It must have hit Rocky the same way, for he gave me a pleading look.
‘You’ll come along, won’t you, Bertie, and have a drink at the flat?’
I had a feeling that this wasn’t in the contract, but there wasn’t anything to be done. It seemed brutal to leave the poor chap alone with the woman, so I went along.
Right from the start, from the moment we stepped into the taxi, the feeling began to grow that something was about to break loose. A massive silence prevailed in the corner where the aunt sat, and, though Rocky, balancing himself on the little seat in front, did his best to supply dialogue, we weren’t a chatty party.
I had a glimpse of Jeeves as we went into the flat, sitting in his lair, and I wished I could have called to him to rally round. Something told me that I was about to need him.
The stuff was on the table in the sitting-room. Rocky took up the decanter.
‘Say when, Bertie.’
‘Stop!’ barked the aunt, and he dropped it.
I caught Rocky’s eye as he stooped to pick up the ruins. It was the eye of one who sees it coming.
‘Leave it there, Rockmetteller!’ said Aunt Isabel; and Rocky left it there.
‘The time has come to speak,’ she said. ‘I cannot stand idly by and see a young man going to perdition!’
Poor old Rocky gave a sort of gurgle, a kind of sound rather like the whisky had made running out of the decanter on to my carpet.
‘Eh?’ he said, blinking.
The aunt proceeded.
‘The fault,’ she said, ‘was mine. I had not then seen the light. But now my eyes are open. I see the hideous mistake I have made. I shudder at the thought of the wrong I did you, Rockmetteller, by urging you into contact with this wicked city.’
I saw Rocky grope feebly for the table. His fingers touched it, and a look of relief came into the poor chappie’s face. I understood his feelings.
‘But when I wrote you that letter, Rockmetteller, instructing you to go to the city and live its life, I had not had the privilege of hearing Mr Mundy speak on the subject of New York.’
‘Jimmy Mundy!’ I cried.
You know how it is sometimes when everything seems all mixed up and you suddenly get a clue. When she mentioned Jimmy Mundy I began to understand more or less what had happened. I’d seen it happen before. I remember, back in England, the man I had before Jeeves sneaked off to a meeting on his evening out and came back and denounced me in front of a crowd of chappies I was giving a bit of supper to as a useless blot on the fabric of Society.
The aunt gave me a withering up and down.
‘Yes; Jimmy Mundy!’ she said. ‘I am surprised at a man of your stamp having heard of him. There is no music, there are no drunken, dancing men, no shameless, flaunting women at his meetings; so for you they would have no attraction. But for others, less dead in sin, he has his message. He has come to save New York from itself; to force it – in his picturesque phrase – to hit the trail. It was three days ago, Rockmetteller, that I first heard him. It was an accident that took me to his meeting. How often in this life a mere accident may shape our whole future!
‘You had been called away by that telephone message from Mr Belasco; so you could not take me to the Hippodrome, as we had arranged. I asked your man-servant, Jeeves, to take me there. The man has very little intelligence. He seems to have misunderstood me. I am thankful that he did. He took me to what I subsequently learned was Madison Square Garden, where Mr Mundy is holding his meetings. He escorted me to a seat and then left me. And it was not till the meeting had begun that I discovered the mistake which had been made. My seat was in the middle of a row. I could not leave without inconveniencing a great many people, so I remained.’
She gulped.
‘Rockmetteller, I have never been so thankful for anything else. Mr Mundy was wonderful! He was like some prophet of old, scourging the sins of the people. He leaped about in a frenzy of inspiration till I feared he would do himself an injury. Sometimes he expressed himself in a somewhat odd manner, but every word carried conviction. He showed me New York in its true colours. He showed me the vanity and wickedness of sitting in gilded haunts of vice, eating lobster when decent people should be in bed.
‘He said that the tango and the fox-trot were devices of the devil to drag people down into the Bottomless Pit. He said that there was more sin in ten minutes with a negro banjo orchestra than in all the ancient revels of Nineveh and Babylon. And when he stood on one leg and pointed right at where I was sitting and shouted “This means you!” I could have sunk through the floor. I came away a changed woman. Surely you must have noticed the change in me, Rockmetteller? You must have seen that I was no longer the careless, thoughtless person who had urged you to dance in those places of wickedness?’
Rocky was holding on to the table as if it was his only friend.
‘Y-yes,’ he stammered; ‘I – I thought something was wrong.’
‘Wrong? Something was right! Everything was right! Rockmetteller, it is not too late for you to be saved. You have only sipped of the evil cup. You have not drained it. It will be hard at first, but you will find that you can do it if you fight with a stout heart against the glamour and fascination of this dreadful city. Won’t you, for my sake, try, Rockmetteller? Won’t you go to the country to-morrow and begin the struggle? Little by little, if you use your will—’
I can’t help thinking it must have been that word ‘will’ that roused dear old Rocky like a trumpet call. It must have brought home to him the realisation that a miracle had come off and saved him from being cut out of Aunt Isabel’s. At any rate, as she said it he perked up, let go of the table, and faced her with gleaming eyes.
‘Do you want me to go to the country, Aunt Isabel?’
‘Yes.’
‘To live in the country?’
‘Yes, Rockmetteller.’
‘Stay in the country all the time? Never come to New York?’
‘Yes, Rockmetteller; I mean just that. It is the only way. Only there can you be safe from temptation. Will you do it, Rockmetteller? Will you – for my sake?’
Rocky grabbed the table again. He seemed to draw a lot of encouragement from that table.
‘I will!’ he said.
‘Jeeves,’ I said. It was next day, and I was back in the old flat, lying in the old arm-chair, with my feet upon the good old table. I had just come from seeing dear old Rocky off to his country cottage, and an hour before he had seen his aunt off to whatever hamlet it was that she was the curse of; so we were alone at last. ‘Jeeves, there’s no place like home – what?’
‘Very true, sir.’
‘The jolly old roof-tree, and all that sort of thing – what?’
‘Precisely, sir.’
I lit another cigarette.
‘Jeeves.’
‘Sir?’
‘Do you know, at one point in the business I really thought you were baffled.’
‘Indeed, sir?’
‘When did you get the idea of taking Miss Rockmetteller to the meeting? It was pure genius!’
‘Thank you, sir. It came to me a little suddenly, one morning when I was thinking of my aunt, sir.’
‘Your aunt? The hansom cab one?’
‘Yes, sir. I recollected that, whenever we observed one of her attacks coming on, we used to send for the clergyman of the parish. We always found that if he talked to her a while of higher things it diverted her mind from hansom cabs. It occurred to me that the same treatment might prove efficacious in the case of Miss Rockmetteller.’
I was stunned by the man’s resource.
‘It’s brain,’ I said; ‘pure brain! What do you do to get like that, Jeeves? I believe you must eat a lot of fish, or something. Do you eat a lot of fish, Jeeves?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Oh, well, then, it’s just a gift, I take it; and if you aren’t born that way there’s no use worrying.’
‘Precisely, sir,’ said Jeeves. ‘If I might make the suggest
ion, sir, I should not continue to wear your present tie. The green shade gives you a slightly bilious air. I should strongly advocate the blue with the red domino pattern instead, sir.’
‘All right, Jeeves,’ I said humbly. ‘You know!’
6 THE RUMMY AFFAIR OF OLD BIFFY
‘JEEVES,’ I SAID, emerging from the old tub, ‘rally round.’
‘Yes, sir.’
I beamed on the man with no little geniality. I was putting in a week or two in Paris at the moment, and there’s something about Paris that always makes me feel fairly full of espièglerie and joie de vivre.
‘Lay out our gent’s medium-smart raiment, suitable for Bohemian revels,’ I said. ‘I am lunching with an artist bloke on the other side of the river.’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘And if anybody calls for me, Jeeves, say that I shall be back towards the quiet evenfall.’
‘Yes, sir. Mr Biffen rang up on the telephone while you were in your bath.’
‘Mr Biffen? Good heavens!’
Amazing how one’s always running across fellows in foreign cities – coves, I mean, whom you haven’t seen for ages and would have betted weren’t anywhere in the neighbourhood. Paris was the last place where I should have expected to find old Biffy popping up. There was a time when he and I had been lads about town together, lunching and dining together practically every day; but some eighteen months back his old godmother had died and left him that place in Herefordshire, and he had retired there to wear gaiters and prod cows in the ribs and generally be the country gentleman and landed proprietor. Since then I had hardly seen him.
‘Old Biffy in Paris? What’s he doing here?’
‘He did not confide in me, sir,’ said Jeeves – a trifle frostily, I thought. It sounded somehow as if he didn’t like Biffy. And yet they had always been matey enough in the old days.
‘Where’s he staying?’
‘At the Hotel Avenida, Rue du Colisée, sir. He informed me that he was about to take a walk and would call this afternoon.’
‘Well, if he comes when I’m out, tell him to wait. And now, Jeeves, mes gants, mon chapeau, et le whangee de monsieur. I must be popping.’
It was such a corking day and I had so much time in hand that near the Sorbonne I stopped my cab, deciding to walk the rest of the way. And I had hardly gone three steps and a half when there on the pavement before me stood old Biffy in person. If I had completed the last step I should have rammed him.
‘Biffy!’ I cried. ‘Well, well, well!’
He peered at me in a blinking kind of way, rather like one of his Herefordshire cows prodded unexpectedly while lunching.
‘Bertie!’ he gurgled, in a devout sort of tone. ‘Thank God!’ He clutched my arm. ‘Don’t leave me, Bertie. I’m lost.’
‘What do you mean, lost?’
‘I came out for a walk and suddenly discovered after a mile or two that I didn’t know where on earth I was. I’ve been wandering round in circles for hours.’
‘Why didn’t you ask the way?’
‘I can’t speak a word of French.’
‘Well, why didn’t you call a taxi?’
‘I suddenly discovered I’d left all my money at my hotel.’
‘You could have taken a cab and paid it when you got to the hotel.’
‘Yes, but I suddenly discovered, dash it, that I’d forgotten its name.’
And there in a nutshell you have Charles Edward Biffen. As vague and woollen-headed a blighter as ever bit a sandwich. Goodness knows – and my Aunt Agatha will bear me out in this – I’m no mastermind myself; but compared with Biffy I’m one of the great thinkers of all time.
‘I’d give a shilling,’ said Biffy wistfully, ‘to know the name of that hotel.’
‘You can owe it me. Hotel Avenida, Rue du Colisée.’
‘Bertie! This is uncanny. How the deuce did you know?’
‘That was the address you left with Jeeves this morning.’
‘So it was. I had forgotten.’
‘Well, come along and have a drink, and then I’ll put you in a cab and send you home. I’m engaged for lunch, but I’ve plenty of time.’
We drifted to one of the eleven cafés which jostled each other along the street and I ordered restoratives.
‘What on earth are you doing in Paris?’ I asked.
‘Bertie, old man,’ said Biffy solemnly, ‘I came here to try and forget.’
‘Well, you’ve certainly succeeded.’
‘You don’t understand. The fact is, Bertie, old lad, my heart is broken. I’ll tell you the whole story.’
‘No, I say!’ I protested. But he was off.
‘Last year,’ said Biffy, ‘I buzzed over to Canada to do a bit of salmon fishing.’
I ordered another. If this was going to be a fish-story, I needed stimulants.
‘On the liner going to New York I met a girl.’ Biffy made a sort of curious gulping noise not unlike a bulldog trying to swallow half a cutlet in a hurry so as to be ready for the other half. ‘Bertie, old man, I can’t describe her. I simply can’t describe her.’
This was all to the good.
‘She was wonderful! We used to walk on the boat-deck after dinner. She was on the stage. At least, sort of.’
‘How do you mean, sort of?’
‘Well, she had posed for artists and been a mannequin in a big dressmaker’s and all that sort of thing, don’t you know. Anyway, she had saved up a few pounds and was on her way to see if she could get a job in New York. She told me all about herself. Her father ran a milk-walk in Clapham. Or it may have been Crickle-wood. At least, it was either a milk-walk or a boot-shop.’
‘Easily confused.’
‘What I’m trying to make you understand,’ said Biffy, ‘is that she came of good, sturdy, respectable middle-class stock. Nothing flashy about her. The sort of wife any man might have been proud of.’
‘Well, whose wife was she?’
‘Nobody’s. That’s the whole point of the story. I wanted her to be mine, and I lost her.’
‘Had a quarrel, you mean?’
‘No, I don’t mean we had a quarrel. I mean I literally lost her. The last I ever saw of her was in the Customs sheds at New York. We were behind a pile of trunks, and I had just asked her to be my wife, and she had just said she would and everything was perfectly splendid, when a most offensive blighter in a peaked cap came up to talk about some cigarettes which he had found at the bottom of my trunk and which I had forgotten to declare. It was getting pretty late by then, for we hadn’t docked till about ten-thirty, so I told Mabel to go on to her hotel and I would come round next day and take her to lunch. And since then I haven’t set eyes on her.’
‘You mean she wasn’t at the hotel?’
‘Probably she was. But—’
‘You don’t mean you never turned up?’
‘Bertie, old man,’ said Biffy, in an overwrought kind of way, ‘for Heaven’s sake don’t keep trying to tell me what I mean and what I don’t mean! Let me tell this my own way, or I shall get all mixed up and have to go back to the beginning.’
‘Tell it your own way,’ I said hastily.
‘Well, then, to put it in a word, Bertie, I forgot the name of the hotel. By the time I’d done half an hour’s heavy explaining about those cigarettes my mind was a blank. I had an idea I had written the name down somewhere, but I couldn’t have done, for it wasn’t on any of the papers in my pocket. No, it was no good. She was gone.’
‘Why didn’t you make inquiries?’
‘Well, the fact is, Bertie, I had forgotten her name.’
‘Oh, no, dash it!’ I said. This seemed a bit too thick even for Biffy. ‘How could you forget her name? Besides, you told it me a moment ago. Muriel or something.’
‘Mabel,’ corrected Biffy coldly. ‘It was her surname I’d forgotten. So I gave it up and went to Canada.’
‘But half a second,’ I said. ‘You must have told her your name. I mean, if you couldn’t trace he
r, she could trace you.’
‘Exactly. That’s what makes it all seem so infernally hopeless. She knows my name and where I live and everything, but I haven’t heard a word from her. I suppose, when I didn’t turn up at the hotel, she took it that that was my way of hinting delicately that I had changed my mind and wanted to call the thing off.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. There didn’t seem anything else to suppose. ‘Well, the only thing to do is to whizz around and try to heal the wound, what? How about dinner to-night, winding up at the Abbaye or one of those places?’
Biffy shook his head
‘It wouldn’t be any good. I’ve tried it. Besides, I’m leaving on the four o’clock train. I have a dinner engagement to-morrow with a man who’s nibbling at that house of mine in Herefordshire.’
‘Oh, are you trying to sell that place? I thought you liked it.’
‘I did. But the idea of going on living in that great, lonely barn of a house after what has happened appals me, Bertie. So when Sir Roderick Glossop came along—’
‘Sir Roderick Glossop! You don’t mean the loony-doctor?’
‘The great nerve specialist, yes. Why, do you know him?’
It was a warm day, but I shivered.
‘I was engaged to his daughter for a week or two,’ I said, in a hushed voice. The memory of that narrow squeak always made me feel faint.
‘Has he a daughter?’ said Biffy absently.
‘He has. Let me tell you all about—’
‘Not just now, old man,’ said Biffy, getting up. ‘I ought to be going back to my hotel to see about my packing.’
Which, after I had listened to his story, struck me as pretty low-down. However, the longer you live, the more you realise that the good old sporting spirit of give-and-take has practically died out in our midst. So I boosted him into a cab and went off to lunch.
It can’t have been more than ten days after this that I received a nasty shock while getting outside my morning tea and toast. The English papers had arrived, and Jeeves was just drifting out of the room after depositing The Times by my bed-side, when, as I idly turned the pages in search of the sporting section, a paragraph leaped out and hit me squarely in the eyeball.
Carry On, Jeeves! Page 12