The Jeeves Omnibus (63 page)

‘No, no!’ I cried, paling beneath the tan.

‘Don’t be silly, Bertie. She is just the wife for you.’

‘Yes, but look here –’

‘She will mould you.’

‘But I don’t want to be moulded.’

Aunt Agatha gave me the kind of look she used to give me when I was a kid and had been found in the jam cupboard.

‘Bertie! I hope you are not going to be troublesome.’

‘Well, but I mean –’

‘Lady Glossop has very kindly invited you to Ditteredge Hall for a few days. I told her you would be delighted to come down tomorrow.’

‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got a dashed important engagement tomorrow.’

‘What engagement?’

‘Well – er –’

‘You have no engagement. And, even if you had, you must put it off. I shall be very seriously annoyed, Bertie, if you do not go to Ditteredge Hall tomorrow.’

‘Oh, right-o!’ I said.

It wasn’t two minutes after I had parted from Aunt Agatha before the old fighting spirit of the Woosters reasserted itself. Ghastly as the peril was which loomed before me, I was conscious of a rummy sort of exhilaration. It was a tight corner, but the tighter the corner, I felt, the more juicily should I score off Jeeves when I got myself out of it without a bit of help from him. Ordinarily, of course, I should have consulted him and trusted to him to solve the difficulty; but after what I had heard him saying in the kitchen, I was dashed if I was going to demean myself. When I got home I addressed the man with light abandon.

‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘I’m in a bit of a difficulty.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir.’

‘Yes, quite a bad hole. In fact, you might say on the brink of a precipice, and faced by an awful doom.’

‘If I could be of any assistance, sir –’

‘Oh, no. No, no. Thanks very much, but no, no. I won’t trouble you. I’ve no doubt I shall be able to get out of it by myself.’

‘Very good, sir.’

So that was that. I’m bound to say I’d have welcomed a bit more curiosity from the fellow, but that is Jeeves all over. Cloaks his emotions, if you know what I mean.

Honoria was away when I got to Ditteredge on the following afternoon. Her mother told me that she was staying with some people named Braythwayt in the neighbourhood, and would be back next day, bringing the daughter of the house with her for a visit. She said I would find Oswald out in the grounds, and such is a mother’s love that she spoke as if that were a bit of a boost for the grounds and an inducement to go there.

Rather decent, the grounds at Ditteredge. A couple of terraces, a bit of lawn with a cedar on it, a bit of shrubbery, and finally a small but goodish lake with a stone bridge running across it. Directly I’d worked my way round the shrubbery I spotted young Bingo leaning against the bridge smoking a cigarette. Sitting on the stone-work, fishing, was a species of kid whom I took to be Oswald the Plague-Spot.

Bingo was both surprised and delighted to see me, and introduced me to the kid. If the latter was surprised and delighted too, he concealed it like a diplomat. He just looked at me, raised his eyebrows slightly, and went on fishing. He was one of those supercilious striplings who give you the impression that you went to the wrong school and that your clothes don’t fit.

‘This is Oswald,’ said Bingo.

‘What,’ I replied cordially, ‘could be sweeter? How are you?’

‘Oh, all right,’ said the kid.

‘Nice place, this.’

‘Oh, all right,’ said the kid.

‘Having a good time fishing?’

‘Oh, all right,’ said the kid.

Young Bingo led me off to commune apart.

‘Doesn’t jolly old Oswald’s incessant flow of prattle make your head ache sometimes?’ I asked.

Bingo sighed.

‘It’s a hard job.’

‘What’s a hard job?’

‘Loving him.’

‘Do you love him?’ I asked, surprised. I shouldn’t have thought it could be done.

‘I try to,’ said young Bingo, ‘for Her sake. She’s coming back tomorrow, Bertie.’

‘So I heard.’

‘She is coming, my love, my own –’

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘But touching on young Oswald once more.
Do
you have to be with him all day? How do you manage to stick it?’

‘Oh, he doesn’t give much trouble. When we aren’t working he sits on that bridge all the time, trying to catch tiddlers.’

‘Why don’t you shove him in?’

‘Shove him in?’

‘It seems to me distinctly the thing to do,’ I said, regarding the stripling’s back with a good deal of dislike. ‘It would wake him up a bit, and make him take an interest in things.’

Bingo shook his head a bit wistfully.

‘Your proposition attracts me,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid it can’t be done. You see, She would never forgive me. She is devoted to the little brute.’

‘Great Scott!’ I cried. ‘I’ve got it!’ I don’t know if you know that feeling when you get an inspiration, and tingle all down your spine from the soft collar as now worn to the very soles of the old Waukeesis? Jeeves, I suppose, feels that way more or less all the time, but it isn’t often it comes to me. But now all Nature seemed to be shouting at me. ‘You’ve clicked!’ and I grabbed young Bingo by the arm in a way that must have made him feel as if a horse had bitten him. His finely-chiselled features were twisted with agony and what not, and he asked me what the dickens I thought I was playing at.

‘Bingo,’ I said, ‘what would Jeeves have done?’

‘How do you mean, what would Jeeves have done?’

‘I mean what would he have advised in a case like yours? I mean you wanting to make a hit with Honoria Glossop and all that. Why, take it from me, he would have shoved you behind that clump of bushes over there; he would have got me to lure Honoria on to the bridge somehow; then, at the proper time, he would have told me to give the kid a pretty hefty jab in the small of the back, so as to shoot him into the water; and then you would have dived in and hauled him out. How about it?’

‘You didn’t think that out by yourself, Bertie?’ said young Bingo, in a hushed sort of voice.

‘Yes, I did. Jeeves isn’t the only fellow with ideas.’

‘But it’s absolutely wonderful.’

‘Just a suggestion.’

‘The only objection I can see is that it would be so dashed awkward for you. I mean to say, suppose the kid turned round and said you had shoved him in, that would make you frightfully unpopular with Her.’

‘I don’t mind risking that.’

The man was deeply moved.

‘Bertie, this is noble.’

‘No, no.’

He clasped my hand silently, then chuckled like the last drop of water going down the waste pipe in a bath.

‘Now what?’ I said.

‘I was only thinking,’ said young Bingo, ‘how fearfully wet Oswald will get. Oh, happy day!’

I DON’T KNOW
if you’ve noticed it, but it’s rummy how nothing in this world ever seems to be absolutely perfect. The drawback to this otherwise singularly fruity binge was, of course, the fact that Jeeves wouldn’t be on the spot to watch me in action. Still, apart from that there wasn’t a flaw. The beauty of the thing was, you see, that nothing could possibly go wrong. You know how it is, as a rule, when you want to get Chappie A on Spot B at exactly the same moment when Chappie C is on Spot D. There’s always a chance of a hitch. Take the case of a general, I mean to say, who’s planning out a big movement. He tells one regiment to capture the hill with the windmill on it at the exact moment when another regiment is taking the bridgehead or something down in the valley; and everything gets all messed up. And then, when they’re chatting the thing over in camp that night, the colonel of the first regiment says, ‘Oh, sorry! Did you say the hill with the windmill? I thought you said the one with the flock of sheep?’ And there you are! But in this case, nothing like that could happen, because Oswald and Bingo would be on the spot right along, so that all I had to worry about was getting Honoria there in due season. And I managed that all right, first shot, by asking her if she would come for a stroll in the grounds with me, as I had something particular to say to her.

She had arrived shortly after lunch in the car with the Braythwayt girl. I was introduced to the latter, a tallish girl with blue eyes and fair hair. I rather took to her – she was so unlike Honoria – and, if I had been able to spare the time, I shouldn’t have minded talking to her for a bit. But business was business – I had fixed it up with Bingo to be behind the bushes at three sharp, so I got hold of Honoria and steered her out through the grounds in the direction of the lake.

‘You’re very quiet, Mr Wooster,’ she said.

Made me jump a bit. I was concentrating pretty tensely at the moment. We had just come in sight of the lake, and I was casting
a
keen eye over the ground to see that everything was in order. Everything appeared to be as arranged. The kid Oswald was hunched up on the bridge; and, as Bingo wasn’t visible, I took it that he had got into position. My watch made it two minutes after the hour.

‘Eh?’ I said. ‘Oh, ah, yes. I was just thinking.’

‘You said you had something important to say to me.’

‘Absolutely!’ I had decided to open the proceedings by sort of paving the way for young Bingo. I mean to say, without actually mentioning his name, I wanted to prepare the girl’s mind for the fact that, surprising as it might seem, there was someone who had long loved her from afar and all that sort of rot. ‘It’s like this,’ I said. ‘It may sound rummy and all that, but there’s somebody who’s frightfully in love with you and so forth – a friend of mine, you know.’

‘Oh, a friend of yours?’

‘Yes.’

She gave a kind of a laugh.

‘Well, why doesn’t he tell me so?’

‘Well, you see, that’s the sort of chap he is. Kind of shrinking, diffident kind of fellow. Hasn’t got the nerve. Thinks you so much above him, don’t you know. Looks on you as a sort of goddess. Worships the ground you tread on, but can’t whack up the ginger to tell you so.’

‘This is very interesting.’

‘Yes. He’s not a bad chap, you know, in his way. Rather an ass, perhaps, but well-meaning. Well, that’s the posish. You might just bear it in mind, what?’

‘How funny you are!’

She chucked back her head and laughed with considerable vim. She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel. It didn’t sound over-musical to me, and on the kid Oswald it appeared to jar not a little. He gazed at us with a good deal of dislike.

‘I wish the dickens you wouldn’t make that row,’ he said. ‘Scaring all the fish away.’

It broke the spell a bit. Honoria changed the subject.

‘I do wish Oswald wouldn’t sit on the bridge like that,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it isn’t safe. He might easily fall in.’

‘I’ll go and tell him,’ I said.

I suppose the distance between the kid and me at this juncture was
about
five yards, but I got the impression that it was nearer a hundred. And, as I started to toddle across the intervening space, I had a rummy feeling that I’d done this very thing before. Then I remembered. Years ago, at a country-house party, I had been roped in to play the part of a butler in some amateur theatricals in aid of some ghastly charity or other; and I had had to open the proceedings by walking across the empty stage from left upper entrance and shoving a tray on a table down right. They had impressed it on me at rehearsals that I mustn’t take the course at a quick heel-and-toe, like a chappie finishing strongly in a walking-race; and the result was that I kept the brakes on to such an extent that it seemed to me as if I was never going to get to the bally table at all. The stage seemed to stretch out in front of me like a trackless desert, and there was a kind of breathless hush as if all Nature had paused to concentrate its attention on me personally. Well, I felt just like that now. I had a kind of dry gulping in my throat, and the more I walked the farther away the kid seemed to get, till suddenly I found myself standing just behind him without quite knowing how I’d got there.

‘Hallo!’ I said, with a sickly sort of grin – wasted on the kid, because he didn’t bother to turn round and look at me. He merely wiggled his left ear in a rather peevish manner. I don’t know when I’ve met anybody in whose life I appeared to mean so little.

‘Hallo!’ I said. ‘Fishing?’

I laid my hand in a sort of elderly-brotherly way on his shoulder.

‘Here, look out!’ said the kid, wobbling on his foundations.

It was one of those things that want doing quickly or not at all. I shut my eyes and pushed. Something seemed to give. There was a scrambling sound, a kind of yelp, a scream in the offing, and a splash. And so the long day wore on, so to speak.

I opened my eyes. The kid was just coming to the surface.

‘Help!’ I shouted, cocking an eye on the bush from which young Bingo was scheduled to emerge.

Nothing happened. Young Bingo didn’t emerge to the slightest extent whatever.

‘I say! Help!’ I shouted again.

I don’t want to bore you with reminiscences of my theatrical career, but I must just touch once more on that appearance of mine as the butler. The scheme on that occasion had been that when I put the tray on the table the heroine would come on and say a few words to get me off. Well, on the night the misguided female forgot to stand by, and it was a full minute before the search-party located
her
and shot her on to the stage. And all that time I had to stand there, waiting. A rotten sensation, believe me, and this was just the same, only worse. I understood what these writer-chappies mean when they talk about time standing still.

Meanwhile, the kid Oswald was presumably being cut off in his prime, and it began to seem to me that some sort of steps ought to be taken about it. What I had seen of the lad hadn’t particularly endeared him to me, but it was undoubtedly a bit thick to let him pass away. I don’t know when I have seen anything more grubby and unpleasant than the lake as viewed from the bridge; but the thing apparently had to be done. I chucked off my coat and vaulted over.

It seems rummy that water should be so much wetter when you go into it with your clothes on than when you’re just bathing, but take it from me that it is. I was only under about three seconds, I suppose, but I came up feeling like the bodies you read of in the paper which ‘had evidently been in the water several days’. I felt clammy and bloated.