The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 4: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.4 (28 page)

They had scarcely swum into my ken when the welkin started ringing like billy-o. This was due to the barking of a small dachshund, who now advanced on me with the apparent intention of seeing the colour of my insides. Milder counsels, however, prevailed, and on arriving at journey’s end he merely rose like a rocket and licked me on the chin, seeming to convey the impression that in Bertram Wooster he had found just what the doctor ordered. I have noticed before in dogs this tendency to form a beautiful friendship immediately on getting within sniffing distance of me. Something to do, no doubt, with the characteristic Wooster smell, which for some reason seems to speak to their deeps. I tickled him behind the right ear and scratched the base of his spine for a moment or two: then, these civilities concluded, switched my attention to the poetry group.

It was the male half of the sketch who had been doing the reading, a willowy bird of about the tonnage and general aspect of David Niven with ginger hair and a small moustache. As he was unquestionably not Aubrey Upjohn, I assumed that this must be Willie Cream, and it surprised me a bit to find him dishing out verse. One would have expected a New York playboy, widely publicized as one of the lads, to confine himself to prose, and dirty prose, at that. But no doubt these playboys have their softer moments.

His companion was a well-stacked young featherweight, who could be none other than the Phyllis Mills of whom Kipper had spoken. Nice but goofy, Kipper had said, and a glance told me that he was right. One learns, as one goes through life, to spot goofiness in the other sex with an unerring eye, and this exhibit had a sort of mild, Soul’s Awakening kind of expression which made it abundantly clear that, while not a super-goof like some of the female goofs I’d met, she was quite goofy enough to be going on with. Her whole aspect was that of a girl who at the drop of a hat would start talking baby talk.

This she now proceeded to do, asking me if I didn’t think that Poppet, the dachshund, was a sweet little doggie. I assented rather austerely, for I prefer the shorter form more generally used, and she said she supposed I was Mrs Travers’s nephew Bertie Wooster, which, as we knew, was substantially the case.

‘I heard you were expected today. I’m Phyllis Mills,’ she said, and I said I had divined as much and that Kipper had told me to slap her on the back and give her his best, and she said, ‘Oh, Reggie Herring? He’s a sweetie-pie, isn’t he?’ and I agreed that Kipper was one of the
sweetie-pies
and not the worst of them, and she said, ‘Yes, he’s a lambkin.’

This duologue had, of course, left Wilbert Cream a bit out of it, just painted on the backdrop as you might say, and for some moments, knitting his brow, plucking at his moustache, shuffling the feet and allowing the limbs to twitch, he had been giving abundant evidence that in his opinion three was a crowd and that what the leafy glade needed to make it all that a leafy glade should be was a complete absence of Woosters. Taking advantage of a lull in the conversation, he said:

‘Are you looking for someone?’

I replied that I was looking for Bobbie Wickham.

‘I’d go on looking, if I were you. Bound to find her somewhere.’

‘Bobbie?’ said Phyllis Mills. ‘She’s down at the lake, fishing.’

‘Then what you do,’ said Wilbert Cream, brightening, ‘is follow this path, bend right, sharp left, bend right again and there you are. You can’t miss. Start at once, is my advice.’

I must say I felt that, related as I was by ties of blood, in a manner of speaking, to this leafy glade, it was a bit thick being practically bounced from it by a mere visitor, but Aunt Dahlia had made it clear that the Cream family must not be thwarted or put upon in any way, so I did as he suggested, picking up the feet without anything in the nature of back chat. As I receded, I could hear in my rear the poetry breaking out again.

The lake at Brinkley calls itself a lake, but when all the returns are in it’s really more a sort of young pond. Big enough to mess about on in a punt, though, and for the use of those wishing to punt a boathouse has been provided with a small pier or landing stage attached to it. On this, rod in hand, Bobbie was seated, and it was with me the work of an instant to race up and breathe down the back of her neck.

‘Hey!’ I said.

‘Hey to you with knobs on,’ she replied. ‘Oh, hullo, Bertie. You here?’

‘You never spoke a truer word. If you can spare me a moment of your valuable time, young Roberta –’

‘Half a second, I think I’ve got a bite. No, false alarm. What were you saying?’

‘I was saying –’

‘Oh, by the way, I heard from Mother this morning.’

‘I heard from her yesterday morning.’

‘I was kind of expecting you would. You saw that thing in
The Times
?’

‘With the naked eye.’

‘Puzzled you for a moment, perhaps?’

‘For several moments.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you all about that. The idea came to me in a flash.’

‘You mean it was you who shoved that communiqué in the journal?’

‘Of course.’

‘Why?’ I said, getting right down to it in my direct way.

I thought I had her there, but no.

‘I was paving the way for Reggie.’

I passed a hand over my fevered brow.

‘Something seems to have gone wrong with my usually keen hearing,’ I said. ‘It sounds just as if you were saying “I was paving the way for Reggie.”’

‘I was. I was making his path straight. Softening up Mother on his behalf.’

I passed another hand over my f.b.

‘Now you seem to be saying “Softening up Mother on his behalf.”’

‘That’s what I am saying. It’s perfectly simple. I’ll put it in words of one syllable for you. I love Reggie. Reggie loves me.’

‘Reggie,’ of course, is two syllables, but I let it go.

‘Reggie who?’

‘Reggie Herring.’

I was amazed.

‘You mean old Kipper?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call him Kipper.’

‘I always have. Dash it,’ I said with some warmth, ‘if a fellow shows up at a private school on the south coast of England with a name like Herring, what else do you expect his playmates to call him? But how do you mean you love him and he loves you? You’ve never met him.’

‘Of course I’ve met him. We were in the same hotel in Switzerland last Christmas. I taught him to ski,’ she said, a dreamy look coming into her twin starlikes. ‘I shall never forget the day I helped him unscramble himself after he had taken a toss on the beginners’ slope. He had both legs wrapped round his neck. I think that is when love dawned. My heart melted as I sorted him out.’

‘You didn’t laugh?’

‘Of course I didn’t laugh. I was all sympathy and understanding.’

For the first time the thing began to seem plausible to me. Bobbie is a fun-loving girl, and the memory of her reaction when in the garden at Skeldings I had once stepped on the teeth of a rake and had the handle jump up and hit me on the tip of the nose was still laid away among my souvenirs. She had been convulsed with mirth.
If,
then, she had refrained from guffawing when confronted with the spectacle of Reginald Herring with both legs wrapped round his neck, her emotions must have been very deeply involved.

‘Well, all right,’ I said. ‘I accept your statement that you and Kipper are that way. But why, that being so, did you blazon it forth to the world, if blazoning forth is the expression I want, that you were engaged to me?’

‘I told you. It was to soften Mother up.’

‘Which sounded to me like delirium straight from the sick bed.’

‘You don’t get the subtle strategy?’

‘Not by several parasangs.’

‘Well, you know how you stand with Mother.’

‘Our relations are a bit distant.’

‘She shudders at the mention of your name. So I thought if she thought I was going to marry you and then found I wasn’t, she’d be so thankful for the merciful escape I’d had that she’d be ready to accept anyone as a son-in-law, even someone like Reggie, who, though a wonder man, hasn’t got his name in Debrett and isn’t any too hot financially. Mother’s idea of a mate for me has always been a well-to-do millionaire or a Duke with a large private income. Now do you follow?’

‘Oh yes, I follow all right. You’ve been doing what Jeeves does, studying the psychology of the individual. But do you think it’ll work?’

‘Bound to. Let’s take a parallel case. Suppose your Aunt Dahlia read in the paper one morning that you were going to be shot at sunrise.’

‘I couldn’t be. I’m never up so early.’

‘But suppose she did? She’d be pretty worked up about it, wouldn’t she?’

‘Extremely, one imagines, for she loves me dearly. I’m not saying her manner toward me doesn’t verge at times on the brusque. In childhood days she would occasionally clump me on the side of the head, and since I have grown to riper years she has more than once begged me to tie a brick around my neck and go and drown myself in the pond in the kitchen garden. Nevertheless, she loves her Bertram, and if she heard I was to be shot at sunrise, she would, as you say, be as sore as a gumboil. But why? What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Well, suppose she then found out it was all a mistake and it wasn’t you but somebody else who was to face the firing squad. That would make her happy, wouldn’t it?’

‘One can picture her dancing all over the place on the tips of her toes.’

‘Exactly. She’d be so all over you that nothing you did would be wrong in her eyes. Whatever you wanted to do would be all right with
her.
Go to it, she would say. And that’s how Mother will feel when she learns that I’m not marrying you after all. She’ll be so relieved.’

I agreed that the relief would, of course, be stupendous.

‘But you’ll be giving her the inside facts in a day or two?’ I said, for I was anxious to have assurance on this point. A man with an Engagement notice in
The Times
hanging over him cannot but feel uneasy.

‘Well, call it a week or two. No sense in rushing things.’

‘You want me to sink in?’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘And meanwhile what’s the drill? Do I kiss you a good deal from time to time?’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Right ho. I just want to know where I stand.’

‘An occasional passionate glance will be ample.’

‘It shall be attended to. Well, I’m delighted about you and Kipper or, as you would prefer to say, Reggie. There’s nobody I’d rather see you centre-aisle-ing with.’

‘It’s very sporting of you to take it like this.’

‘Don’t give it a thought.’

‘I’m awfully fond of you, Bertie.’

‘Me, too, of you.’

‘But I can’t marry everybody, can I?’

‘I wouldn’t even try. Well, now that we’ve got all that straight, I suppose I’d better be going and saying “Come aboard” to Aunt Dahlia.’

‘What’s the time?’

‘Close on five.’

‘I must run like a hare. I’m supposed to be presiding at the tea table.’

‘You? Why you?’

‘Your aunt’s not here. She found a telegram when she got back yesterday saying that her son Bonzo was sick of a fever at his school, and dashed off to be with him. She asked me to deputy-hostess for her till her return, but I shan’t be able to for the next few days. I’ve got to dash back to Mother. Ever since she saw that thing in
The Times
, she’s been wiring me every hour on the hour to come home for a round table conference. What’s a guffin?’

‘I don’t know. Why?’

‘That’s what she calls you in her latest ’gram. Quote. “Cannot understand how you can be contemplating marrying that guffin.” Close quote. I suppose it’s more or less the same as a gaby, which was how you figured in one of her earlier communications.’

‘That sounds promising.’

‘Yes, I think the thing’s in the bag. After you, Reggie will come to her like rare and refreshing fruit. She’ll lay down the red carpet for him.’

And with a brief ‘Whoopee!’ she shot off in the direction of the house at forty or so m.p.h. I followed more slowly, for she had given me much food for thought, and I was musing.

Strange, I was feeling, this strong pro-Kipper sentiment in the Wickham bosom. I mean, consider the facts. What with that
espièglerie
of hers, which was tops, she had been pretty extensively wooed in one quarter and another for years, and no business had resulted, so that it was generally assumed that only something extra special in the way of suitors would meet her specifications and that whoever eventually got his nose under the wire would be a king among men and pretty warm stuff. And she had gone and signed up with Kipper Herring.

Mind you, I’m not saying a word against old Kipper. The salt of the earth. But nobody could have called him a knock-out in the way of looks. Having gone in a lot for boxing from his earliest years, he had the cauliflower ear of which I had spoken to Aunt Dahlia and in addition to this a nose which some hidden hand had knocked slightly out of the straight. He would, in short, have been an unsafe entrant to have backed in a beauty contest, even if the only other competitors had been Boris Karloff, King Kong and Oofy Prosser of the Drones.

But then, of course, one had to remind oneself that looks aren’t everything. A cauliflower ear can hide a heart of gold, as in Kipper’s case it did, his being about as gold as they come. His brain, too, might have helped to do the trick. You can’t hold down an editorial post on an important London weekly paper without being fairly well fixed with the little grey cells, and girls admire that sort of thing. And one had to remember that most of the bimbos to whom Roberta Wickham had been giving the bird through the years had been of the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ type, fellows who had more or less shot their bolt after saying ‘Eh, what?’ and slapping their leg with a hunting crop. Kipper must have come as a nice change.

Still, the whole thing provided, as I say, food for thought, and I was in what is called a reverie as I made my way to the house, a reverie so profound that no turf accountant would have given any but the shortest odds against my sooner or later bumping into something. And this, to cut a long story s., I did. It might have been a tree, a bush or a rustic seat. In actual fact it turned out to be Aubrey Upjohn. I came on him round a corner and rammed him squarely before I could put the brakes on. I clutched him round the neck and he
clutched
me about the middle, and for some moments we tottered to and fro, linked in a close embrace. Then, the mists clearing from my eyes, I saw who it was that I had been treading the measure with.