Funny Ha, Ha

by Paul Merton

  It was about noon when I got back to the flat. I went into the sitting-room and tried to adjust the mind to the coming interview. It had to be faced, of course, but it wasn’t any good my telling myself that it was going to be one of those jolly scenes the memory of which cheer you up as you sit toasting your toes at the fire in your old age. I stood or fell by the roses. If they sweetened the Slingsby, all would be well. If they failed to sweeten her, Bertram was undoubtedly for it.

  The clock ticked on, but she did not come. A late riser, I took it, and was slightly encouraged by the reflection. My experience of women has been that the earlier they leave the hay the more vicious specimens they are apt to be. My Aunt Agatha, for instance, is always up with the lark, and look at her.

  Still, you couldn’t be sure that this rule always worked, and after a while the suspense began to get in amongst me a bit. To divert the mind, I fetched the old putter out of its bag and began to practice putts into a glass. After all, even if the Slingsby turned out to be all that I had pictured her in my gloomier moments, I should have improved my close-to-the-hole work on the green and be that much up, at any rate.

  It was while I was shaping for a rather tricky shot that the front-door bell went.

  I picked up the glass and shoved the putter behind the settee. It struck me that if the woman found me engaged on what you might call a frivolous pursuit she might take it to indicate lack of remorse and proper feeling. I straightened the collar, pulled down the waistcoat, and managed to fasten on the face a sort of sad half-smile which was welcoming without being actually jovial. It looked all right in the mirror, and I held it as the door opened.

  ‘Mr Slingsby,’ announced Jeeves.

  And, having spoken these words, he closed the door and left us alone together.

  *

  For quite a time there wasn’t anything in the way of chit-chat. The shock of expecting Mrs Slingsby and finding myself confronted by something entirely different—in fact, not the same thing at all—seemed to have affected the vocal cords. And the visitor didn’t appear to be disposed to make light conversation himself. He stood there looking strong and silent. I suppose you have to be like that if you want to manufacture anything in the nature of a really convincing soup.

  Slingsby’s Superb Soups was a Roman Emperor-looking sort of bird, with keen, penetrating eyes and one of those jutting chins. The eyes seemed to be fixed on me in a dashed unpleasant stare and, unless I was mistaken, he was grinding his teeth a trifle. For some reason he appeared to have taken a strong dislike to me at sight, and I’m bound to say this rather puzzled me. I don’t pretend to have one of those Fascinating Personalities which you get from studying the booklets advertised in the back pages of the magazines, but I couldn’t recall another case in the whole of my career where a single glimpse of the old map had been enough to make anyone look as if he wanted to foam at the mouth. Usually, when people meet me for the first time, they don’t seem to know I’m there.

  However, I exerted myself to play the host.

  ‘Mr Slingsby?’

  ‘That is my name.’

  ‘Just got back from America?’

  ‘I landed this morning.’

  ‘Sooner than you were expected, what?’

  ‘So I imagine.’

  ‘Very glad to see you.’

  “You will not be long.’

  I took time off to do a bit of gulping. I saw now what had happened. This bloke had been home, seen his wife, heard the story of the accident, and had hastened round to the flat to slip it across me. Evidently those roses had not sweetened the female of the species. The only thing to do now seemed to be to take a stab at sweetening the male.

  ‘Have a drink?’ I said.

  ‘No!’

  ‘A cigarette?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘A chair?’

  ‘No!’

  I went into the silence once more. These non-drinking, non-smoking non-sitters are hard birds to handle.

  ‘Don’t grin at me, sir!’

  I shot a glance at myself in the mirror, and saw what he meant. The sad half-smile had slopped over a bit. I adjusted it, and there was another pause.

  ‘Now, sir,’ said the Superb Souper. ‘To business. I think I need scarcely tell you why I am here.’

  ‘No. Of course. Absolutely. It’s about that little matter—’

  He gave a snort which nearly upset a vase on the mantelpiece. ‘Little matter? So you consider it a little matter, do you?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Let me tell you, sir, that when I find that during my absence from the country a man has been annoying my wife with his importunities I regard it as anything but a little matter. And I shall endeavour,’ said the Souper, the eyes gleaming a trifle brighter as he rubbed his hands together in a hideous, menacing way, ‘to make you see the thing in the same light.’

  I couldn’t make head or tail of this. I simply couldn’t follow him. The lemon began to swim.

  ‘Eh?’ I said. ‘Your wife?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘There must be some mistake.’

  ‘There is. You made it.’

  ‘But I don’t know your wife.’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘I’ve never even met her.’

  ‘Tchah!’

  ‘Honestly, I haven’t.’

  ‘Bah!’

  He drank me in for a moment.

  ‘Do you deny you sent her flowers?’

  I felt the heart turn a double somersault. I began to catch his drift.

  ‘Flowers!’ he proceeded. ‘Roses, sir. Great, fat, beastly roses. Enough of them to sink a ship. Your card was attached to them by a small pin—’

  His voice died away in a sort of gurgle, and I saw that he was staring at something behind me. I spun round, and there, in the doorway—I hadn’t seen it open, because during the last spasm of dialogue I had been backing cautiously towards it—there in the doorway stood a female. One glance was enough to tell me who she was. No woman could look so like Lucius Pim who hadn’t the misfortune to be related to him. It was Sister Beatrice, the tough egg. I saw all. She had left home before the flowers had arrived: she had sneaked, unsweetened, into the flat, while I was fortifying the system at the Drones: and here she was.

  ‘Er—’ I said.

  ‘Alexander!’ said the female.

  ‘Goo!’ said the Souper. Or it may have been ‘Coo’.

  Whatever it was, it was in the nature of a battle-cry or slogan of war. The Souper’s worst suspicions had obviously been confirmed. His eyes shone with a strange light. His chin pushed itself out another couple of inches. He clenched and unclenched his fingers once or twice, as if to make sure that they were working properly and could be relied on to do a good, clean job of strangling. Then, once more observing ‘Coo!’ (or ‘Goo!’), he sprang forward, trod on the golf-ball I had been practising putting with, and took one of the finest tosses I have ever witnessed. The purler of a lifetime. For a moment the air seemed to be full of arms and legs, and then, with a thud that nearly dislocated the flat, he made a forced landing against the wall.

  And, feeling I had had about all I wanted, I oiled from the room and was in the act of grabbing my hat from the rack in the hall, when Jeeves appeared.

  ‘I fancied I heard a noise, sir,’ said Jeeves.

  ‘Quite possibly,’ I said. ‘It was Mr Slingsby.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Mr Slingsby practicing Russian dances,’ I explained. ‘I rather think he has fractured an assortment of limbs. Better go in and see.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  ‘If he is the wreck I imagine, put him in my room and send for the doctor. The flat is filling up nicely with the various units of the Pim family and its connections, eh, Jeeves?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I think the supply is about exhausted, but should any aunts or uncles by marriage come along and break their limbs, bed them out on the Chesterfield.’

  ‘Very good, sir.�
�

  ‘I, personally, Jeeves,’ I said, opening the front door and pausing on the threshold, ‘am off to Paris. I will wire you the address. Notify me in due course when the place is free from Pims and completely purged of Slingsbys, and I will return. Oh, and Jeeves.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Spare no effort to mollify these birds. They think—at least, Slingsby (female) thinks, and what she thinks to-day he will think to-morrow—that it was I who ran over Mr Pim in my car. Endeavour during my absence to sweeten them.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  ‘And now perhaps you had better be going in and viewing the body I shall proceed to the Drones, where I shall lunch, subsequently catching the two o’clock train at Charing Cross. Meet me there with an assortment of luggage.’

  *

  It was a matter of three weeks or so before Jeeves sent me the ‘All clear’ signal. I spent the time pottering pretty perturbedly about Paris and environs. It is a city I am fairly fond of, but I was glad to be able to return to the old home. I hopped on to a passing aeroplane and a couple of hours later was bowling through Croydon on my way to the centre of things. It was somewhere down in the Sloane Square neighbourhood that I first caught sight of the posters.

  A traffic block had occurred, and I was glancing idly this way and that, when suddenly my eye was caught by something that looked familiar. And then I saw what it was.

  Pasted on a blank wall and measuring about a hundred feet each way was an enormous poster, mostly red and blue. At the top of it were the words:

  SLINGSBY’S SUPERB SOUPS

  and at the bottom:

  SUCCULENT AND STRENGTHENING

  And, in between, me. Yes, dash it, Bertram Wooster in person. A reproduction of the Pendlebury portrait, perfect in every detail.

  It was the sort of thing to make a fellow’s eyes flicker, and mine flickered. You might say a mist seemed to roll before them. Then it lifted, and I was able to get a good long look before the traffic moved on.

  Of all the absolutely foul sights I have ever seen, this took the biscuit with ridiculous ease. The thing was a bally libel on the Wooster face, and yet it was as unmistakable as if it had had my name under it. I saw now what Jeeves had meant when he said that the portrait had given me a hungry look. In the poster this look had become one of bestial greed. There I sat absolutely slavering through a monocle about six inches in circumference at a plateful of soup, looking as if I hadn’t had a meal for weeks. The whole thing seemed to take one straight away into a different and a dreadful world.

  I woke from a species of trance or coma to find myself at the door of the block of flats. To buzz upstairs and charge into the home was with me the work of a moment.

  Jeeves came shimmering down the hall, the respectful beam of welcome on his face.

  ‘I am glad to see you back, sir.’

  ‘Never mind about that,’ I yipped. ‘What about—?’

  ‘The posters, sir? I was wondering if you might have observed them.’

  ‘I observed them!’

  ‘Striking, sir?’

  ‘Very striking. Now, perhaps you’ll kindly explain—’

  ‘You instructed me, if you recollect, sir, to spare no effort to mollify Mr Slingsby.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘It proved a somewhat difficult task, sir. For some time Mr Slingsby, on the advice and owing to the persuasion of Mrs Slingsby, appeared to be resolved to institute an action in law against you—a procedure which I knew you would find most distasteful.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘And then, the first day he was able to leave his bed, he observed the portrait, and it seemed to me judicious to point out to him its possibilities as an advertising medium. He readily fell in with the suggestion and, on my assurance that, should he abandon the projected action in law, you would willingly permit the use of the portrait, he entered into negotiations with Miss Pendlebury for the purchase of the copyright.’

  ‘Oh? Well, I hope she’s got something out of it, at any rate?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Mr Pim, acting as Miss Pendlebury’s agent, drove, I understand, an extremely satisfactory bargain.’

  ‘He acted as her agent, eh?’

  ‘Yes, sir. In his capacity as fiancé to the young lady, sir.’

  ‘Fiancé!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  It shows how the sight of that poster had got into my ribs when I state that, instead of being laid out cold by this announcement, I merely said ‘Ha!’ or ‘Ho!’ or it may have been ‘H’m’. After the poster, nothing seemed to matter.

  ‘After that poster, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘nothing seems to matter.’

  ‘No, sir?’

  ‘No, Jeeves. A woman has tossed my heart lightly away, but what of it?’

  ‘Exactly, sir.’

  ‘The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number. Is that going to crush me?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘No, Jeeves. It is not. But what does matter is this ghastly business of my face being spread from end to end of the Metropolis with the eyes fixed on a plate of Slingsby’s Superb Soup. I must leave London. The lads at the Drones will kid me without ceasing.’

  ‘Yes, sir. And Mrs Spenser Gregson—’

  I paled visibly. I hadn’t thought of Aunt Agatha and what she might have to say about letting down the family prestige.

  ‘You don’t mean to say she has been ringing up?’

  ‘Several times daily, sir.’

  ‘Jeeves, flight is the only resource.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Back to Paris, what?’

  ‘I should not recommend the move, sir. The posters are, I understand, shortly to appear in that city also, advertising the Bouillon Suprême. Mr Slingsby’s products command a large sale in France. The sight would be painful for you, sir.’

  ‘Then where?’

  ‘If I might make a suggestion, sir, why not adhere to your original intention of cruising in Mrs Travers’ yacht in the Mediterranean? On the yacht you would be free from the annoyance of these advertising displays.’

  The man seemed to me to be drivelling.

  ‘But the yacht started weeks ago. It may be anywhere by now.’

  ‘No, sir. The cruise was postponed for a month owing to the illness of Mr Travers’ chef, Anatole, who contracted influenza. Mr Travers refused to sail without him.’

  ‘You mean they haven’t started?’

  ‘Not yet, sir. The yacht sails from Southampton on Tuesday next.’

  ‘Why, then, dash it, nothing could be sweeter.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Ring up Aunt Dahlia and tell her we’ll be there.’

  ‘I ventured to take the liberty of doing so a few moments before you arrived, sir.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I thought it probable that the plan would meet with your approval.’

  ‘It does! I’ve wished all along I was going on that cruise.’

  ‘I, too, sir. It should be extremely pleasant.’

  ‘The tang of the salt breezes, Jeeves!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘The moonlight on the water!’

  ‘Precisely, sir.’

  ‘The gentle heaving of the waves!’

  ‘Exactly, sir.’

  I felt absolutely in the pink. Gwladys—pah! The posters—bah! That was the way I looked at it.

  ‘Yo-ho-ho, Jeeves!’ I said, giving the trousers a bit of a hitch.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘In fact, I will go further. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!’

  ‘Very good, sir. I will bring it immediately.’

  MULLINER’S BUCK-U-UPPO

  P.G. Wodehouse

  P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) was the author of almost a hundred books and the creator of Jeeves, Blandings Castle, Psmith, Ukridge, Uncle Fred and Mr Mulliner. Born in London, he spent two years in banking before becoming a full-time writer, contributing to periodicals including Punch and the Globe. As
well as his novels and short stories, he wrote lyrics for musical comedies with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, and at one time had five musicals running simultaneously on Broadway. His time in Hollywood also provided much source material for fiction.

  The village Choral Society had been giving a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Sorcerer in aid of the Church Organ Fund; and, as we sat in the window of the Anglers’ Rest, smoking our pipes, the audience came streaming past us down the little street. Snatches of song floated to our ears, and Mr Mulliner began to croon in unison.

  ‘“Ah me! I was a pa-ale you-oung curate then!”,’ chanted Mr Mulliner in the rather snuffling voice in which the amateur singer seems to find it necessary to render the old songs.

  ‘Remarkable,’ he said, resuming his natural tones, ‘how fashions change, even in clergymen. There are very few pale young curates nowadays.’

  ‘True,’ I agreed. ‘Most of them are beefy young fellows who rowed for their colleges. I don’t believe I have ever seen a pale young curate.’

  ‘You never met my nephew Augustine, I think?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘The description in the song would have fitted him perfectly. You will want to hear all about my nephew Augustine.’

  *

  At the time of which I am speaking (said Mr Mulliner) my nephew Augustine was a curate, and very young and extremely pale. As a boy he had completely outgrown his strength, and I rather think at his Theological College some of the wilder spirits must have bullied him; for when he went to Lower Briskett-in-the-Midden to assist the vicar, the Rev. Stanley Brandon, in his cure of souls, he was as meek and mild a young man as you could meet in a day’s journey. He had flaxen hair, weak blue eyes, and the general demeanour of a saintly but timid cod-fish. Precisely, in short, the sort of young curate who seems to have been so common in the Eighties, or whenever it was that Gilbert wrote The Sorcerer.

  The personality of his immediate superior did little or nothing to help him to overcome his native diffidence. The Rev. Stanley Brandon was a huge and sinewy man of violent temper, whose red face and glittering eyes might well have intimidated the toughest curate. The Rev. Stanley had been a heavyweight boxer at Cambridge, and I gather from Augustine that he seemed to be always on the point of introducing into debates on parish matters the methods which had made him so successful in the roped ring. I remember Augustine telling me that once, on the occasion when he had ventured to oppose the other’s views in the matter of decorating the church for the Harvest Festival, he thought for a moment that the vicar was going to drop him with a right hook to the chin. It was some quite trivial point that had come up – a question as to whether the pumpkin would look better in the apse or the clerestory, if I recollect rightly – but for several seconds it seemed as if blood was about to be shed.