‘You’re a great comfort, Gussie.’
‘I try to be, Esmond. What are you going to sing? The “Yeoman’s Wedding Song”?’
‘No, it’s a thing written by my Aunt Charlotte, with music by my Aunt Myrtle.’
I pursed the lips. This didn’t sound too good. Nothing that I had seen of Aunt Charlotte had led me to suppose that the divine fire lurked within her. One didn’t want to condemn her unheard, of course, but I was prepared to bet that anything proceeding from her pen would be well on the lousy side.
‘I say,’ said Esmond Haddock, struck by an idea, ‘would you mind if I just ran through it for you now?’
‘Nothing I’d like better.’
‘Except perhaps another spot of port?’
‘Except that, perhaps. Thanks.’
Esmond Haddock drained his glass.
‘I won’t sing the verse. It’s just a lot of guff about the sun is high up in the sky and the morn is bright and fair, and so forth.’
‘Quite.’
‘The chorus is what brings home the bacon. It goes like this.’
He assumed the grave, intent expression of a stuffed frog, and let it rip.
‘“Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo …”’
I raised a hand.
‘Just a second. What are you supposed to be doing? Telephoning?’
‘No, it’s a hunting song.’
‘Oh, a hunting song? I see. I thought it might be one of those “I’m going to telephone ma baby” things. Right ho.’
He resumed.
‘“Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo!
A-hunting we will go, pom pom,
A-hunting we will go, Gussie.”’
I raised the hand again.
‘I don’t like that.’
‘What?’
‘That “pom pom”.’
‘Oh, that’s just in the accompaniment.’
‘And I don’t like that “Gussie”. It lets the side down.’
‘Did I say “Gussie”?’
‘Yes. You said “A-hunting we will go, pom pom, a-hunting we will go, Gussie”.’
‘Just a slip of the tongue.’
‘It isn’t in the script?’
‘No, it isn’t in the script.’
‘I’d leave it out on the night.’
‘I will. Shall I continue?’
‘Do.’
‘Where was I?’
‘Better start again at the beginning.’
‘Right. Another drop of port?’
‘Just a trickle, perhaps.’
‘Well, then, starting again at the beginning and omitting, as before, all the-sun-is-high-up-in-the-sky stuff, “Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo! A-hunting we will go, pom pom, a-hunting we will go. Today’s the day, so come what may, a-hunting we will go”.’
I began to see that I had been right about Charlotte. This wouldn’t do at all. Young Squire or no young Squire, a songster singing this sort of thing at a village concert was merely asking for the raspberry.
‘All wrong,’ I said.
‘All wrong?’
‘Well, think it out for yourself. You start off “A-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go”, and then, just as the audience is all keyed up for a punch line, you repeat that a-hunting we will go. There will be a sense of disappointment.’
‘You think so, Gussie?’
‘I’m sure of it, Esmond.’
‘Then what would you advise?’
I pondered a moment.
‘Try this,’ I said. ‘“Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo! A-hunting we will go, my lads, a-hunting we will go, pull up our socks and chase the fox and lay the blighter low.”’
‘I say, that’s good!’
‘Stronger, I think?’
‘Much stronger.’
‘How do you go on from there?’
He switched on the stuffed-frog expression once more:
‘“Oh, hearken to the merry horn!
Over brake and over thorn
Upon this jolly hunting morn
A-hunting we will go.”’
I weighed this.
‘I pass the first two lines,’ I said. ‘“Merry horn.” “Brake and thorn.” Not bad at all. At-a-girl, Charlotte, we always knew you had it in you! But not the finish.’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘Weak. Very weak. I don’t know what sort of standees you get at King’s Deverill, but if they’re like the unshaven thugs behind the back row at every village concert I’ve ever known, you’re simply inviting them to chi-yike and make a noise like tearing calico. No, we must do better than that. Born … corn … pawn … torn … Ha!’ I said, reaching out for the decanter, ‘I think I have it. “Oh, hearken to the merry horn! Over brake and over thorn we’ll ride although our bags get torn! What ho! What ho! What ho!”’
I had more or less expected it to knock him cold and it did. For an instant he was speechless with admiration, then he said it lifted the whole thing and he couldn’t thank me enough.
‘It’s terrific!’
‘I was hoping you would like it.’
‘How do you think of these things?’
‘Oh, they just come to one.’
‘We might run through the authorized version, old man, shall we?’
‘No time like the present, dear old chap.’
It’s curious how, looking back, you can nearly always spot where you went wrong in any binge or enterprise. Take this little slab of community singing of ours, for instance. In order to give the thing zip, I stood on my chair and waved the decanter like a baton, and this, I see now, was a mistake. It helped the composition enormously, but it tended to create a false impression in the mind of the observer, conjuring up a picture of drunken revels.
And if you are going to say that on the present occasion there was no observer, I quietly reply that you are wrong. We had just worked through the ‘brake and thorn’ and were going all out for the rousing finish, when a voice spoke behind us.
It said:
‘Well!’
There are, of course, many ways of saying ‘Well!’ The speaker who had the floor at the moment – Dame Daphne Winkworth – said it rather in the manner of the prudish Queen of a monarch of Babylon who has happened to wander into the banqueting hall just as the Babylonian orgy is beginning to go nicely.
‘Well!’ she said.
Of course, what Corky had told me about Esmond Haddock’s aunt-fixation ought to have prepared me for it, but I must say I was shocked at his deportment at this juncture. It was the deportment of a craven and a worm. Possibly stimulated by my getting on a chair, he had climbed onto the table and was using a banana as a hunting-crop, and he now came down like an apologetic sack of coals, his whole demeanour so crushed and cringing that I could hardly bear to look at him.
‘It’s all right, Aunt Daphne!’
‘All right!’
‘We were rehearsing. For the concert, you know. With the concert so near, one doesn’t want to lose a minute.’
‘Oh? Well, we are expecting you in the drawing room.’
‘Yes, Aunt Daphne.’
‘Gertrude is waiting to play backgammon with you.’
‘Yes, Aunt Daphne.’
‘If you feel capable of playing backgammon.’
‘Oh, yes, Aunt Daphne.’
He slunk from the room with bowed head, and I was about to follow, when the old geezer checked me with an imperious gesture. One noted a marked increase in the resemblance to Wallace Beery, and the thought crossed my mind that life for the unfortunate moppets who had drawn this Winkworth as a headmistress must have been like Six Weeks on Sunny Devil’s Island. Previous to making her acquaintance, I had always supposed the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn to be the nearest thing to the late Captain Bligh of the Bounty which the scholastic world had provided to date, but I could see now that compared with old Battling Daphne he was a mere prelim boy.
‘Augustus, did you bring a great, rough dog with you this evening?’ she demanded.
It shows how the rush and swirl of events at Deverill Hall had affected me when I say that for an instant nothing stirred.
‘Dog?’
‘Silversmith says it belongs to you.’
‘Oh, ah,’ I said, memory returning to its throne. ‘Yes, yes, yes, of course. Yes, to be sure. You mean Sam Goldwyn. But he’s not mine. He belongs to Corky.’
‘To whom?’
‘Corky Pirbright. She asked me to put him up for a day or two.’
The mention of Corky’s name, as had happened at the dinner table, caused her to draw in her breath and do a quick-take-um. There was no getting away from the fact that the girl’s popularity at Deverill Hall was but slight.
‘Is Miss Pirbright a great friend of yours?’
‘Oh, rather,’ I said, remembering too late that this scarcely squared with what Corky had told Esmond Haddock. I was glad that he was no longer with us. ‘She was a trifle dubious about springing the animal on her uncle without a certain amount of preliminary spade-work, he being apparently not very dog-minded, so she turned it over to me. It’s in the stables.’
‘It is not in the stables.’
‘Then Silversmith was pulling my leg. He said he would have it taken there!’
‘He did have it taken there, but it broke loose and came rushing into the drawing room just now like a mad thing.’
I saw that here was where the soothing word was required.
‘Sam Goldwyn isn’t dotty,’ I assured her. ‘I wouldn’t say he was one of our great minds, but he’s perfectly compos. In re his rushing into the drawing room, that was because he thought I was there. He has conceived a burning passion for me and counts every minute lost when he is not in my society. No doubt his first act on being tied up in the stables was to start gnawing through the rope in order to be free to come and look for me. Rather touching.’
Her manner suggested that she did not think it in the least touching. Her eye was alight with anti-Sam sentiment.
‘Well, it was most unpleasant. We had left the french windows open, as the night was so warm, and suddenly this disgusting brute came galloping in. My sister Charlotte received a nervous shock from which it will take her a long time to recover. The animal leaped upon her back and chased her all over the room.’
I did not give the thought utterance, for if there is one thing the Woosters are, it is tactful, but it did occur to me that this had come more or less as a judgment on Charlotte for writing all that Hallo-hallo-hallo-hallo, a-hunting-we-will-go stuff and would be a lesson to her next time she took pen in hand. She was now in a position to see the thing from the fox’s point of view.
‘And when we rang for Silversmith, the creature bit him.’
I must confess to feeling a thrill of admiration as I heard these words. ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din’, I came within a toucher of saying. I wouldn’t have bitten Silversmith myself to please a dying grandmother.
‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ I said. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘I have considerable influence with this hound. I might be able to induce him to call it a day and go back to the stables and get his eight hours.’
‘It will not be necessary. Silversmith succeeded in overpowering the animal and locking it in a cupboard. Now that you tell me its home is at the Vicarage, I will send it there at once.’
‘I’ll take him, shall I?’
‘Pray do not trouble. I think it would be better if you were to go straight to bed.’
This seemed to me the most admirable suggestion. From the moment when the females had legged it from the dinner table, I had been musing somewhat apprehensively on the quiet home evening which would set in as soon as Esmond and I were through with the port. You know what these quiet home evenings are like at country houses were the personnel of the ensemble is mainly feminine. You get backed into corners and shown photograph albums. Folk songs are sung at you. You find the head drooping like a lily on its stem and have to keep jerking it back into position one with an effort that taxes the frail strength to the utmost. Far, far better to retire to my sleeping quarters now, especially as I was most anxious to get in touch with Jeeves, who long ’ere this must have arrived by train with the heavy luggage.
I am not saying that this woman’s words, with their underlying suggestion that I was fried to the tonsils, had not wounded me. It was all too plainly her opinion that, if let loose in drawing rooms, I would immediately proceed to create an atmosphere reminiscent of a waterfront saloon when the Fleet is in. But the Woosters are essentially fair-minded, and I did not blame her for holding these views. I could quite see that when you come into a dining room and find a guest leaping about on a chair with a decanter in his hand, singing Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo, a-hunting we will go, my lads, a-hunting we will go, you are pretty well bound to fall into a certain train of thought.
‘I do feel a little fatigued after my journey,’ I said.
‘Silversmith will show you to your room,’ she replied, and I perceived that Uncle Charlie was in our midst. I had not seen or heard him arrive. Like Jeeves, he had manifested himself silently out of the void. No doubt these things run in families.
‘Silversmith.’
‘Madam?’
‘Show Mr Fink-Nottle to his room,’ said Dame Daphne, though I could see that she was feeling that ‘help’ would have been more the mot juste.
‘Very good, madam.’
I noticed that the man was limping slightly, seeming to suggest that Sam Goldwyn had connected with his calf, but I forbore to probe and question, realizing that the subject, like the calf, might be a sore one. I followed him up the stairs to a well-appointed chamber and wished him a cheery good night.
‘Oh, Silversmith,’ I said.
‘Sir?’
‘Has my man arrived?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You might send him along.’
‘Very good, sir.’
He withdrew, and a few minutes later there entered a familiar form.
But it wasn’t the familiar form of Jeeves. It was the familiar form of Claude Cattermole Pirbright.
7
* * *
WELL, I SUPPOSE if I had been a Seigneur of the Middle Ages – somebody like Childe Roland, for instance – in the days when you couldn’t throw a brick without beaning a magician or a wizard or a sorcerer and people were always getting changed into something else, I wouldn’t have given the thing a second thought. I would just have said ‘Ah, so Jeeves has had a spell cast on him and been turned into Catsmeat, has he? Too bad. Still, that’s life’, and carried on regardless, calling for my pipe and my bowl and my fiddlers three.
But nowadays you tend to lose this easy outlook, and it would be wilfully deceiving my public to say that I did not take it big. I stared at the man, my eyes coming out of the parent sockets like a snail’s and waving about on their stems.
‘Catsmeat!’ I yipped.
He waggled his head frowningly, like a conspirator when a fellow-conspirator has said the wrong thing.
‘Meadowes,’ he corrected.
‘What do you mean, Meadowes?’
‘That is my name while I remain in your employment. I’m your man.’
A solution occurred to me. I have already mentioned that the port which I had swigged perhaps a little too freely in Esmond Haddock’s society was of a fine old vintage and full of body. It now struck me that it must have had even more authority than I had supposed and that Dame Daphne Winkworth had been perfectly correct in assuming that I was scrooched. And I was about to turn my face to the wall and try to sleep it off, when he proceeded.
‘Your valet. Your attendant. Your gentleman’s personal gentleman. It’s quite simple. Jeeves couldn’t come.’
‘What!’
‘No.’
‘You mean Jeeves isn’t going to be at my side?’
‘That’s right. So I am taking his place. What are you doing?’
‘Turning
my face to the wall.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, wouldn’t you turn your face to the wall if you were trapped in a place like this with everybody thinking you were Gussie Fink-Nottle and without Jeeves to comfort and advise? Oh, hell! Oh, blast! Oh, damn! Why couldn’t Jeeves come? Is he ill?’
‘I don’t think so. I speak only as a layman, of course, not as a medical man, but the last I saw of him he seemed pretty full of vitamins. Sparkling eyes. Rosy cheeks. No, Jeeves isn’t ill. What stopped him coming was the fact that his Uncle Charlie is the butler here.’
‘Why the devil should that stop him?’
‘My good Bertie, use your intelligence, if any. Uncle Charlie knows that Jeeves is your keeper. No doubt Jeeves writes him weekly letters, saying how happy he is with you and how nothing would ever induce him to switch elsewhere. Well, what would happen if he suddenly showed up in attendance on Gussie Fink-Nottle? I’ll tell you what would happen. Uncle Charlie’s suspicions would be aroused. “Something fishy here,” he would say to himself. And before you knew where you were he would be tearing off your whiskers and denouncing you. Obviously Jeeves couldn’t come.’
I was forced to admit that there was something in this. But I still chafed.
‘Why didn’t he tell me?’
‘It only occurred to him after you had left.’
‘And why couldn’t he have squared Silversmith?’
‘That point came up when we were discussing the thing, and Jeeves said his Uncle Charlie was one of those fellows who can’t be squared. A man of very rigid principles.’
‘Every man has his price.’
‘Not Jeeves’s Uncle Charlie. My gosh, Bertie, what a lad! He received me when I arrived, and my bones turned to water. Do you remember the effect King Solomon had on the Queen of Sheba at their first meeting? My reactions were somewhat similar. “The half was not told unto me,” I said to myself. If it hadn’t been for Queenie leading me from the presence and buoying me up with a quick cooking sherry, I might have swooned in my tracks.’
‘Who’s Queenie?’
‘Haven’t you met her? The parlourmaid. Delightful girl. Engaged to the village policeman, a fellow named Dobbs. Have you ever tasted cooking sherry, Bertie? Odd stuff.’
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3: The Mating Season / Ring for Jeeves / Very Good, Jeeves Page 26