The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 4: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.4 (3 page)

This was the moment when, had conditions been normal, I would no doubt have laughed nervously, fingered the tie and shuffled the feet, but with two of Jeeves’s specials under my belt, still exercising their powerful spell, I not only remained intrepid but retorted with considerable spirit, putting him right in his place.

‘I fail to understand you, officer,’ I said coldly. ‘Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this is the hour when it is customary for an English gentleman to partake of a short snifter. Will you join me?’

His lip curled. Most unpleasant. These coppers are bad enough when they leave their lips
in statu quo
.

‘No, I won’t,’ he replied, curtly and offensively. ‘
I
don’t want to ruin my constitution. What do you suppose those things are going to do to your eye and your power of control? How can you expect to throw doubles if you persist in stupefying yourself with strong drink? It’s heart-breaking.’

I saw all. He was thinking of the Darts sweep.

The annual Darts sweep is one of the high spots of life at the Drones Club. It never fails to stir the sporting instincts of the members, causing them to roll up in dense crowds and purchase tickets at ten bob a go, with the result that the sum in the kitty is always colossal. This time my name had been drawn by Stilton, and as Horace Pendlebury-Davenport, last year’s winner, had gone and got married and at his wife’s suggestion resigned his membership, the thing was pretty generally recognized as a sitter for me, last year’s runner-up. ‘Wooster,’ the word flew to and fro, ‘is the deadest of snips. He throws a beautiful dart.’

So I suppose it was only natural in a way that, standing, if all went well, to scoop in a matter of fifty-six pounds ten shillings, Stilton should feel that it was his mission in life to see that I kept at the peak of my form. But that didn’t make this incessant surveillance of his easier to endure. Ever since he had glanced at his ticket, seen that it bore the name Wooster, and learned that I was a red-hot favourite for the tourney, his attitude towards me had been that of an official at Borstal told off to keep an eye on a more than ordinarily up-and-coming juvenile delinquent. He had a way of looming up beside me at the club, sniffing quickly at my glass and giving me an accusing look, coupled with a sharp whistling intake of the breath, and here he was now doing the same thing in my very home. It was worse than being back in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit and ringlets and having a keen-eyed nurse always at one’s elbow, watching one’s every move like a bally hawk.

I was about to say how deeply I resented being tailed up in this manner, when he resumed.

‘I have come here tonight to talk seriously to you, Wooster,’ he said, frowning in a most unpleasant manner. ‘I am shocked at the casual, frivolous way in which you are treating this Darts tournament. You seem not to be taking the most elementary precautions to ensure victory on the big day. It’s the old, old story. Over-confidence. All these fatheads keep telling you you’re sure to win, and you suck it down like one of your beastly cocktails. Well, let me tell you you’re living in a fool’s paradise. I happened to look in at the Drones this afternoon, and Freddie Widgeon was at the Darts board, stunning all beholders with a performance that took the breath away. His accuracy was sensational.’

I waved a hand and tossed the head. In fact, I suppose you might say I bridled. He had wounded my amour propre.

‘Tchah!’ I said, registering scorn.

‘Eh?’

‘I said “Tchah!” With ref. to F. Widgeon. I know his form backwards. Flashy, but no staying power. The man will be less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels.’

‘That’s what you think. As I said before, over-confidence. You can take it from me that Freddie is a very dangerous competitor. I happen to know that he has been in strict training for weeks. He’s knocked off smoking and has a cold bath every morning. Did you have a cold bath this morning?’

‘Certainly not. What do you suppose the hot tap’s for?’

‘Do you do Swedish exercises before breakfast?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of such a thing. Leave these excesses to the Swedes, I say.’

‘No,’ said Stilton bitterly. ‘All you do is riot and revel and carouse. I am told that you were at that party of Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright’s last night. You probably reeled home at three in the morning, rousing the neighbourhood with drunken shouts.’

I raised a haughty eyebrow. This police persecution was intolerable.

‘You would scarcely expect me, constable,’ I said coldly, ‘to absent myself from the farewell supper of a boyhood friend who is leaving for Hollywood in a day or two and may be away from civilization for years. Catsmeat would have been pained to his foundations if I had oiled out. And it wasn’t three in the morning, it was two-thirty.’

‘Did you drink anything?’

‘The merest sip.’

‘And smoke?’

‘The merest cigar.’

‘I don’t believe you. I’ll bet, if the truth was known,’ said Stilton morosely, intensifying the darkness of his frown, ‘you lowered yourself to the level of the beasts of the field. I’ll bet you whooped it up like a sailor in a Marseilles bistro. And from the fact that there is a white tie round your neck and a white waistcoat attached to your foul stomach at this moment I gather that you are planning to be off shortly to some other nameless orgy.’

I laughed one of my quiet laughs. The word amused me.

‘Orgy, eh? I’m giving dinner to some friends of my Aunt Dahlia’s, and she strictly warned me to lay off the old Falernian because my guests are teetotallers. When the landlord fills the flowing bowl, it will be with lemonade, barley water, or possibly lime juice. So much for your nameless orgies.’

This, as I had expected, had a mollifying effect on his acerbity, if acerbity is the word I want. He did not become genial, because he couldn’t, but he became as nearly genial as it was in his power to be. He practically smiled.

‘Capital,’ he said. ‘Capital. Most satisfactory.’

‘I’m glad you’re pleased. Well, good night.’

‘Teetotallers, eh? Yes, that’s excellent. But avoid all rich foods and sauces and be sure to get to bed early. What was that you said?’

‘I said good night. You’ll be wanting to run along, no doubt.’

‘I’m not running along.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Why the devil are women always late?’ he said peevishly. ‘She ought to have been here long ago. I’ve told her over and over again that if there’s one thing that makes Uncle Joe furious, it’s being kept waiting for his soup.’

This introduction of the sex motif puzzled me.

‘She?’

‘Florence. She is meeting me here. We’re dining with my uncle.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, well. So Florence will be with us ere long, will she? Splendid, splendid, splendid.’

I spoke with quite a bit of warmth and animation, trying to infuse a cheery note into the proceedings, and immediately wished I hadn’t, because he quivered like a palsy patient and gave me a keen glance, and I saw that we had got on to dangerous ground. A situation of considerable delicacy had been precipitated.

One of the things which make it difficult to bring about a beautiful friendship between G. D’Arcy Cheesewright and self is the fact that not long ago I unfortunately got tangled up in his love life. Incensed by some crack he had made about modern enlightened thought, modern enlightened thought being practically a personal buddy of hers, Florence gave him the swift heave-ho and – much against my will, but she seemed to wish it – became betrothed to me. And this had led Stilton, a man of volcanic passions, to express a desire to tear me limb from limb and dance buck-and-wing dances on my remains. He also spoke of stirring up my face like an omelette and buttering me over the West End of London.

Fortunately before matters could proceed to this awful extreme love resumed work at the old stand, with the result that my nomination was cancelled and the peril passed, but he has never really got over the distressing episode. Ever since then the green-eyed monster has always been more or less round and about, ready to snap into action at the drop of the hat, and he has tended to docket me as a snake in the grass that can do with a lot of watching.

So, though disturbed, I was not surprised that he now gave me that keen glance and spoke in a throaty growl, like a Bengal tiger snarling over its breakfast coolie.

‘What do you mean, splendid? Are you so anxious to see her?’

I saw that tact would be required.

‘Not anxious, exactly,’ I said smoothly. ‘The word is too strong. It’s just that I would like to have her opinion of this moustache of mine. She is a girl of taste, and I would be prepared to accept her verdict. Shortly before you arrived, Jeeves was subjecting the growth to some destructive criticism, and it shook me a little. What do you think of it, by the way?’

‘I think it’s ghastly.’

‘Ghastly?’

‘Revolting. You look like something in the chorus line of a touring
revue.
But you say Jeeves doesn’t like it?’

‘He didn’t seem to.’

‘Ah, so you’ll have to shave it. Thank God for that!’

I stiffened. I resent the view, so widely held in my circle of acquaintances, that I am a mere Hey-you in the home, bowing to Jeeves’s behests like a Hollywood yes-man.

‘Over my dead body I’ll shave it! It stays just where it is, rooted to the spot. A fig for Jeeves, if I may use the expression.’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Well, it’s up to you, I suppose. If you don’t mind making yourself an eyesore –’

I stiffened a bit further.

‘Did you say eyesore?’

‘Eyesore was what I said.’

‘Oh, it was, was it?’ I riposted, and it is possible that, had we not been interrupted, the exchanges would have become heated, for I was still under the stimulating influence of those specials and in no mood to brook back-chat. But before I could tell him that he was a fatheaded ass, incapable of recognizing the rare and the beautiful if handed to him on a skewer, the door bell rang again and Jeeves announced Florence.

IT’S JUST OCCURRED
to me, thinking back, that in that passage where I gave a brief pen portrait of her – fairly near the start of this narrative, if you remember – I may have made a bloomer and left you with a wrong impression of Florence Craye. Informed that she was an intellectual girl who wrote novels and was like ham and eggs with the boys with the bulging foreheads out Bloomsbury way, it is possible that you conjured up in your mind’s eye the picture of something short and dumpy with ink spots on the chin, as worn by so many of the female intelligentsia.

Such is far from being the truth. She is tall and willowy and handsome, with a terrific profile and luxuriant platinum-blond hair, and might, so far as looks are concerned, be the star unit of the harem of one of the better-class Sultans. I have known strong men to be bowled over by her at first sight, and it is seldom that she takes her walks abroad without being whistled at by visiting Americans.

She came breezing in, dressed up to the nines, and Stilton received her with a cold eye on his wrist-watch.

‘So there you are at last,’ he said churlishly. ‘About time, dash it. I suppose you had forgotten that Uncle Joe has a nervous breakdown if he’s kept waiting for his soup.’

I was expecting some haughty response to this crack, for I knew her to be a girl of spirit, but she ignored the rebuke, and I saw that her eyes, which are bright and hazel in colour, were resting on me with a strange light in them. I don’t know if you have ever seen a female of what they call teen-age gazing raptly at Humphrey Bogart in a cinema, but her deportment was much along those lines. More than a touch of the Soul’s Awakening, if I make my meaning clear.

‘Bertie!’ she yipped, shaking from stem to stern. ‘The moustache! It’s
lovely
! Why have you kept this from us all these years? It’s wonderful. It gives you such a dashing look. It alters your whole appearance.’

Well, after the bad Press the old fungus had been getting of late, you might have thought that a rave notice like this would have been
right
up my street. I mean, while one lives for one’s Art, so to speak, and cares little for the public’s praise or blame and all that sort of thing, one can always do with something to paste into one’s scrapbook, can one not? But it left me cold, particularly in the vicinity of the feet. I found my eye swivelling round to Stilton, to see how he was taking it, and was concerned to note that he was taking it extremely big.

Pique. That’s the word I was trying to think of. He was looking definitely piqued, like a diner in a restaurant who has bitten into a bad oyster, and I wasn’t sure I altogether blamed him, for his loved one had not only patted my cheek with an affectionate hand but was drinking me in with such wide-eyed admiration that any fiancé, witnessing the spectacle, might well have been excused for growing a bit hot under the collar. And Stilton, of course, as I have already indicated, is a chap who could give Othello a couple of bisques and be dormy one at the eighteenth.

It seemed to me that unless prompt steps were taken through the proper channels, raw passions might be unchained, so I hastened to change the subject.

‘Tell me all about your uncle, Stilton,’ I said. ‘Fond of soup, is he? Quite a boy for the bouillon, yes?’

He merely gave a grunt like a pig dissatisfied with its ration for the day, so I changed the subject again.

‘How is
Spindrift
going?’ I asked Florence. ‘Still selling pretty copiously?’

I had said the right thing. She beamed.

‘Yes, it’s doing splendidly. It has just gone into another edition.’

‘That’s good.’

‘You knew it had been made into a play?’

‘Eh? Oh, yes. Yes, I heard about that.’

‘Do you know Percy Gorringe?’

I winced a trifle. Proposing, as I did, to expunge the joy from Percy’s life by giving him the uncompromising miss-in-baulk before tomorrow’s sun had set, I would have preferred to keep him out of the conversation. I said the name seemed somehow familiar, as if I had heard it somewhere in some connection.

‘He did the dramatization. He has made a splendid job of it.’