‘I am furious with Augustus!’ she said, and my heart stood still. It was as if the Totleigh Towers spectre, if there was one, had laid an icy hand on it.
‘Why, what’s happened?’
‘He was very rude to Roderick.’
This seemed incredible. Nobody but an all-in wrestling champion would be rude to a fellow as big as Spode.
‘Surely not?’
‘I mean he was very rude about Roderick. He said he was sick and tired of seeing him clumping about the place as if it belonged to him, and hadn’t he got a home of his own, and if Daddy had an ounce more sense than a billiard ball he would charge him rent. He was most offensive.’
My h. stood stiller. It is not stretching the facts to say that I was appalled and all of a doodah. It just showed, I was telling myself, what a vegetarian diet can do to a chap, changing him in a flash from a soft boiled to a hard boiled egg. I have no doubt the poet Shelley’s circle noticed the same thing with the poet Shelley.
I tried to pour oil on the troubled w’s.
‘Probably just kidding, don’t you think?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘He didn’t say it with a twinkle in his eye?’
‘No.’
‘Nor with a light laugh?’
‘No.’
‘You might not have noticed it. Very easy to miss, these light laughs.’
‘He meant every word he said.’
‘Then it was probably just a momentary spasm of what-d’you-call-it. Irritability. We all have them.’
She ground a tooth or two. At least, it looked as if that was what she was doing.
‘It was nothing of the kind. He was harsh and bitter, and he has been like that for a long time. I noticed it first at Brinkley. One morning we had walked in the meadows and the grass was all covered with little wreaths of mist, and I said Didn’t he sometimes feel that they were the elves’ bridal veils, and he said sharply, “No, never,” adding that he had never heard such a silly idea in his life.’
Well, of course, he was perfectly correct, but it was no good pointing that out to a girl like Madeline Bassett.
‘And that evening we were watching the sunset, and I said sunsets always made me think of the Blessed Damozel leaning out from the gold bar of heaven, and he said “Who?” and I said “The Blessed Damozel,” and he said, “Never heard of her”. And he said that sunsets made him sick and so did the Blessed Damozel and he had a pain in his inside.’
I saw that the time had come to be a raisonneur.
‘This was at Brinkley?’
‘Yes.’
‘I see. After you had made him become a vegetarian. Are you sure,’ I said, raisonneuring like nobody’s business, ‘that you were altogether wise in confining him to spinach and what not? Many a proud spirit rebels when warned off the proteins. And I don’t know if you know it, but medical research has established that the ideal diet is one in which animal and vegetable foods are balanced. It’s something to do with the something acids required by the body.’
I won’t say she actually snorted, but the sound she uttered was certainly on the borderline of the snort.
‘What nonsense!’
‘It’s what doctors say.’
‘Which doctors?’
‘Well-known Harley Street physicians.’
‘I don’t believe it. Thousands of people are vegetarians and enjoy perfect health.’
‘Bodily health, yes,’ I said, cleverly seizing on the debating point. ‘But what of the soul? If you suddenly steer a fellow off the steaks and chops, it does something to his soul. My Aunt Agatha once made my Uncle Percy be a vegetarian, and his whole nature became soured. Not,’ I was forced to admit, ‘that it wasn’t fairly soured already, as anyone’s would be who was in constant contact with my Aunt Agatha. I bet you’ll find that that’s all that’s wrong with Gussie. He simply wants a mutton chop or two under his belt.’
‘Well, he’s not going to have them. And if he continues to behave like a sulky child, I shall know what to do about it.’
I remember Stinker Pinker telling me once that toward the end of his time at Oxford he was down in Bethnal Green spreading the light, and a costermonger kicked him in the stomach. He said it gave him a strange, confused, dreamlike feeling, and that’s what these ominous words of M. Bassett’s gave me now. She had spoken them from between teeth which, if not actually clenched, were the next thing to it, and it was as if the substantial boot of a vendor of blood oranges and bananas had caught me squarely in the solar plexus.
‘Er – what will you do about it?’
‘Never mind.’
I put out a cautious feeler.
‘Suppose … not that it’s likely to happen, of course … but suppose Gussie, maddened by abstinence, were to go off and tuck into … well, to take an instance at random, cold steak and kidney pie, what would be the upshot?’
I had never supposed that she had it in her to give anyone a piercing look, but that is what she gave me now. I don’t think even Aunt Agatha’s eyes have bored more deeply into me.
‘Are you telling me, Bertie, that Augustus has been eating steak and kidney pie?’
‘Good heavens, no. It was just a thingummy.’
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘What do they call questions that aren’t really questions? Begins with an h. Hypothetical, that’s the word. It was just a hypothetical question.’
‘Oh? Well, the answer to it is that if I found that Augustus had been eating the flesh of animals slain in anger, I would have nothing more to do with him,’ she said, and she biffed off, leaving me a spent force and a mere shell of my former self.
13
* * *
THE FOLLOWING DAY dawned bright and fair. At least I suppose it did. I didn’t see it dawning myself, having dropped off into a troubled slumber some hours before it got its nose down to it, but when the mists of sleep cleared and I was able to attend to what was going on, sunshine was seeping through the window and the ear detected the chirping of about seven hundred and fifty birds, not one of whom, unlike me, appeared to have a damn thing on his or her mind. As carefree a bunch as I’ve ever struck, and it gave me the pip to listen to them, for melancholy had marked me for her own, as the fellow said, and all this buck and heartiness simply stepped up the gloom in which my yesterday’s chat with Madeline Bassett had plunged me.
As may well be imagined, her obiter dicta, as I believe they’re called, had got right in amongst me. This, it was plain, was no mere lovers’ tiff, to be cleaned up with a couple of tears and a kiss or two, but a real Class A rift which, if prompt steps were not taken through the proper channels, would put the lute right out of business and make it as mute as a drum with a hole in it. And the problem of how those steps were to be taken defeated me. Two iron wills had clashed. On the one hand we had Madeline’s strong anti-flesh-food bias, on the other Gussie’s firm determination to get all the cuts off the joint that were coming to him. What, I asked myself, would the harvest be, and I was still shuddering at the thought of what the future might hold, when Jeeves trickled in with the morning cup of tea.
‘Eh?’ I said absently, as he put it on the table. Usually I spring at the refreshing fluid like a seal going after a slice of fish. Preoccupied, if you know what I mean. Or distrait, if you care to put it that way.
‘I was saying that we are fortunate in having a fine day for the school treat, sir.’
I sat up with a jerk, upsetting the cuppa as deftly as if I’d been the Rev. H.P. Pinker.
‘Is it today?’
‘This afternoon, sir.’
I groaned one of those hollow ones.
‘It needed but this, Jeeves.’
‘Sir?’
‘The last straw. I’d enough on my mind already.’
‘There is something disturbing you, sir?’
‘You’re right there is. Hell’s foundations are quivering. What do you call it when a couple of nations start off by being all palsy-walsy and t
hen begin calling each other ticks and bounders?’
‘Relations have deteriorated would be the customary phrase, sir.’
‘Well, relations have deteriorated between Miss Bassett and Gussie. He, as we know, was already disgruntled, and now she’s disgruntled, too. She has taken exception to a derogatory crack he made about the sunset. She thinks highly of sunsets, and he told her they made him sick. Can you believe this?’
‘Quite readily, sir. Mr. Fink-Nottle was commenting to me on the sunset yesterday evening. He said it looked so like a slice of underdone beef that it tortured him to see it. One can appreciate his feelings.’
‘I dare say, but I wish he’d keep them to himself. He also appears to have spoken disrespectfully of the Blessed Damozel. Who’s the Blessed Damozel, Jeeves? I don’t seem to have heard of her.’
‘The heroine of a poem by the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti, sir. She leaned out from the gold bar of Heaven.’
‘Yes, I gathered that. That much was specified.’
‘Her eyes were deeper than the depths of waters stilled at even. She had three lilies in her hand, and the stars in her hair were seven.’
‘Oh, were they? Well, be that as it may, Gussie said she made him sick, too, and Miss Bassett’s as sore as a sunburned neck.’
‘Most disturbing, sir.’
‘Disturbing is the word. If things go on the way they are, no bookie would give odds of less than a hundred to eight on this betrothal lasting another week. I’ve seen betrothals in my time, many of them, but never one that looked more likely to come apart at the seams than that of Augustus Fink-Nottle and Madeline, daughter of Sir Watkyn and the late Lady Bassett. The suspense is awful. Who was the chap I remember reading about somewhere, who had a sword hanging over him attached to a single hair?’
‘Damocles, sir. It is an old Greek legend.’
‘Well, I know just how he felt. And with this on my mind, I’m expected to attend a ruddy school treat. I won’t go.’
‘Your absence may cause remark, sir.’
‘I don’t care. They won’t get a smell of me. I’m oiling out, and let them make of it what they will.’
Apart from anything else, I was remembering the story I had heard Pongo Twistleton tell one night at the Drones, illustrative of how unbridled passions are apt to become at these binges. Pongo got mixed up once in a school treat down in Somersetshire, and his description of how, in order to promote a game called ‘Is Mr. Smith at Home?’ he had had to put his head in a sack and allow the younger generation to prod him with sticks had held the smoking-room spellbound. At a place like Totleigh, where even on normal days human life was not safe, still worse excesses were to be expected. The glimpse or two I had had of the local Dead End kids had told me how tough a bunch they were and how sedulously they should be avoided by the man who knew what was good for him.
‘I shall nip over to Brinkley in the car and have lunch with Uncle Tom. You at my side, I hope?’
‘Impossible, I fear, sir. I have promised to assist Mr. Butterfield in the tea tent.’
‘Then you can tell me all about it.’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘If you survive.’
‘Precisely, sir.’
It was a nice easy drive to Brinkley, and I got there well in advance of the luncheon hour. Aunt Dahlia wasn’t there, having, as foreshadowed, popped up to London for the day, and Uncle Tom and I sat down alone to a repast in Anatole’s best vein. Over the Suprême de Foie Gras au Champagne and the Neige aux Perles des Alpes I placed him in possession of the facts relating to the black amber statuette thing, and his relief at learning that Pop Bassett hadn’t got a thousand-quid objet d’art for a fiver was so profound and the things he said about Pop B. so pleasing to the ear that by the time I started back my dark mood had become sensibly lightened and optimism had returned to its throne.
After all, I reminded myself, it wasn’t as if Gussie was going to be indefinitely under Madeline’s eye. In due season he would buzz back to London and there would be able to tuck into the beefs and muttons till his ribs squeaked, confident that not a word of his activities would reach her. The effect of this would be to refill him with sweetness and light, causing him to write her loving letters which would carry him along till she emerged from this vegetarian phase and took up stamp collecting or something. I know the other sex and their sudden enthusiasms. They get these crazes and wallow in them for awhile, but they soon become fed up and turn to other things. My Aunt Agatha once went in for politics, but it only took a few meetings at which she got the bird from hecklers to convince her that the cagey thing to do was to stay at home and attend to her fancy needlework, giving the whole enterprise a miss.
It was getting on for what is called the quiet evenfall when I anchored at Totleigh Towers. I did my usual sneak to my room, and I had been there a few minutes when Jeeves came in.
‘I saw you arrive, sir,’ he said, ‘and I thought you might be in need of refreshment.’
I assured him that his intuition had not led him astray, and he said he would bring me a whisky-and-s. immediately.
‘I trust you found Mr. Travers in good health, sir.’
I was able to reassure him there.
‘He was a bit low when I blew in, but on receipt of my news about the what-not blossomed like a flower. It would have done you good to have heard what he had to say about Pop Bassett. And talking of Pop Bassett, how did the school treat go off?’
‘I think the juvenile element enjoyed the festivities, sir.’
‘How about you?’
‘Sir?’
‘You were all right? They didn’t put your head in a sack and prod you with sticks?’
‘No, sir. My share in the afternoon’s events was confined to assisting in the tea tent.’
‘You speak lightly, Jeeves, but I’ve known some dark work to take place in school treat tea tents.’
‘It is odd that you should say that, sir, for it was while partaking of tea that a lad threw a hard-boiled egg at Sir Watkyn.’
‘And hit him?’
‘On the left cheek-bone, sir. It was most unfortunate.’
I could not subscribe to this.
‘I don’t know why you say “unfortunate”. Best thing that could have happened, in my opinion. The very first time I set eyes on Pop Bassett, in the picturesque environment of Bosher Street police court, I remember saying to myself that there sat a man to whom it would do all the good in the world to have hard-boiled eggs thrown at him. One of my crowd on that occasion, a lady accused of being drunk and disorderly and resisting the police, did on receipt of her sentence, throw her boot at him, but with a poor aim, succeeding only in beaning the magistrate’s clerk. What’s the boy’s name?’
‘I could not say, sir. His actions were cloaked in anonymity.’
‘A pity. I would have liked to reward him by sending camels bearing apes, ivory and peacocks to his address. Did you see anything of Gussie in the course of the afternoon?’
‘Yes, sir. Mr. Fink-Nottle, at Miss Bassett’s insistence, played a large part in the proceedings and was, I am sorry to say, somewhat roughly handled by the younger revellers. Among other vicissitudes that he underwent, a child entangled its all-day sucker in his hair.’
‘That must have annoyed him. He’s fussy about his hair.’
‘Yes, sir, he was visibly incensed. He detached the sweetmeat and threw it from him with a good deal of force, and by ill luck it struck Miss Byng’s dog on the nose. Affronted by what he presumably mistook for an unprovoked assault, the animal bit Mr. Fink-Nottle in the leg.’
‘Poor old Gussie!’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Still, into each life some rain must fall.’
‘Precisely, sir. I will go and bring your whisky-and-soda.’
He had scarcely gone, when Gussie blew in, limping a little but otherwise showing no signs of what Jeeves had called the vicissitudes he had undergone. He seemed, indeed, above rather than below his usual for
m, and I remember the phrase ‘the bulldog breed’ passed through my mind. If Gussie was a sample of young England’s stamina and fortitude, it seemed to me that the country’s future was secure. It is not every nation that can produce sons capable of grinning, as he was doing, so shortly after being bitten by Aberdeen terriers.
‘Oh, there you are, Bertie,’ he said. ‘Jeeves told me you were back. I looked in to borrow some cigarettes.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, filling his case. ‘I’m taking Emerald Stoker for a walk.’
‘You’re what?’
‘Or a row on the river. Whichever she prefers.’
‘But, Gussie –’
‘Oh, before I forget. Pinker is looking for you. He says he wants to see you about something important.’
‘Never mind about Stinker. You can’t take Emerald Stoker for walks.’
‘Can’t I? Watch me.’
‘But –’
‘Sorry, no time to talk now. I don’t want to keep her waiting. So long, I must be off.’
He left me plunged in thought, and not agreeable thought either. I think I have made it clear to the meanest i. that my whole future depended on Augustus Fink-Nottle sticking to the straight and narrow path and not blotting his copybook, and I could not but feel that by taking Emerald Stoker for walks he was skidding off the straight and narrow path and blotting his c. in no uncertain manner. That, at least, was, I was pretty sure, how an idealistic beazel like Madeline Bassett, already rendered hot under the collar by his subversive views on sunsets and Blessed Damozels, would regard it. It is not too much to say that when Jeeves returned with the whisky-and-s., he found me all of a twitter and shaking on my stem.
I would have liked to put him abreast of this latest development, but, as I say, there are things we don’t discuss, so I merely drank deep of the flowing bowl and told him that Gussie had just been a pleasant visitor.
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