The Jeeves Omnibus (318 page)

‘Yes, Butterfield? What is it, what is it?’

‘Constable Oates desires a word with you, sir.’

‘Who?’

‘Police Constable Oates, sir.’

‘What does he want?’

‘I gather that he has a clue to the identity of the boy who threw a hard-boiled egg at you, sir.’

The words acted on Pop Bassett as I’m told the sound of bugles acts on war-horses, not that I’ve ever seen a war-horse. His whole demeanour changed in a flash. His face lit up, and there came into it the sort of look you see on the faces of bloodhounds when they settle down to the trail. He didn’t actually say ‘Whoopee!’ but that was probably because the expression was not familiar to him. He was out of the room in a matter of seconds, Butterfield lying some lengths behind, and Stinker, who had been replacing a framed photograph
which
he had knocked off a neighbouring table, addressed me in what you might call a hushed voice.

‘I say, Bertie, what do you think Stiffy meant when she said that?’

I, too, had been speculating as to what the young pipsqueak had had in mind. A sinister thing to say, it seemed to me. Those words ‘Just wait’ had had an ominous ring. I weighed his question gravely.

‘Difficult to decide,’ I said, ‘it may be one thing, or it may be another.’

‘She has such an impulsive nature.’

‘Very impulsive.’

‘It makes me uneasy.’

‘Why you? Pop B’s the one who ought to be feeling uneasy. Knowing her as I do, if I were in his place –’

The sentence I had begun would, if it had come to fruition, have concluded with the words ‘I’d pack a few necessaries in a suitcase and go to Australia,’ but as I was about to utter them I chanced to glance out of the window and they froze on my lips.

The window looked on the drive, and from where I was standing I got a good view of the front steps, and when I saw what was coming up those front steps, my heart leaped from its base.

It was Plank. There was no mistaking that square, tanned face and that purposeful walk of his. And when I reflected that in about a couple of ticks Butterfield would be showing him into the drawing-room where I stood and we would meet once more, I confess that I was momentarily at a loss to know how to proceed.

My first thought was to wait till he had got through the front door and then nip out of the window, which was conveniently open. That, I felt, was what Napoleon would have done. And I was just about to get the show on the road, as Stiffy would have said, when I saw the dog Bartholomew coming sauntering along, and I knew that I would be compelled to revise my strategy from the bottom up. You can’t go climbing out of windows under the eyes of an Aberdeen terrier so prone as Bartholomew was always to think the worst. In due season, no doubt, he would learn that what he had taken for a burglar escaping with the swag had been in reality a harmless guest of the house and would be all apologies, but by that time my lower slopes would be as full of holes as a Swiss cheese.

Falling back on my second line of defence, I slid behind the sofa with a muttered, ‘Not a word to a soul, Stinker. Chap I don’t want to meet,’ and was nestling there like a turtle in its shell, when the door opened.

IT’S PRETTY GENERALLY
recognized at the Drones Club and elsewhere that Bertram Wooster is a man who knows how to keep the chin up and the upper lip stiff, no matter how rough the going may be. Beneath the bludgeonings of Fate, his head is bloody but unbowed, as the fellow said. In a word, he can take it.

But I must admit that as I crouched in my haven of refuge I found myself chafing not a little. Life at Totleigh Towers, as I mentioned earlier, had got me down. There seemed no way of staying put in the darned house. One was either soaring like an eagle on to the top of chests or whizzing down behind sofas like a diving duck, and apart from the hustle and bustle of it all that sort of thing wounds the spirit and does no good to the trouser crease. And so, as I say, I chafed.

I was becoming increasingly bitter about this man Plank and the tendency he seemed to be developing of haunting me like a family spectre. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing here. Whatever the faults of Totleigh Towers, I had supposed that, when there, one would at least be free from his society. He had an excellent home in Hockley-cum-Meston, and one sought in vain for an explanation of why the hell he didn’t stay in it.

My disapproval extended to the personnel of the various native tribes he had encountered in the course of his explorations. On his own showing, he had for years been horning in uninvited on the aborigines of Brazil, the Congo and elsewhere, and not one of them apparently had had the enterprise to get after him with a spear or to say it with poisoned darts from the family blowpipe. And these were fellows who called themselves savages. Savages, forsooth! The savages in the books I used to read in my childhood would have had him in the Obituary column before he could say ‘What ho’, but with the ones you get nowadays it’s all slackness and laissez-faire. Can’t be bothered. Leave it to somebody else. Let George do it. One sometimes wonders what the world’s coming to.

From where I sat my range of vision was necessarily a bit restricted, but I was able to see a pair of Empire-building brogue shoes, so I
assumed
that when the door had opened it was Butterfield showing him in, and this surmise was confirmed a moment later when he spoke. His was a voice which, once heard, lingers in the memory.

‘Afternoon,’ he said.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Stinker.

‘Warm day.’

‘Very warm.’

‘What’s been going on here? What are all those tents and swings and things in the park?’

Stinker explained that the annual school treat had only just concluded, and Plank expressed his gratification at having missed it. School treats, he said, were dashed dangerous things, always to be avoided by the shrewd, as they were only too apt to include competitions for bonny babies.

‘Did you have a competition for bonny babies?’

‘Yes, we did, as a matter of fact. The mothers always insist on it.’

‘The mothers are the ones you want to watch out for,’ said Plank. ‘I’m not saying the little beasts aren’t bad enough themselves, dribbling out of the side of their mouths at you and all that sort of thing, but it’s the mothers who constitute the really grave peril. Look,’ he said, and I think he must at this point have pulled up a trouser leg. ‘See that scar on my calf? That’s what I got in Peru once for being fool enough to let myself be talked into judging a competition for bonny babies. The mother of one of the Honourably Mentioneds spiked me in the leg with a native dagger as I was stepping down from the judge’s stand after making my speech. Hurt like sin, I can assure you, and still gives me a twinge when the weather’s wet. Fellow I know is fond of saying that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Whether this is so or not I couldn’t tell you, but it certainly knows how to handle a Peruvian dagger.’

I found myself revising to some extent the rather austere opinion I had formed of the slackness and lack of ginger of the modern native. The males might have lost their grip in recent years, but the female element, it seemed, still had the right stuff in them, though of course where somebody like Plank is concerned, a stab in the fleshy part of the leg is only a step in the right direction, merely scratching the surface as you might say.

Plank continued chatty. ‘You live in these parts?’ he said.

‘Yes, I live in the village.’

‘Totleigh?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t run a Rugger club in Totleigh, do you?’

Stinker replied in the negative. The Totleigh-in-the-Wold athletes, he said, preferred the Association code, and Plank, probably shuddering, said ‘Good God!’

‘You ever played Rugger?’

‘A little.’

‘You should take it up seriously. No finer sport. I’m trying to make the Hockley-cum-Meston team the talk of Gloucestershire. I coach the boys daily, and they’re coming along very nicely, very nicely indeed. What I need is a good prop forward.’

What he got was Pop Bassett, who came bustling in at this moment. He Good-afternoon-Plank-ed, and Plank responded in suitable terms.

‘Very nice of you to look me up, Plank,’ said Pop. ‘Will you have something to drink?’

‘Ah,’ said Plank, and you could see that he meant it.

‘I would ask you to stay to dinner, but unfortunately one of my guests has eloped with the cook.’

‘Dashed sensible of him, if he was going to elope with anyone. Very hard to find these days, cooks.’

‘It has of course completely disorganized our domestic arrangements. Neither my daughter nor my niece is capable of preparing even the simplest meal.’

‘You’ll have to go to the pub.’

‘It seems the only solution.’

‘If you were in West Africa, you could drop in and take pot luck with a native chief.’

‘I am not in West Africa,’ said Pop Bassett, speaking, I thought, a little testily, and I could understand him feeling a bit miffed. It’s always annoying when you’re up against it and people tell you what a jolly time you could be having if you weren’t and how topping everything would be if you were somewhere where you aren’t.

‘I dined out a good deal in West Africa,’ said Plank. ‘Capital dinners some of those fellows used to give me, I remember, though there was always the drawback that you could never be sure the main dish wasn’t one of their wives’ relations, broiled over a slow fire and disguised in some native sauce. Took the edge off your appetite, unless you were feeling particularly peckish.’

‘So I would be disposed to imagine.’

‘All a matter of taste, of course.’

‘Quite. Was there something you particularly wished to see me about, Plank?’

‘No, nothing that I can think of.’

‘Then if you will excuse me, I will be getting back to Madeline.’

‘Who’s Madeline?’

‘My daughter. Your arrival interrupted me in a serious talk I was having with her.’

‘Something wrong with the girl?’

‘Something extremely wrong. She is contemplating making a disastrous marriage.’

‘All marriages are disastrous,’ said Plank, who gave one the impression, reading between the lines, that he was a bachelor. ‘They lead to bonny babies, and bonny babies lead to bonny baby competitions. I was telling this gentleman here of an experience I had in Peru and showing him the scar on my leg, the direct result of being ass enough to judge one of these competitions. Would you care to see the scar on my leg?’

‘Some other time, perhaps.’

‘Any time that suits you. Why is this marriage you say she’s contemplating so disastrous?’

‘Because Mr. Wooster is not a suitable husband for her.’

‘Who’s Mr. Wooster?’

‘The man she wishes to marry. A typical young wastrel of the type so common nowadays.’

‘I used to know a fellow called Wooster, but I don’t suppose it can be the same chap, because my Wooster was eaten by a crocodile on the Zambesi the other day, which rather rules him out. All right, Bassett, you pop back to the girl and tell her from me that if she’s going to start marrying every Tom, Dick and Harry she comes across, she ought to have her head examined. If she’d seen as many native chiefs’ wives as I have, she wouldn’t be wanting to make such an ass of herself. Dickens of a life they lead, those women. Nothing to do but grind maize meal and have bonny babies. Right ho, Bassett, don’t let me keep you.’

There came the sound of a closing door as Pop Bassett sped on his way, and Plank turned his attention to Stinker. He said:

‘I didn’t tell that old ass, because I didn’t want him sticking around in here talking his head off, but as a matter of fact I did come about something special. Do you happen to know where I can find a chap called Pinker?’

‘My name’s Pinker.’

‘Are you sure? I thought Bassett said it was Wooster.’

‘No, Wooster’s the one who’s going to marry Sir Watkyn’s daughter.’

‘So he is. It all comes back to me now. I wonder if you can be the fellow I want. The Pinker I’m after is a curate.’

‘I’m a curate.’

‘You are? Yes, by Jove, you’re perfectly right. I see your collar buttons at the back. You’re not H. P. Pinker by any chance?’

‘Yes.’

‘Prop forward for Oxford and England a few years ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, would you be interested in becoming a vicar?’

There was a crashing sound, and I knew that Stinker in his emotion must have upset his customary table. After a while he said in a husky voice that the one thing he wanted was to get his hooks on a vicarage or words to that effect, and Plank said he was glad to hear it.

‘My chap at Hockley-cum-Meston is downing tools now that his ninetieth birthday is approaching, and I’ve been scouring the countryside for a spare. Extraordinarily difficult the quest has been, because what I wanted was a vicar who was a good prop forward, and it isn’t often you find a parson who knows one end of a football from the other. I’ve never seen you play, I’m sorry to say, because I’ve been abroad so much, but with your record you must obviously be outstanding. So you can take up your duties as soon as old Bellamy goes into storage. When I get home, I’ll embody the thing in the form of a letter.’

Stinker said he didn’t know how to thank him, and Plank said that was all right, no need of any thanks.

‘I’m the one who ought to be grateful. We’re all right at half-back and three-quarters, but we lost to Upper Bleaching last year simply because our prop forward proved a broken reed. This year we’ll show ’em. Amazing bit of luck finding you, and I could never have done it if it hadn’t been for a friend of mine, a Chief Inspector Witherspoon of Scotland Yard. He phoned me just now and told me you were to be found at Totleigh-in-the-Wold. He said if I called at Totleigh Towers, they would give me your address. Extraordinary how these Scotland Yard fellows nose things out. The result of years of practise, I suppose. What was that noise?’

Stinker said he had heard nothing.

‘Sort of gasping noise. Seemed to come from behind that sofa. Take a look.’

I was aware for a moment of Stinker’s face peering down at me; then he turned away.