The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 2: (Jeeves & Wooster): No. 2 (32 page)

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It doesn’t sound probable, but no doubt you know best. Spinoza, eh? Is he the Book Society’s Choice of the Month?’

‘I believe not, sir.’

‘Well, he’s the only fellow I ever heard of who wasn’t. Right ho. I’ll see to it instanter.’

And presently, having assembled the hat, the gloves and the neatly rolled u., I sauntered forth.

As I made my way to the bookery, I found my thoughts turning
once
more, as you may readily imagine, to this highly suggestive business of old Worplesdon. The thing intrigued me. I found it difficult to envisage what possible sort of jam a man like that could have got himself into.

When, about eighteen months before, news had reached me through well-informed channels that my Aunt Agatha, for many years a widow, or derelict, as I believe it is called, was about to take another pop at matrimony, my first emotion, as was natural in the circumstances, had been a gentle pity for the unfortunate goop slated to step up the aisle with her – she, as you are aware, being my tough aunt, the one who eats broken bottles and conducts human sacrifices by the light of the full moon.

But when the details began to come in, and I discovered that the bimbo who had drawn the short straw was Lord Worplesdon, the shipping magnate, this tender commiseration became sensibly diminished. The thing, I felt, would be no walkover. Even if in the fullness of time she wore him down and at length succeeded in making him jump through hoops, she would know she had been in a fight.

For he was hot stuff, this Worplesdon. I had known him all my life. It was he who at the age of fifteen – when I was fifteen, I mean, of course – found me smoking one of his special cigars in the stable yard and chased me a mile across difficult country with a hunting crop. And though with advancing years our relations had naturally grown more formal, I had never been able to think of him without getting goose pimples. Given the choice between him and a hippogriff as a companion for a walking tour, I would have picked the hippogriff every time.

It was not easy to see how such a man of blood and iron could have been reduced to sending out SOS’s for Jeeves, and I was reflecting on the possibility of compromising letters in the possession of gold-digging blondes, when I reached my destination and started to lodge my order.

‘Good morning, good morning,’ I said. ‘I want a book.’

Of course, I ought to have known that it’s silly to try to buy a book when you go to a book shop. It merely startles and bewilders the inmates. The moth-eaten old bird who had stepped forward to attend to me ran true to form.

‘A book, sir?’ he replied, with ill-concealed astonishment.

‘Spinoza,’ I replied, specifying.

This had him rocking back on his heels.

‘Did you say Spinoza, sir?’

‘Spinoza was what I said.’

He seemed to be feeling that if we talked this thing out long enough as man to man, we might eventually hit upon a formula.

‘You do not mean
The Spinning Wheel
?’

‘No.’

‘It would not be
The Poisoned Pin
?’

‘It would not.’

‘Or
With Gun and Camera in Little Known Borneo
?’ he queried, trying a long shot.

‘Spinoza,’ I repeated firmly. That was my story, and I intended to stick to it.

He sighed a bit, like one who feels that the situation has got beyond him.

‘I will go and see if we have it in stock, sir. But possibly this may be what you are requiring. Said to be very clever.’

He pushed off, Spinoza-ing under his breath in a hopeless sort of way, leaving me clutching a thing called
Spindrift
.

It looked pretty foul. Its jacket showed a female with a green, oblong face sniffing at a purple lily, and I was just about to fling it from me and start a hunt for that ‘Poisoned Pin’ of which he had spoken, when I became aware of someone Good-gracious-Bertie-ing and, turning, found that the animal cries proceeded from a tall girl of commanding aspect who had oiled up behind me.

‘Good gracious, Bertie! Is it really you?’

I emitted a sharp gurgle, and shied like a startled mustang. It was old Worplesdon’s daughter, Florence Craye.

And I’ll tell you why, on beholding her, I shied and gurgled as described. I mean, if there’s one thing I bar, it’s the sort of story where people stagger to and fro, clutching their foreheads and registering strong emotion, and not a word of explanation as to what it’s all about till the detective sums up in the last chapter.

Briefly, then, the reason why this girl’s popping up had got in amongst me in this fashion was that we had once been engaged to be married, and not so dashed long ago, either. And though it all came out all right in the end, the thing being broken off and self-saved from the scaffold at the eleventh hour, it had been an extraordinarily narrow squeak and the memory remained green. The mere mention of her name was still enough to make me call for a couple of quick ones, so you can readily appreciate
my
agitation at bumping into her like this absolutely in the flesh.

I swayed in the breeze, and found myself a bit stumped for the necessary dialogue.

‘Oh, hullo,’ I said.

Not good, of course, but the best I could do.

SCANNING THE ROSTER
of the females I’ve nearly got married to in my time, we find the names of some tough babies. The eye rests on that of Honoria Glossop, and a shudder passes through the frame. So it does when we turn to the B’s and come upon Madeline Bassett. But, taking everything into consideration and weighing this and that, I have always been inclined to consider Florence Craye the top. In the face of admittedly stiff competition, it is to her that I would award the biscuit.

Honoria Glossop was hearty, yes. Her laugh was like a steam-riveting machine, and from a child she had been a confirmed back-slapper. Madeline Bassett was soppy, true. She had large, melting eyes and thought the stars were God’s daisy chain. These are grave defects, but to do this revolting duo justice neither had tried to mould me, and that was what Florence Craye had done from the start, seeming to look on Bertram Wooster as a mere chunk of plasticine in the hands of the sculptor.

The root of the trouble was that she was one of those intellectual girls, steeped to the gills in serious purpose, who are unable to see a male soul without wanting to get behind it and shove. We had scarcely arranged the preliminaries before she was checking up on my reading, giving the bird to
Blood On The Bannisters
, which happened to be what I was studying at the moment, and substituting for it a thing called
Types of Ethical Theory
. Nor did she attempt to conceal the fact that this was a mere pipe opener and that there was worse to come.

Have you ever dipped into
Types of Ethical Theory
? The volume is still on my shelves. Let us open it and see what it has to offer. Yes, here we are.

Of the two antithetic terms in the Greek philosophy one only was real and self-subsisting; and that one was Ideal Thought as opposed to that which it has to penetrate and mould. The other, corresponding to our Nature, was in itself phenomenal, unreal, without any permanent footing, having no predicates that held
true
for two moments together; in short, redeemed from negation only by including in-dwelling realities appearing through.

Right. You will have got the idea, and will, I think, be able to understand why the sight of her made me give at the knees somewhat. Old wounds had been reopened.

None of the embarrassment which was causing the Wooster toes to curl up inside their neat suède shoes like the tendrils of some sensitive plant seemed to be affecting this chunk of the dead past. Her manner, as always, was brisk and aunt-like. Even at the time when I had fallen beneath the spell of that profile of hers, which was a considerable profile and tended to make a man commit himself to statements which he later regretted, I had always felt that she was like someone training on to be an aunt.

‘And how are you, Bertie?’

‘Oh, fine, thanks.’

‘I have just run up to London to see my publisher. Fancy meeting you, and in a book shop, of all places. What are you buying? Some trash, I suppose?’

Her gaze, which had been resting on me in a rather critical and censorious way, as if she was wondering how she could ever have contemplated linking her lot to anything so sub-human, now transferred itself to the volume in my hand. She took it from me, her lip curling in faint disgust, as if she wished she had had a pair of tongs handy.

And then, as she looked at it, her whole aspect suddenly altered. She switched off the curling lip. She smiled a pleased smile. The eye softened. A blush mantled the features. She positively giggled.

‘Oh, Bertie!’

The gist got past me. ‘Oh, Bertie!’ was a thing she had frequently said to me in the days when we had been affianced, but always with that sort of nasty ring in the voice which made you feel that she had been on the point of expressing her exasperation with something a good deal fruitier but had remembered her ancient lineage just in time. This current ‘Oh, Bertie!’ was quite different. Practically a coo. As it might have been one turtle dove addressing another turtle dove.

‘Oh,
Bertie
!’ she repeated. ‘Well, of course, I must autograph it for you,’ she said, and at the same moment all was suddenly made clear to me. I had missed it at first, because I had been concentrating on the girl with the green face, but I now perceived
at
the bottom of the jacket the words ‘By Florence Craye’. They had been half hidden by a gummed-on label which said ‘Book Society Choice Of The Month’. I saw all, and the thought of how near I had come to marrying a female novelist made everything go black for a bit.

She wrote in the book with a firm hand, thus dishing any prospect that the shop would take it back and putting me seven bob and a tanner down almost, as you might say, before the day had started. Then she said ‘Well!’ still with that turtle dove timbre in her voice.

‘Fancy you buying
Spindrift
!’

Well, one has to say the civil thing, and it may be that in the agitation of the moment I overdid it a bit. I rather think that the impression I must have conveyed, when I assured her that I had made a bee-line for the beastly volume, was that I had been counting the minutes till I could get my hooks on it. At any rate, she came back with a gratified simper.

‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am. Not just because it’s mine, but because I see that all the trouble I took training your mind was not wasted. You have grown to love good literature.’

It was at this point, as if he had entered on cue, that the moth-eaten bird returned and said they had not got old Pop Spinoza, but could get him for me. He seemed rather depressed about it all, but Florence’s eyes lit up as if somebody had pressed a switch.

‘Bertie! This is amazing! Do you really read Spinoza?’

It’s extraordinary how one yields to that fatal temptation to swank. It undoes the best of us. Nothing, I mean, would have been simpler than to reply that she had got the data twisted and that the authoritatively annotated edition was a present for Jeeves. But, instead of doing the simple, manly, straightforward thing, I had to go and put on dog.

‘Oh, rather,’ I said, with an intellectual flick of the umbrella. ‘When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza’s latest’

‘
Well!
’

A simple word, but as she spoke it a shudder ran through me from brilliantined topknot to rubber shoe sole.

It was the look that accompanied the yip that caused this shudder. It was exactly the same sort of look that Madeline Bassett had given me, that time I went to Totleigh Towers to pinch old Bassett’s cow-creamer and she thought I had come because I loved her so much that I couldn’t stay away from her side. A frightful, tender, melting look that went through me like a
red-hot
bradawl through a pat of butter and filled me with a nameless fear.

I wished now I hadn’t plugged Spinoza so heartily, and above all I wished I hadn’t been caught in the act of apparently buying this blighted
Spindrift
. I saw that unwittingly I had been giving myself a terrific build-up, causing this girl to see Bertram Wooster with new eyes and to get hep to his hidden depths. It might quite well happen that she would review the position in the light of this fresh evidence and decide that she had made a mistake in breaking off her engagement to so rare a spirit. And once she got thinking along those lines, who knew what the harvest might be?

An imperious urge came upon me to be elsewhere, before I could make a chump of myself further.

‘Well, I’m afraid I must be popping,’ I said. ‘Most important appointment. Frightfully jolly, seeing you again.’

‘We ought to see each other more,’ she replied, still with that melting look. ‘We ought to have some long talks.’

‘Oh, rather.’

‘A developing mind is so fascinating. Why don’t you ever come to the Hall?’

‘Oh, well, one gets a bit chained to the metropolis, you know.’

‘I should like to show you the reviews of
Spindrift
. They are wonderful. Edwin is pasting them in an album for me.’

‘I’d love to see them some time. Later on, perhaps.

Goodbye.’ ‘You’re forgetting your book.’

‘Oh, thanks. Well, toodle-oo,’ I said, and fought my way out.

The appointment to which I had alluded was with the barman at the Bollinger. Seldom, if ever, had I felt in such sore need of a restorative. I headed for my destination like a hart streaking towards cooling streams, when heated in the chase, and was speedily in conference with the dispenser of life savers.

Ten minutes later, feeling considerably better, though still shaken, I was standing in the doorway, twirling my umbrella and wondering what to do next, when my eye was arrested by an odd spectacle.

A certain rumminess had begun to manifest itself across the way.

THE BOLLINGER BAR
conducts its beneficent activities about halfway up Bond Street, and on the other side of the thoroughfare, immediately opposite, there stands a courteous and popular jeweller’s, where I generally make my purchases when the question of investing in
bijouterie
arises. In fact, the day being so fine, I was rather thinking of looking in there now and buying a new cigarette-case.