The Jeeves Omnibus (9 page)

‘Oh, you swam ashore to get to Chuffy?’

‘Of course. Father was keeping me a prisoner on board the yacht, and this evening your man Jeeves –’

I winced.

‘My late man.’

‘All right. Your late man. Your late man Jeeves arrived with an early letter from Marmaduke. Oh, boy!’

‘How do you mean, oh, boy?’

‘Was that a letter? I cried six pints when I read it.’

‘Hot stuff?’

‘It was beautiful. It throbbed with poetry.’

‘It did?’

‘Yes.’

‘This letter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Chuffy’s letter?’

‘Yes. You seem surprised.’

I was a bit. One of the very best, old Chuffy, of course, but I wouldn’t have said he could write letters like that. But then one has got to take into consideration the fact that when I’ve been with him he has generally been eating steak-and-kidney pudding or cursing horses for not running fast enough. On such occasions, the poetic side of a man is not uppermost.

‘So this letter stirred you up, did it?’

‘You bet it stirred me up. I felt I couldn’t wait another day without
seeing
him. What was that poem about a woman wailing for her demon lover?’

‘Ah, there you have me. Jeeves would know.’

‘Well, that’s what I felt like. And, talking of Jeeves, what a man! Sympathy? He drips with it.’

‘Oh, you confided in Jeeves?’

‘Yes. And told him what I was going to do.’

‘And he didn’t try to stop you?’

‘Stop me? He was all for it.’

‘He was, was he?’

‘You should have seen him. Such a kind smile. He said you would be delighted to help me.’

‘He did, eh?’

‘He spoke most highly of you.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh, yes, he thinks a lot of you. I remember his very words. “Mr Wooster, miss,” he said, “is, perhaps, mentally somewhat negligible, but he has a heart of gold.” He said that as he was lowering me from the side of the boat by a rope, having first made sure that the coast was clear. I couldn’t dive, you see, because of the splash.’

I was chewing the lip in some chagrin.

‘What the devil did he mean, “mentally negligible”?’

‘Oh, you know. Loopy.’

‘Tchah!’

‘Eh?’

‘I said “Tchah!”’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’ I was a good deal moved. ‘Well, wouldn’t you say “Tchah!” if your late man was going about the place telling people you were mentally negligible …’

‘But with a heart of gold.’

‘Never mind the heart of gold. The point is that my man, my late man, a fellow I have always looked on more as some sort of an uncle than a personal attendant, is shooting to and fro bellowing out at the top of his voice that I am mentally negligible and filling my bedroom with girls –’

‘Bertie! Are you annoyed?’

‘Annoyed!’

‘You sound annoyed. And I can’t see why. I should have thought you would have been only too glad of the chance of helping me get to the man I love. Having this heart of gold I hear so much about.’

‘The point is not whether I have a heart of gold. Heaps of people have hearts of gold and yet would be upset at finding girls in their bedrooms in the small hours. What you don’t seem to realize, what you and this Jeeves of yours have omitted to take into your calculations, is that I have a reputation to keep up, an unspotted name to maintain in its pristine purity. This cannot be done by entertaining girls who come in, in the middle of the night, without so much as a by-your-leave and coolly pinch your heliotrope pyjamas –’

‘You didn’t expect me to sleep in a wet swimming suit?’

‘– and leap into your bed –’

She uttered an exclamation.

‘I know what this reminds me of. I’ve been trying to think ever since you came in. The story of the Three Bears. You must have been told it as a kid. “There’s somebody in my bed …” Wasn’t that what the Big Bear said?’

I frowned doubtfully.

‘As I recollect it, it was something about porridge. “Who’s been eating my porridge?”’

‘I’m sure there was a bed in it.’

‘Bed? Bed? I can’t remember any bed. On the subject of the porridge, however, I am absolutely … But we are wandering from the point once more. What I was saying was that a reputable bachelor like myself, who has never had his licence so much as endorsed, can scarcely be blamed for looking askance at girls in heliotrope pyjamas in his bed …’

‘You said they suited me.’

‘They do suit you.’

‘You said I looked fine in them.’

‘You do look fine in them, but once more you are refusing to meet the issue squarely. The point is –’

‘How many points is that? I seem to have counted about a dozen.’

‘There is only one point, and I am endeavouring to make it clear. In a nutshell, what will people say when they find you here?’

‘But they won’t find me here.’

‘You think so? Ha! What about Brinkley?’

‘Who’s he?’

‘My man.’

‘Your late man?’

I clicked the tongue.

‘My new man. At nine tomorrow morning he will bring me tea.’

‘Well, you’ll like that.’

‘He will bring it to this room. He will approach the bed. He will place it on the table.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘To facilitate my getting at the cup and sipping.’

‘Oh, you mean he will put the tea on the table. You said he would put the bed on the table.’

‘I never said anything of the sort.’

‘You did. Distinctly.’

I tried to reason with the girl.

‘My dear child,’ I said, ‘I must really ask you to use your intelligence. Brinkley is not a juggler. He is a well-trained gentleman’s gentleman, and would consider it a liberty to put beds on tables. And why should he put beds on tables? The idea would never occur to him. He –’

She interrupted my reasoning.

‘But wait a minute. You keep babbling about Brinkley, but there isn’t a Brinkley.’

‘There is a Brinkley. One Brinkley. And one Brinkley coming into this room at nine o’clock tomorrow morning and finding you in that bed will be enough to start a scandal which will stagger humanity.’

‘I mean, he can’t be in the house.’

‘Of course he’s in the house.’

‘Well, he must be deaf, then. I made enough noise getting in to wake six gentlemen’s gentlemen. Apart from smashing a window at the back –’

‘Did you smash a window at the back?’

‘I had to, or I couldn’t have got in. It was the window of some sort of bedroom on the ground floor.’

‘Why dash it, that’s Brinkley’s bedroom.’

‘Well, he wasn’t in it.’

‘Why on earth not? I gave him the evening off, not the night.’

‘I can see what has happened. He’s away on a toot somewhere, and won’t be back for days. Father had a man who did that once. He went out for his evening from our house on East Sixty-Seventh Street, New York, on April the fourth in a bowler hat, grey gloves and a check suit, and the next we heard of him was a telegram from Portland, Oregon, on April the tenth, saying he had overslept himself and would be back shortly. That’s what your Brinkley must have done.’

I must say I drew a good deal of comfort from the idea.

‘Let us hope so,’ I said. ‘If he is really trying to drown his sorrows, it ought to take him weeks.’

‘So, you see, you’ve been making a fuss about nothing. I always say –’

But what it was she always said, I was not privileged to learn. For at that moment she broke off with a sharp squeak.

Somebody was knocking on the front door.

WE LOOKED AT
each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a first-floor back in Chuffnell Regis. That frightful sound, coming unexpectedly like that in the middle of the peaceful summer night, had been enough to strike the chit-chat from anybody’s lips. And what rendered it so particularly unpleasant to us, personally, was the fact that we had both jumped simultaneously to the same ghastly conclusion.

‘It’s Father!’ Pauline gargled, and with a swift flip of her finger she doused the candle.

‘What did you do that for?’ I said, a good deal pipped. The sudden darkness seemed to make things worse.

‘So that he shouldn’t see a light in the window, of course. If he thinks you’re asleep he may go away.’

‘What a hope!’ I retorted, as the knocking, which had eased off for a moment, started again with more follow-through than ever.

‘Well, I suppose you had better go down,’ said the girl in a subdued sort of voice. ‘Or’ – she seemed to brighten – ‘shall we pour water on him from the staircase window?’

I started violently. She had made the suggestion as if she considered it one of her best and brightest, and I suddenly realized what it meant to play the host to a girl of her temperament and personality. All that I had ever heard or read about the reckless younger generation seemed to come back to me.

‘Don’t dream of it!’ I whispered urgently. ‘Dismiss the project utterly and absolutely from your mind.’

I mean to say, a dry J. Washburn Stoker seeking an errant daughter was bad enough. A J. Washburn Stoker stimulated to additional acerbity by a jugful of H
₂
O on his head, I declined to contemplate. Goodness knows, I wasn’t keen on going down and passing the time of night with the man, but if the alternative was to allow his loved one to drench him to the skin and then wait while he tore the walls down with his bare hands I proposed to do so immediately.

‘I’ll have to see him,’ I said.

‘Well, be careful.’

‘How do you mean, careful?’

‘Oh, just careful. Still, of course, he may not have a gun.’

I swallowed a trifle.

‘What exactly would you say the odds were, for and against?’

She mused awhile.

‘I’m trying to remember if Father is a Southerner or not.’

‘A what?’

‘I know he was born at a place called Carterville, but I can’t recollect if it was Carterville, Kentucky, or Carterville, Massachusetts.’

‘What the dickens difference does it make?’

‘Well, if you smirch the honour of a Southerner’s family, he’s apt to shoot.’

‘Would your father consider it smirched the family honour, your being here?’

‘Bound to, I should think.’

I couldn’t help agreeing with her. It did seem to me offhand that a purist might consider the smirching pretty good, but I hadn’t time to weigh the point, because the knocker got going again with renewed vim.

‘Well, dash it,’ I said, ‘wherever this ghastly parent of yours was born, I shall have to go down and talk to him. That door will be splitting asunder soon.’

‘Don’t get closer to him than you can help.’

‘I won’t.’

‘He was a great wrestler when he was a young man.’

‘You needn’t tell me any more about your father.’

‘I only meant, I wouldn’t let him get hold of you, if you can help. Is there anywhere I can hide?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know why not,’ I replied, a little curtly. ‘They don’t build these country cottages with secret rooms and underground passages. When you hear me open the front door, stop breathing.’

‘Do you want me to suffocate?’

Well, of course, a Wooster does not put such thoughts into words, but I’m bound to say this struck me as a jolly good idea. Forbearing the reply, I hurried down the stairs and flung open the front door.
Well
, when I say flung, I opened it a matter of six inches, not omitting to keep it on the chain.

‘Hallo?’ I said. ‘Yes?’

I don’t know when I’ve felt such a chunk of relief as surged over me the next moment.

‘Oy!’ said a voice. ‘Taken your time, haven’t you? What’s the matter with you, young man? Deaf or something?’

It wasn’t in its essentials a musical voice, being on the thick side and a shade ropey. If I’d been its owner, I’d have given more than a little thought to the subject of tonsils. But it had one supreme merit which out-weighed all its defects. It wasn’t the voice of J. Washburn Stoker.

‘Frightfully sorry,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of this and that. Sort of reverie, if you know what I mean.’

The voice spoke again, not without a pretty goodish modicum of suavity this time.

‘Oh, I beg your pardon, sir. I thought you was the young man Brinkley.’

‘Brinkley’s out,’ I said, feeling that if he ever returned I would have a word to say to him about the hours at which his pals paid social calls. ‘Who are you?’

‘Sergeant Voules, sir.’

I opened the door. It was pretty dark outside, but I could recognize the arm of the Law all right. This Voules was a bird built rather on the lines of the Albert Hall, round in the middle and not much above. He always looked to me as if Nature had really intended to make two police sergeants and had forgotten to split them up.

‘Ah, Sergeant!’ I said.

Careless, debonair. Not a thing on Bertram’s mind, you would have supposed, but his hair.

‘Anything I can do for you, Sergeant?’

My eyes were getting accustomed to the darkness by this time, and I was enabled to spot certain objects of interest by the wayside. The principal one was another policeman. Tall and lean and stringy, this one.

‘This is my young nephew, sir. Constable Dobson.’

Well, I wasn’t exactly in the mood for a social reunion, and I could have wished that the sergeant, if he wanted to make me one of the family and all pals together, so to speak, had selected some other time, but I inclined the bean gracefully in the constable’s
direction
and uttered a kindly ‘Ah, Dobson!’ I rather think, if I remember, that I also said something about its being a fine night.

But apparently this wasn’t just one of those chummy gatherings which recall the old-time
salon
.

‘Are you aware, sir, that there’s a window broke at the back of your residence? My young nephew here spotted it and thought best to wake me up and have me investigate. A ground-floor window, sir, with a whole pane of glass gone from it.’

I simpered slightly.

‘Oh, that? Yes, Brinkley did that yesterday. Silly ass!’

‘You knew about it, then sir?’

‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Quite all right, Sergeant.’

‘Well, you know best if it’s quite all right, sir, but I should say there was a danger of marauders getting through.’