Monty fell into this error and so did I. And the lip-pursing was attended to by Spode, who chanced to enter at this moment. Seeing the popsy bathed in tears, he quivered from stem to stern.
‘Madeline!’ he yipped. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘It is nothing, Roderick, nothing,’ she replied chokingly.
She buzzed off, no doubt to bathe her eyes, and Spode pivoted round and gave me a penetrating look. He had grown a bit, I noticed, since I had last seen him, being now about nine foot seven. In speaking of him to Emerald Stoker I had, if you remember, compared him to a gorilla, and what I had had in mind had been the ordinary run-of-the-mill gorilla, not the large economy size. What he was looking like now was King Kong. His fists were clenched, his eyes glittered, and the dullest observer could have divined that it was in no sunny spirit that he was regarding Bertram.
6
* * *
TO EASE THE strain, I asked him if he would have a cucumber sandwich, but with an impassioned gesture he indicated that he was not in the market for cucumber sandwiches, though I could have told him, for I had found them excellent, that he was passing up a good thing.
‘A muffin?’
No, not a muffin, either. He seemed to be on a diet.
‘Wooster,’ he said, his jaw muscles moving freely, ‘I can’t make up my mind whether to break your neck or not.’
‘Not’ would have been the way my vote would have been cast, but he didn’t give me time to say so.
‘I was amazed when I heard from Madeline that you had had the effrontery to invite yourself here. Your motive, of course, was clear. You have come to try to undermine her faith in the man she loves and sow doubts in her mind. Like a creeping snake,’ he added, and I was interested to learn that this was what snakes did. ‘You had not the elementary decency, when she had made her choice, to accept her decision and efface yourself. You hoped to win her away from Fink-Nottle.’
Feeling that it was about time I said something, I got as far as ‘I –’, but he shushed me with another of those impassioned gestures. I couldn’t remember when I’d met anyone so resolved on hogging the conversation.
‘No doubt you will say that your love was so overpowering that you could not resist the urge to tell her of it and plead with her. Utter nonsense. Despicable weakness. Let me tell you, Wooster, that I have loved that girl for years and years, but never by word or look have I so much as hinted it to her. It was a great shock to me when she became engaged to this man Fink-Nottle, but I accepted the situation because I thought that that was where her happiness lay. Though stunned, I kept –’
‘A stiff upper lip?’
‘– my feelings to myself. I sat –’
‘Like Patience on a monument.’
‘– tight, and said nothing that would give her a suspicion of how I felt. All that mattered was that she should be happy. If you ask me if I approve of Fink-Nottle as a husband for her, I admit frankly that I do not. To me he seems to possess all the qualities that go to make the perfect pill, and I may add that my opinion is shared by her father. But he is the man she has chosen and I abide by her choice. I do not crawl behind Fink-Nottle’s back and try to prejudice her against him.’
‘Very creditable.’
‘What did you say?’
I said I had said it did him credit. Very white of him, I said I thought it.
‘Oh? Well, I suggest to you, Wooster, that you follow my example. And let me tell you that I shall be watching you closely, and I shall expect to see less of this head-stroking you were doing when I came in. If I don’t, I’ll –’
Just what he proposed to do he did not reveal, though I was able to hazard a guess, for at this moment Madeline returned. Her eyes were pinkish and her general aspect down among the wines and spirits.
‘I will show you your room, Bertie,’ she said in a pale, saintlike voice, and Spode gave me a warning look.
‘Be careful, Wooster, be very careful,’ he said as we went out.
Madeline seemed surprised.
‘Why did Roderick tell you to be careful?’
‘Ah, that we shall never know. Afraid I might slip on the parquet floor, do you think?’
‘He sounded as if he was angry with you. Had you been quarrelling?’
‘Good heavens, no. Our talk was conducted throughout in an atmosphere of the utmost cordiality.’
‘I thought he might be annoyed at your coming here.’
‘On the contrary. Nothing could have exceeded the warmth of his “Welcome to Totleigh Towers”.’
‘I’m so glad. It would pain me so much if you and he were … Oh, there’s Daddy.’
We had reached the upstairs corridor, and Sir Watkyn Bassett was emerging from his room, humming a light air. It died on his lips as he saw me, and he stood staring at me aghast. He reminded me of one of those fellows who spend the night in haunted houses and are found next morning dead to the last drop with a look of awful horror on their faces.
‘Oh, Daddy,’ said Madeline. ‘I forgot to tell you. I asked Bertie to come here for a few days.’
Pop Bassett swallowed painfully.
‘When you say a few days –?’
‘At least a week, I hope.’
‘Good God!’
‘If not longer.’
‘Great heavens!’
‘There is tea in the drawing-room, Daddy.’
‘I need something stronger than tea,’ said Pop Bassett in a low, husky voice, and he tottered off, a broken man. The sight of his head disappearing as he made for the lower regions where the snootful awaited him brought to my mind a poem I used to read as a child. I’ve forgotten most of it, but it was about a storm at sea and the punch line ran “We are lost,” the captain shouted, as he staggered down the stairs.’
‘Daddy seems upset about something,’ said Madeline.
‘He did convey that impression,’ I said, speaking austerely, for the old blister’s attitude had offended me. I could make allowances for him, because naturally a man of regular habits doesn’t like suddenly finding Woosters in his midst, but I did feel that he might have made more of an effort to bear up. Think of the Red Indians, Bassett, I would have said to him, had we been on better terms, pointing out that they were never in livelier spirits than when being cooked on both sides at the stake.
This painful encounter, following so quickly on my conversation, if you could call it a conversation, with Spode, might have been expected to depress me, but this was far from being the case. I was so uplifted by the official news that all was well between M. Bassett and G. Fink-Nottle that I gave it little thought. It’s never, of course, the ideal set-up to come to stay at a house where your host shudders to the depths of his being at the mere sight of you and is compelled to rush to where the bottles are and get a restorative, but the Woosters can take the rough with the s., and the bonging of the gong for dinner some little time later found me in excellent fettle. It was to all intents and purposes with a song on my lips that I straightened my tie and made my way to the trough.
Dinner is usually the meal at which you catch Bertram at his best, and certainly it’s the meal I always most enjoy. Many of my happiest hours have been passed in the society of the soup, the fish, the pheasant or whatever it may be, the soufflé, the fruits in their season and the spot of port to follow. They bring out the best in me. ‘Wooster,’ those who know me have sometimes said, ‘may be a pretty total loss during the daytime hours, but plunge the world in darkness, switch on the soft lights, uncork the champagne and shove a dinner into him, and you’d be surprised.’
But if I am to sparkle and charm all and sundry, I make one provision – viz. that the company be congenial. And anything less congenial than the Co. on this occasion I have seldom encountered. Sir Watkyn Bassett, who was plainly still much shaken at finding me on the premises, was very far from being the jolly old Squire who makes the party go from the start. Beyond shooting glances at me over his glasses, blinking as if he couldn’t bring himself t
o believe I was real and looking away with a quick shudder, he contributed little or nothing to what I have heard Jeeves call the feast of reason and the flow of soul. Add Spode, strong and silent, Madeline Bassett, mournful and drooping, Gussie, also apparently mournful, and Stiffy, who seemed to be in a kind of daydream, and you had something resembling a wake of the less rollicking type.
Sombre, that’s the word I was trying to think of. The atmosphere was sombre. The whole binge might have been a scene from one of those Russian plays my Aunt Agatha sometimes makes me take her son Thos to at the Old Vic in order to improve his mind, which, as is widely known, can do with all the improvement that’s coming to it.
It was toward the middle of the meal that, feeling that it was about time somebody said something, I drew Pop Bassett’s attention to the table’s centrepiece. In any normal house it would have been a bowl of flowers or something of that order, but this being Totleigh Towers it was a small black figure carved of some material I couldn’t put a name to. It was so gosh-awful in every respect that I presumed it must be something he had collected recently. My Uncle Tom is always coming back from sales with similar eyesores.
‘That’s new, isn’t it?’ I said, and he started violently. I suppose he’d just managed to persuade himself that I was merely a mirage and had been brought up with a round turn on discovering that I was there in the flesh.
‘That thing in the middle of the table that looks like the end man in a minstrel show. It’s something you got since … er … since I was here last, isn’t it?’
Tactless of me, I suppose, to remind him of that previous visit of mine, and I oughtn’t to have brought it up, but these things slip out.
‘Yes,’ he said, having paused for a moment to shudder. ‘It is the latest addition to my collection.’
‘Daddy bought it from a man named Plank who lives not far from here at Hockley-cum-Meston,’ said Madeline.
‘Attractive little bijou,’ I said. It hurt me to look at it, but I felt that nothing was to be lost by giving him the old oil. ‘Just the sort of thing Uncle Tom would like to have. By Jove,’ I said, remembering, ‘Aunt Dahlia was speaking to me about it on the phone yesterday, and she told me Uncle Tom would give his eyeteeth to have it in his collection. I’m not surprised. It looks valuable.’
‘It’s worth a thousand pounds,’ said Stiffy, coming out of her coma and speaking for the first time.
‘As much as that? Golly!’ Amazing, I was thinking, that magistrates could get to be able to afford expenditure on that scale just by persevering through the years fining people and sticking to the money. ‘What is it? Soapstone?’
I had said the wrong thing.
‘Amber,’ Pop Bassett snapped, giving me the sort of look he had given me in heaping measure on the occasion when I had stood in the dock before him at Bosher Street police court. ‘Black amber.’
‘Of course, yes. That’s what Aunt Dahlia said, I recall. She spoke very highly of it, let me tell you, extremely highly.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Oh, absolutely.’
I had been hoping that this splash of dialogue would have broken the ice, so to speak, and started us off kidding back and forth like the guys and dolls in one of those old-world salons you read about. But no. Silence fell again, and eventually, at long last, the meal came to an end, and two minutes later I was on my way to my room, where I proposed to pass the rest of the evening with an Erle Stanley Gardner I’d brought with me. No sense, as I saw it, in going and mixing with the mob in the drawing-room and having Spode glare at me and Pop Bassett sniff at me and Madeline Bassett as likely as not sing old English folk songs at me till bedtime. I was aware that in executing this quiet sneak I was being guilty of a social gaffe which would have drawn raised eyebrows from the author of a book of etiquette, but the great lesson we learn from life is to know when and when not to be in the centre of things.
7
* * *
I HAVEN’T MENTIONED it till now, having been all tied up with other matters, but during dinner, as you may well imagine, something had been puzzling me not a little – the mystery, to wit, of what on earth had become of Emerald Stoker.
At that lunch of ours she had told me in no uncertain terms that she was off to Totleigh on the four o’clock train that afternoon, and however leisurely its progress it must have got there by this time, because Gussie had travelled on it and he had fetched up at the joint all right. But I could detect no sign of her on the premises. It seemed to me, sifting the evidence, that only one conclusion could be arrived at, that she had been pulling the Wooster leg.
But why? With what motive? That was what I was asking myself as I sneaked up the stairs to where Erle Stanley Gardner awaited me. If you had cared to describe me as perplexed and bewildered, you would have been perfectly correct.
Jeeves was in my room when I got there, going about his gentleman’s gentlemanly duties, and I put my problem up to him.
‘Did you ever see a film called The Vanishing Lady, Jeeves?’
‘No, sir. I rarely attend cinematographic performances.’
‘Well, it was about a lady who vanished, if you follow what I mean, and the reason I bring it up is that a female friend of mine has apparently disappeared into thin air, leaving not a wrack behind, as I once heard you put it.’
‘Highly mysterious, sir.’
‘You said it. I seek in vain for a solution. When I gave her lunch yesterday, she told me she was off on the four o’clock train to go and stay at Totleigh Towers, and the point I want to drive home is that she hasn’t arrived. You remember the day I lunched at the Ritz?’
‘Yes, sir. You were wearing an Alpine hat.’
‘There is no need to dwell on the Alpine hat, Jeeves.’
‘No, sir.’
‘If you really want to know, several fellows at the Drones asked me where I had got it.’
‘No doubt with a view to avoiding your hatter, sir.’
I saw that nothing was to be gained by bandying words. I turned the conversation to a pleasanter and less controversial subject.
‘Well, Jeeves, you’ll be glad to hear that everything’s all right.’
‘Sir?’
‘About that lute we were speaking of. No rift. Sound as a bell. I have it straight from the horse’s mouth that Miss Bassett and Gussie are sweethearts still. The relief is stupendous.’
I hadn’t expected him to clap his hands and leap about, because of course he never does, but I wasn’t prepared for the way he took this bit of hot news. He failed altogether to string along with my jocund mood.
‘I fear, sir, that you are too sanguine. Miss Bassett’s attitude may well be such as you have described, but on Mr. Fink-Nottle’s side, I am sorry to say there exists no little dissatisfaction and resentment.’
The smile which had been splitting my face faded. It’s never easy to translate what Jeeves says into basic English, but I had been able to grab this one off the bat, and what I believe the French call a frisson went through me like a dose of salts.
‘You mean she’s a sweetheart still, but he isn’t?’
‘Precisely, sir. I encountered Mr. Fink-Nottle in the stable yard as I was putting away the car, and he confided his troubles to me. His story occasioned me grave uneasiness.’
Another frisson passed through my frame. I had the unpleasant feeling you get sometimes that centipedes in large numbers are sauntering up and down your spinal column. I feared the worst.
‘But what’s happened?’ I faltered, if faltered’s the word.
‘I regret to inform you, sir, that Miss Bassett has insisted on Mr. Fink-Nottle adopting a vegetarian diet. His mood is understandably disgruntled and rebellious.’
I tottered. In my darkest hour I had never anticipated anything as bad as this. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, because he’s small and shrimplike and never puts on weight, but Gussie loves food. Watching him tucking into his rations at the Drones, a tapeworm would raise its hat respectfully, know
ing that it was in the presence of a master. Cut him off, therefore, from the roasts and boileds and particularly from cold steak and kidney pie, a dish of which he is inordinately fond, and you turned him into something fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils, as the fellow said – the sort of chap who would break an engagement as soon as look at you. At the moment of my entry I had been about to light a cigarette, and now the lighter fell from my nerveless hand.
‘She’s made him become a vegetarian?’
‘So Mr. Fink-Nottle informed me, sir.’
‘No chops?’
‘No, sir.’
‘No steaks?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Just spinach and similar garbage?’
‘So I gather, sir.’
‘But why?’
‘I understand that Miss Bassett has recently been reading the life of the poet Shelley, sir, and has become converted to his view that the consumption of flesh foods is unspiritual. The poet Shelley held strong opinions on this subject.’
I picked up the lighter in a sort of trance. I was aware that Madeline B. was as potty as they come in the matter of stars and rabbits and what happened when fairies blew their wee noses, but I had never dreamed that her goofiness would carry her to such lengths as this. But as the picture rose before my eyes of Gussie at the dinner table picking with clouded brow at what had unquestionably looked like spinach, I knew that his story must be true. No wonder Gussie in agony of spirit had said that Madeline made him sick. Just so might a python at a Zoo have spoken of its keeper, had the latter suddenly started feeding it cheese straws in lieu of the daily rabbit.
‘But this is frightful, Jeeves!’
‘Certainly somewhat disturbing, sir.’
‘If Gussie is seething with revolt, anything may happen.’
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 4: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.4 Page 40