‘He tells me Stinker Pinker wants to see me about something.’
‘No doubt with reference to the episode of Sir Watkyn and the hard-boiled egg, sir.’
‘Don’t tell me it was Stinker who threw it.’
‘No, sir, the miscreant is believed to have been a lad in his early teens. But the young fellow’s impulsive action has led to unfortunate consequences. It has caused Sir Watkyn to entertain doubts as to the wisdom of entrusting a vicarage to a curate incapable of maintaining order at a school treat. Miss Byng, while confiding this information to me, appeared greatly distressed. She had supposed – I quote her verbatim – that the thing was in the bag, and she is naturally much disturbed.’
I drained my glass and lit a moody gasper. If Totleigh Towers wanted to turn me into a cynic, it was going the right way about it.
‘There’s a curse on this house, Jeeves. Broken blossoms and shattered hopes wherever you look. It seems to be something in the air. The sooner we’re out of here, the better. I wonder if we couldn’t –’
I had been about to add ‘make our getaway tonight’, but at this moment the door flew open and Spode came bounding in, wiping the words from my lips and causing me to raise an eyebrow or two. I resented this habit he was developing of popping up out of a trap at me every other minute like a Demon King in pantomime, and only the fact that I couldn’t think of anything restrained me from saying something pretty stinging. As it was, I wore the mask and spoke with the suavity of the perfect host.
‘Ah, Spode. Come on in and take a few chairs,’ I said, and was on the point of telling him that we Woosters kept open house, when he interrupted me with the uncouth abruptness so characteristic of these human gorillas. Roderick Spode may have had his merits, though I had never been able to spot them, but his warmest admirer couldn’t have called him couth.
14
* * *
‘HAVE YOU SEEN Fink-Nottle?’ he said.
I didn’t like the way he spoke or the way he was looking. The lips, I noted, were twitching, and the eyes glittered with what I believe is called a baleful light. It seemed pretty plain to me that it was in no friendly spirit that he was seeking Gussie, so I watered down the truth a bit, as the prudent man does on these occasions.
‘I’m sorry, no. I’ve only just got back from my uncle’s place over Worcestershire way. Some urgent family business came up and I had to go and attend to it, so unfortunately missed the school treat. A great disappointment. You haven’t seen Gussie, have you, Jeeves?’
He made no reply, possibly because he wasn’t there. He generally slides discreetly off when the young master is entertaining the quality, and you never see him go. He just evaporates.
‘Was it something important you wanted to see him about?’
‘I want to break his neck.’
My eyebrows, which had returned to normal, rose again. I also, if I remember rightly, pursed my lips.
‘Well, really, Spode! Is this not becoming a bit thick? It’s not so long ago that you were turning over in your mind the idea of breaking mine. I think you should watch yourself in this matter of neck-breaking and check the urge before it gets too strong a grip on you. No doubt you say to yourself that you can take it or leave it alone, but isn’t there the danger of the thing becoming habit-forming? Why do you want to break Gussie’s neck?’
He ground his teeth, at least that’s what I think he did to them, and was silent for a space. Then, though there wasn’t anyone within earshot but me, he lowered his voice.
‘I can speak frankly to you, Wooster, because you, too, love her.’
‘Eh? Who?’ I said. It should have been ‘whom’, I suppose, but that didn’t occur to me at the time.
‘Madeline, of course.’
‘Oh, Madeline?’
‘As I told you, I have always loved her, and her happiness is very dear to me. It is everything to me. To give her a moment’s pleasure I would cut myself in pieces.’
I couldn’t follow him there, but before I could go into the question of whether girls enjoy seeing people cut themselves in pieces he had resumed.
‘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 silent.’
‘Very white.’
‘I said nothing that would give her a suspicion of how I felt.’
‘Very pukka.’
‘It was enough for me that she should be happy. Nothing else mattered. But when Fink-Nottle turns out to be a libertine –’
‘Who, Gussie?’ I said, surprised. ‘The last chap I’d have attached such a label to. Pure as the driven s., I’d have thought, if not purer. What makes you think Gussie’s a libertine?’
‘The fact that less than ten minutes ago I saw him kissing the cook,’ said Spode through the teeth which I’m pretty sure he was grinding, and he dived out of the door and was gone.
How long I remained motionless, like a ventriloquist’s dummy whose ventriloquist has gone off to the local and left it sitting, I cannot say. Probably not so very long, for when life returned to the rigid limbs and I legged it for the open spaces to try to find Gussie and warn him of this V-shaped depression which was coming his way, Spode was still in sight. He was disappearing in a nor’-nor’-easterly direction, so, not wanting to hobnob with him again while he was in this what you might call difficult mood, I pushed off sou’-sou’-west, and found that I couldn’t have set my course more shrewdly. There was a sort of yew alley or rhododendron walk or some such thing confronting me, and as I entered it I saw Gussie. He was standing in a kind of trance, and his fatheadedness in standing when he ought to have been running like a rabbit smote me like a blow and lent an extra emphasis to the ‘Hoy!’ with which I accosted him.
He turned, and as I approached him I noted that he seemed even more braced than when last seen. The eyes behind the horn-rimmed spectacles gleamed with a brighter light, and a smile wreathed his lips. He looked like a fish that’s just learned that its rich uncle in Australia has pegged out and left it a packet.
‘Ah, Bertie,’ he said, ‘we decided to go for a walk, not a row. We thought it might be a little chilly on the water. What a beautiful evening, Bertie, is it not?’
I couldn’t see eye to eye with him there.
‘It strikes you as that, does it? It doesn’t me.’
He seemed surprised.
‘In what respect do you find it not up to sample?’
‘I’ll tell you in what respect I find it not up to sample. What’s all this I hear about you and Emerald Stoker? Did you kiss her?’
The Soul’s Awakening expression on his face became intensified. Before my revolted eyes Augustus Fink-Nottle definitely smirked.
‘Yes, Bertie, I did, and I’ll do it again if it’s the last thing I do. What a girl, Bertie! So kind, so sympathetic. She’s my idea of a thoroughly womanly woman, and you don’t see many of them around these days. I hadn’t time when I was in your room to tell you about what happened at the school treat.’
‘Jeeves told me. He said Bartholomew bit you.’
‘And how right he was. The bounder bit me to the bone. And do you know what Emerald Stoker did? Not only did she coo over me like a mother comforting a favourite child, but she bathed and bandaged my lacerated leg. She was a ministering angel, the nearest thing to Florence Nightingale you could hope to find. It was shortly after she had done the swabbing and bandaging that I kissed her.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t have kissed her.’
Again he showed surprise. He had thought it, he said, a pretty sound idea.
‘But you’re engaged to Madeline.’
I had hoped with these words to start his conscience working on all twelve cylinders, but something seemed to have gone wrong with the machinery, for he remained as calm and unmoved as the fish on ice he so closely resembled.
‘Ah, Madeline,’ he said. ‘I was about to touch on Madeline. Shall I tell
you what’s wrong with Madeline Bassett? No heart. That’s where she slips up. Lovely to look at, but nothing here,’ he said, tapping the left side of his chest. ‘Do you know how she reacted to that serious flesh wound of mine? She espoused Bartholomew’s cause. She said the whole thing was my fault. She accused me of having teased the little blister. In short, she behaved like a louse. How different from Emerald Stoker. Do you know what Emerald Stoker did?’
‘You told me.’
‘I mean in addition to binding up my wounds. She went straight off to the kitchen and cut me a package of sandwiches. I have them here,’ said Gussie, exhibiting a large parcel and eyeing it reverently. ‘Ham,’ he added in a voice that throbbed with emotion. ‘She made them for me with her own hands, and I think it was her thoughtfulness even more than her divine sympathy that showed me that she was the only girl in the world for me. The scales fell from my eyes, and I saw that what I had once felt for Madeline had been just a boyish infatuation. What I feel for Emerald Stoker is the real thing. In my opinion she stands alone, and I shall be glad if you will stop going about the place saying that she looks like a Pekinese.’
‘But, Gussie –’
He silenced me with an imperious wave of the ham sandwiches.
‘It’s no good your saying “But, Gussie”. The trouble with you, Bertie, is that you haven’t got it in you to understand true love. You’re a mere butterfly flitting from flower to flower and sipping, like Freddie Widgeon and the rest of the halfwits of whom the Drones Club is far too full. A girl to you is just the plaything of an idle hour, and anything in the nature of a grand passion is beyond you. I’m different. I have depth. I’m a marrying man.’
‘But you can’t marry Emerald Stoker.’
‘Why not? We’re twin souls.’
I thought for a moment of giving him a word-portrait of old Stoker, to show him the sort of father-in-law he would be getting if he carried through the project he had in mind, but I let it go. Reason told me that a fellow who for months had been expecting to draw Pop Bassett as a father-in-law was not going to be swayed by an argument like that. However frank my description of him, Stoker could scarcely seem anything but a change for the better.
I stood there at a loss, and was still standing there at a loss, when I heard my name called and looking behind me saw Stinker and Stiffy. They were waving hands and things, and I gathered that they had come to thresh out with me the matter of Sir Watkyn Bassett and the hard-boiled egg.
The last thing I would have wished at this crucial point in my affairs was an interruption, for all my faculties should have been concentrated on reasoning with Gussie and trying to make him see the light, but it has often been said of Bertram Wooster that when a buddy in distress is drawn to his attention he forgets self. No matter what his commitments elsewhere, the distressed buddy has only to beckon and he is with him. With a brief word to Gussie that I would be back at an early date to resume our discussion, I hurried to where Stiffy and Stinker stood.
‘Talk quick,’ I said. ‘I’m in conference. Too long to tell you all about it, but a serious situation has arisen. As, according to Jeeves, one has with you. From what he told me I gathered that the odds against Stinker clicking as regards that vicarage have lengthened. More letting-I-dare-not-wait-upon-I-would-ness on Pop Bassett’s part, he gave me to understand. Too bad.’
‘Of course, one can see it from Sir Watkyn’s point of view,’ said Stinker, who, if he has a fault besides bumping into furniture and upsetting it, is always far too tolerant in his attitude toward the dregs of humanity. ‘He thinks that if I’d drilled the distinction between right and wrong more vigorously into the minds of the Infants Bible Class, the thing wouldn’t have happened.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Stiffy.
Nor did I. In my opinion, no amount of Sunday afternoon instruction would have been sufficient to teach a growing boy not to throw hard-boiled eggs at Sir Watkyn Bassett.
‘But there’s nothing I can do about it, is there?’ I said.
‘You bet there is,’ said Stiffy. ‘We haven’t lost all hope of sweetening him. The great thing is to let his nervous system gradually recover its poise, and what we came to see you about, Bertie, was to tell you on no account to go near him till he’s had a chance to simmer down. Don’t seek him out. Leave him alone. The sight of you does something to him.’
‘No more than the sight of him does to me,’ I riposted warmly. I resented the suggestion that I had nothing better to do with my time than fraternize with ex-magistrates. ‘Certainly I’ll avoid his society. It’ll be a pleasure. Is that all?’
‘That’s all.’
‘Then I’ll be getting back to Gussie,’ I said, and was starting to move off, when Stiffy uttered a sharp squeak.
‘Gussie! That reminds me. There’s something I wanted to tell him, something of vital concern to him, and I can’t think how it slipped my mind. Gussie,’ she called, and Gussie, seeming to wake abruptly from a daydream, blinked and came over. ‘What are you doing hanging about here, Gussie?’
‘Who, me? I was discussing something with Bertie, and he said he’d be back, when at liberty, to go into it further.’
‘Well, let me tell you that you’ve no time for discussing things with Bertie.’
‘Eh?’
‘Or for saying “Eh?” I met Roderick just now, and he asked me if I knew where you were, because he wants to tear you limb from limb owing to his having seen you kiss the cook.’
Gussie’s jaw fell with a dull thud.
‘You never told me that,’ he said to me, and one spotted the note of reproach in his voice.
‘No, sorry, I forgot to mention it. But it’s true. You’d better start coping. Run like a hare, is my advice.’
He took it. Standing not on the order of his going, as the fellow said, he dashed off as if shot from a gun, and was making excellent time when he was brought up short by colliding with Spode, who had at that moment entered left centre.
15
* * *
IT’S ALWAYS DISCONCERTING to have even as small a chap as Gussie take you squarely in the midriff, as I myself can testify, having had the same experience down in Washington Square during a visit to New York. Washington Square is bountifully supplied with sad-eyed Italian kids who whizz to and fro on roller skates, and one of them, proceeding on his way with lowered head, rammed me in the neighbourhood of the third waistcoat button at a high rate of m.p.h. It gave me a strange Where-am-I feeling, and I imagine Spode’s sensations were somewhat similar. His breath escaped him in a sharp ‘Oof!’ and he swayed like some forest tree beneath the woodman’s axe. But unfortunately Gussie had paused to sway, too, and this gave him time to steady himself on even keel and regroup his forces. Reaching out a hamlike hand, he attached it to the scruff of Gussie’s neck and said ‘Ha!’
‘Ha!’ is one of those things it’s never easy to find the right reply to – it resembles ‘You!’ in that respect – but Gussie was saved the necessity of searching for words by the fact that he was being shaken like a cocktail in a manner that precluded speech, if precluded is the word I want. His spectacles fell off and came to rest near where I was standing. I picked them up with a view to returning them to him when he had need of them, which I could see would not be immediately.
As this Fink-Nottle was a boyhood friend, with whom, as I have said, I had frequently shared my last bar of milk chocolate, and as it was plain that if someone didn’t intervene pretty soon he was in danger of having all his internal organs shaken into a sort of macédoine or hash, the thought of taking some steps to put an end to this distressing scene naturally crossed my mind. The problem presenting several points of interest was, of course, what steps to take. My tonnage was quite insufficient to enable me to engage Spode in hand-to-hand conflict, and I toyed with the idea of striking him on the back of the head with a log of wood. But this project was rendered null and void by the fact that there were no logs of wood present. These yew alleys or rhododendron walks
provide twigs and fallen leaves, but nothing in the shape of logs capable of being used as clubs. And I had just decided that something might be accomplished by leaping on Spode’s back and twining my arms around his neck, when I heard Stiffy cry ‘Harold!’
One gathered what she was driving at. Gussie was no particular buddy of hers, but she was a tender-hearted young prune and one always likes to save a fellow creature’s life, if possible. She was calling on Stinker to get into the act and save Gussie’s. And a quick look at him showed me that he was at a loss to know how to proceed. He stood there passing a finger thoughtfully over his chin, like a cat in an adage.
I knew what was stopping him getting into action. It was not … it’s on the tip of my tongue … begins with a p … I’ve heard Jeeves use the word … pusillanimity, that’s it, meaning broadly that a fellow is suffering from a pronounced case of cold feet … it was not, as I was saying when I interrupted myself, pusillanimity that held him back. Under normal conditions lions could have taken his correspondence course, and had he encountered Spode on the football field, he would have had no hesitation in springing at his neck and twisting it into a lovers’ knot. The trouble was that he was a curate, and the brass hats of the Church look askance at curates who swat the parishioners. Sock your flock, and you’re sunk. So now he shrank from intervening, and when he did intervene, it was merely with the soft word that’s supposed to turn away wrath.
‘I say, you know, what?’ he said.
I could have told him he was approaching the thing from the wrong angle. When a gorilla like Spode is letting his angry passions rise, there is little or no percentage in the mild remonstrance. Seeming to realize this, he advanced to where the blighter was now, or so it appeared, trying to strangle Gussie and laid a hand on his shoulder. Then, seeing that this, too, achieved no solid results, he pulled. There was a rending sound, and the clutching hand relaxed its grip.
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 4: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.4 Page 46