The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 1: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.1 (37 page)

But mere thews and sinews do not qualify a man to pinch policemen’s helmets. You need finesse.

‘He will, will he?’ I said. ‘A fat lot of bishing he’s going to do, if he’s caught sneaking helmets from members of his flock.’

‘He won’t be caught.’

‘Of course he’ll be caught. At the old Alma Mater he was always caught. He seemed to have no notion whatsoever of going about a thing in a subtle, tactful way. Chuck it, Stiffy. Abandon the whole project.’

‘No.’

‘Stiffy!’

‘No. The show must go on.’

I gave it up. I could see plainly that it would be mere waste of time to try to argue her out of her girlish daydreams. She had the same type of mind, I perceived, as Roberta Wickham, who once persuaded me to go by night to the bedroom of a fellow guest at a country house and puncture his hot-water bottle with a darning needle on the end of a stick.

‘Well, if it must be, I suppose,’ I said resignedly. ‘But at least impress upon him that it is essential, when pinching policemen’s helmets, to give a forward shove before applying the upwards lift. Otherwise, the subject’s chin catches in the strap. It was to overlooking this vital point that my own downfall in Leicester Square was
due
. The strap caught, the cop was enabled to turn and clutch, and before I knew what had happened I was in the dock, saying “Yes, your Honour” and “No, your Honour” to your Uncle Watkyn.’

I fell into a thoughtful silence, as I brooded on the dark future lying in wait for an old friend. I am not a weak man, but I was beginning to wonder if I had been right in squelching so curtly Jeeves’s efforts to get me off on a Round-The-World cruise. Whatever you may say against these excursions – the cramped conditions of shipboard, the possibility of getting mixed up with a crowd of bores, the nuisance of having to go and look at the Taj Mahal – at least there is this to be said in their favour, that you escape the mental agony of watching innocent curates dishing their careers and forfeiting all chance of rising to great heights in the Church by getting caught bonneting their parishioners.

I heaved a sigh, and resumed the conversation.

‘So you and Stinker are engaged, are you? Why didn’t you tell me when you lunched at the flat?’

‘It hadn’t happened then. Oh, Bertie, I’m so happy I could bite a grape. At least, I shall be, if we can get Uncle Watkyn thinking along “Bless you, my children” lines.’

‘Oh, yes, you were saying, weren’t you? About him being sweetened. How do you mean, sweetened?’

‘That’s what I want to have a talk with you about. You remember what I said in my telegram, about there being something I wanted you to do for me?’

I started. A well-defined uneasiness crept over me. I had forgotten all about that telegram of hers.

‘It’s something quite simple.’

I doubted it. I mean to say, if her idea of a suitable job for curates was the pinching of policemen’s helmets, what sort of an assignment, I could not but ask myself, was she likely to hand to me? It seemed that the moment had come for a bit of in-the-bud-nipping.

‘Oh, yes?’ I said. ‘Well, let me tell you here and now that I’m jolly well not going to do it.’

‘Yellow, eh?’

‘Bright yellow. Like my Aunt Agatha.’

‘What’s the matter with her?’

‘She’s got jaundice.’

‘Enough to give her jaundice, having a nephew like you. Why, you don’t even know what it is.’

‘I would prefer not to know.’

‘Well, I’m going to tell you.’

‘I do not wish to listen.’

‘You would rather I unleashed Bartholomew? I notice he has been looking at you in that odd way of his. I don’t believe he likes you. He does take sudden dislikes to people.’

The Woosters are brave, but not rash. I allowed her to lead me to the stone wall that bordered the terrace, and we sat down. The evening, I remember, was one of perfect tranquillity, featuring a sort of serene peace. Which just shows you.

‘I won’t keep you long,’ she said. ‘It’s all quite simple and straightforward. I shall have to begin, though, by telling you why we have had to be so dark and secret about the engagement. That’s Gussie’s fault.’

‘What has he done?’

‘Just been Gussie, that’s all. Just gone about with no chin, goggling through his spectacles and keeping newts in his bedroom. You can understand Uncle Watkyn’s feelings. His daughter tells him she is going to get married. “Oh, yes?” he says. “Well, let’s have a dekko at the chap.” And along rolls Gussie. A nasty jar for a father.’

‘Quite.’

‘Well, you can’t tell me that a time when he is reeling under the blow of having Gussie for a son-in-law is the moment for breaking it to him that I want to marry the curate.’

I saw her point. I recollected Freddie Threepwood telling me that there had been trouble at Blandings about a cousin of his wanting to marry a curate. In that case, I gathered, the strain had been eased by the discovery that the fellow was the heir of a Liverpool shipping millionaire; but as a broad, general rule, parents do not like their daughters marrying curates, and I take it that the same thing applies to uncles with their nieces.

‘You’ve got to face it. Curates are not so hot. So before anything can be done in the way of removing the veil of secrecy, we have got to sell Harold to Uncle Watkyn. If we play our cards properly, I am hoping that he will give him a vicarage which he has in his gift. Then we shall begin to get somewhere.’

I didn’t like her use of the word ‘we’, but I saw what she was driving at, and I was sorry to have to insert a spanner in her hopes and dreams.

‘You wish me to put in a word for Stinker? You would like me to draw your uncle aside and tell him what a splendid fellow Stinker
is?
There is nothing I would enjoy more, my dear Stiffy, but unfortunately we are not on those terms.’

‘No, no, nothing like that.’

‘Well, I don’t see what more I can do.’

‘You will,’ she said, and again I was conscious of that subtle feeling of uneasiness. I told myself that I must be firm. But I could not but remember Roberta Wickham and the hot-water bottle. A man thinks he is being chilled steel – or adamant, if you prefer the expression – and suddenly the mists clear away and he finds that he has allowed a girl to talk him into something frightful. Samson had the same experience with Delilah.

‘Oh?’ I said, guardedly.

She paused in order to tickle the dog Bartholomew under the left ear. Then she resumed.

‘Just praising Harold to Uncle Watkyn isn’t any use. You need something much cleverer than that. You want to engineer some terrifically brainy scheme that will put him over with a bang. I thought I had got it a few days ago. Do you ever read
Milady’s Boudoir
?’

‘I once contributed an article to it on “What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing”, but I am not a regular reader. Why?’

‘There was a story in it last week about a Duke who wouldn’t let his daughter marry the young secretary, so the secretary got a friend of his to take the Duke out on the lake and upset the boat, and then he dived in and saved the Duke, and the Duke said “Right ho”.’

I resolved that no time should be lost in quashing this idea.

‘Any notion you may have entertained that I am going to take Sir W. Bassett out in a boat and upset him can be dismissed instanter. To start with, he wouldn’t come out on a lake with me.’

‘No. And we haven’t a lake. And Harold said that if I was thinking of the pond in the village, I could forget it, as it was much too cold to dive into ponds at this time of year. Harold is funny in some ways.’

‘I applaud his sturdy common sense.’

‘Then I got an idea from another story. It was about a young lover who gets a friend of his to dress up as a tramp and attack the girl’s father, and then he dashes in and rescues him.’

I patted her hand gently.

‘The flaw in all these ideas of yours,’ I pointed out, ‘is that the hero always seems to have a half-witted friend who is eager to place himself in the foulest positions on his behalf. In Stinker’s case, this
is
not so. I am fond of Stinker – you could even go so far as to say that I love him like a brother – but there are sharply defined limits to what I am prepared to do to further his interests.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter, because he put the presidential veto on that one, too. Something about what the vicar would say if it all came out. But he loves my new one.’

‘Oh, you’ve got a new one?’

‘Yes, and it’s terrific. The beauty of it is Harold’s part in it is above reproach. A thousand vicars couldn’t get the goods on him. The only snag was that he has to have someone working with him, and until I heard you were coming down here I couldn’t think who we were to get. But now you have arrived, all is well.’

‘It is, is it? I informed you before, young Byng, and I now inform you again that nothing will induce me to mix myself up with your loathsome schemes.’

‘Oh, but, Bertie, you must! We’re relying on you. And all you have to do is practically nothing. Just steal Uncle Watkyn’s cow-creamer.’

I don’t know what you would have done, if a girl in heather-mixture tweeds had sprung this on you, scarcely eight hours after a mauve-faced aunt had sprung the same. It is possible that you would have reeled. Most chaps would, I imagine. Personally, I was more amused than aghast. Indeed, if memory serves me aright, I laughed. If so, it was just as well, for it was about the last chance I had.

‘Oh, yes?’ I said. ‘Tell me more,’ I said, feeling that it would be entertaining to allow the little blighter to run on. ‘Steal his cow-creamer, eh?’

‘Yes. It’s a thing he brought back from London yesterday for his collection. A sort of silver cow with a kind of blotto look on its face. He thinks the world of it. He had it on the table in front of him at dinner last night, and was gassing away about it. And it was then that I got the idea. I thought that if Harold could pinch it, and then bring it back, Uncle Watkyn would be so grateful that he would start spouting vicarages like a geyser. And then I spotted the catch.’

‘Oh, there was a catch?’

‘Of course. Don’t you see? How would Harold be supposed to have got the thing? If a silver cow is in somebody’s collection, and it disappears, and next day a curate rolls round with it, that curate has got to do some good, quick explaining. Obviously, it must be made to look like an outside job.’

‘I see. You want me to put on a black mask and break in through
the
window and snitch this
object d’art
and hand it over to Stinker? I see. I see.’

I spoke with satirical bitterness, and I should have thought that anyone could have seen that satirical bitterness was what I was speaking with, but she merely looked at me with admiration and approval.

‘You are clever, Bertie. That’s exactly it. Of course you needn’t wear a mask.’

‘You don’t think it would help me throw myself into the part?’ I said with s. b., as before.

‘Well, it might. That’s up to you. But the great thing is to get through the window. Wear gloves, of course, because of the fingerprints.’

‘Of course.’

‘Then Harold will be waiting outside, and he will take the thing from you.’

‘And after that I go off and do my stretch at Dartmoor?’

‘Oh, no. You escape in the struggle, of course.’

‘What struggle?’

‘And Harold rushes into the house, all over blood –’

‘Whose blood?’

‘Well, I said yours, and Harold thought his. There have got to be signs of a struggle to make it more interesting, and my idea was that he should hit you on the nose. But he said the thing would carry greater weight if he was all covered with gore. So how we’ve left it is that you both hit each other on the nose. And then Harold rouses the house and comes in and shows Uncle Watkyn the cow-creamer and explains what happened, and everything’s fine. Because, I mean, Uncle Watkyn couldn’t just say “Oh thanks” and leave it at that, could he? He would be compelled, if he had a spark of decency in him, to cough up that vicarage. Don’t you think it’s a wonderful scheme, Bertie?’

I rose. My face was cold and hard.

‘Most. But I’m sorry –’

‘You don’t mean you won’t do it, now that you see that it will cause you practically no inconvenience at all? It would only take about ten minutes of your time.’

‘I do mean I won’t do it.’

‘Well, I think you’re a pig.’

‘A pig, maybe, but a shrewd, level-headed pig. I wouldn’t touch the project with a bargepole. I tell you I know Stinker. Exactly how
he
would muck the thing up and get us all landed in the jug, I cannot say, but he would find a way. And now I’ll take that book, if you don’t mind.’

‘What book? Oh, that one of Gussie’s.’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you want it for?’

‘I want it,’ I said gravely, ‘because Gussie is not fit to be in charge of it. He might lose it again, in which event it might fall into the hands of your uncle, in which event he would certainly kick the stuffing out of the Gussie-Madeline wedding arrangements, in which event I would be up against it as few men have ever been up against it before.’

‘You?’

‘None other.’

‘How do you come into it?’

‘I will tell you.’

And in a few terse words I outlined for her the events which had taken place at Brinkley Court, the situation which had arisen from those events and the hideous peril which threatened me if Gussie’s entry were to be scratched.

‘You will understand,’ I said, ‘that I am implying nothing derogatory to your cousin Madeline, when I say that the idea of being united to her in the bonds of holy wedlock is one that freezes the gizzard. The fact is in no way to her discredit. I should feel just the same about marrying many of the world’s noblest women. There are certain females whom one respects, admires, reveres, but only from a distance. If they show any signs of attempting to come closer, one is prepared to fight them off with a blackjack. It is to this group that your cousin Madeline belongs. A charming girl, and the ideal mate for Augustus Fink-Nottle, but ants in the pants to Bertram.’

She drank this in.

‘I see. Yes, I suppose Madeline is a bit of a Gawd-help-us.’