The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3 (39 page)

It impressed her. No mistaking that. She uttered a meditative ‘Golly!’ and stood on one leg, looking like ‘The Soul’s Awakening’.

‘And so,’ I proceeded, ‘we are going to strain every nerve to see that Esmond Haddock’s hunting song is the high-spot of the evening. Jeeves is to go about the village, scattering beers, so as to assemble what is known as a claque and ensure the thunderous applause. You will be able to help in that direction, too.’

‘Of course I will. My standing in the village is terrific. I have the place in my pocket. I must get after this right away. I can’t wait. You don’t mind me leaving you?’

‘Not at all, not at all, or, rather, yes, I jolly well do. Before you go, we’ve got to get this Gussie thing straight.’

‘What Gussie thing?’

I clicked my tongue.

‘You know perfectly well what Gussie thing. For reasons into which we need not go, you have recently been making Augustus Fink-Nottle the plaything of an idle hour, and it has got to stop. I don’t have to tell you again what will happen if you continue carrying on as of even date. In our conference at the flat I made the facts clear to the meanest intelligence. You are fully aware that should the evil spread, should sand be shoved into the gears of the Fink-Nottle-Bassett romance to such an extent that it ceases to tick over, Bertram Wooster will be faced with the fate that is worse than death – viz. marriage. I feel sure that, now that you have been reminded of the hideous peril that looms, your good heart will not allow you to go on encouraging the above Fink-Nottle as, according to the evidence of five aunts, you are doing now. Appalled by the thought of poor old Wooster pressing the wedding trousers and packing the trunks for a honeymoon with that ghastly Bassett, you will obey the dictates of your better self and cool him off.’

She saw my point.

‘You want me to restore Gussie to circulation?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Switch off the fascination? Release him from my clutches?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Why, of course. I’ll attend to it immediately.’

And on these very satisfactory terms we parted. A great weight had been lifted from my mind.

Well, I don’t know what your experience has been, but mine is that there is very little percentage in having a weight lifted off your
mind
, because the first thing you know another, probably a dashed sight heavier, is immediately shoved on. It would appear to be a game you can’t beat.

I had scarcely got back to my room, all soothed and relaxed, when in blew Catsmeat, and there was that in his mere appearance that chilled my merry mood like a slap in the eye with a wet towel. His face was grave, and his deportment not at all the sprightly deportment of a man who has recently been playing gin rummy with parlourmaids.

‘Bertie,’ he said, ‘hold on tight to something. A very serious situation has arisen.’

The floor seemed to heave beneath me like a stage sea. The mice, which since that latter sequence and the subsequent chat with Corky had been taking a breather, sprang into renewed activity, as if starting training for some athletic sports.

‘Oh, my sainted aunt!’ I moaned, and Catsmeat said I might well say ‘My sainted aunt’, because she was the spearhead of the trouble.

‘Here comes the bruise,’ he said. ‘When I was in the servants’ hall a moment ago, Silversmith rolled in. And do you know what he had just been told by the girls higher up? He had been told that your Aunt Agatha is coming here. I don’t know when, but in the next day or so. Dame Daphne Winkworth had a letter from her by the afternoon post, and in it she announced her intention of shortly being a pleasant visitor at this ruddy hencoop. So now what?’

IT WAS A
Bertram Wooster with a pale, careworn face and a marked disposition to start at sudden noises who sat in his bedroom on the following afternoon, rising occasionally to pace the floor. Few, seeing him, would have recognized in this limp and shivering chunk of human flotsam the suave, dapper
boulevardier
of happier years. I was waiting for Catsmeat to return from the metropolis and make his report.

Threshing the thing out on the previous evening, we had not taken long in reaching the conclusion that it would be madness to attempt to cope with this major crisis ourselves, and that the whole conduct of the affair must at the earliest moment be handed over to Jeeves. And as Jeeves was in London and it might have looked odd for me to dash away from the Big House for the night, Catsmeat had gone up to confer with him. He had tooled off secretly in my two-seater, expecting to be back around lunch-time.

But lunch had come and gone, the duck and green peas turning to ashes in my mouth, and still no sign of him. It was past three when he finally showed up.

At the sight of him, my heart, throwing off its burden of care, did a quick soft-shoe dance. No fellow, I reasoned, unless he was bringing good news, could look so like the United States Marines. When last seen, driving off on his mission, his air had been sober and downcast, as if he feared that even Jeeves would have to confess himself snookered by this one. He was now gay, bobbish and boomps-a-daisy.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘I had to wait for Jeeves’s brain to gather momentum. He was a little slower off the mark than usual.’

I clutched his arm.

‘Did he click?’ I cried, quivering in every limb.

‘Oh, yes, he clicked. Jeeves always clicks. But this time only after brooding for what seemed an eternity. I found him in the kitchen at your flat, sipping a cup of tea and reading Spinoza, and put our problem before him, bidding him set the little grey cells in operation
without
delay and think of some way of preventing your blasted aunt from fulfilling her evil purpose of coming to infest Deverill Hall. He said he would, and I went back to the sitting room, where I took a seat, put my feet on the mantelpiece and thought of Gertrude. From time to time I would rise and look in at the kitchen and ask him how it was coming, but he motioned me away with a silent wave of the hand and let the brain out another notch. Finally he emerged and announced that he had got it. He had been musing, as always, on the psychology of the individual.’

‘What individual? My Aunt Agatha?’

‘Naturally, your Aunt Agatha. What other individual’s psychology would you have expected him to muse on? Sir Stafford Cripps’s? He then proceeded to outline a scheme which I think you will agree was a ball of fire. Tell me, Bertie, have you ever stolen a cub from a tigress?’

I said no, for one reason and another I never had, and he asked me what, if I ever did, I supposed the reactions of the tigress would be, always assuming that she was a good wife and mother. And I said that, while I didn’t set myself up as an authority on tigresses, I imagined that she would be as sick as mud.

‘Exactly. And you would expect the animal, the loss of its child having been drawn to its attention, to drop everything and start looking for it, would you not? It would completely revise its social plans, don’t you think? If, for instance, it had arranged to visit other tigresses in a nearby cave, it would cancel the date and begin hunting around for clues. You agree?’

I said Yes, I thought this probable.

‘Well, that is what Jeeves feels will happen in the case of your Aunt Agatha when she learns that her son Thomas has vanished from his school at Bramley-on-Sea.’

I can’t tell you offhand what I had been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. Having recovered sufficient breath to enable me to put the question, I asked what it was that he had said, and he repeated his words at dictation speed, and I said, ‘But dash it!’ and he said ‘Well?’

‘You aren’t telling me that Jeeves is going to kidnap young Thos?’

He t’chk-t’chked impatiently.

‘You don’t have to kidnap dyed-in-the-wool fans like your cousin Thomas, if you inform them that their favourite film star is hoping that they will be able to get away and come and spend a few days at the Vicarage where she is staying. That is the message which Jeeves
has
gone to Bramley-on-Sea to deliver, and I confidently expect it to work like a charm.’

‘You mean he’ll run away from school?’

‘Of course he’ll run away from school. Like lightning. However, to clinch the thing, I empowered Jeeves in your name to offer a fee of five quid in the event of any hesitation. I gather from Jeeves, in whom he confided, that young Thomas is more than ordinarily out for the stuff just now. He’s saving up to buy a camera.’

I applauded the shrewd thought, but I didn’t think that this introduction of the sordid note would really be necessary. Thos is a boy of volcanic passions, the sort of boy who, if he had but threepence in the world, would spend it on a stamp, writing to Dorothy Lamour for her autograph, and the message which Catsmeat had outlined would, I felt, be in itself amply sufficient to get him on the move.

‘Yes,’ Catsmeat agreed, ‘I think we should shortly have the young fellow with us. But not your Aunt Agatha, who will be occupied elsewhere. It’s a pity she has to be temporarily deprived of her cub, of course, and one sympathizes with a mother’s anxiety. It would have been nice if the thing could have been arranged some other way, but that’s how it goes. One has simply got to say to oneself that into each life some rain must fall.’

My own view was that Aunt Agatha wouldn’t be anxious so much as hopping mad.

‘Thos,’ I said, ‘makes rather a speciality of running away from school. He’s done it twice before this, once to attend a cup final and once to go hunting for buried treasure in the Caribbees, and I don’t remember Aunt Agatha on either occasion as the stricken mother. Thos was the one who got stricken. Six of the best on the old spot, he tells me. This, I should imagine, will probably occur again, and I think that even if he takes the assignment on for love alone, I will slip him that fiver as added money.’

‘It would be a graceful act.’

‘After all, what’s money? You can’t take it with you.’

‘The right spirit.’

‘But isn’t Corky going to be a bit at a loss when he suddenly shows up?’

‘That’s all fixed. I met her in the village and told her.’

‘And she approved?’

‘Wholeheartedly. Corky always approves of anything that seems likely to tend to start something.’

‘She’s a wonderful girl.’

‘A very admirable character. By the way, she tells me you put in that word in season.’

‘Yes. I thought she seemed braced.’

‘That’s how she struck me, too. Odd that she should be so crazy about Esmond Haddock. I’ve only seen him from a distance, of course, but I should have imagined he would have been a bit on the stiff side for Corky.’

‘He’s not really stiff. You should see him relaxing over the port.’

‘Perhaps you’re right. And, anyway, love’s a thing you can’t argue about. I suppose it would perplex thousands that Gertrude, bless her, loves me. Yet she does. And look at poor little Queenie. Heartbroken over the loss of a rozzer I wouldn’t be seen in a ditch with. And talking of Queenie, I was thinking of taking her to the pictures in Basingstoke this afternoon, if you’ll lend me your car.’

‘Of course. You feel it would cheer her up?’

‘It might. And I should like to slap balm on that wounded spirit, if it can be managed. It’s curious how, when you’re in love, you yearn to go about doing acts of kindness to everybody. I am bursting with a sort of yeasty benevolence these days, like one of those chaps in Dickens. I very nearly bought you a tie in London. Gosh! Who’s that?’

Someone had knocked on the door.

‘Come in,’ I said, and Catsmeat dashed at the wardrobe and dashed out festooned in trousers and things. Striking the professional note.

Silversmith came navigating over the threshold. This majestic man always had in his deportment a suggestion of the ambassador about to deliver important State papers to a reigning monarch, and now the resemblance was heightened by the fact that in front of his ample stomach he was bearing a salver with a couple of telegrams on it. I gathered them in, and he went navigating out again.

Catsmeat replaced the trousers. He was quivering a little.

‘What effect does that bloke have on you, Bertie?’ he asked in a hushed voice, as if he were speaking in a cathedral. ‘He paralyses me. I don’t know if you are familiar with the works of Joseph Conrad, but there’s a chap in his
Lord Jim
of whom he says “Had you been the Emperor of the East and West, you could not have ignored your inferiority in his presence”. That’s Silversmith. He fills me with an awful humility. He shrivels my immortal soul to the size of a parched pea. He’s the living image of some of those old time pros who used to give me such a hell of a time when I first went on the stage. Well, go on. Open them.’

‘You mean these telegrams?’

‘What did you think I meant?’

‘They’re addressed to Gussie.’

‘Of course they’re addressed to Gussie. But they’re for you.’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘They must be. One’s probably from Jeeves, telling you that the balloon has gone up.’

‘But the other? It may be a tender bob’s-worth from Madeline.’

‘Ah, go on.’

I was firm.

‘No, Catsmeat. The code of the Woosters restrains me. The code of the Woosters is more rigid than the code of the Catsmeats. A Wooster cannot open a telegram addressed to another, even if for the moment he is that other, if you see what I mean. I’ll have to submit them to Gussie.’

‘All right, if you see it that way. I’ll be off, then, to try to bring a little sunshine into Queenie’s life.’

He legged it, and I took a seat and went on being firm. The hour was then three-forty-five.

I continued firm till about five minutes to four.

The catch about the code of the Woosters is that if you start examining it with a couple of telegrams staring you in the face, one of them almost certainly containing news of vital import, you find yourself after a while beginning to wonder if it’s really so hot, after all. I mean to say, the thought creeps in that maybe, if one did but know, the Woosters are priceless asses to let themselves be ruled by a code like that. By four o’clock I wasn’t quite so firm as I had been. By ten past my fingers were definitely twitching.