The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3 (61 page)

‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘you’re talking rot.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘Absolute drivel.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘Pure mashed potatoes.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘Very good, sir – I mean very good, Jeeves, that will be all,’ I said.

And I drank a modicum of tea, with a good deal of hauteur.

It isn’t often that I find myself able to prove Jeeves in the wrong, but by dinner-time that night I was in a position to do so, and I did it without delay.

‘Touching on that matter we were touching on, Jeeves,’ I said, coming in from the bath and tackling him as he studied the shirt, ‘I should be glad if you would give me your careful attention for a moment. I warn you that what I am about to say is going to make you look pretty silly.’

‘Indeed, sir?’

‘Yes, Jeeves. Pretty dashed silly it’s going to make you look. It may lead you to be rather more careful in future about broadcasting these estimates of yours of people’s characters. This morning, if I remember rightly, you stated that Miss Wickham was volatile, frivolous and lacking in seriousness. Am I correct?’

‘Quite correct, sir.’

‘Then what I have to tell you may cause you to alter that opinion. I went for a walk with Miss Wickham this afternoon: and, as we walked, I told her about what young Tuppy Glossop did to me in the swimming-bath at the Drones. She hung upon my words, Jeeves, and was full of sympathy.’

‘Indeed, sir?’

‘Dripping with it. And that’s not all. Almost before I had finished, she was suggesting the ripest, fruitiest, brainiest scheme for bringing young Tuppy’s grey hairs in sorrow to the grave that anyone could possibly imagine.’

‘That is very gratifying, sir.’

‘Gratifying is the word. It appears that at the girls’ school where Miss Wickham was educated, Jeeves, it used to become necessary from time to time for the right-thinking element of the community to slip it across certain of the baser sort. Do you know what they did, Jeeves?’

‘No, sir.’

‘They took a long stick, Jeeves, and – follow me closely here – they tied a darning-needle to the end of it. Then at dead of night, it appears, they sneaked privily into the party of the second part’s cubicle and shoved the needle through the bed-clothes and punctured her hot-water bottle. Girls are much subtler in these matters than boys, Jeeves. At my old school one would occasionally heave a jug of water over another bloke during the night-watches, but we never thought of effecting the same result in this particularly neat and scientific manner. Well, Jeeves, that was the scheme which Miss Wickham suggested I should work on young Tuppy, and this is the girl you call frivolous and lacking in seriousness. Any girl who can think up a wheeze like that is my idea of a helpmeet. I shall be glad, Jeeves, if by the time I come to bed tonight you have for me in this room a stout stick with a good sharp darning needle attached.’

‘Well, sir –’

I raised my hand.

‘Jeeves,’ I said. ‘Not another word. Stick, one, and needle, darning, good, sharp, one, without fail in this room at eleven-thirty tonight.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘Have you any idea where young Tuppy sleeps?’

‘I could ascertain, sir.’

‘Do so, Jeeves.’

In a few minutes he was back with the necessary informash.

‘Mr Glossop is established in the Moat Room, sir.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘The second door on the floor below this, sir.’

‘Right ho, Jeeves. Are the studs in my shirt?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And the link also?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then push me into it.’

The more I thought about this enterprise which a sense of duty and good citizenship had thrust upon me, the better it seemed to me. I am not a vindictive man, but I felt, as anybody would have felt in my
place
, that if fellows like young Tuppy are allowed to get away with it the whole fabric of Society and Civilization must inevitably crumble. The task to which I had set myself was one that involved hardship and discomfort, for it meant sitting up till well into the small hours and then padding down a cold corridor, but I did not shrink from it. After all, there is a lot to be said for family tradition. We Woosters did our bit in the Crusades.

It being Christmas Eve, there was, as I had foreseen, a good deal of revelry and what not. First, the village choir surged round and sang carols outside the front door, and then somebody suggested a dance, and after that we hung around chatting of this and that, so that it wasn’t till past one that I got to my room. Allowing for everything, it didn’t seem that it was going to be safe to start my little expedition till half-past two at the earliest: and I’m bound to say that it was only the utmost resolution that kept me from snuggling into the sheets and calling it a day. I’m not much of a lad now for late hours.

However, by half-past two everything appeared to be quiet. I shook off the mists of sleep, grabbed the good old stick-and-needle and off along the corridor. And presently, pausing outside the Moat Room, I turned the handle, found the door wasn’t locked, and went in.

I suppose a burglar – I mean a real professional who works at the job six nights a week all the year round – gets so that finding himself standing in the dark in somebody else’s bedroom means absolutely nothing to him. But for a bird like me, who has had no previous experience, there’s a lot to be said in favour of washing the whole thing out and closing the door gently and popping back to bed again. It was only by summoning up all the old bulldog courage of the Woosters, and reminding myself that, if I let this opportunity slip another might never occur, that I managed to stick out what you might call the initial minute of the binge. Then the weakness passed, and Bertram was himself again.

At first when I beetled in, the room had seemed as black as a coal-cellar: but after a bit things began to lighten. The curtains weren’t quite drawn over the window and I could see a trifle of the scenery here and there. The bed was opposite the window, with the head against the wall and the end where the feet were jutting out towards where I stood, thus rendering it possible after one had sown the seed, so to speak, to make a quick getaway. There only remained now the rather tricky problem of locating the old hot-water bottle. I mean to say, the one thing you can’t do if you want to carry a job like this through with secrecy and dispatch is to stand at the end of a fellow’s bed, jabbing the blankets at random with a darning-needle.
Before
proceeding to anything in the nature of definite steps, it is imperative that you locate the bot.

I was a good deal cheered at this juncture to hear a fruity snore from the direction of the pillows. Reason told me that a bloke who could snore like that wasn’t going to be awakened by a trifle. I edged forward and ran a hand in a gingerly sort of way over the coverlet. A moment later I had found the bulge. I steered the good old darning-needle on to it, gripped the stick, and shoved. Then, pulling out the weapon, I sidled towards the door, and in another moment would have been outside, buzzing for home and the good night’s rest, when suddenly there was a crash that sent my spine shooting up through the top of my head and the contents of the bed sat up like a jack-in-the-box and said:

‘Who’s that?’

It just shows how your most careful strategic moves can be the very ones that dish your campaign. In order to facilitate the orderly retreat according to plan I had left the door open, and the beastly thing had slammed like a bomb.

But I wasn’t giving much thought to the causes of the explosion, having other things to occupy my mind. What was disturbing me was the discovery that, whoever else the bloke in the bed might be, he was not young Tuppy. Tuppy has one of those high, squeaky voices that sound like the tenor of the village choir failing to hit a high note. This one was something in between the last Trump and a tiger calling for breakfast after being on a diet for a day or two. It was the sort of nasty, rasping voice you hear shouting ‘Fore!’ when you’re one of a slow foursome on the links and are holding up a couple of retired colonels. Among the qualities it lacked were kindliness, suavity and that sort of dove-like cooing note which makes a fellow feel he has found a friend.

I did not linger. Getting swiftly off the mark, I dived for the door-handle and was off and away, banging the door behind me. I may be a chump in many ways, as my Aunt Agatha will freely attest, but I know when and when not to be among those present.

And I was just about to do the stretch of corridor leading to the stairs in a split second under the record time for the course, when something brought me up with a sudden jerk. One moment, I was all dash and fire and speed; the next, an irresistible force had checked me in my stride and was holding me straining at the leash, as it were.

You know, sometimes it seems to me as if Fate were going out of its way to such an extent to snooter you that you wonder if it’s worth while continuing to struggle. The night being a trifle chillier than the
dickens
, I had donned for this expedition a dressing-gown. It was the tail of this infernal garment that had caught in the door and pipped me at the eleventh hour.

The next moment the door had opened, light was streaming through it, and the bloke with the voice had grabbed me by the arm.

It was Sir Roderick Glossop.

The next thing that happened was a bit of a lull in the proceedings. For about three and a quarter seconds or possibly more we just stood there, drinking each other in, so to speak, the old boy still attached with a limpet-like grip to my elbow. If I hadn’t been in a dressing-gown and he in pink pyjamas with a blue stripe, and if he hadn’t been glaring quite so much as if he were shortly going to commit a murder, the tableau would have looked rather like one of those advertisements you see in the magazines, where the experienced elder is patting the young man’s arm, and saying to him, ‘My boy, if you subscribe to the Mutt-Jeff Correspondence School of Oswego, Kan, as I did, you may some day, like me, become Third Assistant Vice-President of the Schenectady Consolidated Nail-File and Eyebrow Tweezer Corporation.’

‘You!’ said Sir Roderick finally. And in this connection I want to state that it’s all rot to say you can’t hiss a word that hasn’t an ‘s’ in it. The way he pushed out that ‘You!’ sounded like an angry cobra, and I am betraying no secrets when I mention that it did me no good whatsoever.

By rights, I suppose, at this point I ought to have said something. The best I could manage, however, was a faint, soft bleating sound. Even on ordinary social occasions, when meeting this bloke as man to man and with a clear conscience, I could never be completely at my ease: and now those eyebrows seemed to pierce me like a knife.

‘Come in here,’ he said, lugging me into the room. ‘We don’t want to wake the whole house. ‘Now,’ he said, depositing me on the carpet and closing the door and doing a bit of eyebrow work, ‘kindly inform me what is this latest manifestation of insanity?’

It seemed to me that a light and cheery laugh might help the thing along. So I had a pop at one.

‘Don’t gibber!’ said my genial host. And I’m bound to admit that the light and cheery hadn’t come out quite as I’d intended.

I pulled myself together with a strong effort.

‘Awfully sorry about all this,’ I said in a hearty sort of voice. ‘The fact is, I thought you were Tuppy.’

‘Kindly refrain from inflicting your idiotic slang on me. What do you mean by the adjective “tuppy”?’

‘It isn’t so much an adjective, don’t you know. More of a noun, I should think, if you examine it squarely. What I mean to say is, I thought you were your nephew.’

‘You thought I was my nephew? Why should I be my nephew?’

‘What I’m driving at is, I thought this was his room.’

‘My nephew and I changed rooms. I have a great dislike for sleeping on an upper floor. I am nervous about fire.’

For the first time since this interview had started, I braced up a trifle. The injustice of the whole thing stirred me to such an extent that for a moment I lost that sense of being a toad under the harrow which had been cramping my style up till now. I even went so far as to eye this pink-pyjamed poltroon with a good deal of contempt and loathing. Just because he had this craven fear of fire and this selfish preference for letting Tuppy be cooked instead of himself should the emergency occur, my nice-reasoned plans had gone up the spout. I gave him a look, and I think I may even have snorted a bit.

‘I should have thought that your man-servant would have informed you,’ said Sir Roderick, ‘that we contemplated making this change. I met him shortly before luncheon and told him to tell you.’

I reeled. Yes, it is not too much to say that I reeled. This extraordinary statement had taken me amidships without any preparation, and it staggered me. That Jeeves had been aware all along that this old crumb would be the occupant of the bed which I was proposing to prod with darning-needles and had let me rush upon my doom without a word of warning was almost beyond belief. You might say I was aghast. Yes, practically aghast.

‘You told Jeeves that you were going to sleep in this room?’ I gasped.

‘I did. I was aware that you and my nephew were on terms of intimacy, and I wished to spare myself the possibility of a visit from you. I confess that it never occurred to me that such a visit was to be anticipated at three o’clock in the morning. What the devil do you mean,’ he barked, suddenly hotting up, ‘by prowling about the house at this hour? And what is that thing in your hand?’

I looked down, and found that I was still grasping the stick. I give you my honest word that, what with the maelstrom of emotions into which his revelation about Jeeves had cast me, the discovery came as an absolute surprise.

‘This?’ I said. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘What do you mean, Oh yes? What is it?’

‘Well, it’s a long story –’

‘We have the night before us.’

‘It’s this way. I will ask you to picture me some weeks ago, perfectly peaceful and inoffensive, after dinner at the Drones, smoking a thoughtful cigarette and –’

I broke off. The man wasn’t listening. He was goggling in a rapt sort of way at the end of the bed, from which there had now begun to drip onto the carpet a series of drops.