The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3 (49 page)

‘In that case, I think you would be well advised to refrain from attempting to entertain the audience, sir. It would be best to hand the whole conduct of the affair over to Mr Haddock.’

‘Eh?’

‘I am confident that Mr Haddock would gladly deputize for you. In the uplifted frame of mind in which he now is, he would welcome an opportunity to appear again before his public.’

‘But he couldn’t learn the stuff in a quarter of an hour.’

‘No, sir, but he could read it from the book. I have a copy of the book on my person, for I had been intending to station myself at the side of the stage in order to prompt you, as I believe the technical expression is, should you have need of my services.’

‘Dashed good of you, Jeeves. Very white. Very feudal.’

‘Not at all, sir. Shall I step across and explain the position of affairs to Mr Haddock and hand him the book?’

I mused. The more I examined his suggestion, the better I liked it. When you are slated to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, the idea of getting a kindly friend to take your place is always an attractive one; the only thing that restrains you, as a rule, from making the switch being the thought that it is a bit tough on the kindly f. But in the present case this objection did not apply. On this night of nights Esmond Haddock could get away with anything. There was, I seemed to remember dimly, a poem in the book about Christopher Robin having ten little toes. Even that, dished out by the idol of King’s Deverill, would not provoke mob violence.

‘Yes, buzz straight over and fix up the deal, Jeeves,’ I said hesitating no longer. ‘As always, you have found the way.’

He adjusted the bowler hat which he had courteously doffed at my entry, and went off on his errand of mercy. And I, too agitated to remain sitting, wandered out into the street and began to pace up and down outside the hostelry. And I had paused for a moment to look at the stars, wondering, as I always did when I saw stars, why Jeeves had once described them to me as quiring to the young-eyed Cherubim, when a tapping on my arm and a bleating voice saying ‘I say, Bertie’ told me that some creature of the night was trying to arrest my attention. I turned and beheld something in a green beard and a check suit of loud pattern which, as it was not tall enough to be Catsmeat, the only other person likely to be going about in that striking get-up, I took correctly to be Gussie.

‘I say, Bertie,’ said Gussie, speaking with obvious emotion, ‘do you think you could get me some brandy?’

‘You mean orange juice?’

‘No, I do not mean orange juice. I mean brandy. About a bucketful.’

Puzzled, but full of the St-Bernard-dog spirit, I returned to the saloon bar and came back with the snifter. He accepted it gratefully and downed about half of it at a gulp, gasping in a struck-by-lightning manner, as I have seen men gasp after taking one of Jeeves’s special pick-me-ups.

‘Thanks,’ he said, when he had recovered. ‘I needed that. And I didn’t like to go in myself with this beard on.’

‘Why don’t you take it off?’

‘I can’t get it off. I stuck it on with spirit gum, and it hurts like sin when I pull at it. I shall have to get Jeeves to see what he can do about it later. Is this stuff brandy?’

‘That’s what they told me.’

‘What appalling muck. Like vitriol. How on earth can you and your fellow topers drink it for pleasure?’

‘What are you drinking it for? Because you promised your mother you would?’

‘I am drinking it, Bertie, to nerve myself for a frightful ordeal.’

I gave his shoulder a kindly pat. It seemed to me that the man’s mind was wandering.

‘You’re forgetting, Gussie. Your ordeal is over. You’ve done your act. And pretty lousy it was,’ I said, unable to check the note of censure. ‘What was the matter with you?’

He blinked like a chidden codfish.

‘Wasn’t I good?’

‘No, you were not good. You were cheesy. Your work lacked fire and snap.’

‘Well, so would your work lack fire and snap, if you had to play in a knockabout cross-talk act and knew that directly the thing was over, you were going to break into a police station and steal a dog.’

The stars, ceasing for a moment to quire to the young-eyed Cherubim, did a quick buck-and-wing.

‘Say that again!’

‘What’s the point of saying it again? You heard. I’ve promised Corky I’ll go to Dobbs’s cottage and extract that dog of hers. She will be waiting in her car near at hand and will gather the animal in and whisk it off to the house of some friends of hers who live about twenty miles along the London road, well out of Dobbs’s sphere of influence. So now you know why I wanted brandy.’

I wanted brandy, too. Either that or something equally restorative.
Oh
, I was saying to myself, for a beaker full of the warm south, full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene. I have spoken earlier of the tendency of the spirit of the Woosters to rise when crushed to earth, but there is a limit, and this limit had now been reached. At these frightful words, the spirit of the Woosters felt as if it had been sat on by an elephant. And not one of your streamlined, schoolgirl-figured elephants, either. A big, fat one.

‘Gussie! You mustn’t!’

‘What do you mean, I mustn’t? Of course I must. Corky wishes it.’

‘But you don’t realize the peril. Dobbs is laying for you. Esmond Haddock is laying for you. They’re just waiting to spring.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Esmond Haddock told me so himself. He dislikes you intensely and it is his dearest hope some day to catch you bending and put you behind the bars. And he’s a JP, so is in a strong position to bring about the happy ending. You’ll look pretty silly when you find yourself doing thirty days in the jug.’

‘For Corky’s sake I’d do a year. As a matter of fact,’ said Gussie in a burst of confidence, ‘though you might not think it from the way I’ve been calling for brandy, there’s no chance of my being caught. Dobbs is watching the concert.’

This, of course, improved the outlook. I don’t say I breathed freely, but I breathed more freely than I had been breathing.

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘I saw him myself.’

‘You couldn’t have been mistaken?’

‘My dear Bertie, when Dobbs has come into a room in which you have been strewing frogs and stood face to face with you for an eternity, chewing his moustache and grinding his teeth at you, you know him when you see him again.’

‘But all the same –’

‘It’s no good saying “All the same”. Corky wants me to extract her dog, and I’m going to do it. “Gussie”, she said to me, “you’re such a
help
”, and I intend to be worthy of those words.’

And, having spoken thus, he gave his beard a hitch and vanished into the silent night, leaving me to pay for the brandy.

I had just finished doing so when Jeeves returned.

‘Everything has been satisfactorily arranged, sir,’ he said. ‘I have seen Mr Haddock, and, as I anticipated, he is more than willing to deputize for you.’

A great weight seemed to roll off my mind.

‘Then God bless Mr Haddock!’ I said. ‘There is splendid stuff in these young English landowners, Jeeves, is there not?’

‘Unquestionably, sir.’

‘The backbone of the country, I sometimes call them. But I gather from the fact that you have been gone the dickens of a time that you had to do some heavy persuading.’

‘No, sir. Mr Haddock consented immediately and with enthusiasm. My delay in returning was due to the fact that I was detained in conversation by Police Constable Dobbs. There were a number of questions of a theological nature on which he was anxious to canvas my views. He appears particularly interested in Jonah and the Whale.’

‘Is he enjoying the concert?’

‘No, sir. He spoke in disparaging terms of the quality of the entertainment provided.’

‘He didn’t like George Kegley-Bassington much?’

‘No, sir. On the subject of Master Kegley-Bassington he expressed himself strongly, and was almost equally caustic when commenting upon Miss Kegley-Bassington’s rhythmic dance. It is in order to avoid witnessing the efforts of the remaining members of the family that he has returned to his cottage, where he plans to pass what is left of the evening with a pipe and the works of Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll.’

SO THAT WAS
that. You get the picture. Above, in the serene sky, the stars quiring to the Cherubim. Off-stage, in the public bar, the local toughies quiring to the potboy. And down centre Jeeves, having exploded his bombshell, regarding me with the eye of concern, as if he feared that all was not well with the young master, in which conjecture he was one hundred per cent right. The young master was feeling as if his soul had just received the Cornish Riviera express on the seat of its pants.

I gulped perhaps half a dozen times before I was able to utter.

‘Jeeves, you didn’t really say that, did you?’

‘Sir?’

‘About Constable Dobbs going back to his cottage.’

‘Yes, sir. He informed me that it was his intention to do so. He said he desired solitude.’

‘Solitude!’ I said. ‘Ha!’

And in a dull, toneless voice, like George Kegley-Bassington reciting ‘Ben Battle’, I gave him the lowdown.

‘That is the situation in what is sometimes called a nutshell, Jeeves,’ I concluded. ‘And, not that it matters, for nothing matters now, I wonder if you have spotted how extraordinarily closely the present set-up resembles that of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s well-known poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, which is another of the things I used to recite in happier days. I mean to say, someone has blundered and Gussie, like the Six Hundred, is riding into the Valley of Death. His not to reason why, his but to do or –’

‘Pardon me, sir, for interrupting you –’

‘Not at all, Jeeves. I had nearly finished.’

‘– but would it not be advisable to take some form of action?’ I gave him the lacklustre eye.

‘Action, Jeeves? How can that help us now? And what form of it would you suggest? I should have said the thing had got beyond the scope of human power.’

‘It might be possible to overtake Mr Fink-Nottle, sir, and apprise him of his peril.’

I shrugged the shoulders.

‘We can try, if you like. I see little percentage in it, but I suppose one should leave no stone unturned. Can you find your way to
chez
Dobbs?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then shift ho,’ I said listlessly.

As we made our way out of the High Street into the dark regions beyond, we chatted in desultory vein.

‘I noticed, Jeeves, that when I started telling you the bad news just now, one of your eyebrows flickered.’

‘Yes, sir. I was much exercised.’

‘Don’t you ever get exercised enough to say “Coo!”?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Or “Crumbs!”?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Strange. I should have thought you might have done so at a moment like that. I would say this was the end, wouldn’t you?’

‘While there is life, there is hope, sir.’

‘Neatly put, but I disagree with you. I see no reason for even two-pennorth of hope. We shan’t overtake Gussie. He must have got there long ago. About now, Dobbs is sitting on his chest and slipping the handcuffs on him.’

‘The officer may not have proceeded directly to his home, sir.’

‘You think there is a possibility that he paused at a pub for a gargle? It may be so, of course, but I am not sanguine. It would mean that Fate was handing out lucky breaks, and my experience of Fate –’

I would have spoken further and probably been pretty deepish, for the subject of Fate and its consistent tendency to give good men the elbow was one to which I had devoted considerable thought, but at this moment I was accosted by another creature of the night, a soprano one this time, and I perceived a car drawn up at the side of the road.

‘Yoo-hoo, Bertie,’ said a silvery voice. ‘Hi-ya, Jeeves.’

‘Good evening, miss,’ said Jeeves in his suave way. ‘Miss Pirbright, sir,’ he added, giving me the office in an undertone.

I had already recognized the silvery v.

‘Hallo, Corky,’ I said moodily. ‘You are waiting for Gussie?’

‘Yes, he went by just now. What did you say?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ I replied, for I had merely remarked by way of a passing comment that cannons to left of him, cannons to right of him
volleyed
and thundered. ‘I suppose you know that you have lured him on to a doom so hideous that the brain reels, contemplating it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He will find Dobbs at journey’s end reading Robert G. Ingersoll. How long the officer will continue reading Robert G. Ingersoll after discovering that Gussie has broken in and is de-dogging the premises, one cannot –’

‘Don’t be an ass. Dobbs is at the concert.’

‘He
was
at the concert. But he left early and is now –’

Once more I was interrupted when about to speak further. From down the road there had begun to make itself heard in the silent night a distant barking. It grew in volume, indicating that the barker was heading our way, and Corky sprang from the car and established herself as a committee of welcome in the middle of the fairway.

‘What a chump you are, Bertie,’ she said with some heat, ‘pulling a girl’s leg and trying to scare her stiff. Everything has gone according to plan. Here comes Sam. I’d know his voice anywhere. At-a-boy, Sam! This way. Come to Mother.’

What ensued was rather like the big scene in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. The baying and the patter of feet grew louder, and suddenly out of the darkness Sam Goldwyn clocked in, coming along at a high rate of speed and showing plainly in his manner how keenly he appreciated the termination of the sedentary life he had been leading these last days. He looked good for about another fifty miles at the same pace, but the sight of us gave him pause. He stopped, looked and listened. Then, as our familiar odour reached his nostrils, he threw his whole soul into a cry of ecstasy. He bounded at Jeeves as if contemplating licking his face, but was checked by the latter’s quiet dignity. Jeeves views the animal kingdom with a benevolent eye and is the first to pat its head and offer it a slice of whatever is going, but he does not permit it to lick his face.