‘I got it.’
‘Then off you go.’
So off I went.
11
* * *
CONSIDERING HOW SHAKY was his moral outlook and how marked his tendency to weave low plots at the drop of a hat, you would have expected Bingley’s headquarters to have been one of those sinister underground dens lit by stumps of candles stuck in the mouths of empty beer bottles such as abound, I believe, in places like Whitechapel and Limehouse. But no. Number 5 Ormond Crescent turned out to be quite an expensive-looking joint with a nice little bit of garden in front of it well supplied with geraniums, bird baths and terracotta gnomes, the sort of establishment that might have belonged to a blameless retired Colonel or a saintly stockbroker. Evidently his late uncle hadn’t been just an ordinary small town grocer, weighing out potted meats and raisins to a public that had to watch the pennies, but something on a much more impressive scale. I learned later that he had owned a chain of shops, one of them as far afield as Birmingham, and why the ass had gone and left his money to a chap like Bingley is more than I can tell you, though the probability is that Bingley, before bumping him off with some little-known Asiatic poison, had taken the precaution of forging the will.
On the threshold I paused. I remember in my early days at the private school where I won my Scripture Knowledge prize, Arnold Abney M.A., the headmaster, would sometimes announce that he wished to see Wooster in his study after morning prayers, and I always halted at the study door, a prey to uneasiness and apprehension, not liking the shape of things to come. It was much the same now. I shrank from the impending interview. But whereas in the case of A. Abney my disinclination to get things moving had been due to the fear that the proceedings were going to lead up to six of the best from a cane that stung like an adder, with Bingley it was a natural reluctance to ask a favour of a fellow I couldn’t stand the sight of. I wouldn’t say the Woosters were particularly proud, but we do rather jib at having to grovel to the scum of the earth.
However, it had to be done, and, as I heard Jeeves say once, if it were done, then ’twere well ’twere done quickly. Stiffening the sinews and summoning up the blood, to quote another of his gags, I pressed the bell.
If I had any doubts as to Bingley now being in the chips, the sight of the butler who opened the door would have dispelled them. In assembling his domestic staff, Bingley had done himself proud, sparing no expense. I don’t say his butler was quite in the class of Jeeves’s Uncle Charlie Silversmith, but he came so near it that the breath was taken. And like Uncle Charlie he believed in pomp and ceremony when buttling. I asked him if I could see Mr Bingley, and he said coldly that the master was not receiving.
‘I think he’ll see me. I’m an old friend of his.’
‘I will enquire. Your name, sir?’
‘Mr Wooster.’
He pushed off, to return some moments later to say that Mr Bingley would be glad if I would join him in the library. Speaking in what seemed to me a disapproving voice, as though to suggest that, while he was compelled to carry out the master’s orders however eccentric, he would never have admitted a chap like me if it had been left to him.
‘If you would step this way, sir,’ he said haughtily.
What with one thing and another I had rather got out of touch lately with that If-you-would-step-this-way-sir stuff, and it was in a somewhat rattled frame of mind that I entered the library and found Bingley in an armchair with his feet up on an occasional table. He greeted me cordially enough, but with that touch of the patronizing so noticeable at our two previous meetings.
‘Ah, Wooster, my dear fellow, come in. I told Bastable to tell everyone I was not at home, but of course you’re different. Always glad to see an old pal. And what can I do for you, Wooster?’
I had to say for him that he had made it easy for me to introduce the subject I was anxious to discuss. I was about to get going, when he asked me if I would like a drink. I said No, thanks, and he said in an insufferably smug way that I was probably wise.
‘I often thought, when I was staying with you at Chuffnell Regis, that you drank too much, Wooster. Remember how you burned that cottage down? A sober man wouldn’t have done that. You must have been stewed to the eyebrows, cocky.’
A hot denial trembled on my lips. I mean to say, it’s a bit thick to be chided for burning cottages down by the very chap who put them to the flames. But I restrained myself. The man, I reminded myself, had to be kept in with. If that was how he remembered that night of terror at Chuffnell Regis, it was not for me to destroy his illusions. I refrained from comment, and he asked me if I would like a cigar. When I said I wouldn’t, he nodded like a father pleased with a favourite son.
‘I am glad to see this improvement in you, Wooster. I always thought you smoked too much. Moderation, moderation in all things, that’s the only way. But you were going to tell me why you came here. Just for a chat about old times, was it?’
‘It’s with ref to that book you pinched from the Junior Ganymede.’
He had been drinking a whisky and soda as I spoke, and he drained his glass before replying.
‘I wish you wouldn’t use that word “pinch”,’ he said, looking puff-faced. It was plain that I had given offence. ‘I simply borrowed it because I needed it in my business. They’ll get it back all right.’
‘Mrs McCorkadale told my aunt you tried to sell it to her.’
His annoyance increased. His air was that of a man compelled to listen to a tactless oaf who persisted in saying the wrong thing.
‘Not sell. I would have had a clause in the agreement saying that she was to return it when she had done with it. The idea I had in mind was that she would have photostatic copies made of the pages dealing with young Winship without the book going out of my possession. But the deal didn’t come off. She wouldn’t cooperate. Fortunately I have other markets. It’s the sort of property there’ll be a lot of people bidding for. But why are you so interested, old man? Nothing to do with you, is it?’
‘I’m a pal of Ginger Winship’s.’
‘And I’ve no objection to him myself. Nice enough young fellow he always seemed to me, though the wrong size.’
‘Wrong size?’ I said, not getting this.
‘His shirts didn’t fit me. Not that I hold that against him. These things are all a matter of luck. Don’t run away with the idea that I’m a man with a grievance, trying to get back at him for something he did to me when I was staying at his place. Our relations were very pleasant. I quite liked him, and if it didn’t matter to me one way or the other who won this election, I’d just as soon he came out on top. But business is business. After studying form I did some pretty heavy betting on McCorkadale, and I’ve got to protect my investments, old man. That’s only common sense, isn’t it?’
He paused, apparently expecting a round of applause for his prudence. When I remained sotto voce and the silent tomb, he proceeded.
‘If you want to get along in this world, Wooster old chap, you’ve got to grasp your opportunities. That’s what I do. I examine each situation that crops up, and I ask myself “What is there in this for me? How,” I ask myself, “can I handle this situation so as to do Rupert Bingley a bit of good?”, and it’s not often I don’t find a way. This time I didn’t even have to think. There was young Winship trying to get into Parliament, and here was I standing to win something like a couple of hundred quid if he lost the election, and there was the club book with all the stuff in it which would make it certain he did lose. I recognized it at once as money for jam. The only problem was how to get the book, and I soon solved that. I don’t know if you noticed, that day we met at the Junior Ganymede, that I had a large briefcase with me? And that I said I’d got to see the secretary about something? Well, what I wanted to see him about was borrowing the book. And I wouldn’t have to find some clever way of getting him looking the other way while I did it, because I knew he’d be out to lunch. So I popped in, popped the book in the briefcase and popped off.
Nobody saw me go in. Nobody saw me come out. The whole operation was like taking candy from a kid.’
There are some stories which fill the man of sensibility with horror, repugnance, abhorrence and disgust. I don’t mean anecdotes like the one Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright told me at the Drones, I am referring to loathsome revelations such as the bit of autobiography to which I had just been listening. To say that I felt as if the Wooster soul had been spattered with mud by a passing car would not be putting it at all too strongly. I also felt that nothing was to be gained by continuing this distasteful interview. I had had some idea of going into the possibility of Aunt Agatha reading the contents of the club book and touching on the doom, desolation and despair which must inevitably be my portion if she did, but I saw that it would be fruitless or bootless. The man was without something and pity … ruth, would it be? I know it begins with r … and would simply have given me the horse’s laugh. I was now quite certain that he had murdered his uncle and forged the will. Such a performance to such a man would have been mere routine.
I turned, accordingly, to the door, but before I got there he stopped me, wanting to know if when coming to stay with Aunt Dahlia I had brought Reggie Jeeves with me. I said I had, and he said he would like to see old Reggie again.
‘What a cough drop!’ he said mirthfully. The word was strange to me, but weighing it and deciding that it was intended to be a compliment and a tribute to his many gifts, I agreed that Jeeves was in the deepest and truest sense a cough drop.
‘Tell Bastable as you go out that if Reggie calls to send him up. But nobody else.’
‘Right ho.’
‘Good man, Bastable. He places my bets for me. Which reminds me. Have you done as I advised and put a bit on Ma McCorkadale for the Market Snodsbury stakes? No? Do it without fail, Wooster old man. You’ll never regret it. It’ll be like finding money in the street.’
I wasn’t feeling any too good as I drove away. I have described my heart-bowed-down-ness on approaching the Arnold Abney study door after morning prayers in the days when I was in statu pupillari, as the expression is, and I was equally apprehensive now as I faced the prospect of telling the old ancestor of my failure to deliver the goods in the matter of Bingley. I didn’t suppose that she would give me six of the best, as A. Abney was so prone to do, but she would certainly not hesitate to let me know she was displeased. Aunts as a class are like Napoleon, if it was Napoleon; they expect their orders to be carried out without a hitch and don’t listen to excuses.
Nor was I mistaken. After lunching at a pub in order to postpone the meeting as long as possible, I returned to the old homestead and made my report, and was unfortunate enough to make it while she was engaged in reading a Rex Stout – in the hard cover, not a paperback. When she threw this at me with the accurate aim which years of practice have given her, its sharp edge took me on the tip of the nose, making me blink not a little.
‘I might have known you would mess the whole thing up,’ she boomed.
‘Not my fault, aged relative,’ I said. ‘I did my best. Than which,’ I added, ‘no man can do more.’
I thought I had her there, but I was wrong. It was the sort of line which can generally be counted on to soothe the savage breast, but this time it laid an egg. She snorted. Her snorts are not the sniffing snorts snorted by Ma McCorkadale, they resemble more an explosion in the larger type of ammunition dump and send strong men rocking back on their heels as if struck by lightning.
‘How do you mean you did your best? You don’t seem to me to have done anything. Did you threaten to have him arrested?’
‘No, I didn’t do that.’
‘Did you grasp him by the throat and shake him like a rat?’
I admitted that that had not occurred to me.
‘In other words, you did absolutely nothing,’ she said, and thinking it over I had to own that she was perfectly right. It’s funny how one doesn’t notice these things at the time. It was only now that I realized that I had let Bingley do all the talking, self offering practically nil in the way of a come-back. I could hardly have made less of a contribution to our conversation if I had been the deaf adder I mentioned earlier.
She heaved herself up from the chaise longue on which she was reclining. Her manner was peevish. In time, of course, she would get over her chagrin and start loving her Bertram again as of yore, but there was no getting away from it that an aunt’s affection was, as of even date, at its lowest ebb. She said gloomily:
‘I’ll have to do it myself.’
‘Are you going to see Bingley?’
‘I am going to see Bingley, and I am going to talk to Bingley, and I am going, if necessary, to take Bingley by the throat and shake him—’
‘Like a rat?’
‘Yes, like a rat,’ she said with the quiet confidence of a woman who had been shaking rats by the throat since she was a slip of a girl. ‘Five Ormond Crescent, here I come!’
It shows to what an extent happenings in and about Market Snodsbury had affected my mental processes that she had been gone at least ten minutes before the thought of Bastable floated into my mind, and I wished I had been able to give her a word of warning. That zealous employee of Rupert Bingley had been instructed to see to it that no callers were admitted to the presence, and I saw no reason to suppose that he would fail in his duty when the old ancestor showed up. He would not use physical violence – indeed, with a woman of her physique he would be unwise to attempt it – but it would be the work of an instant with him not to ask her to step this way, thus ensuring her departure with what Ma McCorkadale would call a flea in her ear. I could see her returning in, say, about a quarter of an hour a baffled and defeated woman.
I was right. It was some twenty minutes later, as I sat reading the Rex Stout which she had used as a guided missile, that heavy breathing became audible without and shortly afterwards she became visible within, walking with the measured tread of a saint going round St Paul’s. A far less discerning eye than mine could have spotted that she had been having Bastable trouble.
It would have been kinder, perhaps, not to have spoken, but it was one of those occasions when you feel you have to say something.
‘Any luck?’ I enquired.
She sank on to the chaise longue, simmering gently. She punched a cushion, and I could see she was wishing it could have been Bastable. He was essentially the sort of man who asks, nay clamours, to be treated in this manner.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t get in.’
‘Why was that?’ I asked, wearing the mask.
‘A beefy butler sort of bird slammed the door in my face.’
‘Too bad.’
‘And I was just too late to get my foot in.’
‘Always necessary to work quick on these occasions. The most precise timing is called for. Odd that he should have admitted me. I suppose my air of quiet distinction was what turned the scale. What did you do?’
‘I came away. What else could I have done?’
‘No, I can see how difficult it must have been.’
‘The maddening part of it is that I was all set to try to get that money out of L. P. Runkle this afternoon. I felt that today was the day. But if my luck’s out, as it seems to be, perhaps I had better postpone it.’
‘Not strike while the iron is hot?’
‘It may not be hot enough.’
‘Well, you’re the judge. You know,’ I said, getting back to the main issue, ‘the ambassador to conduct the negotiations with Bingley is really Jeeves. It is he who should have been given the assignment. Where I am speechless in Bingley’s presence and you can’t even get into the house, he would be inside and talking a blue streak before you could say What ho. And he has the added advantage that Bingley seems fond of him. He thinks he’s a cough drop.’
‘What on earth’s a cough drop?’
‘I don’t know, but it’s something Bingley admires. When he spoke of him as one, it was with a genuine ring of enthusiasm in his voice. Did you
tell Jeeves about Bingley having the book?’
‘Yes, I told him.’
‘How did he take it?’
‘You know how Jeeves takes things. One of his eyebrows rose a little and he said he was shocked and astounded.’
‘That’s strong stuff for him. “Most disturbing” is as far as he goes usually.’
‘It’s a curious thing,’ said the aged relative thoughtfully. ‘As I was driving off in the car I thought I saw Jeeves coming away from Bingley’s place. Though I couldn’t be sure it was him.’
‘It must have been. His first move on getting the low-down from you about the book would be to go and see Bingley. I wonder if he’s back yet.’
‘Not likely. I was driving, he was walking. There wouldn’t be time.’
‘I’ll ring for Seppings and ask. Oh, Seppings,’ I said, when he answered the bell, ‘Is Jeeves downstairs?’
‘No, sir. He went out and has not yet returned.’
‘When he does, tell him to come and see me, will you.’
‘Very good, sir.’
I thought of asking if Jeeves, when he left, had had the air of a man going to Number 5 Ormond Crescent, but decided that this might be trying Seppings too high, so let it go. He withdrew, and we sat for some time talking about Jeeves. Then, feeling that this wasn’t going to get us anywhere and that nothing constructive could be accomplished till he returned, we took up again the matter of L. P. Runkle. At least, the aged relative took it up, and I put the question I had been wanting to put at an earlier stage.
‘You say,’ I said, ‘that you felt today was the day for approaching him. What gave you that idea?’
‘The way he tucked into his lunch and the way he talked about it afterwards. Lyrical was the only word for it, and I wasn’t surprised. Anatole had surpassed himself.’
‘The Suprême de Foie Gras au Champagne?’
‘And the Neige aux Perles des Alpes.’
I heaved a silent sigh, thinking of what might have been. The garbage I had had to insult the Wooster stomach with at the pub had been of a particularly lethal nature. Generally these rural pubs are all right in the matter of browsing, but I had been so unfortunate as to pick one run by a branch of the Borgia family. The thought occurred to me as I ate that if Bingley had given his uncle lunch there one day, he wouldn’t have had to go to all the bother and expense of buying little-known Asiatic poisons.
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 5: (Jeeves & Wooster) Page 10