The Jeeves Omnibus (279 page)

‘Let me see that necklace,’ he said authoritatively.

Jeeves drew the salver to his attention.

‘You will, I think, support my view, my lord.’

Spode took the contents, glanced at them, sniffed and delivered judgment.

‘Perfectly correct. An imitation, and not a very good one.’

‘You can’t be sure,’ said Percy, and got withered by a look.

‘Can’t be sure?’ Spode bristled like a hornet whose feelings have been wounded by a tactless remark. ‘Can’t be
sure
?’

‘Of course he’s sure,’ I said, not actually slapping him on the back but giving him a back-slapping look designed to show him he had got Bertram Wooster in his corner. ‘He knows, as everybody knows, that cultured pearls have a core. You spotted the core in a second, didn’t you, Spode, old man, or rather Lord Sidcup, old man?’

I was going on to speak of the practice of introducing a foreign substance into the oyster in order to kid it along and induce it to cover this f.s. with layers of nacre – which I still think is a dirty trick to play on a shellfish which simply wants to be left alone with its thoughts – but Spode had risen. There was dudgeon in his manner.

‘All this sort of thing at breakfast!’ he said, and I saw what he meant. At home, no doubt, he wrapped himself around the morning egg in cosy seclusion, his daily paper propped up against the coffee-pot and none of this business of naked passions buzzing all over the place. He wiped his mouth, and left via the french window, wincing with a hand to his head as L.G. Trotter spoke in a voice that nearly cracked his tea-cup.

‘Emily! Explain this!’

Ma Trotter got the lorgnette working on him, but for all the good it did she might as well have used a monocle. He stared right back
at
her, and I imagine – couldn’t be certain, of course, because his back was to me – that there was in his gaze a steely hardness that turned her bones to water. At any rate, when she spoke, it was like what I have heard Jeeves describe as the earliest pipe of half-awakened birds.

‘I can’t explain it,’ she … yes, quavered. I was going to say ‘murmured’, but quavered hits it off better.

L.G. Trotter barked like a seal.

‘I can,’ he said. ‘You’ve been giving money on the sly again to that brother of yours.’

This was the first I had heard of any brother of Ma Trotter’s, but I wasn’t surprised. My experience is that all wives of prosperous business men have shady brothers in the background to whom they slip a bit from time to time.

‘I haven’t!’

‘Don’t lie to me!’

‘Oh!’ cried the shrinking woman, shrinking a bit more, and the spectacle was too much for Percy. All this while he had been sitting tensely where he sat, giving the impression of something stuffed by a good taxidermist, but now, moved by a mother’s distress, he rose rather in the manner of one about to reply to the toast of The Ladies. He was looking a little like a cat in a strange alley which is momentarily expecting a half-brick in the short ribs, but his voice, though low, was firm.

‘I can explain everything. Moth-aw is innocent. She wanted her necklace cleaned. She entrusted it to me to take to the jeweller’s, and I pawned it and had an imitation made. I needed money urgently.’

Aunt Dahlia well-I’ll-be-blowed!

‘What an extraordinary thing to do!’ she said. ‘Did you ever hear of anybody doing anything like that, Bertie?’

‘New to me, I must confess.’

‘Amazing, eh?’

‘Bizarre, you might call it.’

‘Still, that’s how it goes.’

‘Yes, that’s how it goes.’

‘I needed a thousand pounds to put into the play,’ said Percy.

L.G. Trotter, who was in good voice this morning, uttered a howl that set the silverware rattling. It was fortunate for Spode that he had removed himself from earshot, for it would certainly have done that head of his no good. Even I, though a strong man, leaped about six inches.

‘You put a thousand pounds into a
play
?’

‘Into
the
play,’ said Percy. ‘Florence’s and mine. My dramatization of her novel,
Spindrift
. One of our backers had failed us, and rather than disappoint the woman I loved –’

Florence was staring at him, wide-eyed. If you remember, I described her aspect on first glimpsing my moustache as having had in it a touch of the Soul’s Awakening. The S.A. was now even more pronounced. It stuck out a mile.

‘Percy! You did that for me?’

‘And I’d do it again,’ said Percy.

L.G. Trotter began to speak. As to whether he opened his remarks with the words ‘Ba goom!’ I cannot be positive, but there was a ‘Ba goom!’ implicit in every syllable. The man was what is called beside himself, and one felt a gentle pity for Ma Trotter, little as one liked her. Her reign was over. She had had it. From now on it was plain who was going to be the Führer of the Trotter home. The worm of yesterday – or you might say the worm of ten minutes ago – had become a worm in tiger’s clothing.

‘This settles it!’ he vociferated, I’m pretty sure it’s vociferated. ‘There won’t be any more loafing about London for you, young man. We leave this house this morning –’

‘What!’ yipped Aunt Dahlia.

‘– and the moment we get back to Liverpool you start in at the bottom of the business, as you ought to have done two years ago if I hadn’t let myself be persuaded against my better judgment. Five thousand pounds I paid for that necklace, and you …’

Emotion overcame him, and he paused.

‘But, Mr. Trotter!’ There was anguish in Aunt Dahlia’s voice. ‘You aren’t leaving this morning!’

‘Yes, I am. Think I’m going to go through another of that French cook’s lunches?’

‘But I was hoping you would not be going away before we had settled this matter of buying the
Boudoir
. If you could give me a few moments in the library?’

‘No time for that. I’m going to drive into Market Snodsbury and see a doctor. Just a chance he may be able to do something to relieve the pain. It’s about here that it seems to catch me,’ said L.G. Trotter, indicating the fourth button of his waistcoat.

‘Tut-tut,’ said Aunt Dahlia, and I tut-tutted, too, but nobody else expressed the sympathy the writhing man had a right to expect. Florence was still drinking in Percy with every eye at her disposal, and Percy was bending solicitously over Ma Trotter, who was sitting looking like a survivor of a bomb explosion.

‘Come, Moth-aw,’ said Percy, hoiking her up from where she roosted. ‘I will bathe your temples with eau-de-Cologne.’

With a reproachful look at L.G. Trotter he led her gently from the room. A mother’s best friend is her boy.

Aunt Dahlia was still looking aghast, and I knew what was in her mind. Once let this Trotter get away to Liverpool and she would be dished. Delicate negotiations like selling a weekly paper for the gentler sex to a customer full of sales resistance can’t be conducted successfully by mail. You have to have men like L.G. Trotter on the spot, kneading their arms and generally giving them the old personality.

‘Jeeves!’ I cried. I don’t know why, because I couldn’t see what he could do to help.

He sprang respectfully to life. During the late give-and-take he had been standing in the background with that detached, stuffed-frog look on his face which it always wears when he is present at a free-for-all in which his sense of what is fitting does not allow him to take part. And the spirits rose as I saw from his eye that he was going to rally round.

‘If I might make a suggestion, sir.’

‘Yes, Jeeves?’

‘It occurs to me that one of those morning mixtures of mine would bring relief to Mr. Trotter.’

I gargled. I got his meaning.

‘You mean those pick-me-ups you occasionally prepare for me when the state of the old head seems to call for it?’

‘Precisely, sir.’

‘Would they hit the trot with Mr. Spotter, or rather the other way round?’

‘Oh, yes, sir. They act directly on the internal organs.’

It was enough. I saw that, as always, he had
tetigisti
-ed the
rem
. I turned to L.G. Trotter.

‘You heard?’

‘No, I didn’t. How do you expect me to hear things –?’

I checked him with one of my gestures.

‘Well, listen now,’ I said. ‘Be of good cheer, L.G. Trotter, for the United States Marines have arrived. No need for any doctors. Go along with Jeeves, and he will fix you a mixture which will put the old tum in midseason form before you can say “Lemuel Gengulphus”.’

He looked at Jeeves with a wild surmise. I heard Aunt Dahlia gasp a gasp.

‘Is that right?’

‘Yes, sir. I can guarantee the efficacy of the preparation.’

L.G. Trotter emitted a loud ‘Woof!’

‘Let’s go,’ he said briefly.

‘I’ll come with you and hold your hand,’ said Aunt Dahlia.

‘Just one word,’ I said, as the procession started to file out. ‘On swallowing the stuff you will have the momentary illusion that you have been struck by lightning. Pay no attention. It’s all part of the treatment. But watch the eyeballs, as they are liable, unless checked, to start from the parent sockets and rebound from the opposite wall.’

They passed from the room, and I was alone with Florence.

IT’S AN ODD
thing, but it hadn’t occurred to me in the rush and swirl of recent events that, with people drifting off in twos and threes and – in the case of Spode – in ones, the time must inevitably come when this beasel and I would be left face to face in what is called a
solitude à deux
. And now that this unpleasant state of affairs had come about, it was difficult to know how to start the conversation. However, I had a pop at it, the same pop I had had when finding myself closeted with L.G. Trotter.

‘Can I get you a sausage?’ I said.

She waved it away. It was plain that the unrest in her soul could not be lulled with sausages.

‘Oh, Bertie,’ she said, and paused.

‘Or a slice of ham?’

She shook her head. Ham appeared to be just as much a drug in the market as sausages.

‘Oh, Bertie,’ she said again.

‘Right opposite you,’ I said encouragingly.

‘Bertie, I don’t know what to do.’

She signed off once more, and I stood there waiting for something to emerge. A half-formed idea of offering her a kipper I dismissed. Too silly, I mean, keeping on suggesting items on the menu like a waiter trying to help a customer make up his mind.

‘I feel awful!’ she said.

‘You look fine,’ I assured her, but she dismissed the pretty compliment with another wave of the hand.

She was silent again for a moment, and then it came out with a rush.

‘It’s about Percy.’

I was nibbling a slice of toast as she spoke, but lowered it courteously.

‘Percy?’ I said.

‘Oh, Bertie,’ she proceeded, and from the way her nose wiggled I could see that she was in quite a state. ‘All that that happened just
now
… when he said that about not disappointing the woman he loved … when I realized what he had done … just for me …’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘Very white.’

‘Something happened to me. It was as though for the first time I was seeing the real Percy. I had always admired his intellect, of course, but now it was different. I seemed to be gazing into his naked soul, and what I saw there …’

‘Pretty good, was it?’ I queried, helping the thing along.

She drew a deep breath.

‘I was overcome. I was stunned. I realized that he was just like Rollo Beaminster.’

For a moment I was not abreast. Then I remembered.

‘Oh, ah, yes. You didn’t get around to telling me much about Rollo, except that he was in a wild mood.’

‘Oh, that was quite early in the story, before he and Sylvia came together again.’

‘They came together, did they?’

‘Yes. She gazed into his naked soul and knew that there could be no other man for her.’

I have already stressed the fact that I was mentally at my brightest this morning, and hearing these words I got the distinct idea that she was feeling pretty pro-Percy as of even date. I might be wrong, of course, but I didn’t think so, and it seemed to me that this was a good thing that wanted pushing along. There is, as Jeeves had so neatly put it, a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.

‘I say,’ I said, ‘here’s a thought. Why don’t you marry Percy?’

She started. I saw that she was trembling. She moved, she stirred, she seemed to feel the rush of life along her keel. In her eyes, as she gazed at me, it wasn’t difficult to spot the light of hope.

‘But I’m engaged to you,’ she faltered, rather giving the impression that she could have kicked herself for being such a chump.

‘Oh, that can be readily adjusted,’ I said heartily. ‘Call it off, is my advice. You don’t want a weedy butterfly like me about the home, you want something more in the nature of a soul-mate, a chap with a number nine hat you can sit and hold hands and talk about T.S. Eliot with. And Percy fills the bill.’

She choked a bit. The light of hope was now very pronounced.

‘Bertie! You will release me?’

‘Certainly, certainly. Frightful wrench, of course, and all that sort of thing, but consider it done.’

‘Oh, Bertie!’

She flung herself upon me and kissed me. Unpleasant, of course, but these things have to be faced. As I once heard Anatole remark, one must learn to take a few roughs with a smooth.

We were still linked together in a close embrace, when the silence – we were embracing fairly silently – was broken by what sounded like the heart-cry of one of the local dogs which had bumped its nose against the leg of the table.

It wasn’t a dog. It was Percy. He was standing there looking overwrought, and I didn’t blame him. Agony, of course, if you love a girl, to come into a room and find her all tangled up with another fellow.

He pulled himself together with a powerful effort.

‘Go on,’ he said, ‘go on. I’m sorry I interrupted you.’

He broke off with a choking gulp, and I could see it was quite a surprise to him when Florence, abruptly detaching herself from me, did a jack-rabbit leap that was almost in the Cheesewright-Wooster class and hurled herself into his arms.