‘The problem is undoubtedly one that presents certain points of interest, m’lord.’
‘Yes, I’d got as far as that myself.’
‘One rules out anything in the nature of violence, I presume, placing reliance wholly on stealth and finesse.’
‘One certainly does. Dismiss any idea that I propose to swat Mrs Spottsworth on the napper with a blackjack.’
‘Then I would be inclined to say, m’lord, that the best results would probably be obtained from what I might term the spider sequence.’
‘I don’t get you, Jeeves.’
‘If I might explain, m’lord. Your lordship will be joining the lady in the garden?’
‘Probably on a rustic seat.’
‘Then, as I see it, m’lord, conditions will be admirably adapted to the plan I advocate. If shortly after entering into conversation with Mrs Spottsworth, your lordship were to affect to observe a spider on her hair, the spider sequence would follow as doth the night the day. It would be natural for your lordship to offer to brush the insect off. This would enable your lordship to operate with your lordship’s fingers in the neighbourhood of the lady’s neck. And if the clasp, as Captain Biggar assures us, is loose, it will be a simple matter to unfasten the pendant and cause it to fall to the ground. Do I make myself clear, m’lord?’
‘All straight so far. But wouldn’t she pick it up?’
‘No, m’lord, because in actual fact it would be in your lordship’s pocket. Your lordship would institute a search in the surrounding grass, but without avail, and eventually the search would be abandoned until the following day. The object would finally be discovered late tomorrow evening.’
‘After Biggar gets back?’
‘Precisely, m’lord.’
‘Nestling under a bush?’
‘Or on the turf some little distance away. It had rolled.’
‘Do pendants roll?’
‘This pendant would have done so, m’lord.’
Bill chewed his lower lip thoughtfully.
‘So that’s the spider sequence?’
‘That is the spider sequence, m’lord.’
‘Not a bad scheme at all.’
‘It has the merit of simplicity, m’lord. And if your lordship is experiencing any uneasiness at the thought of opening cold, as the theatrical expression is, I would suggest our having what in stage parlance is called a quick run through.’
‘A rehearsal, you mean?’
‘Precisely, m’lord. It would enable your lordship to perfect yourself in lines and business. In the Broadway section of New York, where the theatre industry of the United States of America is centred, I am told that this is known as ironing out the bugs.’
‘Ironing out the spiders.’
‘Ha, ha, m’lord. But, if I may venture to say so it is unwise to waste the precious moments in verbal pleasantries.’
‘Time is of the essence?’
‘Precisely, m’lord. Would your lordship like to walk the scene?’
‘Yes, I think I would, if you say it’s going to steady the nervous system. I feel as if a troupe of performing fleas were practising buck-and-wing steps up and down my spine.’
‘I have heard Mr Wooster complain of a similar malaise in moments of stress and trial, m’lord. It will pass.’
‘When?’
‘As soon as your lordship has got the feel of the part. A rustic seat, your lordship said?’
‘That’s where she was last time.’
‘Scene, A rustic seat,’ murmured Jeeves. ‘Time, A night in summer. Discovered at rise, Mrs Spottsworth. Enter Lord Rowcester. I will portray Mrs Spottsworth, m’lord. We open with a few lines of dialogue to establish atmosphere, then bridge into the spider sequence. Your lordship speaks.’
Bill marshalled his thoughts.
‘Er – Tell me, Rosie –’
‘Rosie, m’lord?’
‘Yes, Rosie, blast it. Any objection?’
‘None whatever, m’lord.’
‘I used to know her at Cannes.’
‘Indeed, m’lord? I was not aware. You were saying, m’lord?’
‘Tell me, Rosie, are you afraid of spiders?’
‘Why does your lordship ask?’
‘There’s rather an outsize specimen crawling on the back of your hair.’ Bill sprang about six inches in the direction of the ceiling. ‘What on earth did you do that for?’ he demanded irritably.
Jeeves preserved his calm.
‘My reason for screaming, m’lord, was merely to add verisimilitude. I supposed that that was how a delicately nurtured lady would be inclined to react on receipt of such a piece of information.’
‘Well, I wish you hadn’t. The top of my head nearly came off.’
‘I am sorry, m’lord. But it was how I saw the scene. I felt it, felt it here,’ said Jeeves, tapping the left side of his waistcoat. ‘If your lordship would be good enough to throw me the line once more.’
‘There’s rather an outsize specimen crawling on the back of your hair.’
‘I would be grateful if your lordship would be so kind as to knock it off.’
‘I can’t see it now. Ah, there it goes. On your neck.’
‘And that,’ said Jeeves, rising from the settee on which in his role of Mrs Spottsworth he had seated himself, ‘is cue for business, m’lord. Your lordship will admit that it is really quite simple.’
‘I suppose it is.’
‘I am sure that after this try-out the performing fleas to which your lordship alluded a moment ago will have substantially modified their activities.’
‘They’ve slowed up a bit, yes. But I’m still nervous.’
‘Inevitable on the eve of an opening performance, m’lord. I think your lordship should be starting as soon as possible. If ’twere done, then ’twere well ’twere done quickly. Our arrangements have been made with a view to a garden set, and it would be disconcerting were Mrs Spottsworth to return to the house, compelling your lordship to adapt your technique to an interior.’
Bill nodded.
‘I see what you mean. Right ho, Jeeves. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye, m’lord.’
‘If anything goes wrong –’
‘Nothing will go wrong, m’lord.’
‘But if it does … You’ll write to me in Dartmoor occasionally, Jeeves? Just a chatty letter from time to time, giving me the latest news from the outer world?’
‘Certainly, m’lord.’
‘It’ll cheer me up as I crack my daily rock. They tell me conditions are much better in these modern prisons than they used to be in the old days.’
‘So I understand, m’lord.’
‘I might find Dartmoor a regular home from home. Solid comfort, I mean to say.’
‘Quite conceivably, m’lord.’
‘Still, we’ll hope it won’t come to that.’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘Yes … Well, goodbye once again, Jeeves.’
‘Goodbye, m’lord.’
Bill squared his shoulders and strode out, a gallant figure. He had summoned the pride of the Rowcesters to his aid, and it buoyed him up. With just this quiet courage had a Rowcester of the seventeenth century mounted the scaffold at Tower Hill, nodding affably to the headsman and waving to friends and relations in the audience. When the test comes, blood will tell.
He had been gone a few moments, when Jill came in.
It seemed to Jeeves that in the course of the past few hours the young master’s betrothed had lost a good deal of the animation which rendered her as a rule so attractive, and he was right. Her recent interview with Captain Biggar had left Jill pensive and inclined to lower the corners of the mouth and stare mournfully. She was staring mournfully now.
‘Have you seen Lord Rowcester, Jeeves?’
‘His lordship has just stepped into the garden, miss.’
‘Where are the others?’
‘Sir Roderick and her ladyship are still in the library, miss.’
‘And Mr
s Spottsworth?’
‘She stepped into the garden shortly before his lordship.’
Jill stiffened.
‘Oh?’ she said, and went into the library to join Monica and Rory. The corners of her mouth were drooping more than ever, and her stare had increased in mournfulness some twenty per cent. She looked like a girl who is thinking the worst, and that was precisely the sort of girl she was.
Two minutes later, Captain Biggar came bustling in with a song on his lips. Yoga and communion with the Jivatma or soul seemed to have done him good. His eyes were bright and his manner alert. It is when the time for action has come that you always catch these White Hunters at their best.
‘Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, where are you now, where are you now?’ sang Captain Biggar. ‘I … how does the dashed thing go … I sink beneath your spell. La, la, la … La, la, la, la. Where are you now? Where are you now? For they’re hanging Danny Deever in the morning,’ he carolled, changing the subject.
He saw Jeeves, and suspended the painful performance.
‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Quai hai, my man. How are things?’
‘Things are in a reasonably satisfactory state, sir.’
‘Where’s Patch Rowcester?’
‘His lordship is in the garden, sir.’
‘With Mrs Spottsworth?’
‘Yes, sir. Putting his fate to the test, to win or lose it all.’
‘You thought of something, then?’
‘Yes, sir. The spider sequence.’
‘The how much?’
Captain Biggar listened attentively as Jeeves outlined the spider sequence, and when he had finished paid him a stately compliment.
‘You’d do well out East, my boy.’
‘It is extremely kind of you to say so, sir.’
‘That is to say if that scheme was your own.’
‘It was, sir.’
‘Then you’d be just the sort of fellow we want in Kuala Lumpur. We need chaps like you, chaps who can use their brains. Can’t leave brains all to the Dyaks. Makes the blighters get above themselves.’
‘The Dyaks are exceptionally intelligent, sir?’
‘Are they! Let me tell you of something that happened to Tubby Frobisher and me one day when we –’ He broke off, and the world was deprived of another excellent story. Bill was coming through the french window.
A striking change had taken place in the ninth Earl in the few minutes since he had gone out through that window, a young man of spirit setting forth on a high adventure. His shoulders, as we have indicated, had then been square. Now they sagged like those of one who bears a heavy weight. His eyes were dull, his brow furrowed. The pride of the Rowcesters appeared to have packed up and withdrawn its support. No longer was there in his bearing any suggestion of that seventeenth-century ancestor who had infused so much of the party spirit into his decapitation on Tower Hill. The ancestor he most closely resembled now was the one who was caught cheating at cards by Charles James Fox at Wattier’s in 1782.
‘Well?’ cried Captain Biggar.
Bill gave him a long, silent mournful look, and turned to Jeeves.
‘Jeeves!’
‘M’lord?’
‘That spider sequence.’
‘Yes, m’lord?’
‘I tried it.’
‘Yes, m’lord?’
‘And things looked good for a moment. I detached the pendant.’
‘Yes, m’lord?’
‘Captain Biggar was right. The clasp was loose. It came off.’
Captain Biggar uttered a pleased exclamation in Swahili.
‘Gimme,’ he said.
‘I haven’t got it. It slipped out of my hand.’
‘And fell?’
‘And fell.’
‘You mean it’s lying in the grass?’
‘No,’ said Bill, with a sombre shake of the head. ‘It isn’t lying in any ruddy grass. It went down the front of Mrs Spottsworth’s dress, and is now somewhere in the recesses of her costume.’
14
* * *
IT IS NOT often that one sees three good men struck all of a heap simultaneously, but anybody who had chanced to stroll into the living room of Rowcester Abbey at this moment would have been able to observe that spectacle. To say that Bill’s bulletin had had a shattering effect on his companions would be, if anything, to understate it. Captain Biggar was expressing his concern by pacing the room with whirling arms, while the fact that two of the hairs of his right eyebrow distinctly quivered showed how deeply Jeeves had been moved. Bill himself, crushed at last by the blows of Fate, appeared formally to have given up the struggle. He had slumped into a chair, and was sitting there looking boneless and despairing. All he needed was a long white beard, and the resemblance to King Lear on one of his bad mornings would have been complete.
Jeeves was the first to speak.
‘Most disturbing, m’lord.’
‘Yes,’ said Bill dully. ‘Quite a nuisance, isn’t it? You don’t happen to have any little-known Asiatic poison on you, do you, Jeeves?’
‘No, m’lord.’
‘A pity,’ said Bill. ‘I could have used it.’
His young employer’s distress pained Jeeves, and as it had always been his view that there was no anodyne for the human spirit, when bruised, like a spot of Marcus Aurelius, he searched in his mind for some suitable quotation from the Emperor’s works. And he was just hesitating between ‘Whatever may befall thee, it was preordained for thee from everlasting’ and ‘Nothing happens to any man which he is not fitted by nature to bear’, both excellent, when Captain Biggar, who had been pouring out a rapid fire of ejaculations in some native dialect, suddenly reverted to English.
‘Doi wieng lek!’ he cried. ‘I’ve got it! Fricassee me with stewed mushrooms on the side, I see what you must do.’
Bill looked up. His eyes were glazed, his manner listless.
‘Do?’ he said. ‘Me?’
‘Yes, you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Bill. ‘I’m in no condition to do anything except possibly expire, regretted by all.’
Captain Biggar snorted, and having snorted uttered a tchah, a pah and a bah.
‘Mun py nawn lap lao!’ he said impatiently. ‘You can dance, can’t you?’
‘Dance?’
‘Preferably the Charleston. That’s all I’m asking of you, a few simple steps of the Charleston.’
Bill stirred slightly, like a corpse moving in its winding sheet. It was an acute spasm of generous indignation that caused him to do so. He was filled with what, in his opinion, was a justifiable resentment. Here he was, in the soup and going down for the third time, and this man came inviting him to dance before him as David danced before Saul. Assuming this to be merely the thin end of the wedge, one received the impression that in next to no time the White Hunter, if encouraged, would be calling for comic songs and conjuring tricks and imitations of footlight favourites who are familiar to you all. What, he asked himself bitterly, did the fellow think this was? The revival of Vaudeville? A village concert in aid of the church organ restoration fund?
Groping for words with which to express these thoughts, he found that the captain was beginning to tell another of his stories. Like Marcus Aurelius, Kuala Lumpur’s favourite son always seemed to have up his sleeve something apposite to the matter in hand, whatever that matter might be. But where the Roman Emperor, a sort of primitive Bob Hope or Groucho Marx, had contented himself with throwing off wisecracks, Captain Biggar preferred the narrative form.
‘Yes, the Charleston,’ said Captain Biggar, ‘and I’ll tell you why. I am thinking of the episode of Tubby Frobisher and the wife of the Greek consul. The recollection of it suddenly flashed upon me like a gleam of light from above.’
He paused. A sense of something omitted, something left undone, was nagging at him. Then he saw why this was so. The whisky. He moved to the table and filled his glass.
‘Whether it was Smyrna or Joppa or Stamboul where Tubby was
stationed at the time of which I speak,’ he said, draining half the contents of his glass and coming back with the rest, ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you. As one grows older, one tends to forget these details. It may even have been Baghdad or half a dozen other places. I admit frankly that I have forgotten. But the point is that he was at some place somewhere and one night he attended a reception or a soirée or whatever they call these binges at one of the embassies. You know the sort of thing I mean. Fair women and brave men, all dolled up and dancing their ruddy heads off. And in due season it came to pass that Tubby found himself doing the Charleston with the wife of the Greek consul as his partner. I don’t know if either of you have ever seen Tubby Frobisher dance the Charleston?’
‘Neither his lordship nor myself have had the privilege of meeting Mr Frobisher, sir,’ Jeeves reminded him courteously.
Captain Biggar stiffened.
‘Major Frobisher, damn it.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir. Major Frobisher. Owing to our never having met him, the major’s technique when performing the Charleston is a sealed book to us.’
‘Oh?’ Captain Biggar refilled his glass. ‘Well, his technique, as you call it, is vigorous. He does not spare himself. He is what in the old days would have been described as a three-collar man. By the time Tubby Frobisher has finished dancing the Charleston, his partner knows she has been in a fight, all right. And it was so on this occasion. He hooked on to the wife of the Greek consul and he jumped her up and he jumped her down, he whirled her about and he spun her round, he swung her here and he swung her there, and all of a sudden what do you think happened?’
‘The lady had heart failure, sir?’
‘No, the lady didn’t have heart failure, but what occurred was enough to give it to all present at that gay affair. For, believe me or believe me not, there was a tinkling sound, and from inside her dress there began to descend to the floor silver forks, silver spoons and, Tubby assures me, a complete toilet set in tortoiseshell. It turned out that the female was a confirmed kleptomaniac and had been using the space between her dress and whatever she was wearing under her dress – I’m not a married man myself, so can’t go into particulars – as a safe deposit.’
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3 Page 14