The Jeeves Omnibus (320 page)

‘Ah yes, sir, I recollect now.’

‘Would they, I asked myself, inherit the combined loopiness of two such parents?’

‘Yes, sir, you were particularly concerned, I recall, for the well-being of the nurses, governesses, private schoolmasters and public schoolmasters who would assume the charge of them.’

‘Little knowing that they were coming up against something hotter than mustard. Exactly. The thought still weighs heavy upon me. However, we haven’t leisure to go into the subject now. You’d better take that ghastly object back where it belongs without delay.’

‘Yes, sir. If it were done when ’twere done, then ’twere well it were done quickly,’ he said, making for the door, and I thought, as I had so often thought before, how neatly he put these things.

It seemed to me that the time had now come to adopt the strategy which I had had in mind right at the beginning – viz. to make my getaway via the window. With Plank at large in the house and likely at any moment to come winging back to where the drinks were, safety could be obtained only by making for some distant yew alley or rhododendron walk and remaining ensconced there till he had blown over. I hastened to the window, accordingly, and picture my chagrin and dismay on finding that Bartholomew, instead of continuing his stroll, had decided to take a siesta on the grass immediately below. I had actually got one leg over the sill before he was drawn to my
attention.
In another half jiffy I should have dropped on him as the gentle rain from heaven upon the spot beneath.

I had no difficulty in recognizing the situation as what the French call an
impasse
, and as I stood pondering what to do for the best, footsteps sounded without, and feeling that ’twere well it were done quickly I made for the sofa once more, lowering my previous record by perhaps a split second.

I was surprised, as I lay nestling in my little nook, by the complete absence of dialogue that ensued. Hitherto, all my visitors had started chatting from the moment of their entry, and it struck me as odd that I should now be entertaining a couple of deaf mutes. Peeping cautiously out, however, I found that I had been mistaken in supposing that I had with me a brace of guests. It was Madeline alone who had blown in. She was heading for the piano, and something told me that it was her intention to sing old folk songs, a pastime to which, as I have indicated, she devoted not a little of her leisure. She was particularly given to indulgence in this nuisance when her soul had been undergoing an upheaval and required soothing, as of course it probably did at this juncture.

My fears were realized. She sang two in rapid succession, and the thought that this sort of thing would be a permanent feature of our married life chilled me to the core. I’ve always been what you might call allergic to old folk songs, and the older they are, the more I dislike them.

Fortunately, before she could start on a third she was interrupted. Clumping footsteps sounded, the door handle turned, heavy breathing made itself heard, and a voice said ‘Madeline!’ Spode’s voice, husky with emotion.

‘Madeline,’ he said, ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

‘Oh, Roderick! How is your eye?’

‘Never mind my eye,’ said Spode. ‘I didn’t come here to talk about eyes.’

‘They say a piece of beefsteak reduces the swelling.’

‘Nor about beefsteaks. Sir Watkyn has told me the awful news about you and Wooster. Is it true you’re going to marry him?’

‘Yes, Roderick, it is true.’

‘But you can’t love a half-baked, half-witted ass like Wooster,’ said Spode, and I thought the remark extremely offensive. Pick your words more carefully, Spode, I might have said, rising and confronting him. However, for one reason and another I didn’t, but continued to nestle and I heard Madeline sigh, unless it was the draught under the sofa.

‘No, Roderick, I do not love him. He does not appeal to the essential me. But I feel it is my duty to make him happy.’

‘Tchah!’ said Spode, or something that sounded like that. ‘Why on earth do you want to go about making worms like Wooster happy?’

‘He loves me, Roderick. You must have seen that dumb, worshipping look in his eyes as he gazes at me.’

‘I’ve something better to do than peer into Wooster’s eyes. Though I can well imagine they look dumb. We’ve got to have this thing out, Madeline.’

‘I don’t understand you, Roderick.’

‘You will.’

‘Ouch!’

I think on the cue ‘You will’ he must have grabbed her by the wrist, for the word ‘Ouch!’ had come through strong and clear, and this suspicion was confirmed when she said he was hurting her.

‘I’m sorry, sorry,’ said Spode. ‘But I refuse to allow you to ruin your life. You can’t marry this man Wooster. I’m the one you’re going to marry.’

I was with him heart and soul, as the expression is. Nothing would ever make me really fond of Roderick Spode, but I liked the way he was talking. A little more of this, I felt, and Bertram would be released from his honourable obligations. I wished he had thought of taking this firm line earlier.

‘I’ve loved you since you were so high.’

Not being able to see him, I couldn’t ascertain how high that was, but I presumed he must have been holding his hand not far from the floor. A couple of feet, would you say? About that, I suppose.

Madeline was plainly moved. I heard her gurgle.

‘I know, Roderick, I know.’

‘You guessed my secret?’

‘Yes, Roderick. How sad life is!’

Spode declined to string along with her in this view.

‘Not a bit of it. Life’s fine. At least, it will be if you give this blighter Wooster the push and marry me.’

‘I have always been devoted to you, Roderick.’

‘Well, then?’

‘Give me time to think.’

‘Carry on. Take all the time you need.’

‘I don’t want to break Bertie’s heart.’

‘Why not? Do him good.’

‘He loves me so dearly.’

‘Nonsense. I don’t suppose he has ever loved anything in his life
except
a dry martini.’

‘How can you say that? Did he not come here because he found it impossible to stay away from me?’

‘No, he jolly well didn’t. Don’t let him fool you on that point. He came here to pinch that black amber statuette of your father’s.’

‘What!’

‘That’s what. In addition to being half-witted, he’s a low thief.’

‘It can’t be true!’

‘Of course it’s true. His uncle wants the thing for his collection. I heard him plotting with his aunt on the telephone not half an hour ago. “It’s going to be pretty hard to get away with it,” he was saying, “but I’ll do my best. I know how much Uncle Tom covets that statuette.” He’s always stealing things. The very first time I met him, in an antique shop in the Brompton Road, he as near as a toucher got away with your father’s umbrella.’

A monstrous charge, and one which I can readily refute. He and Pop Bassett and I were, I concede, in the antique shop in the Brompton Road to which he had alluded, but the umbrella sequence was purely one of those laughable misunderstandings. Pop Bassett had left the blunt instrument propped against a seventeenth-century chair, and what caused me to take it up was the primeval instinct which makes a man without an umbrella, as I happened to be that morning, reach out unconsciously for the nearest one in sight, like a flower turning to the sun. The whole thing could have been explained in two words, but they hadn’t let me say even one, and the slur had been allowed to rest on me.

‘You shock me, Roderick!’ said Madeline.

‘Yes, I thought it would make you sit up.’

‘If this is really so, if Bertie is really a thief –’

‘Well?’

‘Naturally I will have nothing more to do with him. But I can’t believe it.’

‘I’ll go and fetch Sir Watkyn,’ said Spode. ‘Perhaps you’ll believe him.’

For several minutes after he had clumped out, Madeline must have stood in a reverie, for I didn’t hear a sound out of her. Then the door opened, and the next thing that came across was a cough which I had no difficulty in recognizing.

IT WAS THAT
soft cough of Jeeves’s which always reminds me of a very old sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountain top. He coughed it at me, if you remember, on the occasion when I first swam into his ken wearing the Alpine hat. It generally signifies disapproval, but I’ve known it to occur also when he’s about to touch on a topic of a delicate nature. And when he spoke, I knew that that was what he was going to do now, for there was a sort of hushed note in his voice.

‘I wonder if I might have a moment of your time, miss?’

‘Of course, Jeeves.’

‘It is with reference to Mr. Wooster.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘I must begin by saying that I chanced to be passing the door when Lord Sidcup was speaking to you and inadvertently overheard his lordship’s observations on the subject of Mr. Wooster. His lordship has a carrying voice. And I find myself in a somewhat equivocal position, torn between loyalty to my employer and a natural desire to do my duty as a citizen.’

‘I don’t understand you, Jeeves,’ said Madeline, which made two of us.

He coughed again.

‘I am anxious not to take a liberty, miss, but if I may speak frankly –’

‘Please do.’

‘Thank you, miss. His lordship’s words seemed to confirm a rumour which is circulating in the servants’ hall that you are contemplating a matrimonial union with Mr. Wooster. Would it be indiscreet of me if I were to inquire if this is so?’

‘Yes, Jeeves, it is quite true.’

‘If you will pardon me for saying so, I think you are making a mistake.’

Well spoken, Jeeves, you are on the right lines, I was saying to myself, and I hoped he was going to rub it in. I waited anxiously for Madeline’s reply, a little afraid that she would draw herself to her full height and dismiss him from her presence. But she didn’t. She merely said again that she didn’t understand him.

‘If I might explain, miss. I am loath to criticize my employer, but I feel that you should know that he is a kleptomaniac.’

‘What!’

‘Yes, miss. I had hoped to be able to preserve his little secret, as I have always done hitherto, but he has now gone to lengths which I cannot countenance. In going through his effects this afternoon I discovered this small black figure, concealed beneath his underwear.’

I heard Madeline utter a sound like a dying soda-water syphon.

‘But that belongs to my father!’

‘If I may say so, nothing belongs to anyone if Mr. Wooster takes a fancy to it.’

‘Then Lord Sidcup was right?’

‘Precisely, miss.’

‘He said Mr. Wooster tried to steal my father’s umbrella.’

‘I heard him, and the charge was well founded. Umbrellas, jewellery, statuettes, they are all grist to Mr. Wooster’s mill. I do not think he can help it. It is a form of mental illness. But whether a jury would take that view, I cannot say.’

Madeline went into the soda-syphon routine once more.

‘You mean he might be sent to prison?’

‘It is a contingency that seems to me far from remote.’

Again I felt that he was on the right lines. His trained senses told him that if there’s one thing that puts a girl off marrying a chap, it is the thought that the honeymoon may be spoiled at any moment by the arrival of Inspectors at the love nest, come to scoop him in for larceny. No young bride likes that sort of thing, and you can’t blame her if she finds herself preferring to team up with someone like Spode, who, though a gorilla in fairly human shape, is known to keep strictly on the right side of the law. I could almost hear Madeline’s thoughts turning in this direction, and I applauded Jeeves’s sound grip on the psychology of the individual, as he calls it.

Of course, I could see that all this wasn’t going to make my position in the Bassett home any too good, but there are times when only the surgeon’s knife will serve. And I had the sustaining thought that if ever I got out from behind this sofa I could sneak off to where my car waited champing at the bit and drive off Londonwards without stopping to say goodbye and thanks for a delightful visit. This would obviate – is it obviate? – all unpleasantness.

Madeline continued shaken.

‘Oh dear, Oh dear!’ she said.

‘Yes, miss.’

‘This has come as a great shock.’

‘I can readily appreciate it, miss.’

‘Have you known of this long?’

‘Ever since I entered Mr. Wooster’s employment.’

‘Oh dear, Oh dear! Well, thank you, Jeeves.’

‘Not at all, miss.’

I think Jeeves must have shimmered off after this, for silence fell and nothing happened except that my nose began to tickle. I would have given ten quid to have been able to sneeze, but this of course was outside the range of practical politics. I just crouched there, thinking of this and that, and after quite a while the door opened once more, this time to admit something in the nature of a mob scene. I could see three pairs of shoes, and deduced that they were those of Spode, Pop Bassett and Plank. Spode, it will be recalled, had gone to fetch Pop, and Plank presumably had come along for the ride, hoping no doubt for something moist at journey’s end.

Spode was the first to speak, and his voice rang with the triumph that comes into the voices of suitors who have caught a dangerous rival bending.

‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought Sir Watkyn to support my statement that Wooster is a low sneak thief who goes about snapping up everything that isn’t nailed down. You agree, Sir Watkyn?’

‘Of course I do, Roderick. It’s only a month or so ago that he and that aunt of his stole my cow-creamer.’

‘What’s a cow-creamer?’ asked Plank.

‘A silver cream jug, one of the gems of my collection.’

‘They got away with it, did they?’

‘They did.’

‘Ah,’ said Plank. ‘Then in that case I think I’ll have a whisky and soda.’

Pop Bassett was warming to his theme. His voice rose above the hissing of Plank’s syphon.

‘And it was only by the mercy of Providence that Wooster didn’t make off with my umbrella that day in the Brompton Road. If that young man has one defect more marked than another, it is that he appears to be totally ignorant of the distinction between
meum
and
tuum
. He came up before me in my court once, I remember, charged with having stolen a policeman’s helmet, and it is a lasting regret to me that I merely fined him five pounds.’