‘I see you’ve shaved off your moustache.’
‘I have. You do not feel, I hope, that I pursued a mistaken course?’
‘Oh no, rather not. I grew a moustache myself last year, but had to get rid of it.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Public sentiment was against it.’
‘I see. Well, I should be delighted to hear more of your reminiscences, Wooster, but at the moment I am expecting a telephone call from my lawyer.’
‘I thought you’d had one.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘When you were down by the lake, didn’t you go off to talk to him?’
‘I did. But when I reached the telephone, he had grown tired of waiting and had rung off. I should never have allowed Miss Wickham to take me away from the house.’
‘She wanted you to see the big fish.’
‘So I understood her to say.’
‘Talking of fish, you must have been surprised to find Kipper here.’
‘Kipper?’
‘Herring.’
‘Oh, Herring,’ he said, and one spotted the almost total lack of animation in his voice. And conversation had started to flag, when the door flew open and the goof Phyllis bounded in, full of girlish excitement.
‘Oh, Daddy,’ she burbled, ‘are you busy?’
‘No, my dear.’
‘Can I speak to you about something?’
‘Certainly. Goodbye, Wooster.’
I saw what this meant. He didn’t want me around. There was nothing for it but to ooze out through the french window, so I oozed, and had hardly got outside when Bobbie sprang at me like a leopardess.
‘What on earth are you fooling about for like this, Bertie?’ she stage-whispered. ‘All that rot about moustaches. I thought you’d be well into it by this time.’
I pointed out that as yet Aubrey Upjohn had not given me a cue.
‘You and your cues!’
‘All right, me and my cues. But I’ve got to sort of lead the conversation in the right direction, haven’t I?’
‘I see what Bertie means, darling,’ said Kipper. ‘He wants –’
‘A point d’appui.’
‘A what?’ said Bobbie.
‘Sort of jumping-off place.’
The beasel snorted.
‘If you ask me, he’s lost his nerve. I knew this would happen. The worm has got cold feet.’
I could have crushed her by drawing her attention to the fact that worms don’t have feet, cold or piping hot, but I had no wish to bandy words.
‘I must ask you, Kipper,’ I said with frigid dignity, ‘to request your girl friend to preserve the decencies of debate. My feet are not cold. I am as intrepid as a lion and only too anxious to get down to brass tacks, but just as I was working round to the res, Phyllis came in. She said she had something she wanted to speak to him about.’
Bobbie snorted again, this time in a despairing sort of way.
‘She’ll be there for hours. It’s no good waiting.’
‘No,’ said Kipper. ‘May as well call it off for the moment. We’ll let you know time and place of next fixture, Bertie.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ I said, and they drifted away.
And about a couple of minutes later, as I stood there brooding on Kipper’s sad case, Aunt Dahlia came along. I was glad to see her. I thought she might possibly come across with aid and comfort, for though, like the female in the poem I was mentioning, she sometimes inclined to be a toughish egg in hours of ease, she could generally be relied on to be there with the soothing solace when one had anything wrong with one’s brow.
As she approached, I got the impression that her own brow had for some reason taken it on the chin. Quite a good deal of that upon-which-all-the-ends-of-the-earth-are-come stuff, it seemed to me.
Nor was I mistaken.
‘Bertie,’ she said, heaving-to beside me and waving a trowel in an overwrought manner, ‘do you know what?’
‘No, what?’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said the aged relative, rapping out a sharp monosyllable such as she might have uttered in her Quorn and Pytchley days on observing a unit of the pack of hounds chasing a rabbit. ‘That ass Phyllis has gone and got engaged to Wilbert Cream!’
17
* * *
HER WORDS GAVE me quite a wallop. I don’t say I reeled, and everything didn’t actually go black, but I was shaken, as what nephew would not have been. When a loved aunt has sweated herself to the bone trying to save her god-child from the clutches of a New York playboy and learns that all her well-meant efforts have gone blue on her, it’s only natural for her late brother’s son to shudder in sympathy.
‘You don’t mean that?’ I said. ‘Who told you?’
‘She did.’
‘In person?’
‘In the flesh. She came skipping to me just now, clapping her little hands and bleating about how very, very happy she was, dear Mrs. Travers. The silly young geezer. I nearly conked her one with my trowel. I’d always thought her half-baked, but now I think they didn’t even put her in the oven.’
‘But how did it happen?’
‘Apparently that dog of hers joined you in the water.’
‘Yes, that’s right, he took his dip with the rest of us. But what’s that got to do with it?’
‘Wilbert Cream dived in and saved him.’
‘He could have got ashore perfectly well under his own steam. In fact, he was already on his way, doing what looked like an Australian crawl.’
‘That wouldn’t occur to a pinhead like Phyllis. To her Wilbert Cream is the man who rescued her dachshund from a watery grave. So she’s going to marry him.’
‘But you don’t marry fellows because they rescue dachshunds.’
‘You do, if you’ve a mentality like hers.’
‘Seems odd.’
‘And is. But that’s how it goes. Girls like Phyllis Mills are an open book to me. For four years I was, if you remember, the proprietor and editress of a weekly paper for women.’ She was alluding to the periodical entitled Milady’s Boudoir, to the Husbands and Brothers page of which I once contributed an article or ‘piece’ on What The Well-Dressed Man is Wearing. It had recently been sold to a mug up Liverpool way, and I have never seen Uncle Tom look chirpier than when the deal went through, he for those four years having had to foot the bills.
‘I don’t suppose,’ she continued, ‘that you were a regular reader, so for your information there appeared in each issue a short story, and in seventy per cent of those short stories the hero won the heroine’s heart by saving her dog or her cat or her canary or whatever foul animal she happened to possess. Well, Phyllis didn’t write all those stories, but she easily might have done, for that’s the way her mind works. When I say mind,’ said the blood relation, ‘I refer to the quarter-teaspoonful of brain which you might possibly find in her head if you sank an artesian well. Poor Jane!’
‘Poor who?’
‘Her mother. Jane Mills.’
‘Oh, ah, yes. She was a pal of yours, you told me.’
‘The best I ever had, and she was always saying to me “Dahlia, old girl, if I pop off before you, for heaven’s sake look after Phyllis and see that she doesn’t marry some ghastly outsider. She’s sure to want to. Girls always do, goodness knows why,” she said, and I knew she was thinking of her first husband, who was a heel to end all heels and a constant pain in the neck to her till one night he most fortunately walked into the River Thames while under the influence of the sauce and didn’t come up for days. “Do stop her,” she said, and I said “Jane, you can rely on me.” And now this happens.’
I endeavoured to soothe.
‘You can’t blame yourself.’
‘Yes, I can.’
‘It isn’t your fault.’
‘I invited Wilbert Cream here.’
‘Merely from a wifely desire to do Uncle Tom a bit of good.’
‘And I let Upjohn stick around, always at her elbow egging her on.�
�
‘Yes, Upjohn’s the bird I blame.’
‘Me, too.’
‘But for his – undue influence, do they call it? – Phyllis would have remained a bachelor or spinster or whatever it is. “Thou art the man, Upjohn!” seems to me the way to sum it up. He ought to be ashamed of himself.’
‘And am I going to tell him so! I’d give a tenner to have Aubrey Upjohn here at this moment.’
‘You can get him for nothing. He’s in Uncle Tom’s study.’
Her face lit up.
‘He is?’ She threw her head back and inflated the lungs. ‘UPJOHN!’ she boomed, rather like someone calling the cattle home across the sands of Dee, and I issued a kindly word of warning.
‘Watch that blood pressure, old ancestor.’
‘Never you mind my blood pressure. You let it alone, and it’ll leave you alone. UPJOHN!’
He appeared in the french window, looking cold and severe, as I had so often seen him look when hobnobbing with him in his study at Malvern House, self not there as a willing guest but because I’d been sent for. (‘I should like to see Wooster in my study immediately after morning prayers’ was the formula.)
‘Who is making that abominable noise? Oh, it’s you, Dahlia.’
‘Yes, it’s me.’
‘You wished to see me?’
‘Yes, but not the way you’re looking now. I’d have preferred you to have fractured your spine or at least to have broken a couple of ankles and got a touch of leprosy.’
‘My dear Dahlia!’
‘I’m not your dear Dahlia. I’m a seething volcano. Have you seen Phyllis?’
‘She has just left me.’
‘Did she tell you?’
‘That she was engaged to Wilbert Cream? Certainly.’
‘And I suppose you’re delighted?’
‘Of course I am.’
‘Yes, of course you are! I can well imagine that it’s your dearest wish to see that unfortunate muttonheaded girl become the wife of a man who lets off stink bombs in night clubs and pinches the spoons and has had three divorces already and who, if the authorities play their cards right, will end up cracking rocks in Sing-Sing. That is unless the loony-bin gets its bid in first. Just a Prince Charming, you might say.’
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘Then you’re an ass.’
‘Well, really!’ said Aubrey Upjohn, and there was a dangerous note in his voice. I could see that the relative’s manner, which was not affectionate, and her words, which lacked cordiality, were peeving him. It looked like an odds-on shot that in about another two ticks he would be giving her the Collect for the Day to write out ten times or even instructing her to bend over while he fetched his whangee. You can push these preparatory schoolmasters just so far.
‘A fine way for Jane’s daughter to end up. Mrs Broadway Willie!’
‘Broadway Willie?’
‘That’s what he’s called in the circles in which he moves, into which he will now introduce Phyllis. “Meet the moll,” he’ll say, and then he’ll teach her in twelve easy lessons how to make stink bombs, and the children, if and when, will be trained to pick people’s pockets as they dandle them on their knee. And you’ll be responsible, Aubrey Upjohn!’
I didn’t like the way things were trending. Admittedly the aged relative was putting up a great show and it was a pleasure to listen to her, but I had seen Upjohn’s lip twitch and that look of smug satisfaction come into his face which I had so often seen when he had been counsel for the prosecution in some case in which I was involved and had spotted a damaging flaw in my testimony. The occasion when I was on trial for having broken the drawing-room window with a cricket ball springs to the mind. It was plain to an eye as discerning as mine that he was about to put it across the old flesh and blood properly, making her wish she hadn’t spoken. I couldn’t see how, but the symptoms were all there.
I was right. That twitching lip had not misled me.
‘If I might be allowed to make a remark, my dear Dahlia,’ he said, ‘I think we are talking at cross purposes. You appear to be under the impression that Phyllis is marrying Wilbert’s younger brother Wilfred, the notorious playboy whose escapades have caused the family so much distress and who, as you are correct in saying, is known to his disreputable friends as Broadway Willie. Wilfred, I agree, would make – and on three successive occasions has made – a most undesirable husband, but no one to my knowledge has ever spoken a derogatory word of Wilbert. I know few young men who are more generally respected. He is a member of the faculty of one of the greatest American universities, over in this country on his sabbatical. He teaches romance languages.’
Stop me if I’ve told you this before, I rather fancy I have, but once when I was up at Oxford and chatting on the river bank with a girl called something that’s slipped my mind there was a sound of barking and a great hefty dog of the Hound of the Baskervilles type came galloping at me, obviously intent on mayhem, its whole aspect that of a dog that has no use for Woosters. And I was just commending my soul to God and thinking that this was where my new flannel trousers got about thirty bobs’ worth of value bitten out of them, when the girl, waiting till she saw the whites of its eyes, with extraordinary presence of mind opened a coloured Japanese umbrella in the animal’s face. Upon which, with a startled exclamation it did three back somersaults and retired into private life.
And the reason I bring this up now is that, barring the somersaults, Aunt Dahlia’s reaction to this communiqué was precisely that of the above hound to the Japanese umbrella. The same visible taken-aback-ness. She has since told me that her emotions were identical with those she had experienced when she was out with the Pytchley and riding over a ploughed field in rainy weather, and the horse of a sports-lover in front of her suddenly kicked three pounds of wet mud into her face.
She gulped like a bulldog trying to swallow a sirloin steak many sizes too large for its thoracic cavity.
‘You mean there are two of them?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And Wilbert isn’t the one I thought he was?’
‘You have grasped the position of affairs to a nicety. You will appreciate now, my dear Dahlia,’ said Upjohn, speaking with the same unction, if that’s the word, with which he had spoken when unmasking his batteries and presenting unshakable proof that yours was the hand, Wooster, which propelled this cricket ball, ‘that your concern, though doing you the greatest credit, has been needless. I could wish Phyllis no better husband. Wilbert has looks, brains, character … and excellent prospects,’ he added, rolling the words round his tongue like vintage port. ‘His father, I should imagine, would be worth at least twenty million dollars, and Wilbert is the elder son. Yes, most satisfactory, most …’
As he spoke, the telephone rang, and with a quick ‘Ha!’ he shot back into the study like a homing rabbit.
18
* * *
FOR PERHAPS A quarter of a minute after he had passed from the scene the aged relative stood struggling for utterance. At the end of this period she found speech.
‘Of all the damn silly fatheaded things!’ she vociferated, if that’s the word. ‘With a million ruddy names to choose from, these ruddy Creams call one ruddy son Wilbert and the other ruddy son Wilfred, and both these ruddy sons are known as Willie. Just going out of their way to mislead the innocent bystander. You’d think people would have more consideration.’
Again I begged her to keep an eye on her blood pressure and not get so worked up, and once more she brushed me off, this time with a curt request that I would go and boil my head.
‘You’d be worked up if you had just been scored off by Aubrey Upjohn, with that loathsome self-satisfied look on his face as if he’d been rebuking a pimply pupil at his beastly school for shuffling his feet in church.’
‘Odd, that,’ I said, struck by the coincidence. ‘He once rebuked me for that very reason. And I had pimples.’
‘Pompous ass!’
‘Shows what a
small world it is.’
‘What’s he doing here anyway? I didn’t invite him.’
‘Bung him out. I took this point up with you before, if you remember. Cast him into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.’
‘I will, if he gives me any more of his lip.’
‘I can see you’re in a dangerous mood.’
‘You bet I’m in a dangerous … My God! He’s with us again!’
And A. Upjohn was indeed filtering through the french window. But he had lost the look of which the ancestor had complained, the one he was wearing now seeming to suggest that since last heard from something had occurred to wake the fiend that slept in him.
‘Dahlia!’ he … yes better make it vociferated once more, I’m pretty sure it’s the word I want.
The fiend that slept in Aunt Dahlia was also up on its toes. She gave him a look which, if directed at an erring member of the personnel of the Quorn or Pytchley hound ensemble, would have had that member sticking his tail between his legs and resolving for the future to lead a better life.
‘Now what?’
Just as Aunt Dahlia had done, Aubrey Upjohn struggled for utterance. Quite a bit of utterance-struggling there had been around these parts this summer afternoon.
‘I have just been speaking to my lawyer on the telephone,’ he said, getting going after a short stage wait. ‘I had asked him to make inquiries and ascertain the name of the author of that libellous attack on me in the columns of the Thursday Review. He did so, and has now informed me that it was the work of my former pupil, Reginald Herring.’
He paused at this point, to let us chew it over, and the heart sank. Mine, I mean. Aunt Dahlia’s seemed to be carrying on much as usual. She scratched her chin with her trowel, and said:
‘Oh, yes?’
Upjohn blinked, as if he had been expecting something better than this in the way of sympathy and concern.
‘Is that all you can say?’
‘That’s the lot.’
‘Oh? Well, I am suing the paper for heavy damages, and furthermore, I refuse to remain in the same house with Reginald Herring. Either he goes, or I go.’
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 4: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.4 Page 34