‘Oh, yes?’ I said.
‘Oh, yes! Even Rupert Steggles. I must confess that my opinion of Rupert Steggles has materially altered for the better this afternoon.’
Mine hadn’t. But I didn’t say so.
‘I have always considered Rupert Steggles, between ourselves, a rather self-centred youth, by no means the kind who would put himself out to further the enjoyment of his fellows. And yet twice within the last half-hour I have observed him escorting Mrs Penworthy, our worthy tobacconist’s wife, to the refreshment.’
I left him standing. I shook off the clutching hand of the Baxter kid and hared it rapidly to the spot where the Mothers’ Sack Race was just finishing. I had a horrid presentiment that there had been more dirty work at the crossroads. The first person I ran into was young Bingo. I grabbed him by the arm.
‘Who won?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t notice.’ There was bitterness in the chappie’s voice. ‘It wasn’t Mrs Penworthy, dash her! Bertie, that hound Steggles is nothing more nor less than one of our leading snakes. I don’t know how he heard about her, but he must have got on to it that she was dangerous. Do you know what he did? He lured that miserable woman into the refreshment-tent five minutes before the race and brought her out so weighed down with cake and tea that she blew up in the first twenty yards. Just rolled over and lay there! Well, thank goodness, we still have Harold!’
I gaped at the poor chump.
‘Harold! Haven’t you heard?’
‘Heard?’ Bingo turned a delicate green. ‘Heard what? I haven’t heard anything. I only arrived five minutes ago. Came here straight from the station. What has happened? Tell me!’
I slipped him the information. He stared at me for a moment in a ghastly sort of way, then with a hollow groan, tottered away and was lost in the crowd. A nasty knock, poor chap. I didn’t blame him for being upset.
They were clearing the decks now for the Egg and Spoon Race, and I thought I might as well stay where I was and watch the finish. Not that I had much hope. Young Prudence was a good conversationalist, but she didn’t seem to me to be the build for a winner.
As far as I could see through the mob, they got off to a good start. A short, red-haired child was making the running with a freckled blonde second, and Sarah Mills lying up an easy third. Our nominee was straggling along with the field, well behind the leaders. It was not hard even as early as this to spot the winner. There was a grace, a practised precision, in the way Sarah Mills held her spoon that told its own story. She was cutting out a good pace, but her egg didn’t even wobble. A natural egg-and-spooner, if ever there was one.
Class will tell. Thirty yards from the tape, the red-haired kid tripped over her feet and shot her egg on to the turf. The freckled blonde fought gamely, but she had run herself out half-way down the straight, and Sarah Mills came past and home on a tight rein by several lengths, a popular winner. The blonde was second. A sniffing female in blue gingham beat a pie-faced kid in pink for the place-money, and Prudence Baxter, Jeeves’s long shot, was either fifth or sixth, I couldn’t see which.
And then I was carried along with the crowd to where old Heppenstall was going to present the prizes. I found myself standing next to the man Steggles.
‘Hallo, old chap!’ he said, very bright and cheery. ‘You’ve had a bad day, I’m afraid.’
I looked at him with silent scorn. Lost on the blighter, of course.
‘It’s not been a good meeting for any of the big punters,’ he went on. ‘Poor old Bingo Little went down badly over that Egg and Spoon Race.’
I hadn’t been meaning to chat with the fellow, but I was startled.
‘How do you mean badly?’ I said. ‘We – he only had a small bet on.’
‘I don’t know what you call small. He had thirty quid each way on the Baxter kid.’
The landscape reeled before me.
‘What!’
‘Thirty quid at ten to one. I thought he must have heard something, but apparently not. The race went by the form-book all right.’
I was trying to do sums in my head. I was just in the middle of working out the syndicate’s losses, when old Heppenstall’s voice came sort of faintly to me out of the distance. He had been pretty fatherly and debonair when ladling out the prizes for the other events, but now he had suddenly grown all pained and grieved. He peered sorrowfully at the multitude.
‘With regard to the Girls’ Egg and Spoon Race, which has just concluded,’ he said, ‘I have a painful duty to perform. Circumstances have arisen which it is impossible to ignore. It is not too much to say that I am stunned.’
He gave the populace about five seconds to wonder why he was stunned, then went on.
‘Three years ago, as you are aware, I was compelled to expunge from the list of events at this annual festival the Fathers’ Quarter-Mile, owing to reports coming to my ears of wagers taken and given on the result at the village inn and a strong suspicion that on at least one occasion the race had actually been sold by the speediest runner. That unfortunate occurrence shook my faith in human nature, I admit – but still there was one event at least which I confidently expected to remain untainted by the miasma of professionalism. I allude to the Girls’ Egg and Spoon Race. It seems, alas, that I was too sanguine.’
He stopped again, and wrestled with his feelings.
‘I will not weary you with the unpleasant details. I will merely say that before the race was run a stranger in our midst, the manservant of one of the guests at the Hall – I will not specify with more particularity – approached several of the competitors and presented each of them with five shillings on condition that they – er – finished. A belated sense of remorse has led him to confess to me what he did, but it is too late. The evil is accomplished, and retribution must take its course. It is no time for half-measures. I must be firm. I rule that Sarah Mills, Jane Parker, Bessie Clay, and Rosie Jukes, the first four to pass the winning-post, have forfeited their amateur status and are disqualified, and this handsome work-bag, presented by Lord Wickhammersley, goes, in consequence, to Prudence Baxter. Prudence, step forward!’
15
* * *
The Metropolitan Touch
NOBODY IS MORE alive than I am to the fact that young Bingo Little is in many respects a sound old egg. In one way and another he has made life pretty interesting for me at intervals ever since we were at school. As a companion for a cheery hour I think I would choose him before anybody. On the other hand, I’m bound to say that there are things about him that could be improved. His habit of falling in love with every second girl he sees is one of them; and another is his way of letting the world in on the secrets of his heart. If you want shrinking reticence, don’t go to Bingo, because he’s got about as much of it as a soap advertisement.
I mean to say – well, here’s the telegram I got from him one evening in November, about a month after I’d got back to town from my visit to Twing Hall:
I say Bertie old man I am in love at last. She is the most wonderful girl Bertie old man. This is the real thing at last Bertie. Come here at once and bring Jeeves. Oh I say you know that tobacco shop in Bond Street on the left side as you go up. Will you get me a hundred of their special cigarettes and send them to me here. I have run out. I know when you see her you will think she is the most wonderful girl. Mind you bring Jeeves. Don’t forget the cigarettes.
BINGO.
It had been handed in at Twing Post Office. In other words, he had submitted that frightful rot to the goggling eye of a village postmistress who was probably the mainspring of local gossip and would have the place ringing with the news before nightfall. He couldn’t have given himself away more completely if he had hired the town crier. When I was a kid, I used to read stories about knights and vikings and that species of chappie who would get up without a blush in the middle of a crowded banquet and loose off a song about how perfectly priceless they thought their best girl. I’ve often felt that those days would have suited young Bingo
down to the ground.
Jeeves had brought the thing in with the evening drink, and I slung it over to him.
‘It’s about due, of course,’ I said. ‘Young Bingo hasn’t been in love for at least a couple of months. I wonder who it is this time?’
‘Miss Mary Burgess, sir,’ said Jeeves, ‘the niece of the Reverend Mr Heppenstall. She is staying at Twing Vicarage.’
‘Great Scott!’ I knew that Jeeves knew practically everything in the world, but this sounded like second-sight. ‘How do you know that?’
‘When we were visiting Twing Hall in the summer, sir, I formed a somewhat close friendship with Mr Heppenstall’s butler. He is good enough to keep me abreast of the local news from time to time. From his account, sir, the young lady appears to be a very estimable young lady. Of a somewhat serious nature, I understand. Mr Little is very épris, sir. Brookfield, my correspondent, writes that last week he observed him in the moonlight at an advanced hour gazing up at his window.’
‘Whose window! Brookfield’s?’
‘Yes, sir. Presumably under the impression that it was the young lady’s.’
‘But what the deuce is he doing at Twing at all?’
‘Mr Little was compelled to resume his old position as tutor to Lord Wickhammersley’s son at Twing Hall, sir. Owing to having been unsuccessful in some speculations at Hurst Park at the end of October.’
‘Good Lord, Jeeves! Is there anything you don’t know?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir.’
I picked up the telegram.
‘I suppose he wants us to go down and help him out a bit?’
‘That would appear to be his motive in dispatching the message, sir.’
‘Well, what shall we do? Go?’
‘I would advocate it, sir. If I may say so, I think that Mr Little should be encouraged in this particular matter.’
‘You think he’s picked a winner this time?’
‘I hear nothing but excellent reports of the young lady, sir. I think it is beyond question that she would be an admirable influence for Mr Little, should the affair come to a happy conclusion. Such a union would also, I fancy, go far to restore Mr Little to the good graces of his uncle, the young lady being well connected and possessing private means. In short, sir, I think that if there is anything that we can do we should do it.’
‘Well, with you behind him,’ I said, ‘I don’t see how he can fail to click.’
‘You are very good, sir,’ said Jeeves. ‘The tribute is much appreciated.’
Bingo met us at Twing station next day, and insisted on my sending Jeeves on in the car with the bags while he and I walked. He started in about the female the moment we had begun to hoof it.
‘She is very wonderful, Bertie. She is not one of these flippant, shallow-minded modern girls. She is sweetly grave and beautifully earnest. She reminds me of – what is the name I want?’
‘Marie Lloyd?’
‘Saint Cecilia,’ said young Bingo, eyeing me with a good deal of loathing. ‘She reminds me of Saint Cecilia. She makes me yearn to be a better, nobler, deeper, broader man.’
‘What beats me,’ I said, following up a train of thought, ‘is what principle you pick them on. The girls you fall in love with, I mean. I mean to say, what’s your system? As far as I can see, no two of them are alike. First it was Mabel the waitress, then Honoria Glossop, then that fearful blister Charlotte Corday Rowbotham –’
I own that Bingo had the decency to shudder. Thinking of Charlotte always made me shudder, too.
‘You don’t seriously mean, Bertie, that you are intending to compare the feeling I have for Mary Burgess, the holy devotion, the spiritual –’
‘Oh, all right, let it go,’ I said. ‘I say, old lad, aren’t we going rather a long way round?’
Considering that we were supposed to be heading for Twing Hall, it seemed to me that we were making a longish job of it. The Hall is about two miles from the station by the main road, and we had cut off down a lane, gone across country for a bit, climbed a stile or two, and were now working our way across a field that ended in another lane.
‘She sometimes takes her little brother for a walk round this way,’ explained Bingo. ‘I thought we would meet her and bow, and you could see her, you know, and then we would walk on.’
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘that’s enough excitement for anyone, and undoubtedly a corking reward for tramping three miles out of one’s way over ploughed fields with tight boots, but don’t we do anything else? Don’t we tack on to the girl and buzz along with her?’
‘Good Lord!’ said Bingo, honestly amazed. ‘You don’t suppose I’ve got nerve enough for that, do you? I just look at her from afar off and all that sort of thing. Quick! Here she comes! No, I’m wrong!’
It was like that song of Harry Lauder’s where he’s waiting for the girl and says ‘This is her-r-r. No, it’s a rabbut.’ Young Bingo made me stand there in the teeth of a nor’-east half-gale for ten minutes, keeping me on my toes with a series of false alarms, and I was just thinking of suggesting that we should lay off and give the rest of the proceedings a miss, when round the corner there came a fox-terrier, and Bingo quivered like an aspen. Then there hove in sight a small boy, and he shook like a jelly. Finally, like a star whose entrance has been worked up by the personnel of the ensemble, a girl appeared, and his emotion was painful to witness. His face got so red that, what with his white collar and the fact that the wind had turned his nose blue, he looked more like a French flag than anything else. He sagged from the waist upwards, as if he had been filleted.
He was just raising his fingers limply to his cap when he suddenly saw that the girl wasn’t alone. A chappie in clerical costume was also among those present, and the sight of him didn’t seem to do Bingo a bit of good. His face got redder and his nose bluer, and it wasn’t till they had nearly passed that he managed to get hold of his cap.
The girl bowed, the curate said, ‘Ah, Little. Rough weather,’ the dog barked, and then they toddled on and the entertainment was over.
The curate was a new factor in the situation to me. I reported his movements to Jeeves when I got to the Hall. Of course, Jeeves knew all about it already.
‘That is the Reverend Mr Wingham, Mr Heppenstall’s new curate, sir. I gathered from Brookfield that he is Mr Little’s rival, and at the moment the young lady appears to favour him. Mr Wingham has the advantage of being on the premises. He and the young lady play duets after dinner, which acts as a bond. Mr Little on these occasions, I understand, prowls about in the road, chafing visibly.’
‘That seems to be all the poor fish is able to do, dash it. He can chafe all right, but there he stops. He’s lost his pep. He’s got no dash. Why, when we met her just now, he hadn’t even the common manly courage to say “Good evening”!’
‘I gather that Mr Little’s affection is not unmingled with awe, sir.’
‘Well, how are we to help a man when he’s such a rabbit as that? Have you anything to suggest? I shall be seeing him after dinner, and he’s sure to ask first thing what you advise.’
‘In my opinion, sir, the most judicious course for Mr Little to pursue would be to concentrate on the young gentleman.’
‘The small brother? How do you mean?’
‘Make a friend of him, sir – take him for walks and so forth.’
‘It doesn’t sound one of your red-hottest ideas. I must say I expected something fruitier than that.’
‘It would be a beginning, sir, and might lead to better things.’
‘Well, I’ll tell him. I liked the look of her, Jeeves.’
‘A thoroughly estimable young lady, sir.’
I slipped Bingo the tip from the stable that night, and was glad to observe that it seemed to cheer him up.
‘Jeeves is always right,’ he said. ‘I ought to have thought of it myself. I’ll start in tomorrow.’
It was amazing how the chappie bucked up. Long before I left for town it had become a mere commonplace fo
r him to speak to the girl. I mean he didn’t simply look stuffed when they met. The brother was forming a bond that was a dashed sight stronger than the curate’s duets. She and Bingo used to take him for walks together. I asked Bingo what they talked about on these occasions, and he said Wilfred’s future. The girl hoped that Wilfred would one day become a curate, but Bingo said no, there was something about curates he didn’t quite like.
The day we left, Bingo came to see us off with Wilfred frisking about him like an old college chum. The last I saw of them, Bingo was standing him chocolates out of the slot-machine. A scene of peace and cheery goodwill. Dashed promising, I thought.
Which made it all the more of a jar, about a fortnight later, when his telegram arrived. As follows:
Bertie old man I say Bertie could you possibly come down here at once. Everything gone wrong hang it all. Dash it Bertie you simply must come. I am in a state of absolute despair and heart-broken. Would you mind sending another hundred of those cigarettes. Bring Jeeves when you come Bertie. You simply must come Bertie. I rely on you. Don’t forget to bring Jeeves.
BINGO.
For a chap who’s perpetually hard-up, I must say that young Bingo is the most wasteful telegraphist I ever struck. He’s got no notion of condensing. The silly ass simply pours out his wounded soul at twopence a word, or whatever it is, without a thought.
‘How about it, Jeeves?’ I said. ‘I’m getting a bit fed. I can’t go chucking all my engagements every second week in order to biff down to Twing and rally round young Bingo. Send him a wire telling him to end it all in the village pond.’
‘If you could spare me for the night, sir, I should be glad to run down and investigate.’
‘Oh, dash it! Well, I suppose there’s nothing else to be done. After all, you’re the fellow he wants. All right, carry on.’
Jeeves got back late the next day.
‘Well?’ I said.
Jeeves appeared perturbed. He allowed his left eyebrow to flicker upwards in a concerned sort of manner.
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 1: Page 61