The Jeeves Omnibus (218 page)

Dame Daphne blinked. Me, too.

‘Making a speech?’

‘In honour of the happy event, m’lady. My daughter Queenie has become affianced, m’lady.’

Dame Daphne oh-really-ed, and I very nearly said ‘Indeed, sir?’
for
the information had come as a complete surprise. For one thing I hadn’t suspected for an instant that ties of blood linked this bulging butler and that lissom parlourmaid, and for another, it seemed to me that she had got over her spot of Dobbs trouble pretty snappily. So this is what Woman’s constancy amounts to, is it, I remember saying to myself, and I’m not at all sure I didn’t add the word ‘Faugh!’

‘And who is the happy man, Silversmith?’

‘A nice steady young fellow, m’lady. A young fellow called Meadowes.’

I had a feeling I had heard the name before somewhere, but I couldn’t place it. Meadowes? Meadowes? No, it eluded me.

‘Indeed? From the village?’

‘No, m’lady. Meadowes is Mr Fink-Nottle’s personal attendant,’ said Silversmith, now definitely unshipping a smile and directing it at me. He seemed to be trying to indicate that after this he looked on me as one of the boys and practically a relation by marriage and that, on his side at least, no more would be said of my weakness for singing hunting songs over the port and introducing into country houses dogs that bit like serpents.

I suppose the gasp that had escaped my lips sounded to Dame Daphne like the gurgle of a man dying of thirst, for she instantly put in her order for orange juice.

‘Silversmith had better take it to your room. You will be wanting to change your clothes.’

‘He might tell Meadowes to bring it,’ I said faintly.

‘Why, of course. You will want to wish him happiness.’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

It was not immediately that Catsmeat presented himself. No doubt if you have made all your plans for marrying the daughter of the house and then suddenly find yourself engaged to the parlourmaid you need a little time to adjust the faculties. When he finally did appear, it seemed to me from his dazed expression that he had still a longish way to go in that direction. His air was that of a man who has recently been coshed by a small but serviceable rubber bludgeon.

‘Bertie,’ he said, ‘a rather unfortunate thing has happened.’

‘I know.’

‘Oh, you know, do you? Then what do you advise?’

There could be but one answer to this.

‘You’d better place the whole matter before Jeeves.’

‘I will. That great brain may find a formula. I’ll lay the facts before Jeeves and bid him brood on them.’

‘But what are the facts? How did it happen?’

‘I’ll tell you. Do you want this orange juice?’

‘No.’

‘Then I’ll have it. It may help a little.’

He drank deeply, and mopped the forehead.

‘It all comes of letting that Dickens spirit creep over you, Bertie. The advice I give to every young man starting life is Never get Dickensy. You remember I told you that for some days I have been bursting with a sort of yeasty benevolence? This morning it came to a head. I had had Gertrude’s note saying that she would elope with me, and I was just a solid chunk of sweetness and light. In ecstasies myself, I wanted to see happiness all around me. I loved my species and yearned to do it a bit of good. And with these sentiments fizzing about inside me, with the milk of human kindness sloshing up against my back teeth, I wandered into the servants’ hall and found Queenie there in tears.’

‘Your heart bled?’

‘Profusely. I said “There, there”. I took her hand and patted it. And then, as I didn’t seem to be making any headway, almost unconsciously I drew her on to my knee and put my arm around her waist and started kissing her. Like a brother.’

‘H’m.’

‘Don’t say “H’m”, Bertie. It was only what Sir Galahad or someone like that would have done in my place. Dash it, there’s nothing wrong, is there, in acting like a sympathetic elder brother when a girl is in distress? Pretty square behaviour, I should have thought. But don’t run away with the idea that I don’t wish I hadn’t yielded to the kindly impulse. I regret it sincerely, because at that moment Silversmith came in. And what do you think? He’s her father.’

‘I know.’

‘You seem to know everything.’

‘I do.’

‘Well, there’s one thing you don’t know, and that is that he was accompanied by Gertrude.’

‘Gosh!’

‘Yes. Her manner on beholding me was a bit reserved. Silversmith’s, on the other hand, wasn’t. He looked like a minor prophet without a beard suddenly confronted with the sins of the people, and started in immediately to thunder denunciations. There are fathers who know how to set about an erring daughter, and fathers who do not. Silversmith is one of the former. And then, in a sort of dream, I heard Queenie telling him that we were engaged. She has since
informed
me that it seemed to her the only way out. It did, of course, momentarily ease the strain.’

‘How did Gertrude appear to take it?’

‘Not very blithely. I’ve just had a brief note from her, cancelling our arrangements.’

He groaned the sort of hollow groan I had been groaning so much of late.

‘You see before you, Bertie, a spent egg, a man in whom hope is dead. You don’t happen to have any cyanide on you?’ He groaned another hollow one. ‘And on top of all this,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to put on a green beard and play Mike in a knockabout cross-talk act!’

I was sorry for the unhappy young blister, of course, but it piqued me somewhat that he seemed to consider that he was the only one who had any troubles.

‘Well, I’ve got to recite Christopher Robin poems.’

‘Pah!’ he said. ‘It might have been Winnie the Pooh.’

Well, there was that, of course.

THE VILLAGE HALL
stood in the middle of the High Street, just abaft the duck-pond. Erected in the year 1881 by Sir Quintin Deverill, Bart, a man who didn’t know much about architecture but knew what he liked, it was one of those mid-Victorian jobs in glazed red brick which always seem to bob up in these olde-worlde hamlets and do so much to encourage the drift to the towns. Its interior, like those of all the joints of its kind I’ve ever come across, was dingy and fuggy and smelled in about equal proportions of apples, chalk, damp plaster, Boy Scouts and the sturdy English peasantry.

The concert was slated to begin at eight-fifteen, and a few minutes before the kick-off, my own little effort not being billed till after the intermission, I wandered in and took my place among the standees at the back, noting dully that I should be playing to absolute capacity. The populace had rolled up in droves, though I could have warned them that they were asking for it. I had seen the programme, and I knew the worst.

The moment I scanned the bill of fare, I was able to understand why Corky, that afternoon at my flat, had spoken so disgruntedly of the talent at her disposal, like a girl who has been thwarted and frustrated and kept from fulfilling herself and what not. I knew what had happened. Starting out to arrange this binge with high hopes and burning ideals and all that sort of thing, poor child, she had stubbed her toe on the fatal snag which always lurks in the path of the impresario of this type of entertainment. I allude to the fact that at every village concert there are certain powerful vested interests which have to be considered. There are, that is to say, divers local nibs who, having always done their bit, are going to be pretty cold and sniffy if not invited to do it again this time. What Corky had come up against was the Kegley-Bassington clan.

To a man of my wide experience, such items as ‘Solo: Miss Muriel Kegley-Bassington’ and ‘Duologue (A Pair of Lunatics): Colonel and Mrs R.P. Kegley-Bassington’ told their own story; and the same thing applied to ‘Imitations: Watkyn Kegley-Bassington’;
‘Card
Tricks: Percival Kegley-Bassington’ and ‘Rhythmic Dance: Miss Poppy Kegley-Bassington’. Master George Kegley-Bassington, who was down for a recitation, I absolved from blame. I strongly suspected that he, like me, had been thrust into his painful position by
force majeure
and would have been equally willing to make a cash settlement.

In the intervals of feeling a brotherly sympathy for Master George and wishing I could run across him and stand him a commiserating gingerbeer, I devoted my time to studying the faces of my neighbours, hoping to detect in them some traces of ruth and pity and what is known as kind indulgence. But not a glimmer. Like all rustic standees, these were stern, implacable men, utterly incapable of taking the broad, charitable view and realizing that a fellow who comes on a platform and starts reciting about Christopher Robin going hoppity-hoppity-hop (or, alternatively, saying his prayers) does not do so from sheer wantonness but because he is a helpless victim of circumstances beyond his control.

I was gazing with considerable apprehension at a particularly dangerous specimen on my left, a pleasure-seeker with hair oil on his head and those mobile lips to which the raspberry springs automatically, when a mild splatter of applause from the two-bob seats showed that we were off. The vicar was opening the proceedings with a short address.

Apart from the fact that I was aware that he played chess and shared with Catsmeat’s current
fiancée
a dislike for hearing policemen make cracks about Jonah and the Whale, the Rev. Sidney Pirbright had hitherto been a sealed book to me, and this was, of course, the first time I had seen him in action. A tall, drooping man, looking as if he had been stuffed in a hurry by an incompetent taxidermist, it became apparent immediately that he was not one of those boisterous vicars who, when opening a village concert, bound on the stage with a whoop and a holler, give the parishioners a huge Hallo, slam across a couple of travelling-salesman-and-farmer’s-daughter stories and bound off, beaming. He seemed low-spirited, as I suppose he had every right to be. With Corky permanently on the premises, doing the little Mother, and Gussie rolling up for practically every meal, and on top of that a gorilla like young Thos coming and parking himself in the spare bedroom, you could scarcely expect him to bubble over with
joie de vivre
. These things take their toll.

At any rate, he didn’t. His theme was the Church Organ, in aid of which these grim doings had been set afoot, and it was in a vein of pessimism that he spoke of its prospects. The Church Organ, he
told
us frankly was in a hell of a bad way. For years it had been going around with holes in its socks, doing the Brother-can-you-spare-a-dime stuff, and now it was about due to hand in its dinner pail. There had been a time when he had hoped that the pull-together spirit might have given it a shot in the arm, but the way it looked to him at the moment, things had gone too far and he was prepared to bet his shirt on the bally contrivance going down the drain and staying there.

He concluded by announcing sombrely that the first item on the programme would be a Violin Solo by Miss Eustacia Pulbrook, managing to convey the suggestion that, while he knew as well as we did that Eustacia was going to be about as corny as they come, he advised us to make the most of her, because after that we should have the Kegley-Bassington family at our throats.

Except for knowing that when you’ve heard one, you’ve heard them all, I’m not really an authority on violin solos, so cannot state definitely whether La Pulbrook’s was or was not a credit to the accomplices who had taught her the use of the instrument. It was loud in spots and less loud in other spots, and it had that quality which I have noticed in all violin solos, of seeming to last much longer than it actually did. When it eventually blew over, one saw what the sainted Sidney had meant about the Kegley-Bassingtons. A minion came on the stage carrying a table. On this table he placed a framed photograph, and I knew that we were for it. Show Bertram Wooster a table and a framed photograph, and you don’t have to tell him what the upshot is going to be. Muriel Kegley-Bassington stood revealed as a ‘My Hero’ from
The Chocolate Soldier
addict.

I thought the boys behind the back row behaved with extraordinary dignity and restraint, and their suavity gave me the first faint hope I had had that when my turn came to face the firing-squad I might be spared the excesses which I had been anticipating. I would rank ‘My Hero’ next after ‘The Yeoman’s Wedding Song’ as a standee-rouser, and when a large blonde appeared and took up the photograph and gave it a soulful look and rubbed her hands in the rosin and inflated her lungs, I was expecting big things. But these splendid fellows apparently did not war on women. Not only did they refrain from making uncouth noises with the tongue between the lips, one or two actually clapped – an imprudent move, of course, because, taken in conjunction with the applause of the two-bobbers, who applaud everything, it led to ‘Oh, who will o’er the downs with me’ as an encore.

Inflamed by this promising start, Muriel would, I think, willingly have continued, probably with ‘The Indian Love Call’, but something
in
our manner must have shown her that she couldn’t do that here, for she shrank back and withdrew. There was a brief stage wait, and then a small, bullet-headed boy in an Eton jacket came staggering on like Christopher Robin going hoppity-hoppity-hop, in a manner that suggested that blood relations in the background had overcome his reluctance to appear by putting a hand between his shoulder-blades and shoving. Master George Kegley-Bassington, and no other. My heart went out to the little fellow. I knew just how he was feeling.

One could picture so clearly all that must have led up to this rash act. The first fatal suggestion by his mother that it would please the vicar if George gave that recitation which he did so nicely. The agonized ‘Hoy!’ The attempted rebuttal. The family pressure. The sullen scowl. The calling in of Father to exercise his authority. The reluctant acquiescence. The dash for freedom at the eleventh hour, foiled, as we have seen, by that quick thrust between the shoulder-blades.

And here he was, out in the middle.

He gave us an unpleasant look, and said: