The Jeeves Omnibus (111 page)

‘But the door’s shut.’

‘What door?’

‘The front door. Somebody must have shut it.’

‘Then I shall open it.’

‘But it won’t open.’

‘Then I shall try another door.’

‘But all the other doors are shut.’

‘What? Who shut them?’

‘I don’t know.’

I advanced a theory:

‘The wind?’

Aunt Dahlia’s eyes met mine.

‘Don’t try me too high,’ she begged. ‘Not now, precious.’ And, indeed, even as I spoke, it did strike me that the night was pretty still.

Uncle Tom said we must get in through a window. Aunt Dahlia sighed a bit.

‘How? Could Lloyd George do it, could Winston do it, could Baldwin do it? No. Not since you had those bars of yours put on.’

‘Well, well, well. God bless my soul, ring the bell, then.’

‘The fire bell?’

‘The door bell.’

‘To what end, Thomas? There’s nobody in the house. The servants are all at Kingham.’

‘But, confound it all, we can’t stop out here all night.’

‘Can’t we? You just watch us. There is nothing – literally nothing – which a country house party can’t do with Attila here operating on the premises. Seppings presumably took the back-door key with him. We must just amuse ourselves till he comes back.’

Tuppy made a suggestion:

‘Why not take out one of the cars and drive over to Kingham and get the key from Seppings?’

It went well. No question about that. For the first time, a smile lit up Aunt Dahlia’s drawn face. Uncle Tom grunted approvingly.
Anatole
said something in Provençal that sounded complimentary. And I thought I detected even on Angela’s map a slight softening.

‘A very excellent idea,’ said Aunt Dahlia. ‘One of the best. Nip round to the garage at once.’

After Tuppy had gone, some extremely flattering things were said about his intelligence and resource, and there was a disposition to draw rather invidious comparisons between him and Bertram. Painful for me, of course, but the ordeal didn’t last long, for it couldn’t have been more than five minutes before he was with us again.

Tuppy seemed perturbed.

‘I say, it’s all off.’

‘Why?’

‘The garage is locked.’

‘Unlock it.’

‘I haven’t the key.’

‘Shout, then, and wake Waterbury.’

‘Who’s Waterbury?’

‘The chauffeur, ass. He sleeps over the garage.’

‘But he’s gone to the dance at Kingham.’

It was the final wallop. Until this moment, Aunt Dahlia had been able to preserve her frozen calm. The dam now burst. The years rolled away from her, and she was once more the Dahlia Wooster of the old yoicks-and-tantivy days – the emotional, free-speaking girl who had so often risen in her stirrups to yell derogatory personalities at people who were heading hounds.

‘Curse all dancing chauffeurs! What on earth does a chauffeur want to dance for? I mistrusted that man from the start. Something told me he was a dancer. Well, this finishes it. We’re out here till breakfast-time. If those blasted servants come back before eight o’clock, I shall be vastly surprised. You won’t get Seppings away from a dance till you throw him out. I know him. The jazz’ll go to his head, and he’ll stand clapping and demanding encores till his hands blister. Damn all dancing butlers! What is Brinkley Court? A respectable English country house or a crimson dancing school? One might as well be living in the middle of the Russian Ballet. Well, all right. If we must stay out here, we must. We shall all be frozen stiff, except’ – here she directed at me not one of her friendliest glances – ‘Except dear old Attila, who is, I observe, well and warmly clad. We will resign ourselves to the prospect of freezing to death like the Babes in the Wood, merely expressing a dying wish that our old pal Attila will see that we are covered with leaves. No doubt he will also
toll
that fire bell of his as a mark of respect – And what might you want, my good man?’

She broke off, and stood glaring at Jeeves. During the latter portion of her address, he had been standing by in a respectful manner, endeavouring to catch the speaker’s eye.

‘If I might make a suggestion, madam.’

I am not saying that in the course of our long association I have always found myself able to view Jeeves with approval. There are aspects of his character which have frequently caused coldnesses to arise between us. He is one of those fellows who, if you give them a thingummy, take a what-d’you-call it. His work is often raw, and he has been known to allude to me as ‘mentally negligible’. More than once, as I have shown, it has been my painful task to squelch in him a tendency to get uppish and treat the young master as a serf or peon.

These are grave defects.

But one thing I have never failed to hand the man. He is magnetic. There is about him something that seems to soothe and hypnotize. To the best of my knowledge, he has never encountered a charging rhinoceros, but should this contingency occur, I have no doubt that the animal, meeting his eye, would check itself in midstride, roll over and lie purring with its legs in the air.

At any rate he calmed down Aunt Dahlia, the nearest thing to a charging rhinoceros, in under five seconds. He just stood there looking respectful, and though I didn’t time the thing – not having a stopwatch on me – I should say it wasn’t more than three seconds and a quarter before her whole manner underwent an astounding change for the better. She melted before one’s eyes.

‘Jeeves! You haven’t got an idea?’

‘Yes, madam.’

‘That great brain of yours has really clicked as ever in the hour of need?’

‘Yes, madam.’

‘Jeeves,’ said Aunt Dahlia in a shaking voice, ‘I am sorry I spoke so abruptly. I was not myself. I might have known that you would not come simply trying to make conversation. Tell us this idea of yours, Jeeves. Join our little group of thinkers and let us hear what you have to say. Make yourself at home, Jeeves, and give us the good word. Can you really get us out of this mess?’

‘Yes, madam, if one of the gentlemen would be willing to ride a bicycle.’

‘A bicycle?’

‘There is a bicycle in the gardener’s shed in the kitchen garden, madam. Possibly one of the gentlemen might feel disposed to ride over to Kingham Manor and procure the back-door key from Mr Seppings.’

‘Splendid, Jeeves!’

‘Thank you, madam.’

‘Wonderful!’

‘Thank you, madam.’

‘Attila!’ said Aunt Dahlia, turning and speaking in a quiet, authoritative manner.

I had been expecting it. From the very moment those ill-judged words had passed the fellow’s lips, I had had a presentiment that a determined effort would be made to elect me as the goat, and I braced myself to resist and obstruct.

And as I was about to do so, while I was in the very act of summoning up all my eloquence to protest that I didn’t know how to ride a bike and couldn’t possibly learn in the brief time at my disposal, I’m dashed if the man didn’t go and nip me in the bud.

‘Yes, madam, Mr Wooster would perform the task admirably. He is an expert cyclist. He has often boasted to me of his triumphs on the wheel.’

I hadn’t. I hadn’t done anything of the sort. It’s simply monstrous how one’s words get twisted. All I had ever done was to mention to him – casually, just as an interesting item of information, one day in New York when we were watching the six-day bicycle race – that at the age of fourteen, while spending my holidays with a vicar of sorts who had been told off to teach me Latin, I had won the Choir Boys’ Handicap at the local school treat.

A different thing from boasting of one’s triumphs on the wheel.

I mean, he was a man of the world and must have known that the form of school treats is never of the hottest. And, if I’m not mistaken, I had specifically told him that on the occasion referred to I had received half a lap start and that Willie Punting, the odds-on favourite to whom the race was expected to be a gift, had been forced to retire, owing to having pinched his elder brother’s machine without asking the elder brother, and the elder brother coming along just as the pistol went and giving him one on the side of the head and taking it away from him, thus rendering him a scratched-at-the-post non-starter. Yet, from the way he talked, you would have thought I was one of those chaps in sweaters with medals all over them, whose photographs bob up from time to time in the illustrated press on the
occasion
of their having ridden from Hyde Park Corner to Glasgow in three seconds under the hour, or whatever it is.

And as if this were not bad enough, Tuppy had to shove his oar in.

‘That’s right,’ said Tuppy. ‘Bertie has always been a great cyclist. I remember at Oxford he used to take all his clothes off on bump-supper nights and ride around the quad, singing comic songs. Jolly fast he used to go too.’

‘Then he can go jolly fast now,’ said Aunt Dahlia with animation. ‘He can’t go too fast for me. He may also sing comic songs, if he likes … And if you wish to take your clothes off, Bertie, my lamb, by all means do so. But whether clothed or in the nude, whether singing comic songs or not singing comic songs, get a move on.’

I found speech:

‘But I haven’t ridden for years.’

‘Then it’s high time you began again.’

‘I’ve probably forgotten how to ride.’

‘You’ll soon get the knack after you’ve taken a toss or two. Trial and error. The only way.’

‘But it’s miles to Kingham.’

‘So the sooner you’re off, the better.’

‘But –’

‘Bertie, dear.’

‘But, dash it –’

‘Bertie, darling.’

‘Yes, but dash it –’

‘Bertie, my sweet.’

And so it was arranged. Presently I was moving sombrely off through the darkness, Jeeves at my side, Aunt Dahlia calling after me something about trying to imagine myself the man who brought the good news from Ghent to Aix. The first I had heard of the chap.

‘So, Jeeves,’ I said, as we reached the shed, and my voice was cold and bitter, ‘this is what your great scheme has accomplished! Tuppy, Angela, Gussie and the Bassett not on speaking terms, and self faced with an eight-mile ride –’

‘Nine, I believe, sir.’

‘– a nine-mile ride, and another nine-mile ride back.’

‘I am sorry, sir.’

‘No good being sorry now. Where is this foul boneshaker?’

‘I will bring it out, sir.’

He did so. I eyed it sourly.

‘Where’s the lamp?’

‘I fear there is no lamp, sir.’

‘No lamp?’

‘No, sir.’

‘But I may come a fearful stinker without a lamp. Suppose I barge into something?’

I broke off and eyed him frigidly.

‘You smile, Jeeves. The thought amuses you?’

‘I beg your pardon, sir. I was thinking of a tale my Uncle Cyril used to tell me as a child. An absurd little story, sir, though I confess that I have always found it droll. According to my Uncle Cyril, two men named Nicholls and Jackson set out to ride to Brighton on a tandem bicycle, and were so unfortunate as to come into collision with a brewer’s van. And when the rescue party arrived on the scene of the accident, it was discovered that they had been hurled together with such force that it was impossible to sort them out at all adequately. The keenest eye could not discern which portion of the fragments was Nicholls and which Jackson. So they collected as much as they could, and called it Nixon. I remember laughing very much at that story when I was a child, sir.’

I had to pause a moment to master my feelings.

‘You did, eh?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You thought it funny?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And your Uncle Cyril thought it funny?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Golly, what a family! Next time you meet your Uncle Cyril, Jeeves, you can tell him from me that his sense of humour is morbid and unpleasant.’

‘He is dead, sir.’

‘Thank heaven for that … Well, give me the blasted machine.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘Are the tyres inflated?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘The nuts firm, the brakes in order, the sprockets running true with the differential gear?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Right ho, Jeeves.’

In Tuppy’s statement that, when at the University of Oxford, I had been known to ride a bicycle in the nude about the quadrangle of our mutual college, there had been, I cannot deny, a certain amount of substance. Correct, however, though his facts were, so far as they
went,
he had not told all. What he had omitted to mention was that I had invariably been well oiled at the time, and when in that condition a chap is capable of feats at which in cooler moments his reason would rebel.

Stimulated by the juice, I believe, men have even been known to ride alligators.

As I started now to pedal out into the great world, I was icily sober, and the old skill, in consequence, had deserted me entirely. I found myself wobbling badly, and all the stories I had ever heard of nasty bicycle accidents came back to me with a rush, headed by Jeeves’s Uncle Cyril’s cheery little anecdote about Nicholls and Jackson.

Pounding wearily through the darkness, I found myself at a loss to fathom the mentality of men like Jeeves’s Uncle Cyril. What on earth he could see funny in a disaster which had apparently involved the complete extinction of a human creature – or, at any rate, of half a human creature and half another human creature – was more than I could understand. To me, the thing was one of the most poignant tragedies that had ever been brought to my attention, and I have no doubt that I should have continued to brood over it for quite a time, had my thoughts not been diverted by the sudden necessity of zigzagging sharply in order to avoid a pig in the fairway.

For a moment it looked like being real Nicholis-and-Jackson stuff, but, fortunately, a quick zig on my part, coinciding with an adroit zag on the part of the pig, enabled me to win through, and I continued to ride safe, but with the heart fluttering like a captive bird.

The effect of this narrow squeak upon me was to shake the nerve to the utmost. The fact that pigs were abroad in the night seemed to bring home to me the perilous nature of my enterprise. It set me thinking of all the other things that could happen to a man out and about on a velocipede without a lamp after lighting-up time. In particular, I recalled the statement of a pal of mine that in certain sections of the rural districts goats were accustomed to stray across the road to the extent of their chains, thereby forming about as sound a booby trap as one could well wish.