‘Mr Wooster has always been gratifyingly appreciative of my humble efforts on his behalf, m’lord.’
‘What beats me and has always beaten me is why he ever let you go. When you came to me that day and said you were at liberty, you could have bowled me over. The only explanation I could think of was that he was off his rocker … or more off his rocker than he usually is. Or did you have a row with him and hand in your portfolio?’
Jeeves seemed distressed at the suggestion.
‘Oh, no, m’lord. My relations with Mr Wooster continue uniformly cordial, but circumstances have compelled a temporary separation. Mr Wooster is attending a school which does not permit its student body to employ gentlemen’s personal gentlemen.’
‘A school?’
‘An institution designed to teach the aristocracy to fend for itself, m’lord. Mr Wooster, though his finances are still quite sound, feels that it is prudent to build for the future, in case the social revolution should set in with even greater severity. Mr Wooster … I can hardly mention this without some display of emotion … is actually learning to darn his own socks. The course he is taking includes boot-cleaning, sock-darning, bed-making and primary-grade cooking.’
‘Golly! Well, that’s certainly a novel experience for Bertie.’
‘Yes, m’lord. Mr Wooster doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange. I quote the Bard of Stratford. Would your lordship care for another quick whisky and soda before joining Lady Carmoyle?’
‘No, we mustn’t waste a moment. As you were saying not long ago, time is of the … what, Jeeves?’
‘Essence, m’lord.’
‘Essence? You’re sure?’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘Well, if you say so, though I always thought an essence was a sort of scent. Right ho, then, let’s go.’
‘Very good, m’lord.’
6
* * *
IT WAS WITH her mind in something of a whirl that Mrs Spottsworth had driven away from the door of the Goose and Gherkin. The encounter with Captain C.G. Biggar had stirred her quite a good deal.
Mrs Spottsworth was a woman who attached considerable importance to what others of less sensitivity would have dismissed carelessly as chance happenings or coincidences. She did not believe in chance. In her lexicon there was no such word as coincidence. These things, she held, were meant. This unforeseen return into her life of the White Hunter could be explained, she felt, only on the supposition that some pretty adroit staff work had been going on in the spirit world.
It had happened at such a particularly significant moment. Only two days previously A.B. Spottsworth, chatting with her on the ouija board, had remarked, after mentioning that he was very happy and eating lots of fruit, that it was high time she thought of getting married again. No sense, A.B. Spottsworth had said, in her living a lonely life with all that money in the bank. A woman needs a mate, he had asserted, adding that Cliff Bessemer, with whom he had exchanged a couple of words that morning in the vale of light, felt the same. ‘And they don’t come more level-headed than old Cliff Bessemer,’ said A.B. Spottsworth.
And when his widow had asked ‘But, Alexis, wouldn’t you and Clifton mind me marrying again?’ A.B. Spottsworth had replied in his bluff way, spelling the words out carefully, ‘Of course we wouldn’t, you dumb-bell. Go to it, kid.’
And right on top of that dramatic conversation who should pop up out of a trap but the man who had loved her with a strong silent passion from the first moment they had met. It was uncanny. One would have said that passing the veil made the late Messrs Bessemer and Spottsworth clairvoyant.
Inasmuch as Captain Biggar, as we have seen, had not spoken his love but had let concealment like a worm i’ the bud feed on his tomato-coloured cheek, it may seem strange that Mrs Spottsworth should have known anything about the way he felt. But a woman can always tell. When she sees a man choke up and look like an embarrassed beetroot every time he catches her eye over the eland steaks and lime juice, she soon forms an adequate diagnosis of his case.
The recurrence of these phenomena during those moments of farewell outside the Goose and Gherkin showed plainly, moreover, that the passage of time had done nothing to cool off the gallant captain. She had not failed to observe the pop-eyed stare in his keen blue eyes, the deepening of the hue of his vermilion face and the way his number eleven feet had shuffled from start to finish of the interview. If he did not still consider her the tree on which the fruit of his life hung, Rosalinda Spottsworth was vastly mistaken. She was a little surprised that nothing had emerged in the way of an impassioned declaration. But how could she know that a feller had his code?
Driving through the pleasant Southmoltonshire country, she found her thoughts dwelling lingeringly on Captain C.G. Biggar.
At their very first meeting in Kenya she had found something about him that attracted her, and two days later this mild liking had become a rather fervent admiration. A woman cannot help but respect a man capable of upping with his big-bored .505 Gibbs and blowing the stuffing out of a charging buffalo. And from respect to love is as short a step as that from Harrige’s Glass Fancy Goods and Chinaware department to the Ladies’ Underclothing. He seemed to her like someone out of Ernest Hemingway, and she had always had a weakness for those rough, tough devil-may-care Hemingway characters. Spiritual herself, she was attracted by roughness and toughness in the male. Clifton Bessemer had had those qualities. So had A.B. Spottsworth. What had first impressed her in Clifton Bessemer had been the way he had swatted a charging fly with a rolled-up evening paper at the studio party where they had met, and in the case of A.B. Spottsworth the spark had been lit when she heard him one afternoon in conversation with a Paris taxi driver who had expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of his fare.
As she passed through the great gates of Rowcester Abbey and made her way up the long drive, it was beginning to seem to her that she might do considerably worse than cultivate Captain Biggar. A woman needs a protector, and what better protector can she find than a man who thinks nothing of going into tall grass after a wounded lion? True, wounded lions do not enter largely into the ordinary married life, but it is nice for a wife to know that if one does happen to come along, she can leave it with every confidence to her husband to handle.
It would not, she felt, be a difficult matter to arrange the necessary preliminaries. A few kind words and a melting look or two ought to be quite sufficient to bring that strong, passionate nature to the boil. These men of the wilds respond readily to melting looks.
She was just trying one out in the mirror of her car when, as she rounded a bend in the drive, Rowcester Abbey suddenly burst upon her view, and for the moment Captain Biggar was forgotten. She could think of nothing but that she had found the house of her dreams. Its mellow walls aglow in the rays of the setting sun, its windows glittering like jewels, it seemed to her like some palace of Fairyland. The little place in Pasadena, the little place in Carmel, and the little places in New York, Florida, Maine and Oregon were well enough in their way, but this outdid them all. Houses like Rowcester Abbey always look their best from outside and at a certain distance.
She stopped the car and sat there, gazing raptly.
Rory and Monica, tired of waiting in the yew alley, had returned to the house and met Bill coming out. All three had gone back into the living room, where they were now discussing the prospects of a quick sale to this female Santa Claus from across the Atlantic. Bill, though feeling a little better after his whisky and soda, was still in a feverish state. His goggling eyes and twitching limbs would have interested a Harley Street physician, had one been present to observe them.
‘Is there a hope?’ he quavered, speaking rather like an invalid on a sickbed addressing his doctor.
‘I think so,’ said Monica.
‘I don’t,’ said Rory.
Monica quelled him with a glance.
‘The impression I got at that women’s lunch in New York,’ she said, ‘w
as that she was nibbling. I gave her quite a blast of propaganda and definitely softened her up. All that remains now is to administer the final shove. When she arrives, I’ll leave you alone together, so that you can exercise that well-known charm of yours. Give her the old personality.’
‘I will,’ said Bill fervently. ‘I’ll be like a turtle dove cooing to a female turtle dove. I’ll play on her as on a stringed instrument.’
‘Well, mind you do, because if the sale comes off, I’m expecting a commission.’
‘You shall have it, Moke, old thing. You shall be repaid a thousandfold. In due season there will present themselves at your front door elephants laden with gold and camels bearing precious stones and rare spices.’
‘How about apes, ivory and peacocks?’
‘They’ll be there.’
Rory, the practical, hard-headed businessman, frowned on this visionary stuff.
‘Well, will they?’ he said. ‘The point seems to me extremely moot. Even on the assumption that this woman is weak in the head I can’t see her paying a fortune for a place like Rowcester Abbey. To start with, all the farms are gone.’
‘That’s true,’ said Bill, damped. ‘And the park belongs to the local golf club. There’s only the house and garden.’
‘The garden, yes. And we know all about the garden, don’t we? I was saying to Moke only a short while ago that whereas in the summer months the river is at the bottom of the garden –’
‘Oh, be quiet,’ said Monica. ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t get fifteen thousand pounds, Bill. Maybe even as much as twenty.’
Bill revived like a watered flower.
‘Do you really think so?’
‘Of course she doesn’t,’ said Rory. ‘She’s just trying to cheer you up, and very sisterly of her, too. I honour her for it. Under that forbidding exterior there lurks a tender heart. But twenty thousand quid for a house from which even Reclaimed Juvenile Delinquents recoil in horror? Absurd. The thing’s a relic of the past. A hundred and forty-seven rooms!’
‘That’s a lot of house,’ argued Monica.
‘It’s a lot of junk,’ said Rory firmly. ‘It would cost a bally fortune to do it up.’
Monica was obliged to concede this.
‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘Still, Mrs Spottsworth’s the sort of woman who would be quite prepared to spend a million or so on that. You’ve been making a few improvements, I notice,’ she said to Bill.
‘A drop in the bucket.’
‘You’ve even done something about the smell on the first-floor landing.’
‘Wish I had the money it cost.’
‘You’re hard up?’
‘Stony.’
‘Then where the dickens,’ said Rory, pouncing like a prosecuting counsel, ‘do all these butlers and housemaids come from? That girl Jill Stick-in-the-mud –’
‘Her name is not Stick-in-the-mud.’
Rory raised a restraining hand.
‘Her name may or may not be Stick-in-the-mud,’ he said, letting the point go, for after all it was a minor one, ‘but the fact remains that she was holding us spellbound just now with a description of your domestic amenities which suggested the mad luxury that led to the fall of Babylon. Platoons of butlers, beauty choruses of housemaids, cooks in reckless profusion and stories flying about of boys to clean the knives and boots … I said to Moke after she’d left that I wondered if you had set up as a gentleman bur … That reminds me, old girl. Did you tell Bill about the police?’
Bill leaped a foot, and came down shaking in every limb.
‘The police? What about the police?’
‘Some blighter rang up from the local gendarmerie. The rozzers want to question you.’
‘What do you mean, question me?’
‘Grill you,’ explained Rory. ‘Give you the third degree. And there was another call before that. A mystery man who didn’t give his name. He and Moke kidded back and forth for a while.’
‘Yes, I talked to him,’ said Monica. ‘He had a voice that sounded as if he ate spinach with sand in it. He was inquiring about the licence number of your car.’
‘What!’
‘You haven’t run into somebody’s cow, have you? I understand that’s a very serious offence nowadays.’
Bill was still quivering briskly.
‘You mean someone was wanting to know the licence number of my car?’
‘That’s what I said. Why, what’s the matter, Bill? You’re looking as worried as a prune.’
‘White and shaken,’ agreed Rory. ‘Like a side-car.’ He laid a kindly hand on his brother-in-law’s shoulder. ‘Bill, tell me. Be frank. Why are you wanted by the police?’
‘I’m not wanted by the police.’
‘Well, it seems to be their dearest wish to get their hands on you. One theory that crossed my mind,’ said Rory, ‘was – I mentioned it to you, Moke, if you remember – that you had found some opulent bird with a guilty secret and were going in for a spot of blackmail. This may or may not be the case, but if it is, now is the time to tell us, Bill, old man. You’re among friends. Moke’s broad-minded, and I’m broad-minded. I know the police look a bit squiggle-eyed at blackmail, but I can’t see any objection to it myself. Quick profits and practically no overheads. If I had a son, I’m not at all sure I wouldn’t have him trained for that profession. So if the flatties are after you and you would like a helping hand to get you out of the country before they start watching the ports, say the word, and we’ll …’
‘Mrs Spottsworth,’ announced Jeeves from the doorway, and a moment later Bill had done another of those leaps in the air which had become so frequent with him of late.
He stood staring pallidly at the vision that entered.
7
* * *
MRS SPOTTSWORTH HAD COME sailing into the room with the confident air of a woman who knows that her hat is right, her dress is right, her shoes are right and her stockings are right and that she has a matter of forty-two million dollars tucked away in sound securities, and Bill, with a derelict country house for sale, should have found her an encouraging spectacle. For unquestionably she looked just the sort of person who would buy derelict English country houses by the gross without giving the things a second thought.
But his mind was not on business transactions. It had flitted back a few years and was in the French Riviera, where he and this woman had met and – he could not disguise it from himself – become extremely matey.
It had all been perfectly innocent, of course – just a few moonlight drives, one or two mixed bathings and hob-nobbings at Eden Roc and the ordinary exchanges of civilities customary on the French Riviera – but it seemed to him that there was a grave danger of her introducing into their relations now that touch of Auld Lang Syne which is the last thing a young man wants when he has a fiancée around – and a fiancée, moreover, who has already given evidence of entertaining distressing suspicions.
Mrs Spottsworth had come upon him as a complete and painful surprise. At Cannes he had got the impression that her name was Bessemer, but of course in places like Cannes you don’t bother much about surnames. He had, he recalled, always addressed her as Rosie, and she – he shuddered – had addressed him as Billiken. A clear, but unpleasant, picture rose before his eyes of Jill’s face when she heard her addressing him as Billiken at dinner tonight. Most unfortunately, through some oversight, he had omitted to mention to Jill his Riviera acquaintance Mrs Bessemer, and he could see that she might conceivably take a little explaining away.
‘How nice to see you again, Rosalinda,’ said Monica. ‘So glad you found your way here all right. It’s rather tricky after you leave the main road. My husband, Sir Roderick Carmoyle. And this is –’
‘Billiken!’ cried Mrs Spottsworth, with all the enthusiasm of a generous nature. It was plain that if the ecstasy occasioned by this unexpected encounter was a little one-sided, on her side at least it existed in full measure.
‘Eh?’ said Monica.
> ‘Mr Belfry and I are old friends. We knew each other in Cannes a few years ago, when I was Mrs Bessemer.’
‘Bessemer!’
‘It was not long after my husband had passed the veil owing to having a head-on collision with a truck full of beer bottles on the Jericho Turnpike. His name was Clifton Bessemer.’
Monica shot a pleased and congratulatory look at Bill. She knew all about Mrs Bessemer of Cannes. She was aware that her brother had given this Mrs Bessemer the rush of a lifetime, and what better foundation could a young man with a house to sell have on which to build?
‘Well, that’s fine,’ she said. ‘You’ll have all sorts of things to talk about, won’t you? But he isn’t Mr Belfry now, he’s Lord Rowcester.’
‘Changed his name,’ explained Rory. ‘The police are after him, and an alias was essential.’
‘Oh, don’t be an ass, Rory. He came into the title,’ said Monica. ‘You know how it is in England. You start out as something, and then someone dies and you do a switch. Our uncle, Lord Rowcester, pegged out not long ago, and Bill was his heir, so he shed the Belfry and took on the Rowcester.’
‘I see. Well, to me he will always be Billiken. How are you, Billiken?’
Bill found speech, though not much of it and what there was rather rasping.
‘I’m fine, thanks – er – Rosie.’
‘Rosie?’ said Rory, startled and, like the child of nature he was, making no attempt to conceal his surprise ‘Did I hear you say Rosie?’
Bill gave him a cold look.
‘Mrs Spottsworth’s name, as you have already learned from a usually well-informed source – viz Moke – is Rosalinda. All her friends – even casual acquaintances like myself – called her Rosie.’
‘Oh, ah,’ said Rory. ‘Quite, quite. Very natural, of course.’
‘Casual acquaintances?’ said Mrs Spottsworth, pained.
Bill plucked at his tie.
‘Well, I mean blokes who just knew you from meeting you at Cannes and so forth.’
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3 Page 6