The Jeeves Omnibus (261 page)

It’s an odd thing. I know one or two song writers and have found them among the most cheery of my acquaintances, ready of smile and full of merry quips and so forth. But directly they put pen to paper they never fail to take the dark view. All that ‘We’re-drifting-apart-you’re-breaking-my-heart’ stuff, I mean to say. The thing this bird was putting across per megaphone at the moment was about a chap crying into his pillow because the girl he loved was getting married next day, but – and this was the point or nub – not to him. He didn’t like it. He viewed the situation with concern. And the megaphonist was extracting every ounce of juice from the set-up.

Some fellows, no doubt, would have taken advantage of this outstanding goo to plunge without delay into what Jeeves calls
medias res
, but I, being shrewd, knew that you have to give these things time to work. So, having ordered kippers and a bottle of what would probably turn out to be rat poison, I opened the conversation on a more restrained note, asking her how the new novel was coming along. Authors, especially when female, like to keep you posted about this.

She said it was coming very well but not quickly, because she was a slow, careful worker who mused a good bit in between paragraphs and spared no pains to find the exact word with which to express what she wished to say. Like Flaubert, she said, and I said I thought she was on the right lines.

‘Those,’ I said, ‘were more or less my methods when I wrote that thing of mine for the
Boudoir
.’

I was alluding to the weekly paper for the delicately nurtured,
Milady’s Boudoir
, of which Aunt Dahlia is the courteous and popular proprietor or proprietress. She has been running it now for about three years, a good deal to the annoyance of Uncle Tom, her husband, who has to foot the bills. At her request I had once contributed an article – or ‘piece’, as we journalists call it – on What The Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing.

‘So you’re off to Brinkley tomorrow,’ I went on. ‘You’ll like that. Fresh air, gravel soil, company’s own water, Anatole’s cooking and so forth.’

‘Yes. And of course it will be wonderful meeting Daphne Dolores Morehead.’

The name was new to me.

‘Daphne Dolores Morehead?’

‘The novelist. She is going to be there. I admire her work so much. I see, by the way, she is doing a serial for the
Boudoir
.’

‘Oh, yes?’ I said, intrigued. One always likes to hear about the activities of one’s fellow-writers.

‘It must have cost your aunt a fortune. Daphne Dolores Morehead is frightfully expensive. I can’t remember what it is she gets a thousand words, but it’s something enormous.’

‘The old sheet must be doing well.’

‘I suppose so.’

She spoke listlessly, seeming to have lost interest in
Milady’s Boudoir
. Her thoughts, no doubt, had returned to Stilton. She cast a dull eye hither and thither about the room. It had begun to fill up now, and the dance floor was congested with frightful bounders of both sexes.

‘What horrible people!’ she said. ‘I must say I am surprised that you should be familiar with such places, Bertie. Are they all like this?’

I weighed the question.

‘Well, some are better and some worse. I would call this one about average. Garish, of course, but then you said you wanted something garish.’

‘Oh, I’m not complaining. I shall make some useful notes. It is just the sort of place to which I pictured Rollo going that night.’

‘Rollo?’

‘The hero of my novel. Rollo Beaminster.’

‘Oh, I see. Yes, of course. Out on the tiles, was he?’

‘He was in wild mood. Reckless. Desperate. He had lost the girl he loved.’

‘What ho!’ I said. ‘Tell me more.’

I spoke with animation and vim, for whatever you may say of Bertram Wooster, you cannot say that he does not know a cue when he hears one. Throw him the line, and he will do the rest. I hitched up the larynx. The kippers and the bot had arrived by now, and I took a mouthful of the former and a sip of the latter. It tasted like hair-oil.

‘You interest me strangely,’ I said. ‘Lost the girl he loved, had he?’

‘She had told him she never wished to see or speak to him again.’

‘Well, well. Always a nasty knock for a chap, that.’

‘So he comes to this low night club. He is trying to forget.’

‘But I’ll bet he doesn’t.’

‘No, it is useless. He looks about him at the glitter and garishness and feels how hollow it all is. I think I can use that waiter over there in the night club scene, the one with the watery eyes and the pimple
on
his nose,’ she said, jotting down a note on the back of the bill of fare.

I fortified myself with a swig of whatever the stuff was in the bottle and prepared to give her the works.

‘Always a mistake,’ I said, starting to do the sympathetic man of the world, ‘fellows losing girls and – conversely, if that’s the word I want – girls losing fellows. I don’t know how you feel about it, but the way it seems to me is that it’s a silly idea giving the dream man the raspberry just because of some trifling tiff. Kiss and make up, I always say. I saw Stilton at the Drones tonight,’ I said, getting down to it.

She stiffened and took a reserved mouthful of kipper. Her voice, when the consignment had passed down the hatch and she was able to speak, was cold and metallic.

‘Oh, yes?’

‘He was in wild mood.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Reckless. Desperate. He looked about him at the Drones smoking-room, and I could see he was feeling what a hollow smoking-room it was.’

‘Oh, yes?’

Well, I suppose if someone had come along at this moment and said to me ‘Hullo there, Wooster, how’s it going? Are you making headway?’ I should have had to reply in the negative. ‘Not perceptibly, Wilkinson’ – or Banks or Smith or Knatchbull-Huguessen or whatever the name might have been, I would have said. I had the uncomfortable feeling of having been laid a stymie. However, I persevered.

‘Yes, he was in quite a state of mind. He gave me the impression that it wouldn’t take much to make him go off to the Rocky Mountains and shoot grizzly bears. Not a pleasant thought.’

‘You mean if one is fond of grizzly bears?’

‘I was thinking more if one was fond of Stiltons.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Oh? Well, suppose he joined the Foreign Legion?’

‘It would have my sympathy.’

‘You wouldn’t like to think of him tramping through the hot sand without a pub in sight, with Riffs or whatever they’re called potting at him from all directions.’

‘Yes, I would. If I saw a Riff trying to shoot D’Arcy Cheesewright, I would hold his hat for him and egg him on.’

Once more I had that sense of not making progress. Her face, I observed, was cold and hard, like my kipper, which of course during
these
exchanges I had been neglecting, and I began to understand how these birds in Holy Writ must have felt after their session with the deaf adder. I can’t recall all the details, though at my private school I once won a prize for Scripture Knowledge, but I remember that they had the dickens of an uphill job trying to charm it, and after they had sweated themselves to a frazzle no business resulted. It is often this way, I believe, with deaf adders.

‘Do you know Horace Pendlebury-Davenport?’ I said, after a longish pause during which we worked away at our respective kippers.

‘The man who married Valerie Twistleton?’

‘That’s the chap. Formerly the Drones Club Darts champion.’

‘I’ve met him. But why bring him up?’

‘Because he points the moral and adorns the tale. During the period of their betrothal he and Valerie had a row similar in calibre to that which has occurred between you and Stilton and pretty nearly parted for ever.’

She gave me the frosty eye.

‘Must we talk about Mr. Cheesewright?’

‘I see him as tonight’s big topic.’

‘I don’t, and I think I’ll go home.’

‘Oh, not yet. I want to tell you about Horace and Valerie. They had this row of which I speak and might, as I say, have parted for ever, had they not been reconciled by a woman who, so Horace says, looked as if she bred cocker spaniels. She told them a touching story, which melted their hearts. She said she had once loved a bloke and quarrelled with him about some trifle, and he turned on his heel and went off to the Federated Malay States and married the widow of a rubber planter. And each year from then on there arrived at her address a simple posy of white violets, together with a slip of paper bearing the words “It might have been”. You wouldn’t like that to happen with you and Stilton, would you?’

‘I’d love it.’

‘It doesn’t give you a pang to think that at this very moment he may be going the rounds of the shipping offices, inquiring about sailings to the Malay States?’

‘They’d be shut at this time of night.’

‘Well, first thing tomorrow morning, then.’

She laid down her knife and fork and gave me an odd look.

‘Bertie, you’re extraordinary,’ she said.

‘Eh? How do you mean, extraordinary?’

‘All this nonsense you have been talking, trying to reconcile me and D’Arcy. Not that I don’t admire you for it. I think it’s rather
wonderful
of you. But then everybody says that, though you have a brain like a peahen, you’re the soul of kindness and generosity.’

Well, I was handicapped here by the fact that, never having met a peahen, I was unable to estimate the quality of these fowls’ intelligence, but she had spoken as if they were a bit short of the grey matter, and I was about to ask her who the hell she meant by ‘everybody’, when she resumed.

‘You want to marry me yourself, don’t you?’

I had to take another mouthful of the substance in the bottle before I could speak. One of those difficult questions to answer.

‘Oh, rather,’ I said, for I was anxious to make the evening a success. ‘Of course. Who wouldn’t?’

‘And yet you –’

She did not proceed further than the word ‘you’, for at this juncture, with the abruptness with which these things always happen, the joint was pinched. The band stopped in the middle of a bar. A sudden hush fell upon the room. Square-jawed men shot up through the flooring, and one, who seemed to be skippering the team, stood out in the middle and in a voice like a foghorn told everybody to keep their seats. I remember thinking how nicely timed the whole thing was – breaking loose, I mean, at a moment when the conversation had taken a distasteful turn and threatened to become fraught with embarrassment. I have heard hard things said about the London police force – notably by Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright and others on the morning after the annual Oxford and Cambridge boat race – but a fairminded man had to admit that there were occasions when they showed tact of no slight order.

I wasn’t alarmed, of course. I had been through this sort of thing many a time and oft, as the expression is, and I knew what happened. So, noting that my guest was giving a rather close imitation of a cat on hot bricks, I hastened to dispel her alarm.

‘No need to get the breeze up,’ I said. ‘Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail or knock the breast,’ I added, using one of Jeeves’s gags which I chanced to remember. ‘Everything is quite in order.’

‘But won’t they arrest us?’

I laughed lightly. These novices!

‘Absurd. No danger of that whatsoever.’

‘How do you know?’

‘All this is old stuff to me. Here in a nutshell is the procedure. They round us up, and we push off in an orderly manner to the police station in plain vans. There we assemble in the waiting-room and give our names and addresses, exercising a certain latitude as regards the
details.
I, for example, generally call myself Ephraim Gadsby of The Nasturtiums, Jubilee Road, Streatham Common. I don’t know why. Just a whim. You, if you will be guided by me, will be Matilda Bott of 365 Churchill Avenue, East Dulwich. These formalities concluded, we shall be free to depart, leaving the proprietor to face the awful majesty of Justice.’

She refused to be consoled. The resemblance to a cat on hot bricks became more marked. Though instructed by the foghorn chap to keep her seat, she shot up as if a spike had come through it.

‘I’m sure that’s not what happens.’

‘It is, unless they’ve changed the rules.’

‘You have to appear in court.’

‘No, no.’

‘Well, I’m not going to risk it. Good night.’

And getting smoothly off the mark she made a dash for the service door, which was not far from where we sat. And an adjacent constable, baying like a bloodhound, started off in hot pursuit.

Whether I acted judiciously at this point is a question which I have never been able to decide. Sometimes I think yes, reflecting that the Chevalier Bayard in my place would have done the same, sometimes no Briefly what occurred was that as the gendarme came galloping by, I shoved out a foot, causing him to take the toss of a lifetime. Florence withdrew, and the guardian of the peace, having removed his left boot from his right ear, with which it had become temporarily entangled, rose and informed me that I was in custody.

As at the moment he was grasping the scruff of my neck with one hand and the seat of my trousers with the other, I saw no reason to doubt the honest fellow.

I SPENT THE
night in what is called durance vile, and bright and early next day was haled before the beak at Vinton Street police court, charged with assaulting an officer of the Law and impeding him in the execution of his duties, which I suppose was a fairly neat way of putting it. I was extremely hungry and needed a shave.

It was the first time I had met the Vinton Street chap, always hitherto having patronized his trade rival at Bosher Street, but Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, who was introduced to him on the morning of January the first one year, had told me he was a man to avoid, and the truth of this was now borne in upon me in no uncertain manner. It seemed to me, as I stood listening to the cop running through the story sequence, that Barmy, in describing this Solon as a twenty-minute egg with many of the less lovable qualities of some high-up official of the Spanish Inquisition, had understated rather than exaggerated the facts.