But lunch had come and gone, the duck and green peas turning to ashes in my mouth, and still no sign of him. It was past three when he finally showed up.
At the sight of him, my heart, throwing off its burden of care, did a quick soft-shoe dance. No fellow, I reasoned, unless he was bringing good news, could look so like the United States Marines. When last seen, driving off on his mission, his air had been sober and downcast, as if he feared that even Jeeves would have to confess himself snookered by this one. He was now gay, bobbish and boomps-a-daisy.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘I had to wait for Jeeves’s brain to gather momentum. He was a little slower off the mark than usual.’
I clutched his arm.
‘Did he click?’ I cried, quivering in every limb.
‘Oh, yes, he clicked. Jeeves always clicks. But this time only after brooding for what seemed an eternity. I found him in the kitchen at your flat, sipping a cup of tea and reading Spinoza, and put our problem before him, bidding him set the little grey cells in operation without delay and think of some way of preventing your blasted aunt from fulfilling her evil purpose of coming to infest Deverill Hall. He said he would, and I went back to the sitting-room, where I took a seat, put my feet on the mantelpiece and thought of Gertrude. From time to time I would rise and look in at the kitchen and ask him how it was coming, but he motioned me away with a silent wave of the hand and let the brain out another notch. Finally he emerged and announced that he had got it. He had been musing, as always, on the psychology of the individual.’
‘What individual? My Aunt Agatha?’
‘Naturally, your Aunt Agatha. What other individual’s psychology would you have expected him to muse on? Sir Stafford Cripps’s? He then proceeded to outline a scheme which I think you will agree was a ball of fire. Tell me, Bertie, have you ever stolen a cub from a tigress?’
I said no, for one reason and another I never had, and he asked me what, if I ever did, I supposed the reactions of the tigress would be, always assuming that she was a good wife and mother. And I said that, while I didn’t set myself up as an authority on tigresses, I imagined that she would be as sick as mud.
‘Exactly. And you would expect the animal, the loss of its child having been drawn to its attention, to drop everything and start looking for it, would you not? It would completely revise its social plans, don’t you think? If, for instance, it had arranged to visit other tigresses in a nearby cave, it would cancel the date and begin hunting around for clues. You agree?’
I said Yes, I thought this probable.
‘Well, that is what Jeeves feels will happen in the case of your Aunt Agatha when she learns that her son Thomas has vanished from his school at Bramley-on-Sea.’
I can’t tell you offhand what I had been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. Having recovered sufficient breath to enable me to put the question, I asked what it was that he had said, and he repeated his words at dictation speed, and I said, ‘But dash it!’ and he said ‘Well?’
‘You aren’t telling me that Jeeves is going to kidnap young Thos?’
He t’chk-t’chked impatiently.
‘You don’t have to kidnap dyed-in-the-wool fans like your cousin Thomas, if you inform them that their favourite film star is hoping that they will be able to get away and come and spend a few days at the Vicarage where she is staying. That is the message which Jeeves has gone to Bramley-on-Sea to deliver, and I confidently expect it to work like a charm.’
‘You mean he’ll run away from school?’
‘Of course he’ll run away from school. Like lightning. However, to clinch the thing, I empowered Jeeves in your name to offer a fee of five quid in the event of any hesitation. I gather from Jeeves, in whom he confided, that young Thomas is more than ordinarily out for the stuff just now. He’s saving up to buy a camera.’
I applauded the shrewd thought, but I didn’t think that this introduction of the sordid note would really be necessary. Thos is a boy of volcanic passions, the sort of boy who, if he had but threepence in the world, would spend it on a stamp, writing to Dorothy Lamour for her autograph, and the message which Catsmeat had outlined would, I felt, be in itself amply sufficient to get him on the move.
‘Yes,’ Catsmeat agreed, ‘I think we should shortly have the young fellow with us. But not your Aunt Agatha, who will be occupied elsewhere. It’s a pity she has to be temporarily deprived of her cub, of course, and one sympathizes with a mother’s anxiety. It would have been nice if the thing could have been arranged some other way, but that’s how it goes. One has simply got to say to oneself that into each life some rain must fall.’
My own view was that Aunt Agatha wouldn’t be anxious so much as hopping mad.
‘Thos,’ I said, ‘makes rather a speciality of running away from school. He’s done it twice before this, once to attend a cup final and once to go hunting for buried treasure in the Caribbees, and I don’t remember Aunt Agatha on either occasion as the stricken mother. Thos was the one who got stricken. Six of the best on the old spot, he tells me. This, I should imagine, will probably occur again, and I think that even if he takes the assignment on for love alone, I will slip him that fiver as added money’
‘It would be a graceful act.’
After all, what’s money? You can’t take it with you.’
‘The right spirit.’
‘But isn’t Corky going to be a bit at a loss when he suddenly shows up?’
‘That’s all fixed. I met her in the village and told her.’
‘And she approved?’
‘Wholeheartedly. Corky always approves of anything that seems likely to tend to start something.’
‘She’s a wonderful girl.’
‘A very admirable character. By the way, she tells me you put in that word in season.’
‘Yes. I thought she seemed braced.’
‘That’s how she struck me, too. Odd that she should be so crazy about Esmond Haddock. I’ve only seen him from a distance, of course, but I should have imagined he would have been a bit on the stiff side for Corky’
‘He’s not really stiff. You should see him relaxing over the port.’
‘Perhaps you’re right. And, anyway, love’s a thing you can’t argue about. I suppose it would perplex thousands that Gertrude, bless her, loves me. Yet she does. And look at poor little Queenie. Heartbroken over the loss of a rozzer I wouldn’t be seen in a ditch with. And talking of Queenie, I was thinking of taking her to the pictures in Basingstoke this afternoon, if you’ll lend me your car.’
‘Of course. You feel it would cheer her up?’
‘It might. And I should like to slap balm on that wounded spirit, if it can be managed. It’s curious how, when you’re in love, you yearn to go about doing acts of kindness to everybody. I am bursting with a sort of yeasty benevolence these days, like one of those chaps in Dickens. I very nearly bought you a tie in London. Gosh! Who’s that?’
Someone had knocked on the door.
‘Come in,’ I said, and Catsmeat dashed at the wardrobe and dashed out festooned in trousers and things. Striking the professional note.
Silversmith came navigating over the threshold. This majestic man always had in his deportment a suggestion of the ambassador about to deliver important State papers to a reigning monarch, and now the resemblance was heightened by the fact that in front of his ample stomach he was bearing a salver with a couple of telegrams on it. I gathered them in, and he went navigating out again.
Catsmeat replaced the trousers. He was quivering a little.
‘What effect does that bloke have on you, Bertie?’ he asked in a hushed voice, as if he were speaking in a cathedral. ‘He paralyses me. I don’t know if you are familiar with the works of Joseph Conrad, but there’s a chap in his Lord Jim of whom he says “Had you been the Emperor of the East and West, you could not have ignored your inferiority in his presence”. That’s Silversmith. He fills me with an awful humility. He shrivels my immortal soul to the size of a
parched pea. He’s the living image of some of those old time pros who used to give me such a hell of a time when I first went on the stage. Well, go on. Open them.’
‘You mean these telegrams?’
‘What did you think I meant?’
‘They’re addressed to Gussie.’
‘Of course they’re addressed to Gussie. But they’re for you.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘They must be. One’s probably from Jeeves, telling you that the balloon has gone up.’
‘But the other? It may be a tender bob’s-worth from Madeline.’
‘Ah, go on.’
I was firm.
‘No, Catsmeat. The code of the Woosters restrains me. The code of the Woosters is more rigid than the code of the Catsmeats. AWooster cannot open a telegram addressed to another, even if for the moment he is that other, if you see what I mean. I’ll have to submit them to Gussie.’
‘All right, if you see it that way. I’ll be off, then, to try to bring a little sunshine into Queenie’s life.’
He legged it, and I took a seat and went on being firm. The hour was then three-forty-five.
I continued firm till about five minutes to four.
The catch about the code of the Woosters is that if you start examining it with a couple of telegrams staring you in the face, one of them almost certainly containing news of vital import, you find yourself after a while beginning to wonder if it’s really so hot, after all. I mean to say, the thought creeps in that maybe, if one did but know, the Woosters are priceless asses to let themselves be ruled by a code like that. By four o’clock I wasn’t quite so firm as I had been. By ten past my fingers were definitely twitching.
It was at four-fifteen sharp that I opened the first telegram. As Catsmeat had predicted, it was a cautiously worded communication from Jeeves, handed in at Bramley-on-Sea and signed Bodger’s Stores, guardedly intimating that everything had gone according to plan. The goods, it said, were in transit and would be delivered in a plain van in the course of the evening. Highly satisfactory.
I put a match to it and reduced it to ashes, for you can’t be too careful, and having done so was concerned to find, as I looked at the other envelope, that my fingers were still twitching. I took the thing and twiddled it thoughtfully.
I can guess what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that, having perused the first one and mastered its contents, there was no need whatever for me to open the other, and you are perfectly right. But you know how it is. Ask the first lion cub you meet, and it will tell you that, once you’ve tasted blood, there is no pulling up, and it’s the same with opening telegrams. Conscience whispered that this one, addressed to Gussie and intended for Gussie, was for Gussie’s eyes alone, and I agreed absolutely. But I could no more stop myself opening it than you can stop yourself eating another salted almond.
I ripped the envelope, and the quick blush of shame mantled the cheek as my eye caught the signature ‘Madeline’.
Then my eye caught the rest of the bally thing.
It read as follows:
Fink-Nottle
Deverill Hall
King’s Deverill
Hants.
Letter received. Cannot understand why not had reassuring telegram. Sure you concealing accident terribly serious. Fever anxiety. Fear worst. Arriving Deverill Hall to-morrow afternoon. Love. Kisses. Madeline.
CHAPTER 14
Yes, that was the torpedo that exploded under my bows, and I had the feeling you get sometimes that some practical joker has suddenly removed all the bones from your legs, substituting for them an unsatisfactory jelly. I reread the thing, to make sure I had seen what I thought I had seen, and, finding I had, buried the face in the hands.
It was the being without advisers that made the situation so bleak. On these occasions when Fate, having biffed you in the eye, proceeds to kick you in the pants, you want to gather the boys about you and thresh things out, and there weren’t any boys to gather. Jeeves was in London, Catsmeat in Basingstoke. It made me feel like a Prime Minister who starts to call an important Cabinet meeting and finds that the Home Secretary and the Lord President of the Council have nipped over to Paris and the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries and the rest of the gang are at the dog races.
There seemed to be nothing to do but wait till Catsmeat, having sat through the news and the main feature and the two-reel Silly Symphony, wended homeward. And though Reason told me that he couldn’t get back for another two hours or more and that even when he did get back it was about a hundred to eight against him having any constructive policy to put forward, I went down to the main gate and paced up and down, scanning the horizon like Sister what-was-her-name in that story one used to read.
The evening was well advanced, and the local birds had long since called it a day, when I spotted the two-seater coming down the road. I flagged it, and Catsmeat applied the brakes.
‘Oh, hallo, Bertie,’ he said in a subdued sort of voice, and when he had alighted and I had drawn him apart he explained the reason for his sober deportment.
‘Most unfortunate,’ he said, throwing a commiserating glance at the occupant of the other seat, who was staring before her with anguished eyes and from time to time taking a dab at them with her handkerchief. ‘With these tough films so popular, I suppose I might have foreseen that something like this would happen. The picture was full of cops, scores of cops racing to and fro saying “Oh, so you won’t talk?” and it was too much for poor little Queenie. Just twisted the knife in the wound, as you might say. She’s better now, though still sniffing.’
I suppose if you went through the Wl postal district of London with a fine-tooth comb and a brace of bloodhounds, you wouldn’t find more than about three men readier than Bertram Wooster to sympathize with a woman’s distress, and in ordinary circumstances I would unquestionably have given a low, pitying whistle and said ‘Too bad, too bad.’ But I hadn’t time now to mourn over stricken parlourmaids. All the mourning at my disposal was earmarked for Wooster, B.
‘Read this,’ I said.
He cocked an eye at me.
‘Hallo!’ he said, in what is known as a sardonic manner. ‘So the code of the Woosters sprang a leak? I had an idea it would.’
I think he was about to develop the theme and be pretty dashed humorous at my expense, but at this moment he started to scan the document and the gist hit him in the eyeball.
‘H’m!’ he said. ‘This will want a little management.’
‘Yes,’ I concurred.
‘It calls for sophisticated handling. We shall have to think this over.’
‘I’ve been thinking it over for hours.’
‘Yes, but you’ve got one of those cheap substitute brains which are never any good. It will be different when a man like me starts giving it the cream of his intellect.’
‘If only Jeeves were here!’
‘Yes, we could use Jeeves. It’s a pity he is not with us.’
‘And it’s a pity,’ I couldn’t help pointing out, though the man of sensibility dislikes rubbing these things in, ‘that you started the whole trouble by making Gussie wade in the Trafalgar Square fountain.’
‘True. One regrets that. Yet at the time it seemed so right, so inevitable. There he was, I mean, and there was the fountain. I felt very strongly that here was an opportunity which might not occur again. And while I would be the last to deny that the aftermath hasn’t been too good, it was certainly value for money. A man who has seen Gussie Fink-Nottle chasing newts in the Trafalgar Square fountain in correct evening costume at five o’clock in the morning is a man who has lived. He has got something he can tell his grandchildren. But if we are apportioning the blame, we can go further back than that. Where the trouble started was when you insisted on me giving him dinner. Madness. You might have known something would crack.’
‘Well, it’s no good talking about it.’
‘No. Action is what we want. Sharp, decisive action as dished out b
y Napoleon. I suppose you will shortly be going in and dressing for dinner?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘How soon after dinner will you be in your room?’
‘As soon as I can jolly well manage it.’
‘Expect me there, then, probably with a whole plan of campaign cut and dried. And now I really must be getting back to Queenie. She will be on duty before long and will want to powder her nose and remove the tear stains. Poor little soul! If you knew how my heart bleeds for that girl, Bertie, you would shudder.’
And, of course, it being so vital that we should get together with the minimum of delay, that night turned out to be the one night when it was impossible to take an early powder. Instead of the ordinary dinner, a regular binge had been arranged, with guests from all over the countryside. No fewer than ten of Hampshire’s more prominent stiffs had been summoned to the trough, and they stuck on like limpets long after any competent chucker-out would have bounced them. No doubt, if you have gone to the sweat of driving twenty miles to a house to dine, you don’t feel like just snatching a chop and dashing off. You hang on for the musical evening and the drinks at ten-thirty.
Be that as it may, it wasn’t till close on midnight that the final car rolled away. And when I bounded to my room, off duty at last, there was no sign of Catsmeat.
There was, however, a note from him lying on the pillow, and I tore it open with a feverish flick of the finger.
It was dated eleven p.m., and its tone was reproachful. He rebuked me for what he described as sitting gorging and swilling with my fine friends when I ought to have been at the conference table doing a bit of honest work. He asked me if I thought he was going to remain seated on his fanny in my damned room all night, and hoped that I would have a hangover next day, as well as indigestion from too much rich food. He couldn’t wait any longer, he said, it being his intention to take my car and drive to London so as to be at Wimbledon Common bright and early tomorrow morning for an interview with Madeline Bassett. And at that interview, he went on, concluding on a cheerier note, he would fix everything up just the same as Mother makes it, for he had got the idea of a lifetime, an idea so superb that I could set my mind, if I called it a mind, completely at rest. He doubted, he said, whether Jeeves himself, even if full to the brim offish, could have dug up a better modus operandi.
The Mating Season Page 12