The Jeeves Omnibus (228 page)

‘A little more to the right, Jeeves.’

‘Very good, sir.’

I made a neat landing.

‘Wait here, Jeeves.’

‘Very good, sir. The head gardener was informing me this morning, sir, that one of the swans had recently nested on this island.’

‘This is no time for natural history gossip, Jeeves,’ I said, a little severely, for the rain was coming down harder than ever and the Wooster trouser-legs were already considerably moistened.

‘Very good, sir.’

I pushed my way through the bushes. The going was sticky and took about eight and elevenpence off the value of my Sure-Grip tennis shoes in the first two yards: but I persevered, and presently came out in the open and found myself in a sort of clearing facing the Octagon.

This building was run up somewhere in the last century, I have been told, to enable the grandfather of the late owner to have some quiet place out of earshot of the house where he could practise the fiddle. From what I know of fiddlers, I should imagine that he had produced some fairly frightful sounds there in his time, but they can have been nothing to the ones that were coming from the roof of the place now. The Right Hon., not having spotted the arrival of the rescue-party, was apparently trying to make his voice carry across the waste of waters to the house; and I’m not saying it was not a good sporting effort. He had one of those highish tenors, and his yowls seemed to screech over my head like shells.

I thought it about time to slip him the glad news that assistance had arrived, before he strained a vocal cord.

‘Hi!’ I shouted, waiting for a lull.

He poked his head over the edge.

‘Hi’ he bellowed, looking in every direction but the right one, of course.

‘Hi!’

‘Hi!’

‘Hi!’

‘Hi!’

‘Oh!’ he said, spotting me at last.

‘What-ho!’ I replied, sort of clinching the thing.

I suppose the conversation can’t be said to have touched a frightfully high level up to this moment; but probably we should have got a good deal brainier very shortly – only just then, at the very instant when I was getting ready to say something good, there was a hissing noise like a tyre bursting in a nest of cobras, and out of the bushes to my left there popped something so large and white and active that, thinking quicker than I have ever done in my puff, I rose like a rocketing pheasant, and, before I knew what I was doing, had begun to climb for life. Something slapped against the wall about an inch below my right ankle, and any doubts I may have had about remaining below vanished. The lad who bore ’mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device ‘Excelsior!’ was the model for Bertram.

‘Be careful!’ yipped the Right Hon.

I was.

Whoever built the Octagon might have constructed it especially for this sort of crisis. Its walls had grooves at regular intervals which were just right for the hands and feet, and it wasn’t very long before I was parked up on the roof beside the Right Hon., gazing down at one of the largest and shortest-tempered swans I had ever seen. It was standing below, stretching up a neck like a hosepipe, just where a bit of brick, judiciously bunged, would catch it amidships.

I bunged the brick and scored a bull’s-eye.

The Right Hon. didn’t seem any too well pleased.

‘Don’t tease it!’ he said.

‘It teased me,’ I said.

The swan extended another eight feet of neck and gave an imitation of steam escaping from a leaky pipe. The rain continued to lash down with what you might call indescribable fury, and I was sorry that in the agitation inseparable from shinning up a stone wall at practically a second’s notice I had dropped the raincoat which I had been bringing with me for my fellow-rooster. For a moment I thought of offering him mine, but wiser counsels prevailed.

‘How near did it come to getting you?’ I asked.

‘Within an ace,’ replied my companion, gazing down with a look of marked dislike. ‘I had to make a very rapid spring.’

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had
been
poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say ‘When!’ and the picture he conjured up, if you know what I mean, was rather pleasing.

‘It is no laughing matter,’ he said, shifting the look of dislike to me.

‘Sorry.’

‘I might have been seriously injured.’

‘Would you consider bunging another brick at the bird?’

‘Do nothing of the sort. It will only annoy him.’

‘Well, why not annoy him? He hasn’t shown such a dashed lot of consideration for our feelings.’

The Right Hon. now turned to another aspect of the matter.

‘I cannot understand how my boat, which I fastened securely to the stump of a willow-tree, can have drifted away.’

‘Dashed mysterious.’

‘I begin to suspect that it was deliberately set loose by some mischievous person.’

‘Oh, I say, no, hardly likely, that. You’d have seen them doing it.’

‘No, Mr Wooster. For the bushes form an effective screen. Moreover, rendered drowsy by the unusual warmth of the afternoon, I dozed off for some little time almost immediately I reached the island.’

This wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted his mind dwelling on, so I changed the subject.

‘Wet, isn’t it, what?’ I said.

‘I had already observed it,’ said the Right Hon. in one of those nasty, bitter voices. ‘I thank you, however, for drawing the matter to my attention.’

Chit-chat about the weather hadn’t gone with much of a bang, I perceived. I had a shot at Bird Life in the Home Counties.

‘Have you ever noticed,’ I said, ‘how a swan’s eyebrows sort of meet in the middle?’

‘I have had every opportunity of observing all that there is to observe about swans.’

‘Gives them a sort of peevish look, what?’

‘The look to which you allude has not escaped me.’

‘Rummy,’ I said, rather warming to my subject, ‘how bad an effect family life has on a swan’s disposition.’

‘I wish you would select some other topic of conversation than swans.’

‘No, but, really, it’s rather interesting. I mean to say, our old pal down there is probably a perfect ray of sunshine in normal
circumstances
. Quite the domestic pet, don’t you know. But purely and simply because the little woman happens to be nesting –’

I paused. You will scarcely believe me, but until this moment, what with all the recent bustle and activity, I had clean forgotten that, while we were treed up on the roof like this, there lurked all the time in the background one whose giant brain, if notified of the emergency and requested to flock round, would probably be able to think up half-a-dozen schemes for solving our little difficulties in a couple of minutes.

‘Jeeves!’ I shouted.

‘Sir?’ came a faint respectful voice from the great open spaces.

‘My man,’ I explained to the Right Hon. ‘A fellow of infinite resource and sagacity. He’ll have us out of this in a minute. Jeeves!’

‘Sir?’

‘I’m sitting on the roof.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘Don’t say “Very good”. Come and help us. Mr Filmer and I are treed, Jeeves.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘Don’t keep saying “Very good”. It’s nothing of the kind. The place is alive with swans.’

‘I will attend to the matter immediately, sir.’

I turned to the Right Hon. I even went so far as to pat him on the back. It was like slapping a wet sponge.

‘All is well,’ I said. ‘Jeeves is coming.’

‘What can he do?’

I frowned a trifle. The man’s tone had been peevish, and I didn’t like it.

‘That,’ I replied with a touch of stiffness, ‘we cannot say until we see him in action. He may pursue one course, or he may pursue another. But on one thing you can rely with the utmost confidence – Jeeves will find a way. See, here he comes stealing through the undergrowth, his face shining with the light of pure intelligence. There are no limits to Jeeves’s brain-power. He virtually lives on fish.’

I bent over the edge and peered into the abyss.

‘Look out for the swan, Jeeves.’

‘I have the bird under close observation, sir.’

The swan had been uncoiling a further supply of neck in our direction; but now he whipped round. The sound of a voice speaking in his rear seemed to affect him powerfully. He subjected Jeeves to a short, keen scrutiny; and then, taking in some breath for hissing purposes, gave a sort of jump and charged ahead.

‘Look out, Jeeves!’

‘Very good, sir.’

Well, I could have told that swan it was no use. As swans go, he may have been well up in the ranks of the intelligentsia; but, when it came to pitting his brains against Jeeves, he was simply wasting his time. He might just as well have gone home at once.

Every young man starting life ought to know how to cope with an angry swan, so I will briefly relate the proper procedure. You begin by picking up the raincoat which somebody has dropped; and then, judging the distance to a nicety, you simply shove the raincoat over the bird’s head; and, taking the boat-hook which you have prudently brought with you, you insert it underneath the swan and heave. The swan goes into a bush and starts trying to unscramble itself; and you saunter back to your boat, taking with you any friends who may happen at the moment to be sitting on roofs in the vicinity. That was Jeeves’s method, and I cannot see how it could have been improved upon.

The Right Hon. showing a turn of speed of which I would not have believed him capable, we were in the boat in considerably under two ticks.

‘You behaved very intelligently, my man,’ said the Right Hon. as we pushed away from the shore.

‘I endeavour to give satisfaction, sir.’

The Right Hon. appeared to have said his say for the time being. From that moment he seemed to sort of huddle up and meditate. Dashed absorbed he was. Even when I caught a crab and shot about a pint of water down his neck he didn’t seem to notice it.

It was only when we were landing that he came to life again.

‘Mr Wooster.’

‘Oh, ah?’

‘I have been thinking of that matter of which I spoke to you some time back – the problem of how my boat can have got adrift.’

I didn’t like this.

‘The dickens of a problem,’ I said. ‘Better not bother about it any more. You’ll never solve it.’

‘On the contrary, I have arrived at a solution, and one which I think is the only feasible solution. I am convinced that my boat was set adrift by the boy Thomas, my hostess’s son.’

‘Oh, I say, no! Why?’

‘He had a grudge against me. And it is the sort of thing only a boy, or one who is practically an imbecile, would have thought of doing.’

He legged it for the house; and I turned to Jeeves, aghast. Yes, you might say aghast.

‘You heard, Jeeves?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What’s to be done?’

‘Perhaps Mr Filmer, on thinking the matter over, will decide that his suspicions are unjust.’

‘But they aren’t unjust.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then what’s to be done?’

‘I could not say, sir.’

I pushed off rather smartly to the house and reported to Aunt Agatha that the Right Hon. had been salved; and then I toddled upstairs to have a hot bath, being considerably soaked from stem to stern as the result of my rambles. While I was enjoying the grateful warmth, a knock came at the door.

It was Purvis, Aunt Agatha’s butler.

‘Mrs Gregson desires me to say, sir, that she would be glad to see you as soon as you are ready.’

‘But she has seen me.’

‘I gather that she wishes to see you again, sir.’

‘Oh, right-ho.’

I lay beneath the surface for another few minutes; then, having dried the frame, went along the corridor to my room. Jeeves was there, fiddling about with underclothing.

‘Oh, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘I’ve just been thinking. Oughtn’t somebody to go and give Mr Filmer a spot of quinine or something? Errand of mercy, what?’

‘I have already done so, sir.’

‘Good. I wouldn’t say I like the man frightfully, but I don’t want him to get a cold in the head.’ I shoved on a sock. ‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘I suppose you know that we’ve got to think of something pretty quick? I mean to say, you realize the position? Mr Filmer suspects young Thomas of doing exactly what he did do, and if he brings home the charge Aunt Agatha will undoubtedly fire Mr Little, and then Mrs Little will find out what Mr Little has been up to, and what will be the upshot and outcome, Jeeves? I will tell you. It will mean that Mrs Little will get the goods on Mr Little to an extent to which, though only a bachelor myself, I should say that no wife ought to get the goods on her husband if the proper give and take of married life – what you might call the essential balance, as it were – is to be preserved. Women bring these things up, Jeeves. They do not forget and forgive.’

‘Very true, sir.’

‘Then how about it?’

‘I have already attended to the matter, sir.’

‘You have?’

‘Yes, sir. I had scarcely left you when the solution of the affair presented itself to me. It was a remark of Mr Filmer’s that gave me the idea.’

‘Jeeves, you’re a marvel!’

‘Thank you very much, sir.’

‘What was the solution?’

‘I conceived the notion of going to Mr Filmer and saying that it was you who had stolen his boat, sir.’

The man flickered before me. I clutched a sock in a feverish grip.

‘Saying – what?’

‘At first Mr Filmer was reluctant to credit my statement. But I pointed out to him that you had certainly known that he was on the island – a fact which he agreed was highly significant. I pointed out, furthermore, that you were a light-hearted young gentleman, sir, who might well do such a thing as a practical joke. I left him quite convinced, and there is now no danger of his attributing the action to Master Thomas.’

I gazed at the blighter spellbound.

‘And that’s what you consider a neat solution?’ I said.

‘Yes, sir. Mr Little will now retain his position as desired.’

‘And what about me?’

‘You are also benefited, sir.’

‘Oh, I am, am I?’

‘Yes, sir. I have ascertained that Mrs Gregson’s motive in inviting you to this house was that she might present you to Mr Filmer with a view to your becoming his private secretary.’