The Jeeves Omnibus (241 page)

‘Mr Slingsby,’ announced Jeeves.

And, having spoken these words, he closed the door and left us alone together.

For quite a time there wasn’t anything in the way of chit-chat. The shock of expecting Mrs Slingsby and finding myself confronted by something entirely different – in fact, not the same thing at all – seemed to have affected the vocal chords. And the visitor didn’t appear to be disposed to make light conversation himself. He stood there looking strong and silent. I suppose you have to be like that if you want to manufacture anything in the nature of a really convincing soup.

Slingsby’s Superb Soups was a Roman Emperor-looking sort of bird, with keen, penetrating eyes and one of those jutting chins. The eyes seemed to be fixed on me in a dashed unpleasant stare and, unless I was mistaken, he was grinding his teeth a trifle. For some reason he appeared to have taken a strong dislike to me at sight, and I’m bound to say this rather puzzled me. I don’t pretend to have one of those Fascinating Personalities which you get from studying the booklets advertized in the back pages of the magazines, but I couldn’t recall another case in the whole of my career where a single glimpse of the old map had been enough to make anyone look as if he wanted to foam at the mouth. Usually, when people meet me for the first time, they don’t seem to know I’m there.

However, I exerted myself to play the host.

‘Mr Slingsby?’

‘That is my name.’

‘Just got back from America?’

‘I landed this morning.’

‘Sooner than you were expected, what?’

‘So I imagine.’

‘Very glad to see you.’

‘You will not be for long.’

I took time off to do a bit of gulping. I saw now what had happened. This bloke had been home, seen his wife, heard the story of the accident, and had hastened round to the flat to slip it across me. Evidently those roses had not sweetened the female of the species. The only thing to do now seemed to be to take a stab at sweetening the male.

‘Have a drink?’ I said.

‘No!’

‘A cigarette?’

‘No!’

‘A chair?’

‘No!’

I went into the silence once more. These non-drinking, non-smoking, non-sitters are hard birds to handle.

‘Don’t grin at me, sir!’

I shot a glance at myself in the mirror, and saw what he meant. The sad half-smile
had
slopped over a bit. I adjusted it, and there was another pause.

‘Now, sir,’ said the Superb Souper. ‘To business. I think I need scarcely tell you why I am here.’

‘No. Of course. Absolutely. It’s about that little matter –’

He gave a snort which nearly upset a vase on the mantelpiece.

‘Little matter? So you consider it a little matter, do you?’

‘Well –’

‘Let me tell you, sir, that when I find that during my absence from the country a man has been annoying my wife with his importunities I regard it as anything but a little matter. And I shall endeavour,’ said the Souper, the eyes gleaming a trifle brighter as he rubbed his hands together in a hideous, menacing way, ‘to make you see the thing in the same light.’

I couldn’t make head or tail of this. I simply couldn’t follow him. The lemon began to swim.

‘Eh?’ I said. ‘Your wife?’

‘You heard me.’

‘There must be some mistake.’

‘There is. You made it.’

‘But I don’t know your wife.’

‘Ha!’

‘I’ve never even met her.’

‘Tchah!’

‘Honestly, I haven’t.’

‘Bah!’

He drank me in for a moment.

‘Do you deny you sent her flowers?’

I felt the heart turn a double somersault. I began to catch his drift.

‘Flowers!’ he proceeded. ‘Roses, sir. Great, fat, beastly roses. Enough of them to sink a ship. Your card was attached to them by a small pin –’

His voice died away in a sort of gurgle, and I saw that he was staring at something behind me. I spun round, and there, in the doorway – I hadn’t seen it open, because during the last spasm of dialogue I had been backing cautiously towards it – there in the doorway stood a female. One glance was enough to tell me who she was. No woman could look so like Lucius Pim who hadn’t the misfortune to be related to him. It was Sister Beatrice, the tough egg. I saw all. She had left
home
before the flowers had arrived; she had sneaked, unsweetened, into the flat, while I was fortifying the system at the Drones; and here she was.

‘Er –’ I said.

‘Alexander!’ said the female.

‘Goo!’ said the Souper. Or it may have been ‘Coo!’

Whatever it was, it was in the nature of a battle-cry or slogan of war. The Souper’s worst suspicions had obviously been confirmed. His eyes shone with a strange light. His chin pushed itself out another couple of inches. He clenched and unclenched his fingers once or twice, as if to make sure that they were working properly and could be relied on to do a good, clean job of strangling. Then, once more observing ‘Coo!’ (or ‘Goo!’), he sprang forward, trod on the golf-ball I had been practising putting with, and took one of the finest tosses I have ever witnessed. The purler of a lifetime. For a moment the air seemed to be full of arms and legs, and then, with a thud that nearly dislocated the flat, he made a forced landing against the wall.

And, feeling I had had about all I wanted, I oiled from the room and was in the act of grabbing my hat from the rack in the hall, when Jeeves appeared.

‘I fancied I heard a noise, sir,’ said Jeeves.

‘Quite possibly,’ I said. ‘It was Mr Slingsby.’

‘Sir?’

‘Mr Slingsby practising Russian dances,’ I explained. ‘I rather think he has fractured an assortment of limbs. Better go in and see.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘If he is the wreck I imagine, put him in my room and send for the doctor. The flat is filling up nicely with the various units of the Pim family and its connections, eh, Jeeves?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I think the supply is about exhausted, but should any aunts or uncles by marriage come along and break their limbs, bed them out on the Chesterfield.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘I, personally, Jeeves,’ I said, opening the front door and pausing on the threshold, ‘am off to Paris. I will wire you the address. Notify me in due course when the place is free from Pims and completely purged of Slingsbys, and I will return. Oh, and Jeeves.’

‘Sir?’

‘Spare no effort to mollify these birds. They think – at least, Slingsby (female) thinks, and what she thinks today he will think
tomorrow
– that it was I who ran over Mr Pim in my care. Endeavour during my absence to sweeten them.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘And now perhaps you had better be going in and viewing the body. I shall proceed to the Drones, where I shall lunch, subsequently catching the two o’clock train at Charing Cross. Meet me there with an assortment of luggage.’

It was a matter of three weeks or so before Jeeves sent me the ‘All clear’ signal. I spent the time pottering pretty perturbedly about Paris and environs. It is a city I am fairly fond of, but I was glad to be able to return to the old home. I hopped on to a passing aeroplane and a couple of hours later was bowling through Croydon on my way to the centre of things. It was somewhere down in the Sloane Square neighbourhood that I first caught sight of the posters.

A traffic block had occurred, and I was glancing idly this way and that, when suddenly my eye was caught by something that looked familiar. And then I saw what it was.

Pasted on a blank wall and measuring about a hundred feet each way was an enormous poster, mostly red and blue. At the top of it were the words:

and at the bottom:

And, in between, me. Yes, dash it, Bertram Wooster in person. A reproduction of the Pendlebury portrait, perfect in every detail.

It was the sort of thing to make a fellow’s eyes flicker, and mine flickered. You might say a mist seemed to roll before them. Then it lifted, and I was able to get a good long look before the traffic moved on.

Of all the absolutely foul sights I have ever seen, this took the biscuit with ridiculous ease. The thing was a bally libel on the Wooster face, and yet it was as unmistakable as if it had had my name under it. I saw now what Jeeves had meant when he said that the portrait had given me a hungry look. In the poster this look had become one of bestial greed. There I sat absolutely slavering through a monocle about six inches in circumference at a plateful of soup, looking as if I hadn’t had a meal for weeks. The whole thing seemed to take one straight away into a different and a dreadful world.

I woke from a species of trance or coma to find myself at the door of the block of flats. To buzz upstairs and charge into the home was with me the work of a moment.

Jeeves came shimmering down the hall, the respectful beam of welcome on his face.

‘I am glad to see you back, sir.’

‘Never mind about that,’ I yipped. ‘What about –?’

‘The posters, sir? I was wondering if you might have observed them.’

‘I observed them!’

‘Striking, sir?’

‘Very striking. Now, perhaps you’ll kindly explain –’

‘You instructed me, if you recollect, sir, to spare no effort to mollify Mr Slingsby.’

‘Yes, but –’

‘It proved a somewhat difficult task, sir. For some time Mr Slingsby, on the advice and owing to the persuasion of Mrs Slingsby, appeared to be resolved to institute an action in law against you – a procedure which I knew you would find most distasteful.’

‘Yes, but –’

‘And then, the first day he was able to leave his bed, he observed the portrait, and it seemed to me judicious to point out to him its possibilities as an advertising medium. He readily fell in with the suggestion and, on my assurance that, should he abandon the projected action in law, you would willingly permit the use of the portrait, he entered into negotiations with Miss Pendlebury for the purchase of the copyright.’

‘Oh? Well, I hope she’s got something out of it, at any rate?’

‘Yes, sir. Mr Pim, acting as Miss Pendlebury’s agent, drove, I understand, an extremely satisfactory bargain.’

‘He acted as her agent, eh?’

‘Yes, sir. In his capacity as fiancé to the young lady, sir.’

‘Fiancé!’

‘Yes, sir.’

It shows how the sight of that poster had got into my ribs when I state that, instead of being laid out cold by this announcement, I merely said ‘Ha!’ or ‘Ho!’ or it may have been ‘H’m.’ After the poster, nothing seemed to matter.

‘After that poster, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘nothing seems to matter.’

‘No, sir?’

‘No, Jeeves. A woman has tossed my heart lightly away, but what of it?’

‘Exactly, sir.’

‘The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number. Is that going to crush me?’

‘No, sir.’

‘No, Jeeves. It is not. But what does matter is this ghastly business of my face being spread from end to end of the Metropolis with the eyes fixed on a plate of Slingsby’s Superb Soup. I must leave London. The lads at the Drones will kid me without ceasing.’

‘Yes, sir. And Mrs Spenser Gregson –’

I paled visibly. I hadn’t thought of Aunt Agatha and what she might have to say about letting down the family prestige.

‘You don’t mean to say she has been ringing up?’

‘Several times daily, sir.’

‘Jeeves, flight is the only resource.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Back to Paris, what?’

‘I should not recommend the move, sir. The posters are, I understand, shortly to appear in that city also, advertising the
Bouillon Suprême
. Mr Slingsby’s products command a large sale in France. The sight would be painful for you, sir.’

‘Then where?’

‘If I might make a suggestion, sir, why not adhere to your original intention of cruising in Mrs Travers’ yacht in the Mediterranean? On the yacht you would be free from the annoyance of these advertising displays.’

The man seemed to me to be drivelling.

‘But the yacht started weeks ago. It may be anywhere by now.’

‘No, sir. The cruise was postponed for a month owing to the illness of Mrs Travers’ chef, Anatole, who contracted influenza. Mrs Travers refused to sail without him.’

‘You mean they haven’t started?’

‘Not yet, sir. The yacht sails from Southampton on Tuesday next.’

‘Why, then, dash it, nothing could be sweeter.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Ring up Aunt Dahlia and tell her we’ll be there.’

‘I ventured to take the liberty of doing so a few moments before you arrived, sir.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes, sir. I thought it probable that the plan would meet with your approval.’

‘It does! I’ve wished all along I was going on that cruise.’

‘I, too, sir. It should be extremely pleasant.’

‘The tang of the salt breezes, Jeeves!’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘The moonlight on the water!’

‘Precisely, sir.’

‘The gentle heaving of the waves!’

‘Exactly, sir.’

I felt absolutely in the pink. Gwladys – pah! The posters – bah! That was the way I looked at it.

‘Yo-ho-ho, Jeeves!’ I said, giving the trousers a bit of a hitch.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘In fact, I will go further. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!’

‘Very good, sir. I will bring it immediately.’

IT HAS BEEN
well said of Bertram Wooster by those who know him best that, whatever other sporting functions he may see fit to oil out of, you will always find him battling to his sixteen handicap at the annual golf tournament of the Drones Club. Nevertheless, when I heard that this year they were holding it at Bingley-on-Sea, I confess I hesitated. As I stood gazing out of the window of my suite at the Splendide on the morning of the opening day, I was not exactly a-twitter, if you understand me, but I couldn’t help feeling I might have been rather rash.

‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘Now that we have actually arrived, I find myself wondering if it was quite prudent to come here.’

‘It is a pleasant spot, sir.’