he suddenly got the gist.

‘You would give her up to me?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘But, Wooster, this is noble. I’m sorry I said you were a louse.’

‘Quite all right. Sort of mistake anyone might make.’

‘You remind me of Cyrano de Bergerac’

‘One has one’s code.’

He had been all smiles – or pretty nearly all smiles – up to this point, but now melancholy marked him for her own again. He heaved a sigh, as if he had found a dead mouse at the bottom of his tankard.