Bill threw his hands up with a despondent groan.
‘Well, there you are, then. The thing’s off. Your scheme falls to the ground and becomes null and void.’
‘No, m’lord. Your lordship has not, if I may say so, grasped the substance of the plan I am putting forward. The essential at which one aims is the inducing of Mrs Spottsworth to leave her room, thus rendering it possible for your lordship to enter and secure the pendant. I propose now, with your lordship’s approval, to knock on Mrs Spottsworth’s door and request the loan of a bottle of smelling salts.’
Bill clutched at his hair.
‘You said, Jeeves?’
‘Smelling salts, m’lord.’
Bill shook his head.
‘Counting those sheep has done something to me,’ he said. ‘My hearing has become affected. It sounded to me just as if you had said “Smelling salts”.’
‘I did, m’lord. I would explain that I required them in order to restore your lordship to consciousness.’
‘There again. I could have sworn that I heard you say “restore your lordship to consciousness”.’
‘Precisely, m’lord. Your lordship has sustained a severe shock. Happening to be in the vicinity of the ruined chapel at about the hour of midnight, your lordship observed the wraith of Lady Agatha and was much overcome. How your lordship contrived to totter back to your room, your lordship will never know, but I found your lordship there in what appeared to be a coma and immediately applied to Mrs Spottsworth for the loan of her smelling salts.’
Bill was still at a loss.
‘I don’t get the gist, Jeeves.’
‘If I might elucidate my meaning still further, m’lord. The thought I had in mind was that, learning that Lady Agatha was, if I may so term it, on the wing, Mrs Spottsworth’s immediate reaction would be an intense desire to hasten to the ruined chapel in order to observe the manifestation for herself. I would offer to escort her thither, and during her absence …’
It is never immediately that the ordinary man, stunned by some revelation of genius, is able to find words with which to express his emotion. When Alexander Graham Bell, meeting a friend one morning in the year 1876, said ‘Oh, hullo, George, heard the latest? I invented the telephone yesterday’, it is probable that the friend merely shuffled his feet in silence. It was the same with Bill now. He could not speak. He lay there dumbly, while remorse flooded over him that he could ever have doubted this man. It was just as Bertie Wooster had so often said. Let this fish-fed mastermind get his teeth into the psychology of the individual, and it was all over except chucking your hat in the air and doing spring dances.
‘Jeeves,’ he began, at length finding speech, but Jeeves was shimmering through the door.
‘Your smelling salts, m’lord,’ he said, turning his head on the threshold. ‘If your lordship will excuse me.’
It was perhaps two minutes, though to Bill it seemed longer, before he returned, bearing a small bottle.
‘Well?’ said Bill eagerly.
‘Everything has gone according to plan, m’lord. The lady’s reactions were substantially as I had anticipated. Mrs Spottsworth, on receiving my communication, displayed immediate interest. Is your lordship familiar with the expression “Jimmy Christmas!”?’
‘No, I don’t think I ever heard it. You don’t mean “Merry Christmas”?’
‘No, m’lord. “Jimmy Christmas!” It was what Mrs Spottsworth observed on receiving the information that the phantasm of Lady Agatha was to be seen in the ruined chapel. The words, I gathered, were intended to convey surprise and elation. She assured me that it would take her but a brief time to hop into a dressing gown and that at the conclusion of that period she would be with me with, I understood her to say, her hair in a braid. I am to return in a moment and accompany her to the scene of the manifestation. I will leave the door open a few inches, so that your lordship, by applying your lordship’s eye to the crack, may be able to see us depart. As soon as we have descended the staircase, I would advocate instant action, for I need scarcely remind your lordship that time is –’
‘Of the essence? No, you certainly don’t have to tell me that. You remember what you were saying about cheetahs?’
‘With reference to their speed of foot, m’lord?’
‘That’s right. Half a mile in forty-five seconds, I think you said?’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘Well, the way I shall move would leave the nippiest cheetah standing at the post.’
‘That will be highly satisfactory, m’lord. I, on my side, may mention that on the dressing table in Mrs Spottsworth’s room I observed a small jewel case, which I have no doubt contains the pendant. The dressing table is immediately beneath the window. Your lordship will have no difficulty in locating it.’
He was right, as always. It was the first thing that Bill saw when, having watched the little procession of two out of sight down the stairs, he hastened along the corridor to the Queen Elizabeth Room. There, as Jeeves had stated, was the dressing table. On it was the small jewel case of which he had spoken. And in that jewel case, as he opened it with shaking hands, Bill saw the pendant. Hastily he slipped it into the pocket of his pyjamas, and was turning to leave, when the silence, which had been complete but for his heavy breathing, was shattered by a series of dreadful screams.
Reference has been made earlier to the practice of the dog Pomona of shrieking loudly to express the ecstasy she always felt on beholding a friend or even what looked to her like a congenial stranger. It was ecstasy that was animating her now. In the course of that session on the rustic seat, when Bill had done his cooing, she had taken an immediate fancy to her host, as all dogs did. Meeting him now in this informal fashion, just at a moment when she had been trying to reconcile herself to the solitude which she so disliked, she made no attempt to place any bounds on her self-expression.
Screams sufficient in number and volume to have equipped a dozen baronets stabbed in the back in libraries burst from her lips and their effect on Bill was devastating. The author of The Hunting of the Snark says of one of his protagonists in a powerful passage:
So great was his fright
That his waistcoat turned white
and the experience through which he was passing nearly caused Bill’s mauve pyjamas to do the same.
Though fond of Pomona, he did not linger to fraternize. He shot out of the door at a speed which would have had the most athletic cheetah shrugging its shoulders helplessly, and arrived in the corridor just as Jill, roused from sleep by those awful cries, came out of the Clock Room. She watched him steal softly into the Henry VIII Room, and thought in bitter mood that a more suitable spot for him could scarcely have been found.
It was some quarter of an hour later, as Bill, lying in bed, was murmuring ‘Nine hundred and ninety-eight … Nine hundred and ninety-nine … One thousand …’ that Jeeves entered.
He was carrying a salver.
On that salver was a ring.
‘I encountered Miss Wyvern in the corridor a few moments ago, m’lord,’ he said. ‘She desired me to give this to your lordship.’
16
* * *
WYVERN HALL, THE residence of Colonel Aubrey Wyvern, father of Jill and Chief Constable of the county of Southmoltonshire, lay across the river from Rowcester Abbey, and on the following afternoon Colonel Wyvern, having worked his way scowlingly through a most inferior lunch, stumped out of the dining room and went to his study and rang for his butler. And in due course the butler entered, tripping over the rug with a muffled ‘Whoops!’, his invariable practice when crossing any threshold.
Colonel Wyvern was short and stout, and this annoyed him, for he would have preferred to be tall and slender. But if his personal appearance gave him pangs of discomfort from time to time, they were as nothing compared to the pangs the personal appearance of his butler gave him. In England today the householder in the country has to take what he can get in the way of domestic help, and all Colonel
Wyvern had been able to get was the scrapings and scourings of the local parish school. Bulstrode, the major-domo of Wyvern Hall, was a skinny stripling of some sixteen summers, on whom Nature in her bounty had bestowed so many pimples that there was scarcely room on his face for the vacant grin which habitually adorned it.
He was grinning now, and once again, as always happened at these staff conferences, his overlord was struck by the closeness of the lad’s resemblance to a half-witted goldfish peering out of a bowl.
‘Bulstrode,’ he said, with a parade-ground rasp in his voice.
‘Yus?’ replied the butler affably.
At another moment, Colonel Wyvern would have had something to say on the subject of this unconventional verbal approach but today he was after bigger game. His stomach was still sending up complaints to the front office about the lunch, and he wanted to see the cook.
‘Bulstrode,’ he said, ‘bring the cook to me.’
The cook, conducted into the presence, proved also to be one of the younger set. Her age was fifteen. She bustled in, her pigtails swinging behind her, and Colonel Wyvern gave her an unpleasant look.
‘Trelawny!’ he said.
‘Yus?’ said the cook.
This time there was no reticence on the part of the chief constable. The Wyverns did not as a rule war upon women, but there are times when chivalry is impossible.
‘Don’t say “Yus?”, you piefaced little excrescence,’ he thundered. ‘Say “Yes, sir?”, and say it in a respectful and soldierly manner, coming smartly to attention with the thumbs on the seam of the trousers. Trelawny, that lunch you had the temerity to serve up today was an insult to me and a disgrace to anyone daring to call herself a cook, and I have sent for you to inform you that if there is any more of this spirit of slackness and laissez faire on your part …’ Colonel Wyvern paused. The ‘I’ll tell your mother’, with which he had been about to conclude his sentence, seemed to him to lack a certain something. ‘You’ll hear of it,’ he said and, feeling that even this was not as good as he could have wished, infused such vigour and venom into his description of underdone chicken, watery brussels sprouts and potatoes you couldn’t get a fork into that a weaker girl might well have wilted.
But the Trelawnys were made of tough stuff. They did not quail in the hour of peril. The child met his eye with iron resolution, and came back strongly.
‘Hitler!’ she said, putting out her tongue.
The chief constable started.
‘Did you call me Hitler?’
‘Yus, I did.’
‘Well, don’t do it again,’ said Colonel Wyvern sternly. ‘You may go, Trelawny.’
Trelawny went, with her nose in the air, and Colonel Wyvern addressed himself to Bulstrode.
A proud man is never left unruffled when worsted in a verbal duel with a cook, especially a cook aged fifteen with pigtails, and in the chief constable’s manner as he turned on his butler there was more than a suggestion of a rogue elephant at the height of its fever. For some minutes he spoke well and forcefully, with particular reference to the other’s habit of chewing his sweet ration while waiting at table, and when at length he was permitted to follow Evangeline Trelawny to the lower regions in which they had their being, Bulstrode, if not actually shaking in every limb, was at any rate subdued enough to omit to utter his customary ‘Whoops!’ when tripping over the rug.
He left the chief constable, though feeling a little better after having cleansed his bosom of the perilous stuff that weighs upon the soul, still definitely despondent. ‘Ichabod,’ he was saying to himself, and he meant it. In the golden age before the social revolution, he was thinking, a gaping, pimpled tripper over rugs like this Bulstrode would have been a lowly hall-boy, if that. It revolted a Tory of the old school’s finer feelings to have to regard such a blot on the Southmoltonshire scene in the sacred light of a butler.
He thought nostalgically of his young manhood in London at the turn of the century and of the vintage butlers he had been wont to encounter in those brave days … butlers who weighed two hundred and fifty pounds on the hoof, butlers with three chins and bulging abdomens, butlers with large, gooseberry eyes and that austere, supercilious, butlerine manner which has passed away so completely from the degenerate world of the nineteen-fifties. Butlers had been butlers then in the deepest and holiest sense of the word. Now they were mere chinless boys who sucked toffee and said ‘Yus?’ when you spoke to them.
It was almost inevitable that a man living so near to Rowcester Abbey and starting to brood on butlers should find his thoughts turning in the direction of the abbey’s principal ornament, and it was with a warm glow that Colonel Wyvern now began to think of Jeeves. Jeeves had made a profound impression on him. Jeeves, in his opinion, was the goods. Young Rowcester himself was a fellow the colonel, never very fond of his juniors, could take or leave alone, but this man of his, this Jeeves, he had recognized from their first meeting as something special. Out of the night that covered the chief constable, black as the pit – after that disturbing scene with Evangeline Trelawny – from pole to pole, there shone a sudden gleam of light. He himself might have his Bulstrode, but at least he could console himself with the thought that his daughter was marrying a man with a butler in the fine old tradition on his payroll. It put heart into him. It made him feel that this was not such a bad little old world, after all.
He mentioned this to Jill when she came in a moment later, looking cold and proud, and Jill tilted her chin and looked colder and prouder. She might have been a Snow Queen or something of that sort.
‘I am not going to marry Lord Rowcester,’ she said curtly.
It seemed to Colonel Wyvern that his child must be suffering from some form of amnesia, and he set himself to jog her memory.
‘Yes, you are,’ he reminded her. ‘It was in The Times. I saw it with my own eyes. The engagement is announced between –’
‘I have broken off the engagement.’
That little gleam of light of which we were speaking a moment ago, the one we showed illuminating Colonel Wyvern’s darkness, went out with a pop, like a stage moon that has blown a fuse. He stared incredulously.
‘Broken off the engagement?’
‘I am never going to speak to Lord Rowcester again.’
‘Don’t be an ass,’ said Colonel Wyvern. ‘Of course you are. Not going to speak to him again? I never heard such nonsense. I suppose what’s happened is that you’ve had one of these lovers’ tiffs.’
Jill did not intend to allow without protest what was probably the world’s greatest tragedy since the days of Romeo and Juliet to be described in this inadequate fashion. One really must take a little trouble to find the mot juste.
‘It was not a lovers’ tiff,’ she said, all the woman in her flashing from her eyes. ‘If you want to know why I broke off the engagement, it was because of the abominable way he has been behaving with Mrs Spottsworth.’
Colonel Wyvern put a finger to his brow.
‘Spottsworth? Spottsworth? Ah, yes. That’s the American woman you were telling me about.’
‘The American trollop,’ corrected Jill coldly.
‘Trollop?’ said Colonel Wyvern, intrigued.
‘That was what I said.’
‘Why do you call her that? Did you catch them – er – trolloping?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Good gracious!’
Jill swallowed once or twice, as if something jagged in her throat was troubling her.
‘It all seems to have started,’ she said, speaking in that toneless voice which had made such a painful impression on Bill, ‘in Cannes some years ago. Apparently she and Lord Rowcester used to swim together at Eden Roc and go for long drives in the moonlight. And you know what that sort of thing leads to.’
‘I do indeed,’ said Colonel Wyvern with animation, and was about to embark on an anecdote of his interesting past, when Jill went on, still speaking in that same strange, toneless voice.
‘She arrived at
the abbey yesterday. The story that has been put out is that Monica Carmoyle met her in New York and invited her to stay, but I have no doubt that the whole thing was arranged between her and Lord Rowcester, because it was obvious how matters stood between them. No sooner had she appeared than he was all over her … making love to her in the garden, dancing with her like a cat on hot bricks, and,’ said Jill nonchalantly, wearing the mask like the Mrs Fish who had so diverted Captain Biggar by doing the can-can in her step-ins in Kenya, ‘coming out of her room at two o’clock in the morning in mauve pyjamas.’
Colonel Wyvern choked. He had been about to try to heal the rift by saying that it was quite possible for a man to exchange a few civil remarks with a woman in a garden and while away the long evening by partnering her in the dance and still not be in any way culpable, but this statement wiped the words from his lips.
‘Coming out of her room in mauve pyjamas?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mauve pyjamas?’
‘Bright mauve.’
‘God bless my soul!’
A club acquaintance, annoyed by the eccentricity of the other’s bridge game, had once told Colonel Wyvern that he looked like a retired member of Sanger’s troupe of midgets who for years had been doing himself too well on the starchy foods, and this was in a measure true. He was, as we have said, short and stout. But when the call to action came, he could triumph over his brevity of stature and rotundity of waistcoat and become a figure of dignity and menace. It was an impressive chief constable who strode across the room and rang the bell for Bulstrode.
‘Yus?’ said Bulstrode.
Colonel Wyvern choked down the burning words he would have liked to utter. He told himself that he must conserve his energies.
‘Bulstrode,’ he said, ‘bring me my horsewhip.’
Down in the forest of pimples on the butler’s face something stirred. It was a look of guilt.
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3 Page 16