‘That’s what you think. How about Brinkley?’ I said, my allusion being to a fellow the agency had sent me some years previously when Jeeves and I had parted company temporarily because he didn’t like me playing the banjolele. ‘He’s a member, isn’t he?’
‘A county member, sir. He rarely comes to the club. In passing, sir, his name is not Brinkley, it is Bingley.’
I waved an impatient cigarette holder. I was in no mood to split straws. Or is it hairs?
‘His name is not of the essence, Jeeves. What is of the e is that he went off on his afternoon out, came back in an advanced state of intoxication, set the house on fire and tried to dismember me with a carving knife.’
‘A most unpleasant experience, sir.’
‘Having heard noises down below, I emerged from my room and found him wrestling with the grandfather clock, with which he appeared to have had a difference. He then knocked over a lamp and leaped up the stairs at me, complete with cutlass. By a miracle I avoided becoming the late Bertram Wooster, but only by a miracle. And you say there are no men of ill will in the Junior Ganymede club. Tchah!’ I said. It is an expression I don’t often use, but the situation seemed to call for it.
Things had become difficult. Angry passions were rising and dudgeon bubbling up a bit. It was fortunate that at this juncture the telephone should have tootled, causing a diversion.
‘Mrs Travers, sir,’ said Jeeves, having gone to the instrument.
2
* * *
I HAD ALREADY divined who was at the other end of the wire, my good and deserving Aunt Dahlia having a habit of talking on the telephone with the breezy vehemence of a hog-caller in the western states of America calling his hogs to come and get it. She got this way through hunting a lot in her youth with the Quorn and the Pytchley. What with people riding over hounds and hounds taking time off to chase rabbits, a girl who hunts soon learns to make herself audible. I believe that she, when in good voice, could be heard in several adjoining counties.
I stepped to the telephone, well pleased. There are few males or females whose society I enjoy more than that of this genial sister of my late father, and it was quite a time since we had foregathered. She lives near the town of Market Snodsbury in Worcestershire and sticks pretty closely to the rural seat, while I, as Jeeves had just recorded in the club book, had had my time rather full elsewhere of late. I was smiling sunnily as I took up the receiver. Not much good, of course, as she couldn’t see me, but it’s the spirit that counts.
‘Hullo, aged relative.’
‘Hullo to you, you young blot. Are you sober?’
I felt a natural resentment at being considered capable of falling under the influence of the sauce at ten in the morning, but I reminded myself that aunts will be aunts. Show me an aunt, I’ve often said, and I will show you someone who doesn’t give a hoot how much her obiter dicta may wound a nephew’s sensibilities. With a touch of hauteur I reassured her on the point she had raised and asked her in what way I could serve her.
‘How about lunch?’
‘I’m not in London. I’m at home. And you can serve me, as you call it, by coming here. Today, if possible.’
‘Your words are music to my ears, old ancestor. Nothing could tickle me pinker,’ I said, for I am always glad to accept her hospitality and to renew my acquaintance with the unbeatable eatables dished up by her superb French chef Anatole, God’s gift to the gastric juices. I have often regretted that I have but one stomach to put at his disposal. ‘Staying how long?’
‘As long as you like, my beamish boy. I’ll let you know when the time comes to throw you out. The great thing is to get you here.’
I was touched, as who would not have been, by the eagerness she showed for my company. Too many of my circle are apt when inviting me to their homes to stress the fact that they are only expecting me for the week-end and to dwell with too much enthusiasm on the excellence of the earlier trains back to the metropolis on Monday morning. The sunny smile widened an inch or two.
‘Awfully good of you to have me, old blood relation.’
‘It is, rather.’
‘I look forward to seeing you.’
‘Who wouldn’t?’
‘Each minute will seem like an hour till we meet. How’s Anatole?’
‘Greedy young pig, always thinking of Anatole.’
‘Difficult to help it. The taste lingers. How is his art these days?’
‘At its peak.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Ginger says his output has been a revelation to him.’
I asked her to repeat this. It had sounded to me just as if she had said ‘Ginger says his output has been a revelation to him’, and I knew this couldn’t be the case. It turned out, however, that it was.
‘Ginger?’ I said, not abreast.
‘Harold Winship. He told me to call him Ginger. He’s staying here. He says he’s a friend of yours, which he would scarcely admit unless he knew it could be proved against him. You do know him, don’t you? He speaks of having been at Oxford with you.’
I uttered a joyful cry, and she said if I did it again, she would sue me, it having nearly cracked her eardrum. A notable instance of the pot calling the kettle black, as the old saying has it, she having been cracking mine since the start of the proceedings.
‘Know him?’ I said. ‘You bet I know him. We were like … Jeeves!’
‘Sir?’
‘Who were those two fellows?’
‘Sir?’
‘Greek, if I remember correctly. Always mentioned when the subject of bosom pals comes up.’
‘Would you be referring to Damon and Pythias, sir?’
‘That’s right. We were like Damon and Pythias, old ancestor. But what’s he doing chez you? I wasn’t aware that you and he had ever met.’
‘We hadn’t. But his mother was an old school friend of mine.’
‘I see.’
‘And when I heard he was standing for Parliament in the by-election at Market Snodsbury, I wrote to him and told him to make my house his base. Much more comfortable than dossing at a pub.’
‘Oh, you’ve got a by-election at Market Snodsbury, have you?’
‘Under full steam.’
‘And Ginger’s one of the candidates?’
‘The Conservative one. You seem surprised.’
‘I am. You might say stunned. I wouldn’t have thought it was his dish at all. How’s he doing?’
‘Difficult to say so far. Anyway, he needs all the help he can get, so I want you to come and canvass for him.’
This made me chew the lower lip for a moment. One has to exercise caution at a time like this, or where is one?
‘What does it involve?’ I asked guardedly. ‘I shan’t have to kiss babies, shall I?’
‘Of course you won’t, you abysmal chump.’
‘I’ve always heard that kissing babies entered largely into these things.’
‘Yes, but it’s the candidate who does it, poor blighter. All you have to do is go from house to house urging the inmates to vote for Ginger.’
‘Then rely on me. Such an assignment should be well within my scope. Old Ginger!’ I said, feeling emotional. ‘It will warm the what-d’you-call-its of my heart to see him again.’
‘Well, you’ll have the opportunity of hotting them up this very afternoon. He’s gone to London for the day and wants you to lunch with him.’
‘Does he, egad! That’s fine. What time?’
‘One-thirty.’
‘At what spot?’
‘Barribault’s grillroom.’
‘I’ll be there. Jeeves,’ I said, hanging up, ‘You remember Ginger Winship, who used to play Damon to my Pythias?’
‘Yes, indeed, sir.’
‘They’ve got an election on at Market Snodsbury, and he’s standing in the Conservative interest.’
‘So I understood Madam to say, sir.’
‘Oh, you caught her remarks?’
‘With little or no difficulty, sir
. Madam has a penetrating voice.’
‘It does penetrate, doesn’t it,’ I said, massaging the ear I had been holding to the receiver. ‘Good lung power.’
‘Extremely, sir.’
‘I wonder whether she ever sang lullabies to me in my cradle. If so, it must have scared me cross-eyed, giving me the illusion that the boiler had exploded. However, that is not germane to the issue, which is that we leave for her abode this afternoon. I shall be lunching with Ginger. In my absence, pack a few socks and toothbrushes, will you.’
‘Very good, sir,’ he replied, and we did not return to the subject of the club book.
3
* * *
IT WAS WITH no little gusto and animation that some hours later I set out for the tryst. This Ginger was one of my oldest buddies, not quite so old as Kipper Herring or Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, with whom I had plucked the gowans fine at prep school, public school and University, but definitely ancient. Our rooms at Oxford had been adjacent, and it would not be too much to say that from the moment he looked in to borrow a syphon of soda water we became more like brothers than anything, and this state of things had continued after we had both left the seat of learning.
For quite a while he had been a prominent member of the Drones Club, widely known for his effervescence and vivacity, but all of a sudden he had tendered his resignation and gone to live in the country, oddly enough at Steeple Bumpleigh in Essex, where my Aunt Agatha has her lair. This, somebody told me, was due to the circumstance that he had got engaged to a girl of strong character who disapproved of the Drones Club. You get girls like that every now and then, and in my opinion they are best avoided.
Well, naturally this had parted us. He never came to London, and I of course never went to Steeple Bumpleigh. You don’t catch me going anywhere near Aunt Agatha unless I have to. No sense in sticking one’s neck out. But I had missed him sorely. Oh for the touch of a vanished hand, is how you might put it.
Arriving at Barribault’s, I found him in the lobby where you have the pre-luncheon gargle before proceeding to the grillroom, and after the initial What-ho-ing and What-a-time-since-we-met-ing inevitable when two vanished hands who haven’t seen each other for ages re-establish contact, he asked me if I would like one for the tonsils.
‘I won’t join you,’ he said. ‘I’m not actually on the waggon, I have a little light wine at dinner now and then, but my fiancée wants me to stay off cocktails. She says they harden the arteries.’
If you are about to ask me if this didn’t make me purse the lips a bit, I can assure you that it did. It seemed to point to his having gone and got hitched up with a popsy totally lacking in the proper spirit, and it bore out what I had been told about her being a girl of strong character. No one who wasn’t could have dashed the cup from his lips in this manner. She had apparently made him like it, too, for he had spoken of her not with the sullen bitterness of one crushed beneath the iron heel but with devotion in every syllable. Plainly he had got it up his nose and didn’t object to being bossed.
How different from me, I reflected, that time when I was engaged to my Uncle Percy’s bossy daughter Florence Craye. It didn’t last long, because she gave me the heave-ho and got betrothed to a fellow called Gorringe who wrote vers libre, but while it lasted I felt like one of those Ethiopian slaves Cleopatra used to push around, and I chafed more than somewhat. Whereas Ginger obviously hadn’t even started to chafe. It isn’t difficult to spot when a fellow’s chafing, and I could detect none of the symptoms. He seemed to think that putting the presidential veto on cocktails showed what an angel of mercy the girl was, always working with his good at heart.
The Woosters do not like drinking alone, particularly with a critical eye watching them to see if their arteries are hardening, so I declined the proffered snort – reluctantly, for I was athirst – and came straight to the main item on the agenda paper. On my way to Barribault’s I had, as you may suppose, pondered deeply on this business of him standing for Parliament, and I wanted to know the motives behind the move. It looked cockeyed to me.
‘Aunt Dahlia tells me you are staying with her in order to be handy to Market Snodsbury while giving the electors there the old oil,’ I said.
‘Yes, she very decently invited me. She was at school with my mother.’
‘So she told me. I wonder if her face was as red in those days. How do you like it there?’
‘It’s a wonderful place.’
‘Grade A. Gravel soil, main drainage, spreading grounds and Company’s own water. And, of course, Anatole’s cooking.’
‘Ah!’ he said, and I think he would have bared his head, only he hadn’t a hat on. ‘Very gifted, that man.’
‘A wizard,’ I agreed. ‘His dinners must fortify you for the tasks you have to face. How’s the election coming along?’
‘All right.’
‘Kissed any babies lately?’
‘Ah!’ he said again, this time with a shudder. I could see that I had touched an exposed nerve. ‘What blighters babies are, Bertie, dribbling, as they do, at the side of the mouth. Still, it has to be done. My agent tells me to leave no stone unturned if I want to win the election.’
‘But why do you want to win the election? I’d have thought you wouldn’t have touched Parliament with a ten-foot pole,’ I said, for I knew the society there was very mixed. ‘What made you commit this rash act?’
‘My fiancée wanted me to,’ he said, and as his lips framed the word ‘fiancée’ his voice took on a sort of tremolo like that of a male turtle dove cooing to a female turtle dove. ‘She thought I ought to be carving out a career for myself.’
‘Do you want a career?’
‘Not much, but she insisted.’
The uneasiness I had felt when he told me the beazel had made him knock off cocktails deepened. His every utterance rendered it more apparent to an experienced man like myself that he had run up against something too hot to handle, and for a moment I thought of advising him to send her a telegram saying it was all off and, this done, to pack a suitcase and catch the next boat to Australia. But feeling that this might give offence I merely asked him what the procedure was when you stood for Parliament – or ran for it, as they would say in America. Not that I particularly wanted to know, but it was something to talk about other than his frightful fiancée.
A cloud passed over his face, which I ought to have mentioned earlier was well worth looking at, the eyes clear, the cheeks tanned, the chin firm, the hair ginger and the nose shapely. It topped off, moreover, a body which also repaid inspection, being muscular and well knit. His general aspect, as a matter of fact, was rather like that presented by Esmond Haddock, the squire of Deverill Hall, where Jeeves’s Uncle Charlie Silversmith drew his monthly envelope. He had the same poetic look, as if at any moment about to rhyme June with moon, yet gave the impression, as Esmond did, of being able, if he cared to, to fell an ox with a single blow. I don’t know if he had ever actually done this, for one so seldom meets an ox, but in his undergraduate days he had felled people right and left, having represented the University in the ring as a heavyweight a matter of three years. He may have included oxen among his victims.
‘You go through hell,’ he said, the map still clouded as he recalled the past. ‘I had to sit in a room where you could hardly breathe because it was as crowded as the Black Hole of Calcutta and listen to addresses of welcome till midnight. After that I went about making speeches.’
‘Well, why aren’t you down there, making speeches, now? Have they given you a day off?’
‘I came up to get a secretary.’
‘Surely you didn’t go there without one?’
‘No, I had one all right, but my fiancée fired her. They had some sort of disagreement.’
I had pursed the lips a goodish bit when he had told me about his fiancée and the cocktails, and I pursed them to an even greater extent now. The more I heard of this girl he had got engaged to, the less I liked the sound of her. I was thinking ho
w well she would get on with Florence Craye if they happened to meet. Twin souls, I mean to say, each what a housemaid I used to know would have called an overbearing dishpot.
I didn’t say so, of course. There is a time to call someone an overbearing dishpot, and a time not to. Criticism of the girl he loved might be taken in ill part, as the expression is, and you don’t want an ex-Oxford boxing Blue taking things in ill part with you.
‘Have you anyone in mind?’ I asked. ‘Or are you just going to a secretary bin, accepting what they have in stock?’
‘I’m hoping to get hold of an American girl I saw something of before I left London. I was sharing a flat with Boko Fittle-worth when he was writing a novel, and she came every day and worked with him. Boko dictates his stuff, and he said she was tops as a shorthand typist. I have her address, but I don’t know if she’s still there. I’m going round there after lunch. Her name’s Magnolia Glendennon.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘Why not?’
‘Nobody could have a name like Magnolia.’
‘They could if they came from South Carolina, as she did. In the southern states of America you can’t throw a brick without hitting a Magnolia. But I was telling you about this business of standing for Parliament. First, of course, you have to get the nomination.’
‘How did you manage that?’
‘My fiancée fixed it. She knows one of the Cabinet ministers, and he pulled strings. A man named Filmer.’
‘Not A. B. Filmer?’
‘That’s right. Is he a friend of yours?’
‘I wouldn’t say exactly a friend. I came to know him slightly owing to being chased with him on to the roof of a sort of summerhouse by an angry swan. This drew us rather close together for the moment, but we never became really chummy.’
‘Where was this?’
‘On an island on the lake at my Aunt Agatha’s place at Steeple Bumpleigh. Living at Steeple Bumpleigh, you’ve probably been there.’
He looked at me with a wild surmise, much as those soldiers Jeeves has told me about looked on each other when on a peak in Darien, wherever that is.
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 5: (Jeeves & Wooster) Page 2