The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 2: (Jeeves & Wooster): No. 2 (75 page)

‘The great nerve specialist, yes. Why, do you know him?’

It was a warm day, but I shivered.

‘I was engaged to his daughter for a week or two,’ I said, in a hushed voice. The memory of that narrow squeak always made me feel faint.

‘Has he a daughter?’ said Biffy absently.

‘He has. Let me tell you about –’

‘Not just now, old man,’ said Biffy, getting up. ‘I ought to be going back to my hotel to see about my packing.’

Which, after I had listened to his story, struck me as pretty low-down. However, the longer you live, the more you realize that the good old sporting spirit of give-and-take has practically died out in our midst. So I boosted him into a cab and went off to lunch.

It can’t have been more than ten days after this that I received a nasty shock while getting outside my morning tea and toast. The English papers had arrived, and Jeeves was just drifting out of the room after depositing
The Times
by my bedside, when, as I idly turned the pages in search of the sporting section, a paragraph leaped out and hit me squarely in the eyeball.

As follows:-

FORTHCOMING MARRIAGES

MR C.E. BIFFEN AND MISS GLOSSOP

The engagement is announced between Charles Edward, only son of the late Mr E.C. Biffen, and Mrs Biffen, of 11 Penslow Square, Mayfair, and Honoria Jane Louise, only daughter of Sir Roderick and Lady Glossop, of 6b Harley Street, W.

‘Great Scott!’ I exclaimed.

‘Sir?’ said Jeeves, turning at the door.

‘Jeeves, you remember Miss Glossop?’

‘Very vividly, sir.’

‘She’s engaged to Mr Biffen!’

‘Indeed, sir?’ said Jeeves. And, with not another word, he slid out. The blighter’s calm amazed and shocked me. It seemed to indicate that there must be a horrible streak of callousness in him. I mean to say, it wasn’t as if he didn’t know Honoria Glossop.

I read the paragraph again. A peculiar feeling it gave me. I don’t know if you have ever experienced the sensation of seeing the announcement of the engagement of a pal of yours to a girl whom you were only saved from marrying yourself by the skin of your teeth. It induces a sort of – well, it’s difficult to describe it exactly; but I should imagine a fellow would feel much the same if he happened to be strolling through the jungle with a boyhood chum and met a tigress or a jaguar, or what not, and managed to shin up a
tree
and looked down and saw the friend of his youth vanishing into the undergrowth in the animal’s slavering jaws. A sort of profound, prayerful relief, if you know what I mean, blended at the same time with a pang of pity. What I’m driving at is that, thankful as I was that I hadn’t had to marry Honoria myself, I was sorry to see a real good chap like old Biffy copping it. I sucked down a spot of tea and began to brood over the business.

Of course, there are probably fellows in the world – tough, hardy blokes with strong chins and glittering eyes – who could get engaged to this Glossop menace and like it, but I knew perfectly well that Biffy was not one of them. Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to have to face over the breakfast table. Brainy, moreover. The sort of girl who reduces you to pulp with sixteen sets of tennis and a few rounds of golf and then comes down to dinner as fresh as a daisy, expecting you to take an intelligent interest in Freud. If I had been engaged to her another week, her old father would have had one more patient on his books; and Biffy is much the same quiet sort of peaceful, inoffensive bird as me. I was shocked, I tell you, shocked.

And, as I was saying, the thing that shocked me most was Jeeves’s frightful lack of proper emotion. The man happening to float in at this juncture, I gave him one more chance to show some human sympathy.

‘You got the name correctly, didn’t you, Jeeves?’ I said. ‘Mr Biffen is going to marry Honoria Glossop, the daughter of the old boy with the egg-like head and the eyebrows.’

‘Yes, sir. Which suit would you wish me to lay out this morning?’

And this, mark you, from the man who, when I was engaged to the Glossop, strained every fibre in his brain to extricate me. It beat me. I couldn’t understand it.

‘The blue with the red twill,’ I said coldly. My manner was marked, and I meant him to see that he had disappointed me sorely.

About a week later I went back to London, and scarcely had I got settled in the old flat when Biffy blew in. One glance was enough to tell me that the poisoned wound had begun to fester. The man did not look bright. No, there was no getting away from it, not bright. He had that kind of stunned, glassy expression which I used to see on my own face in the shaving-mirror during my brief engagement to the Glossop pestilence. However, if you don’t want to be one of the What is Wrong With This Picture brigade, you must observe the conventions, so I shook his hand as warmly as I could.

‘Well, well, old man,’ I said. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Thanks,’ said Biffy wanly, and there was rather a weighty silence.

‘Bertie,’ said Biffy, after the silence had lasted about three minutes.

‘Hallo?’

‘Is it really true –?’

‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ said Biffy, and conversation languished again. After about a minute and a half he came to the surface once more.

‘Bertie.’

‘Still here, old thing. What is it?’

‘I say, Bertie, is it really true that you were once engaged to Honoria?’

‘It is.’

Biffy coughed.

‘How did you get out – I mean, what was the nature of the tragedy that prevented the marriage?’

‘Jeeves worked it. He thought out the entire scheme.’

‘I think, before I go,’ said Biffy, thoughtfully, ‘I’ll just step into the kitchen and have a word with Jeeves.’

I felt that the situation called for complete candour.

‘Biffy, old egg,’ I said, ‘as man to man, do you want to oil out of this thing?’

‘Bertie, old cork,’ said Biffy earnestly, ‘as one friend to another I do.’

‘Then why the dickens did you ever get into it?’

‘I don’t know. Why did you?’

‘I – well, it sort of happened.’

‘And it sort of happened with me. You know how it is when your heart’s broken. A kind of lethargy comes over you. You get absent-minded and cease to exercise proper precautions, and the first thing you know you’re for it. I don’t know how it happened, old man, but there it is. And what I want you to tell me is, what’s the procedure?’

‘You mean, how does a fellow edge out?’

‘Exactly. I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, Bertie, but I can’t go through with this thing. The shot is not on the board. For about a day and a half I thought it might be all right, but now – You remember that laugh of hers?’

‘I do.’

‘Well, there’s that, and then all this business of never letting a fellow alone – improving his mind and so forth –’

‘I know. I know.’

‘Very well, then. What do you recommend? What did you mean when you said that Jeeves worked a scheme?’

‘Well, you see, old Sir Roderick, who’s a loony-doctor and nothing but a loony-doctor, however much you may call him a nerve specialist, discovered that there was a modicum of insanity in my family. Nothing serious. Just one of my uncles. Used to keep rabbits in his bedroom. And the old boy came to lunch here to give me the once-over, and Jeeves arranged matters so that he went away firmly convinced that I was off my onion.’

‘I see,’ said Biffy thoughtfully. ‘The trouble is there isn’t any insanity in my family.’

‘None?’

It seemed to me almost incredible that a fellow could be such a perfect chump as dear old Biffy without a bit of assistance.

‘Not a loony on the list,’ he said gloomily. ‘It’s just my luck. The old boy’s coming to lunch with me tomorrow, no doubt to test me as he did you. And I never felt saner in my life.’

I thought for a moment. The idea of meeting Sir Roderick again gave me a cold shivery feeling; but when there is a chance of helping a pal we Woosters have no thought of self.

‘Look here, Biffy,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll roll up for that lunch. It may easily happen that when he finds you are a pal of mine he will forbid the banns right away and no more questions asked.’

‘Something in that,’ said Biffy, brightening. ‘Awfully sporting of you, Bertie.’

‘Oh, not at all,’ I said. ‘And meanwhile I’ll consult Jeeves. Put the whole thing up to him and ask his advice. He’s never failed me yet.’

Biffy pushed off, a good deal braced, and I went into the kitchen.

‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘I want your help once more. I’ve just been having a painful interview with Mr Biffen.’

‘Indeed, sir?’

‘It’s like this,’ I said, and told him the whole thing.

It was rummy, but I could feel him freezing from the start. As a rule, when I call Jeeves into conference on one of these little problems, he’s all sympathy and bright ideas; but not today.

‘I fear, sir,’ he said, when I had finished, ‘it is hardly my place to intervene in a private matter affecting –’

‘Oh, come!’

‘No, sir. It would be taking a liberty.’

‘Jeeves,’ I said, tackling the blighter squarely, ‘what have you got against old Biffy?’

‘I, sir?’

‘Yes, you.’

‘I assure you, sir!’

‘Oh, well, if you don’t want to chip in and save a fellow-creature, I suppose I can’t make you. But let me tell you this. I am now going back to the sitting-room, and I am going to put in some very tense thinking. You’ll look pretty silly when I come and tell you that I’ve got Mr Biffen out of the soup without your assistance. Extremely silly you’ll look.’

‘Yes, sir. Shall I bring you a whisky-and-soda, sir?’

‘No. Coffee! Strong and black. And if anybody wants to see me, tell ’em that I’m busy and can’t be disturbed.’

An hour later I rang the bell.

‘Jeeves,’ I said with hauteur.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Kindly ring Mr Biffen up on the phone and say that Mr Wooster presents his compliments and that he has got it.’

I was feeling more than a little pleased with myself next morning as I strolled round to Biffy’s. As a rule the bright ideas you get overnight have a trick of not seeming quite so frightfully fruity when you examine them by the light of day; but this one looked as good at breakfast as it had done before dinner. I examined it narrowly from every angle, and I didn’t see how it could fail.

A few days before, my Aunt Emily’s son Harold had celebrated his sixth birthday; and, being up against the necessity of weighing in with a present of some kind, I had happened to see in a shop in the Strand a rather sprightly little gadget, well calculated in my opinion to amuse the child and endear him to one and all. It was a bunch of flowers in a sort of holder ending in an ingenious bulb attachment which, when pressed, shot about a pint and a half of pure spring water into the face of anyone who was ass enough to sniff at it. It seemed to me just the thing to please the growing mind of a kid of six, and I had rolled round with it.

But when I got to the house I found Harold sitting in the midst of a mass of gifts so luxurious and costly that I simply hadn’t the crust to contribute a thing that had set me back a mere elevenpence-ha’penny; so with rare presence of mind – for we Woosters can think quick on occasion – I wrenched my Uncle James’s card off a toy aeroplane, substituted my own, and trousered the squirt, which I took away with
me.
It had been lying around in my flat ever since, and it seemed to me that the time had come to send it into action.

‘Well?’ said Biffy anxiously, as I curveted into his sitting-room.

The poor old bird was looking pretty green about the gills. I recognized the symptoms. I had felt much the same myself when waiting for Sir Roderick to turn up and lunch with me. How the deuce people who have anything wrong with their nerves can bring themselves to chat with that man, I can’t imagine; and yet he has the largest practice in London. Scarcely a day passes without his having to sit on somebody’s head and ring for the attendant to bring the strait-waistcoat: and his outlook on life has become so jaundiced through constant association with coves who are picking straws out of their hair that I was convinced that Biffy had merely got to press the bulb and nature would do the rest.

So I patted him on the shoulder and said: ‘It’s all right, old man!’

‘What does Jeeves suggest?’ asked Biffy eagerly.

‘Jeeves doesn’t suggest anything.’

‘But you said it was all right.’

‘Jeeves isn’t the only thinker in the Wooster home, my lad. I have taken over your little problem, and I can tell you at once that I have the situation well in hand.’

‘You?’ said Biffy.

His tone was far from flattering. It suggested a lack of faith in my abilities, and my view was that an ounce of demonstration would be worth a ton of explanation. I shoved the bouquet at him.

‘Are you fond of flowers, Biffy?’ I said.

‘Eh?’

‘Smell these.’

Biffy extended the old beak in a careworn sort of way, and I pressed the bulb as per printed instructions on the label.

I do like getting my money’s worth. Elevenpence-ha’penny the thing had cost me, and it would have been cheap at double. The advertisement on the outside of the box had said that its effects were ‘indescribably ludicrous’, and I can testify that it was no overstatement. Poor old Biffy leaped three feet in the air and smashed a small table.

‘There!’ I said.

The old egg was a trifle incoherent at first, but he found words fairly soon and began to express himself with a good deal of warmth.

‘Calm yourself, laddie,’ I said, as he paused for breath. ‘It was no mere jest to pass an idle hour. It was a demonstration. Take this, Biffy, with an old friend’s blessing, refill the bulb, shove it into Sir
Roderick’s
face, press firmly, and leave the rest to him. I’ll guarantee that in something under three seconds the idea will have dawned on him that you are not required in his family.’

Biffy stared at me.

‘Are you suggesting that I squirt Sir Roderick?’