The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3 (18 page)

‘Yes, m’lord?’

‘I tried it.’

‘Yes, m’lord?’

‘And things looked good for a moment. I detached the pendant.’

‘Yes, m’lord?’

‘Captain Biggar was right. The clasp was loose. It came off.’

Captain Biggar uttered a pleased exclamation in Swahili.

‘Gimme,’ he said.

‘I haven’t got it. It slipped out of my hand.’

‘And fell?’

‘And fell.’

‘You mean it’s lying in the grass?’

‘No,’ said Bill, with a sombre shake of the head. ‘It isn’t lying in any ruddy grass. It went down the front of Mrs Spottsworth’s dress, and is now somewhere in the recesses of her costume.’

IT IS NOT
often that one sees three good men struck all of a heap simultaneously, but anybody who had chanced to stroll into the living room of Rowcester Abbey at this moment would have been able to observe that spectacle. To say that Bill’s bulletin had had a shattering effect on his companions would be, if anything, to understate it. Captain Biggar was expressing his concern by pacing the room with whirling arms, while the fact that two of the hairs of his right eyebrow distinctly quivered showed how deeply Jeeves had been moved. Bill himself, crushed at last by the blows of Fate, appeared formally to have given up the struggle. He had slumped into a chair, and was sitting there looking boneless and despairing. All he needed was a long white beard, and the resemblance to King Lear on one of his bad mornings would have been complete.

Jeeves was the first to speak.

‘Most disturbing, m’lord.’

‘Yes,’ said Bill dully. ‘Quite a nuisance, isn’t it? You don’t happen to have any little-known Asiatic poison on you, do you, Jeeves?’

‘No, m’lord.’

‘A pity,’ said Bill. ‘I could have used it.’

His young employer’s distress pained Jeeves, and as it had always been his view that there was no anodyne for the human spirit, when bruised, like a spot of Marcus Aurelius, he searched in his mind for some suitable quotation from the Emperor’s works. And he was just hesitating between ‘Whatever may befall thee, it was preordained for thee from everlasting’ and ‘Nothing happens to any man which he is not fitted by nature to bear’, both excellent, when Captain Biggar, who had been pouring out a rapid fire of ejaculations in some native dialect, suddenly reverted to English.

‘
Doi wieng lek!
’ he cried. ‘I’ve got it! Fricassee me with stewed mushrooms on the side, I see what you must do.’

Bill looked up. His eyes were glazed, his manner listless.

‘Do?’ he said. ‘Me?’

‘Yes, you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Bill. ‘I’m in no condition to do anything except possibly expire, regretted by all.’

Captain Biggar snorted, and having snorted uttered a tchah, a pah and a bah.

‘
Mun py nawn lap lao!
’ he said impatiently. ‘You can dance, can’t you?’

‘Dance?’

‘Preferably the Charleston. That’s all I’m asking of you, a few simple steps of the Charleston.’

Bill stirred slightly, like a corpse moving in its winding sheet. It was an acute spasm of generous indignation that caused him to do so. He was filled with what, in his opinion, was a justifiable resentment. Here he was, in the soup and going down for the third time, and this man came inviting him to dance before him as David danced before Saul. Assuming this to be merely the thin end of the wedge, one received the impression that in next to no time the White Hunter, if encouraged, would be calling for comic songs and conjuring tricks and imitations of footlight favourites who are familiar to you all. What, he asked himself bitterly, did the fellow think this was? The revival of Vaudeville? A village concert in aid of the church organ restoration fund?

Groping for words with which to express these thoughts, he found that the captain was beginning to tell another of his stories. Like Marcus Aurelius, Kuala Lumpur’s favourite son always seemed to have up his sleeve something apposite to the matter in hand, whatever that matter might be. But where the Roman Emperor, a sort of primitive Bob Hope or Groucho Marx, had contented himself with throwing off wisecracks, Captain Biggar preferred the narrative form.

‘Yes, the Charleston,’ said Captain Biggar, ‘and I’ll tell you why. I am thinking of the episode of Tubby Frobisher and the wife of the Greek consul. The recollection of it suddenly flashed upon me like a gleam of light from above.’

He paused. A sense of something omitted, something left undone, was nagging at him. Then he saw why this was so. The whisky. He moved to the table and filled his glass.

‘Whether it was Smyrna or Joppa or Stamboul where Tubby was stationed at the time of which I speak,’ he said, draining half the contents of his glass and coming back with the rest, ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you. As one grows older, one tends to forget these details. It may even have been Baghdad or half a dozen other places. I admit frankly that I have forgotten. But the point is that he was at some
place
somewhere and one night he attended a reception or a
soirée
or whatever they call these binges at one of the embassies. You know the sort of thing I mean. Fair women and brave men, all dolled up and dancing their ruddy heads off. And in due season it came to pass that Tubby found himself doing the Charleston with the wife of the Greek consul as his partner. I don’t know if either of you have ever seen Tubby Frobisher dance the Charleston?’

‘Neither his lordship nor myself have had the privilege of meeting Mr Frobisher, sir,’ Jeeves reminded him courteously.

Captain Biggar stiffened.

‘Major Frobisher, damn it.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir. Major Frobisher. Owing to our never having met him, the major’s technique when performing the Charleston is a sealed book to us.’

‘Oh?’ Captain Biggar refilled his glass. ‘Well, his technique, as you call it, is vigorous. He does not spare himself. He is what in the old days would have been described as a three-collar man. By the time Tubby Frobisher has finished dancing the Charleston, his partner knows she has been in a fight, all right. And it was so on this occasion. He hooked on to the wife of the Greek consul and he jumped her up and he jumped her down, he whirled her about and he spun her round, he swung her here and he swung her there, and all of a sudden what do you think happened?’

‘The lady had heart failure, sir?’

‘No, the lady didn’t have heart failure, but what occurred was enough to give it to all present at that gay affair. For, believe me or believe me not, there was a tinkling sound, and from inside her dress there began to descend to the floor silver forks, silver spoons and, Tubby assures me, a complete toilet set in tortoiseshell. It turned out that the female was a confirmed kleptomaniac and had been using the space between her dress and whatever she was wearing under her dress – I’m not a married man myself, so can’t go into particulars – as a safe deposit.’

‘Embarrassing for Major Frobisher, sir.’

Captain Biggar stared.

‘For Tubby? Why? He hadn’t been pinching the things, he was merely the instrument for their recovery. But don’t tell me you’ve missed the whole point of my story, which is that I am convinced that if Patch Rowcester here were to dance the Charleston with Mrs Spottsworth with one tithe of Tubby Frobisher’s determination and will to win, we’d soon rout that pendant out of its retreat. Tubby would have had it in the open before the band had played a dozen bars.
And
talking of that, we shall need music. Ah, I see a gramophone over there in the corner. Excellent. Well? Do you grasp the scheme?’

‘Perfectly, sir. His lordship dances with Mrs Spottsworth, and in due course the pendant droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.’

‘Exactly. What do you think of the idea?’

Jeeves referred the question to a higher court.

‘What does your lordship think of it?’ he asked deferentially.

‘Eh?’ said Bill. ‘What?’

Captain Biggar barked sharply.

‘You mean you haven’t been listening? Well, of all the –’

Jeeves intervened.

‘In the circumstances, sir, his lordship may, I think, be excused for being distrait,’ he said reprovingly. ‘You can see from his lordship’s lacklustre eye that the native hue of his resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. Captain Biggar’s suggestion is, m’lord, that your lordship shall invite Mrs Spottsworth to join you in performing the dance known as the Charleston. This, if your lordship infuses sufficient vigour into the steps, will result in the pendant becoming dislodged and falling to the ground, whence it can readily be recovered and placed in your lordship’s pocket.’

It was perhaps a quarter of a minute before the gist of these remarks penetrated to Bill’s numbed mind, but when it did, the effect was electric. His eyes brightened, his spine stiffened. It was plain that hope had dawned, and was working away once more at the old stand. As he rose from his chair, jauntily and with the air of a man who is ready for anything, he might have been that debonair ancestor of his who in the days of the Restoration had by his dash and gallantry won from the ladies of King Charles II’s Court the affectionate sobriquet of Tabasco Rowcester.

‘Lead me to her!’ he said, and his voice rang out clear and resonant. ‘Lead me to her, that is all I ask, and leave the rest to me.’

But it was not necessary, as it turned out, to lead him to Mrs Spottsworth, for at this moment she came in through the french window with her Pekinese dog Pomona in her arms.

Pomona, on seeing the assembled company, gave vent to a series of piercing shrieks. It sounded as if she were being torn asunder by red-hot pincers, but actually this was her method of expressing joy. In moments of ecstasy she always screamed partly like a lost soul and partly like a scalded cat.

Jill came running out of the library, and Mrs Spottsworth calmed her fears.

‘It’s nothing, dear,’ she said. ‘She’s just excited. But I wish you would put her in my room, if you are going upstairs. Would it be troubling you too much?’

‘Not at all,’ said Jill aloofly.

She went out, carrying Pomona, and Bill advanced on Mrs Spottsworth.

‘Shall we dance?’ he said.

Mrs Spottsworth was surprised. On the rustic seat just now, especially in the moments following the disappearance of her pendant, she had found her host’s mood markedly on the Byronic side. She could not readily adjust herself to this new spirit of gaiety.

‘You want to
dance
?’

‘Yes, with
you
,’ said Bill, infusing into his manner a wealth of Restoration gallantry. ‘It’ll be like the old days at Cannes.’

Mrs Spottsworth was a shrewd woman. She had not failed to observe Captain Biggar lurking in the background, and it seemed to her that an admirable opportunity had presented itself of rousing the fiend that slept in him … far too soundly, in her opinion. What it was that was slowing up the White Hunter in his capacity of wooer, she did not know: but what she did know was that there is nothing that so lights a fire under a laggard lover as the spectacle of the woman he loves treading the measure in the arms of another man, particularly another man as good-looking as William, Earl of Rowcester.

‘Yes, won’t it!’ she said, all sparkle and enthusiasm. ‘How well I remember those days! Lord Rowcester dances so wonderfully,’ she added, addressing Captain Biggar and imparting to him a piece of first-hand information which, of course, he would have been sorry to have missed. ‘I love dancing. The one unpunished rapture left on earth.’

‘What ho!’ said Bill, concurring. ‘The old Charleston … do you remember it?’

‘You bet I do.’

‘Put a Charleston record on the gramophone, Jeeves.’

‘Very good, m’lord.’

When Jill returned from depositing Pomona in Mrs Spottsworth’s sleeping quarters, only Jeeves, Bill and Mrs Spottsworth were present in the living room, for at the very outset of the proceedings Captain Biggar, unable to bear the sight before him, had plunged through the french window into the silent night.

The fact that it was he himself who had suggested this distressing exhibition, recalling, as it did in his opinion the worst excesses of the Carmagnole of the French Revolution combined with some of
the
more risqué features of native dances he had seen in Equatorial Africa, did nothing to assuage the darkness of his mood. The frogs on the lawn, which he was now pacing with a black scowl on his face, were beginning to get the illusion that it was raining number eleven boots.

His opinion of the Charleston, as rendered by his host and the woman he loved, was one which Jill found herself sharing. As she stood watching from the doorway, she was conscious of much the same rising feeling of nausea which had afflicted the White Hunter when listening to the exchanges on the rustic seat. Possibly there was nothing in the way in which Bill was comporting himself that rendered him actually liable to arrest, but she felt very strongly that some form of action should have been taken by the police. It was her view that there ought to have been a law.

Nothing is more difficult than to describe in words a Charleston danced by, on the one hand, a woman who loves dancing Charlestons and throws herself right into the spirit of them, and, on the other hand, by a man desirous of leaving no stone unturned in order to dislodge from some part of his associate’s anatomy a diamond pendant which has lodged there. It will be enough, perhaps, to say that if Major Frobisher had happened to walk into the room at this moment, he would instantly have been reminded of old days in Smyrna or Joppa or Stamboul or possibly Baghdad. Mrs Spottsworth he would have compared favourably with the wife of the Greek consul, while Bill he would have patted on the back, recognizing his work as fully equal, if not superior, to his own.

Rory and Monica, coming out of the library, were frankly amazed.

‘Good heavens!’ said Monica.

‘The old boy cuts quite a rug, does he not?’ said Rory. ‘Come, girl, let us join the revels.’

He put his arm about Monica’s waist, and the action became general. Jill, unable to bear the degrading spectacle any longer, turned and went out. As she made her way to her room, she was thinking unpleasant thoughts of her betrothed. It is never agreeable for an idealistic girl to discover that she has linked her lot with a libertine, and it was plain to her now that William, Earl of Rowcester, was a debauchee whose correspondence course might have been taken with advantage by Casanova, Don Juan and the rowdier Roman Emperors.