The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 4: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.4 (53 page)

Some minutes later my fellow-rooster came out of the silence. No doubt the haughtiness of my manner had intimidated him, for there was a mildness in his voice which had not been there before.

‘Mr. Wooster.’

I turned coldly.

‘Were you addressing me, Bassett?’

‘There must be something we can do.’

‘You might fine the animal five pounds.’

‘We cannot stay here all night.’

‘Why not? What’s to stop us?’

This held him. He relapsed into silence once more. And we were sitting there like a couple of Trappist monks, when a voice said ‘Well, for heaven’s sake!’ and I perceived that Stiffy was with us.

Not surprising, of course, that she should have turned up sooner or later. If Scotties come, I ought to have said to myself, can Stiffy be far behind?

CONSIDERING THAT SO
substantial a part of her waking hours is devoted to thrusting innocent bystanders into the soup, Stiffy is far prettier than she has any right to be. She’s on the small side – petite, I believe, is the technical term – and I have always felt that when she and Stinker walk up the aisle together, if they ever do, their disparity in height should be good for a laugh or two from the ringside pews. The thought has occurred to me more than once that the correct response for Stinker to make, when asked by the M.C. if he is prepared to take this Stephanie to be his wedded wife, would be, ‘Why, certainly, what there is of her.’

‘What on earth do you two think you’re doing?’ she inquired, not unnaturally surprised to see her uncle and an old friend in our current position. ‘And why have you been upsetting the furniture?’

‘That was me,’ I said. ‘I bumped into the grandfather clock. I’m as bad as Stinker, aren’t I, bumping into things, ha-ha.’

‘Less of the ha-ha,’ she riposted warmly. ‘And don’t mention yourself in the same breath as my Harold. Well, that doesn’t explain why you’re sitting up there like a couple of buzzards on a tree top.’

Pop Bassett intervened, speaking at his sniffiest. Her comparison of him to a buzzard, though perfectly accurate, seemed to have piqued him.

‘We were savagely attacked by your dog.’

‘Not so much attacked,’ I said, ‘as given nasty looks. We didn’t vouchsafe him time to attack us, deeming it best to get out of his sphere of influence before he could settle down to work. He’s been trying to get at us for the last two hours, at least it seems like two hours.’

She was quick to defend the dumb chum.

‘Well, how can you blame the poor angel? Naturally he thought you were international spies in the pay of Moscow. Prowling about the house at this time of night. I can understand Bertie doing it, because he was dropped on the head as a baby, but I’m surprised at you, Uncle Watkyn. Why don’t you go to bed?’

‘I shall be delighted to go to bed,’ said Pop Bassett stiffly, ‘if you will kindly remove this animal. He is a public menace.’

‘Very highly-strung,’ I put in. ‘We were remarking on it only just now.’

‘He’s all right, if you don’t go out of your way to stir him up. Get back to your basket, Bartholomew, you bounder,’ said Stiffy, and such was the magic of her personality that the hound turned on its heel without a word and passed into the night.

Pop Bassett climbed down from the chest, and directed a fishy magisterial look at me.

‘Good night, Mr. Wooster. If there is any more of my furniture you wish to break, pray consider yourself at perfect liberty to indulge your peculiar tastes,’ he said, and he, too, passed into the night.

Stiffy looked after him with a thoughtful eye.

‘I don’t believe Uncle Watkyn likes you, Bertie. I noticed the way he kept staring at you at dinner, as if appalled. Well, I don’t wonder your arrival hit him hard. It did me. I’ve never been so surprised in my life as when you suddenly bobbed up like a corpse rising to the surface of a sheet of water. Harold told me he had pleaded with you to come here, but nothing would induce you. What made you change your mind?’

In my previous sojourn at Totleigh Towers circumstances had compelled me to confide in this young prune my position as regarded her cousin Madeline, so I had no hesitation now in giving her the low-down.

‘I learned that there was trouble between Madeline and Gussie, due, I have since been informed, to her forcing him to follow in the footsteps of the poet Shelley and become a vegetarian, and I felt that I might accomplish something as a
raisonneur
.’

‘As a whatonneur?’

‘I thought that would be a bit above your head. It’s a French expression meaning, I believe, though I would have to check with Jeeves, a calm kindly man of the world who intervenes when a rift has occurred between two loving hearts and brings them together again. Very essential in the present crisis.’

‘You mean that if Madeline hands Gussie the pink slip, she’ll marry you?’

‘That, broadly, is about the strength of it. And while I admire and respect Madeline, I’m all against the idea of having her smiling face peeping at me over the coffee pot for the rest of my life. So I came along here to see what I could do.’

‘Well, you couldn’t have come at a better moment. Now you’re here, you can get cracking on that job Harold told you I want you to do for me.’

I saw that the time had come for some prompt in-the-bud-nipping.

‘Include me out. I won’t touch it. I know you and your jobs.’

‘But this is something quite simple. You can do it on your head. And you’ll be bringing sunshine and happiness into the life of a poor slob who can do with a bit of both. Were you ever a Boy Scout?’

‘Not since early boyhood.’

‘Then you’ve lots of leeway to make up in the way of kind deeds. This’ll be a nice start for you. The facts are as follows.’

‘I don’t want to hear them.’

‘You would prefer that I recalled Bartholomew and told him to go on where he left off?’

She had what Jeeves had called a talking point.

‘Very well. Tell me all. But briefly.’

‘It won’t take long, and then you can be off to beddy-bye. You remember that little black statuette thing on the table at dinner.’

‘Ah yes, the eyesore.’

‘Uncle Watkyn bought it from a man called Plank.’

‘So I gathered.’

‘Well, do you know what he paid him for it?’

‘A thousand quid, didn’t you say?’

‘No, I didn’t. I said it was worth that. But he got it out of this poor blighter Plank for a fiver.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No, I’m not. He paid him five pounds. He makes no secret of it. When we were at Brinkley, he was showing the thing to Mr. Travers and telling him all about it … how he happened to see it on Plank’s mantelpiece and spotted how valuable it was and told Plank it was worth practically nothing but he would give him five pounds for it because he knew how hard up he was. He gloated over how clever he had been, and Mr. Travers writhed like an egg whisk.’

I could well believe it. If there’s one thing that makes a collector spit blood, it’s hearing about another collector getting a bargain.

‘How do you know Plank was hard up?’

‘Well, would he have let the thing go for a fiver if he wasn’t?’

‘Something in that.’

‘You can’t say Uncle Watkyn isn’t a dirty dog.’

‘I would never dream of saying he isn’t – and always has been – the dirtiest of dogs. It bears out what I have frequently maintained, that there are no depths to which magistrates won’t stoop. I don’t wonder you look askance. Your Uncle Watkyn stands revealed as a chiseller of the lowest type. But nothing to be done about it, of course.’

‘I don’t know so much about that.’

‘Why, have you tried doing anything?’

‘In a sort of way. I arranged that Harold should preach a very strong sermon on Naboth’s Vineyard. Not that I suppose you’ve ever heard of Naboth’s Vineyard.’

I bridled. She had offended my
amour propre
.

‘I doubt if there’s a man in London and the home counties who has the facts relating to Naboth’s Vineyard more thoroughly at his fingertips than me. The news may not have reached you, but when at school I once won a prize for Scripture Knowledge.’

‘I bet you cheated.’

‘Not at all. Sheer merit. Did Stinker co-operate?’

‘Yes, he thought it was a splendid idea and went about sucking throat pastilles for a week, so as to be in good voice. The set-up was the same as the play in
Hamlet
. You know. With which to catch the conscience of the king and all that.’

‘Yes, I see the strategy all right. How did it all work out?’

‘It didn’t. Harold lives in the cottage of Mrs. Bootle, the postman’s wife, where they only have oil lamps, and the sermon was on a table with a lamp on it, and he bumped into the table and upset the lamp and it burned the sermon and he hadn’t time to write it out again, so he had to dig out something on another topic from the old stockpile. He was terribly disappointed.’

I pursed my lips, and was on the point of saying that of all the web-footed muddlers in existence H.P. Pinker took the well-known biscuit, when it occurred to me that it might possibly hurt her feelings, and I desisted. The last thing I wanted was to wound the child, particularly when I remembered that crack of hers about recalling Bartholomew.

‘So we’ve got to handle the thing another way, and that’s where you come in.’

I smiled a tolerant smile.

‘I can see where you’re heading,’ I said. ‘You want me to go to your Uncle Watkyn and slip a jack under his better self. “Play the game, Bassett,” you want me to say, “Let conscience be your guide, Bassett,” trying to drive it into his nut how wrong it is to put over a fast one on the widow and the orphan. I am assuming for purposes of argument that Plank is an orphan, though possibly not a widow. But my misguided young shrimp, do you really suppose that Pop Bassett looks on me as a friend and counsellor to whom he is always willing to lend a ready ear? You yourself were stressing only a moment ago how allergic he was to the Wooster charm. It’s no good me talking to him.’

‘I don’t want you to.’

‘Then what do you want me to do?’

‘I want you to pinch the thing and return it to Plank, who will then sell it to Mr. Travers at a proper price. The idea of Uncle Watkyn only giving him a fiver for it! We can’t have him getting away with raw work like that. He needs a sharp lesson.’

I smiled another tolerant smile. The young boll weevil amused me. I was thinking how right I had been in predicting that any job assigned by her to anyone would be unfit for human consumption.

‘Well, really, Stiffy!’

The quiet rebuke in my voice ought to have bathed her in shame and remorse, but it didn’t. She came back at me strongly.

‘I don’t know what you’re Well-really-ing about. You’re always pinching things, aren’t you? Policemen’s helmets and things like that.’

I inclined the bean. It was true that I had once lived in Arcady.

‘There is,’ I was obliged to concede, ‘a certain substance in what you say. I admit that in my time I may have removed a lid or two from the upper stories of members of the constabulary –’

‘Well, then.’

‘– but only on Boat Race Night and when the heart was younger than it is as of even date. It was an episode of the sort that first brought me and your Uncle Watkyn together. But you can take it from me that the hot blood has cooled and I’m a reformed character. My answer to your suggestion is No.’

‘No?’

‘N-ruddy-o,’ I said, making it clear to the meanest intelligence. ‘Why don’t you pinch the thing yourself?’

‘It wouldn’t be any good. I couldn’t take it to Plank. I’m confined to barracks. Bartholomew bit the butler, and the sins of the Scottie are visited upon its owner. I do think you might reconsider, Bertie.’

‘Not a hope.’

‘You’re a blighter!’

‘But a blighter who knows his own mind and is not to be shaken by argument or plea, however specious.’

She was silent for a space. Then she gave a little sigh.

‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘And I did hope I wouldn’t have to tell Madeline about Gussie.’

I gave another of those visible starts of mine. I’ve seldom heard words I liked the sound of less. Fraught with sinister significance they seemed to me.

‘Do you know what happened tonight, Bertie? I was roused from sleep about an hour ago, and what do you think roused me? Stealthy
footsteps,
no less. I crept out of my room, and I saw Gussie sneaking down the stairs. All was darkness, of course, but he had a little torch and it shone on his spectacles. I followed him. He went to the kitchen. I peered in, and there was the cook shovelling cold steak and kidney pie into him like a stevedore loading a grain ship. And the thought flashed into my mind that if Madeline heard of this, she would give him the bum’s rush before he knew what had hit him.’

‘But a girl doesn’t give a fellow the bum’s rush just because she’s told him to stick to the sprouts and spinach and she hears that he’s been wading into the steak and kidney pie,’ I said, trying to reassure myself but not getting within several yards of it.

‘I bet Madeline would.’

And so, thinking it over, did I. You can’t judge goofs like Madeline Bassett by ordinary standards. What the normal popsy would do and what she would do in any given circumstances were two distinct and separate things. I had not forgotten the time when she had severed relations with Gussie purely because through no fault of his own he got stinko when about to present the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School.

‘You know how high her ideals are. Yes, sir, if someone were to drop an incautious word to her about tonight’s orgy, those wedding bells would not ring out. Gussie would be at liberty, and she would start looking about her for somebody else to fill the vacant spot. I really think you’ll have to reconsider that decision of yours, Bertie, and do just this one more bit of pinching.’

‘Oh, my sainted aunt!’

I spoke as harts do when heated in the chase and panting for cooling streams. It would have been plain to a far less astute mind than mine that this blighted Byng had got me by the short hairs and was in a position to dictate tactics and strategy.