The Jeeves Omnibus (208 page)

‘Well, really,’ Dame Daphne Winkworth had observed bitterly just before lunch, when Silversmith had blown in with the news that Gussie had once again telephoned to say he would be taking pot-luck at the Vicarage, ‘Mr Wooster seems to live in Miss Pirbright’s pocket. He appears to regard Deverill Hall as a hotel which he can drop into or stay away from as he feels inclined.’

And Aunt Charlotte, when the facts had been relayed to her through her ear-trumpet, for she was wired for sound, had said with a short, quick sniff that she supposed they ought to consider themselves highly honoured that the piefaced young bastard condescended to sleep in the bally place, or words to that effect.

Nor could one fairly blame them for blinding and stiffing. Nothing sticks the gaff into your chatelaine more than a guest being constantly AWOL, and it was only on the rarest occasions nowadays that Gussie saw fit to put on the nosebag at Deverill Hall. He lunched, tea-ed and dined with Corky. Since that first meeting outside the post office he had seldom left her side. The human poultice, nothing less.

You can readily understand, then, why there were dark circles beneath my eyes and why I had almost permanently now a fluttering sensation at the pit of the stomach, as if I had recently swallowed far more mice than I could have wished. It only needed a word from Dame Daphne Winkworth to Aunt Agatha to the effect that her nephew Bertram had fallen into the toils of a most undesirable girl – a Hollywood film actress, my dear – I could see her writing it as clearly as if I had been peeping over her shoulder – to bring the
old
relative racing down to Deverill Hall with her foot in her hand. And then what? Ruin, desolation and despair.

The obvious procedure, of course, when the morale is being given the sleeve across the windpipe like this, is to get in touch with Jeeves and see what he has to suggest. So, encountering the parlourmaid, Queenie, in the passage outside my room after lunch, I enquired as to his whereabouts.

‘I say,’ I said, ‘I wonder if you happen to know where Jeeves is? Wooster’s man, you know.’

She stood staring at me goofily. Her eyes, normally like twin stars, were dull and a bit reddish about the edges, and I should have described her face as drawn. The whole set-up, in short, seeming to indicate that here one had a parlourmaid who had either gone off her onion or was wrestling with a secret sorrow.

‘Sir?’ she said, in a tortured sort of voice.

I repeated my remarks, and this time they penetrated.

‘Mr Jeeves isn’t here, sir. Mr Wooster let him go to London. There was a lecture he wanted to be at.’

‘Oh thanks,’ I said, speaking dully, for this was a blow. ‘You don’t know when he’ll be back?’

‘No, sir.’

‘I see. Thanks.’

I went on into my room and took a good, square look at the situation.

If you ask any of the nibs who move in diplomatic circles and are accustomed to handling tricky affairs of state, he will tell you that when matters have reached a deadlock, it is not a bit of good just sitting on the seat of the pants and rolling the eyes up to heaven – you have got to turn stones and explore avenues and take prompt steps through the proper channels. Only thus can you hope to find a formula. And it seemed to me, musing tensely, that in the present crisis something constructive might be accomplished by rounding up Corky and giving her a straight-from-the-shoulder talk, pointing out the frightful jeopardy in which she was placing an old friend and dancing-class buddy by allowing Gussie to spend his time frisking and bleating round her.

I left the room, accordingly, and a few minutes later might have been observed stealing through the sunlit grounds en route for the village. In fact, I was observed, and by Dame Daphne Winkworth. I was nearing the bottom of the drive and in another moment should have won through to safety, when somebody called my name – or, rather, Gussie’s name – and I saw the formidable old egg standing
in
the rose garden. From the fact that she had a syringe in her hand I deduced that she was in the process of doing the local green-fly a bit of no good.

‘Come here, Augustus,’ she said.

It was the last thing I would have done, if given the choice, for even at the best of times this dangerous specimen put the wind up me pretty vertically, and she was now looking about ten degrees more forbidding than usual. Her voice was cold and her eye was cold, and I didn’t like the way she was toying with that syringe. It was plain that for some reason I had fallen in her estimation to approximately the level of a green-fly, and her air was that of a woman who for two pins would press the trigger and let me have a fluid ounce of whatever the hell-brew was squarely in the mazzard.

‘Oh, hallo,’ I said, trying to be debonair but missing by a mile. ‘Squirting the rose trees?’

‘Don’t talk to me about rose trees!’

‘Oh, no, rather not,’ I said. Well, I hadn’t wanted to particularly. Just filling in with
ad lib
stuff.

‘Augustus, what is this I hear?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You would do better to beg Madeline’s.’

Mystic stuff. I didn’t get it. The impression I received was of a Dame of the British Empire talking through the back of her neck.

‘When I was in the house just now,’ she proceeded, ‘a telegram arrived for you from Madeline. It was telephoned from the post office. Sometimes they telephone, and sometimes they deliver personally.’

‘I see. According to the whim of the moment.’

‘Please do not interrupt. This time it happened that the message was telephoned, and as I was passing through the hall when the bell rang, I took it down.’

‘Frightfully white of you,’ I said, feeling that I couldn’t go wrong in giving her the old oil.

I had gone wrong, however. She didn’t like it. She frowned, raised the syringe, then, as if remembering in time that she was a Deverill, lowered it again.

‘I have already asked you not to interrupt. I took down the message, as I say, and I have it here. No,’ she said, having searched through her costume, ‘I must have left it on the hall table. But I can tell you its contents. Madeline says she has not received a single letter from you since you arrived at the hall, and she wishes to know why. She is greatly distressed at your abominable neglect, and I am not surprised. You know how sensitive she is. You ought to have been writing to her
every
day. I have no words to express what I think of your heartless behaviour. That is all, Augustus,’ she said, and dismissed me with a gesture of loathing, as if I had been a green-fly that had fallen short of even the very moderate level of decency of the average run-of-the-mill green-fly. And I tottered off and groped my way to a rustic bench and sank onto it.

The information which she had sprung on me had, I need scarcely say, affected me like the impact behind the ear of a stocking full of wet sand. Only once in my career had I experienced an emotion equally intense, on the occasion when Freddie Widgeon at the Drones, having possessed himself of a motor horn, stole up behind me as I crossed Dover Street in what is known as a reverie and suddenly tooted the apparatus in my immediate ear.

It had never so much as occurred to me to suppose that Gussie was not writing daily letters to the Bassett. It was what he had come to this Edgar Allen Poe residence to do, and I had taken it for granted that he was doing it. I didn’t need a diagram to show me what the run of events would be, if he persisted in this policy of ca’canny. A spot more silence on his part, and along would come La Bassett in person to investigate, and the thought of what would happen then froze the blood and made the toes curl.

I suppose it may have been for a matter of about ten minutes that I sat there inert, the jaw drooping, the eyes staring sightlessly at the surrounding scenery. Then I pulled myself together and resumed my journey. It has been well said of Bertram Wooster that though he may sink onto rustic benches and for a while give the impression of being licked to a custard, the old spirit will always come surging back sooner or later.

As I walked, I was thinking hard and bitter thoughts of Corky, the
fons et origo
, if you know what I mean by
fons et origo
, of all the trouble. It was she who, by shamelessly flirting with him, by persistently giving him the flashing smile and the quick sidelong look out of the corner of the eye, had taken Gussie’s mind off his job and slowed him up as our correspondent on the spot. Oh, Woman, Woman, I said to myself, not for the first time, feeling that the sooner the sex was suppressed, the better it would be for all of us.

At the age of eight, in the old dancing-class days, incensed by some incisive remarks on her part about my pimples, of which I had a notable collection at that time, I once forgot myself to the extent of socking Corky Pirbright on the top-knot with a wooden dumb-bell, and until this moment I had always regretted the unpleasant affair, considering my action a blot on an otherwise stainless record and,
no
matter what the provocation, scarcely the behaviour of a
preux chevalier
. But now, as I brooded on the Delilah stuff she was pulling, I found myself wishing I could do it again.

I strode on, rehearsing in my mind some opening sentence to be employed when we should meet, and not far from the Vicarage came upon her seated at the wheel of her car by the side of the road.

But when I confronted her and said I wanted a word with her, she regretted that it couldn’t be managed at the moment. It was, she explained, her busy afternoon. In pursuance of her policy of being the Little Mother to her uncle, the sainted Sidney, she was about to take a bowl of strengthening soup to one of his needy parishioners.

‘A Mrs Clara Wellbeloved, if you want to keep the record straight,’ she proceeded. ‘She lives in one of those picturesque cottages of the High Street. And it’s no good you waiting, because after delivering the bouillon I sit and talk to her about Hollywood. She’s a great fan, and it takes hours. Some other time, my lamb.’

‘Listen, Corky –’

‘You are probably saying to yourself “Where’s the soup?” I unfortunately forgot to bring it along, and Gussie has trotted back for it. What a delightful man he is, Bertie. So kind. So helpful. Always on hand to run errands, when required, and with a fund of good stories about newts. I’ve given him my autograph. Speaking of autographs, I heard from your cousin Thomas this morning.’

‘Never mind about young Thos. What I want –’

She broke into speech again, as girls always do. I have had a good deal of experience of this tendency on the part of the female sex to refrain from listening when you talk to them, and it has always made me sympathize with those fellows who tried to charm the deaf adder and had it react like a Wednesday matinée audience.

‘You remember I gave him fifty of my autographs, and he expected to sell them to his playmates at sixpence apiece? Well, he tells me that he got a bob, not sixpence, which will give you a rough idea of how I stand with the boys at Bramley-on-Sea. He says a genuine Ida Lupino only fetches ninepence.’

‘Listen, Corky –’

‘He wants to come and spend his midterm holiday at the Vicarage, and, of course, I’ve written to say that I shall be delighted. I don’t think Uncle Sidney is too happy at the prospect, but it’s good for a clergyman to have these trials. Makes him more spiritual, and consequently hotter at his job.’

‘Listen, Corky. What I want to talk to you about –’

‘Ah, here’s Gussie,’ she said, once more doing the deaf adder.

Gussie came bounding up with a look of reverent adoration on his face and a steaming can in his hands. Corky gave him a dazzling smile which seemed to go through him like a red-hot bullet through a pat of butter, and stowed the can away in the rumble seat.

‘Thank you, Gussie darling,’ she said. ‘Well, goodbye all. I must rush.’

She drove off, Gussie standing gaping after her transfixed, like a goldfish staring at an ant’s egg. He did not, however, remain transfixed long, because I got him between the third and fourth ribs with a forceful finger, causing him to come to life with a sharp ‘Ouch!’

‘Gussie,’ I said, getting down to brass tacks and beating about no bushes. ‘What’s all this about you not writing to Madeline?’

‘Madeline?’

‘Madeline.’

‘Oh, Madeline?’

‘Yes, Madeline. You ought to have been writing to her every day.’

This seemed to annoy him.

‘How on earth could I write to her every day? What chance do I get to write letters when my time is all taken up with memorizing my lines in this cross-talk act and thinking up effective business? I haven’t a moment.’

‘Well, you’ll jolly well have to find a moment. Do you realize she’s started sending telegrams about it? You must write today without fail.’

‘What, to Madeline?’

‘Yes, blast you, to Madeline.’

I was surprised to see that he was glowering sullenly through his windshields.

‘I’ll be blowed if I write to Madeline,’ he said, and would have looked like a mule if he had not looked so like a fish. ‘I’m teaching her a lesson.’

‘You’re what?’

‘Teaching her a lesson. I’m not at all pleased with Madeline. She wanted me to come to this ghastly house, and I consented on the understanding that she would come, too, and give me moral support. It was a clear-cut gentlemen’s agreement. And at the last moment she coolly backed out on the flimsy plea that some school friend of hers at Wimbledon needed her. I was extremely annoyed, and I let her see it. She must be made to realize that she can’t do that sort of thing. So I’m not writing to her. It’s a sort of system.’

I clutched at the brow. The mice in my interior had now got up an
informal
dance and were buck-and-winging all over the place like a bunch of Nijinskys.

Gussie,’ I said, ‘once and for all, will you or will you not go back to the house and compose an eight-page letter breathing love in every syllable?’

‘No, I won’t,’ he said and left me flat.

Baffled and despondent, I returned to the Hall. And the first person I saw there was Catsmeat. He was in my room, lying on the bed with one of my cigarettes in his mouth.