The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3 (76 page)

And I meant it.

IN THE AUTUMN
of the year in which Yorkshire Pudding won the Manchester November Handicap, the fortunes of my old pal Richard (‘Bingo’) Little seemed to have reached their – what’s the word I want? He was, to all appearances, absolutely on plush. He ate well, slept well, was happily married; and, his Uncle Wilberforce having at last handed in his dinner-pail, respected by all, had come into possession of a large income and a fine old place in the country about thirty miles from Norwich. Buzzing down there for a brief visit, I came away convinced that, if ever a bird was sitting on top of the world, that bird was Bingo.

I had to come away because the family were shooting me off to Harrogate to chaperone my Uncle George, whose liver had been giving him the elbow again. But, as we sat pushing down the morning meal on the day of my departure, I readily agreed to play a return date as soon as ever I could fight my way back to civilization.

‘Come in time for the Lakenham races,’ urged young Bingo. He took aboard a second cargo of sausages and bacon, for he had always been a good trencherman and the country air seemed to improve his appetite. ‘We’re going to motor over with a luncheon basket, and more or less revel.’

I was just about to say that I would make a point of it, when Mrs Bingo, who was opening letters behind the coffee-apparatus, suddenly uttered a pleased yowl.

‘Oh, sweetie-lambkin!’ she cried.

Mrs B., if you remember, before her marriage, was the celebrated female novelist, Rosie M. Banks, and it is in some such ghastly fashion that she habitually addresses the other half of the sketch. She has got that way, I take it, from a life-time of writing heart-throb fiction for the masses. Bingo doesn’t seem to mind. I suppose, seeing that the little woman is the author of such outstanding bilge as
Mervyn
Keene
, Clubman
and
Only A Factory Girl
, he is thankful it isn’t anything worse.

‘Oh, sweetie-lambkin, isn’t that lovely?’

‘What?’

‘Laura Pyke wants to come here.’

‘Who?’

‘You must have heard me speak of Laura Pyke. She was my dearest friend at school. I simply worshipped her. She always had such a wonderful mind. She wants us to put her up for a week or two.’

‘Right ho. Bung her in.’

‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’

‘Of course not. Any pal of yours –’

‘Darling!’ said Mrs Bingo, blowing him a kiss.

‘Angel!’ said Bingo, going on with the sausages.

All very charming, in fact. Pleasant domestic scene, I mean. Cheery give-and-take in the home and all that. I said as much to Jeeves as we drove off.

‘In these days of unrest, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘with wives yearning to fulfil themselves and husbands slipping round the corner to do what they shouldn’t, and the home, generally speaking, in the melting-pot, as it were, it is nice to find a thoroughly united couple.’

‘Decidedly agreeable, sir.’

‘I allude to the Bingos – Mr and Mrs.’

‘Exactly, sir.’

‘What was it the poet said of couples like the Bingeese?’

‘“Two minds but with a single thought, two hearts that beat as one,” sir.’

‘A dashed good description, Jeeves.’

‘It has, I believe, given uniform satisfaction, sir.’

And yet, if I had only known, what I had been listening to that am was the first faint rumble of the coming storm. Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove.

I managed to give Uncle George a miss at a fairly early date and, leaving him wallowing in the waters, sent a wire to the Bingos, announcing my return. It was a longish drive and I fetched up at my destination only just in time to dress for dinner. I had done a quick dash into the soup and fish and was feeling pretty good at the prospect of a cocktail and the well-cooked, when the door opened and Bingo appeared.

‘Hello, Bertie,’ he said. ‘Ah, Jeeves.’

He spoke in one of those toneless voices: and, catching Jeeves’s eye as I adjusted the old cravat, I exchanged a questioning glance with it. From its expression I gathered that the same thing had struck him that had struck me – viz., that our host, the young Squire, was none too chirpy. The brow was furrowed, the eye lacked that hearty sparkle, and the general bearing and demeanour were those of a body discovered after being several days in the water.

‘Anything up, Bingo?’ I asked, with the natural anxiety of a boyhood friend. ‘You have a mouldy look. Are you sickening for some sort of plague?’

‘I’ve got it.’

‘Got what?’

‘The plague.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘She’s on the premises now,’ said Bingo, and laughed in an unpleasant, hacking manner, as if he were missing on one tonsil.

I couldn’t follow him. The old egg seemed to me to speak in riddles.

‘You seem to me, old egg,’ I said, ‘to speak in riddles. Don’t you think he speaks in riddles, Jeeves?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’m talking about the Pyke,’ said Bingo.

‘What pike?’

‘Laura Pyke. Don’t you remember –?’

‘Oh, ah. Of course. The school chum. The seminary crony. Is she still here?’

‘Yes, and looks like staying for ever. Rosie’s absolutely potty about her. Hangs on her lips’

‘The glamour of the old days still persists, eh?’

‘I should say it does,’ said young Bingo ‘This business of schoolgirl friendships beats me. Hypnotic is the only word. I can’t understand it. Men aren’t like that. You and I were at school together, Bertie, but, my gosh, I don’t look on you as a sort of mastermind.’

‘You don’t?’

‘I don’t treat your lightest utterance as a pearl of wisdom.’

‘Why not?’

‘Yet Rosie does with this Pyke. In the hands of the Pyke she is mere putty. If you want to see what was once a first-class Garden of Eden becoming utterly ruined as a desirable residence by the machinations of a Serpent, take a look round this place.’

‘Why, what’s the trouble?’

‘Laura Pyke,’ said young Bingo with intense bitterness, ‘is a food
crank
, curse her. She says we all eat too much and eat it too quickly and, anyway, ought not to be eating it at all but living on parsnips and similar muck. And Rosie, instead of telling the woman not to be a fathead, gazes at her in wide-eyed admiration, taking it in through the pores. The result is that the cuisine of this house has been shot to pieces, and I am starving on my feet. Well, when I tell you that it’s weeks since a beefsteak pudding raised its head in the home, you’ll understand what I mean.’

At this point the gong went. Bingo listened with a moody frown.

‘I don’t know why they still bang that damned thing,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to bang it for. By the way, Bertie, would you like a cocktail?’

‘I would.’

‘Well, you won’t get one. We don’t have cocktails anymore. The girl friend says they corrode the stomach tissues.’

I was appalled. I had had no idea that the evil had spread as far as this.

‘No cocktails!’

‘No. And you’ll be dashed lucky if it isn’t a vegetarian dinner.’

‘Bingo,’ I cried, deeply moved, ‘you must act. You must assert yourself. You must put your foot down. You must take a strong stand. You must be master in the home.’

He looked at me, a long, strange look.

‘You aren’t married, are you, Bertie?’

‘You know I’m not.’

‘I should have guessed it, anyway. Come on.’

Well, the dinner wasn’t absolutely vegetarian, but when you had said that you had said everything. It was sparse, meagre, not at all the jolly, chunky repast for which the old tum was standing up and clamouring after its long motor ride. And what there was of it was turned to ashes in the mouth by the conversation of Miss Laura Pyke.

In happier circs, and if I had not been informed in advance of the warped nature of her soul, I might have been favourably impressed by this female at the moment of our meeting. She was really rather a good-looking girl, a bit strong in the face but nevertheless quite reasonably attractive. But had she been a thing of radiant beauty, she could never have clicked with Bertram Wooster. Her conversation was of a kind which would have queered Helen of Troy with any right-thinking man.

During dinner she talked all the time, and it did not take me long to see why the iron had entered into Bingo’s soul. Practically all she said
was
about food and Bingo’s tendency to shovel it down in excessive quantities, thereby handing the lemon to his stomachic tissues. She didn’t seem particularly interested in my stomachic tissues, rather giving the impression that if Bertram burst it would be all right with her. It was on young Bingo that she concentrated as the brand to be saved from the burning. Gazing at him like a high priestess at the favourite, though erring, disciple, she told him all the things that were happening to his insides because he would insist on eating stuff lacking in fat-soluble vitamins. She spoke freely of proteins, carbohydrates, and the physiological requirements of the average individual. She was not a girl who believed in mincing her words, and a racy little anecdote she told about a man who refused to eat prunes had the effect of causing me to be a non-starter for the last two courses.

‘Jeeves,’ I said, on reaching the sleeping-chamber that night, ‘I don’t like the look of things.’

‘No, sir?’

‘No, Jeeves, I do not. I view the situation with concern. Things are worse than I thought they were. Mr Little’s remarks before dinner may have given you the impression that the Pyke merely lectured on food-reform in a general sort of way. Such, I now find, is not the case. By way of illustrating her theme, she points to Mr Little as the awful example. She criticises him, Jeeves.’

‘Indeed, sir?’

‘Yes. Openly. Keeps telling him he eats too much, drinks too much, and gobbles his food. I wish you could have heard a comparison she drew between him and the late Mr Gladstone, considering them in the capacity of food chewers. It left young Bingo very much with the short end of the stick. And the sinister thing is that Mrs Bingo approves. Are wives often like that? Welcoming criticism of the lord and master, I mean?’

‘They are generally open to suggestion from the outside public with regard to the improvement of their husbands, sir.’

‘That is why married men are wan, what?’

‘Yes, sir.’

I had had the foresight to send the man downstairs for a plate of biscuits. I bit a representative specimen thoughtfully.

‘Do you know what I think, Jeeves?’

‘No, sir.’

‘I think Mr Little doesn’t realize the full extent of the peril which threatens his domestic happiness. I’m beginning to understand this business of matrimony. I’m beginning to see how
the
thing works. Would you care to hear how I figure it out, Jeeves?’

‘Extremely, sir.’

‘Well, it’s like this. Take a couple of birds. These birds get married, and for a while all is gas and gaiters. The female regards her mate as about the best thing that ever came a girl’s way. He is her king, if you know what I mean. She looks up to him and respects him. Joy, as you might say, reigns supreme. Eh?’

‘Very true, sir.’

‘Then gradually, by degrees – little by little, if I may use the expression – disillusionment sets in. She sees him eating a poached egg, and the glamour starts to fade. She watches him mangling a chop, and it continues to fade. And so on and so on, if you follow me, and so forth.’

‘I follow you perfectly, sir.’

‘But mark this Jeeves. This is the point. Here we approach the nub. Usually it is all right, because, as I say, the disillusionment comes gradually and the female has time to adjust herself. But in the case of young Bingo, owing to the indecent outspokenness of the Pyke, it’s coming in a rush. Absolutely in a flash, without any previous preparation, Mrs Bingo is having Bingo presented to her as a sort of human boa-constrictor full of unpleasantly jumbled interior organs. The picture which the Pyke is building up for her in her mind is that of one of those men you see in restaurants with three chins, bulging eyes, and the veins starting out on the forehead. A little more of this, and love must wither.’

‘You think so, sir?’

‘I’m sure of it. No affection can stand the strain. Twice during dinner tonight the Pyke said things about your Bingo’s intestinal canal which I shouldn’t have thought would have been possible in mixed company even in this lax post-war era. Well, you see what I mean. You can’t go on knocking a man’s intestinal canal indefinitely without causing his wife to stop and ponder. The danger, as I see it, is that after a bit more of this, Mrs Little will decide that tinkering is no use and the only thing to do is to scrap Bingo and get a newer model.’

‘Most disturbing, sir.’

‘Something must be done, Jeeves. You must act. Unless you can find some way of getting this Pyke out of the woodwork, and that right speedily, the home’s number is up. You see, what makes matters worse is that Mrs Bingo is romantic. Women like her, who consider the day illspent if they have not churned out five thousand words of
superfatted
fiction, are apt even at the best of times to yearn a trifle. The ink gets into their heads. I mean to say, I shouldn’t wonder if right from the start Mrs Bingo hasn’t had a sort of sneaking regret that Bingo isn’t one of those strong, curt, Empire-building kind of Englishmen she puts into her books, with sad, unfathomable eyes, lean sensitive hands, and riding-boots. You see what I mean?’

‘Precisely, sir. You imply that Miss Pyke’s criticisms will have been instrumental in moving the hitherto unformulated dissatisfaction from the subconscious to the conscious mind.’

‘Once again, Jeeves?’ I said, trying to grab it as it came off the bat, but missing it by several yards.

He repeated the dose.

‘Well, I daresay you’re right,’ I said. ‘Anyway, the point is, P.M.G. Pyke must go. How do you propose to set about it?’

‘I fear I have nothing to suggest at the moment, sir.’

‘Come, come, Jeeves.’

‘I fear not, sir. Possibly after I have seen the lady –’