I was ap-what-is-it. Forget my own name next. Appalled, that’s the word, though shocked to the core would be about as good; nothing much in it, really. I hadn’t read any of those etiquette books you see all over the place, but I was prepared to bet that the leaders of Society who wrote them would raise an eyebrow or two at carrying-ons of this description. The chapter on Hints To Hostesses would be bound to have a couple of paragraphs warning them that it wasn’t the done thing to invite people to the home and having got them settled in to pinch their porringers.
‘But good Lord!’ I ejaculated, appalled or, if you prefer it, shocked to the core.
‘Now what?’
‘The man is under your roof.’
‘Did you expect him to be on it?’
‘He has eaten your salt.’
‘Very imprudent, with blood pressure like his. His doctor probably forbids it.’
‘You can’t do this.’
‘I know I can’t, but I have,’ she said, just like the chap in the story, and I saw it would be fruitless or bootless to go on arguing. It rarely is with aunts – if you’re their nephew, I mean, because they were at your side all through your formative years and know what an ass you were then and can’t believe that anything that you may say later is worth listening to. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Jeeves’s three aunts don’t shut him up when he starts talking, remembering that at the age of six the child Jeeves didn’t know the difference between the poet Burns and a hole in the ground.
Ceasing to expostulate, therefore, if expostulate is the word I want, I went to the bell and pressed it, and when she asked for footnotes throwing a light on why I did this, I told her I proposed to place the matter in the hands of a higher power.
‘I’m ringing for Jeeves.’
‘You’ll only get Seppings.’
‘Seppings will provide Jeeves.’
‘And what do you think Jeeves can do?’
‘Make you see reason.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Well, it’s worth a try.’
Further chit-chat was suspended till Jeeves arrived and silence fell except for the ancestor snorting from time to time and self breathing more heavily than usual, for I was much stirred. It always stirs a nephew to discover that a loved aunt does not know the difference between right and wrong. There is a difference … at my private school Arnold Abney M.A. used to rub it into the student body both Sundays and weekdays … but apparently nobody had told the aged relative about it, with the result that she could purloin people’s porringers without a yip from her conscience. Shook me a bit, I confess.
When Jeeves blew in, it cheered me to see the way his head stuck out at the back, for that’s where the brain is, and what was needed here was a man with plenty of the old grey matter who would put his points so that even a fermenting aunt would have to be guided by him.
‘Well, here’s Jeeves,’ said the ancestor. ‘Tell him the facts and I’ll bet he says I’ve done the only possible thing and can carry on along the lines I sketched out.’
I might have risked a fiver on this at say twelve to eight, but it didn’t seem fitting. But telling Jeeves the facts was a good idea, and I did so without delay, being careful to lay a proper foundation.
‘Jeeves,’ I said.
‘Sir?’ he responded.
‘Sorry to interrupt you again. Were you reading Spinoza?’
‘No, sir, I was writing a letter to my Uncle Charlie.’
‘Charlie Silversmith,’ I explained in an aside to the ancestor. ‘Butler at Deverill Hall. One of the best.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘I know few men whom I esteem more highly than your Uncle Charlie. Well, we won’t keep you long. It’s just that another problem presenting certain points of interest has come up. In a recent conversation I revealed to you the situation relating to Tuppy Glossop and L. P. Runkle. You recall?’
‘Yes, sir. Madam was hoping to extract a certain sum of money from Mr Runkle on Mr Glossop’s behalf.’
‘Exactly. Well, it didn’t come off.’
‘I am sorry to hear that, sir.’
‘But not, I imagine, surprised. If I remember, you considered it a hundred to one shot.’
‘Approximately that, sir.’
‘Runkle being short of bowels of compassion.’
‘Precisely, sir. A twenty-minute egg.’
Here the ancestor repeated her doubts with regard to L. P. Runkle’s legitimacy, and would, I think, have developed the theme had I not shushed her down with a raised hand.
‘She pleaded in vain,’ I said. ‘He sent her away with a flea in her ear. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he laughed her to scorn.’
‘The superfatted old son of a bachelor,’ the ancestor interposed, and once more I shushed her down.
‘Well, you know what happens when you do that sort of thing to a woman of spirit. Thoughts of reprisals fill her mind. And so, coming to the nub, she decided to purloin Runkle’s porringer. But I mustn’t mislead you. She did this not as an act of vengeance, if you know what I mean, but in order to have a bargaining point when she renewed her application. “Brass up,” she would have said when once more urging him to scare the moths out of his pocketbook, “or you won’t get back your porringer”. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Perfectly clear, sir. I find you very lucid.’
‘Now first it will have to be explained to you what a porringer is, and here I am handicapped by not having the foggiest notion myself, except that it’s silver and old and the sort of thing Uncle Tom has in his collection. Runkle was hoping to sell it to him. Could you supply any details?’ I asked the aged relative.
She knitted the brows a bit, and said she couldn’t do much in that direction.
‘All I know is that it was made in the time of Charles the Second by some Dutchman or other.’
‘Then I think I know the porringer to which you allude, sir,’ said Jeeves, his face lighting up as much as it ever lights up, he for reasons of his own preferring at all times to preserve the impassivity of a waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s. ‘It was featured in a Sotheby’s catalogue at which I happened to be glancing not long ago. Would it,’ he asked the ancestor, ‘be a silver-gilt porringer on a circular moulded foot, the lower part chased with acanthus foliage, with beaded scroll handles, the cover surmounted by a foliage on a rosette of swirling acanthus leaves, the stand of tazza form on circular detachable feet with acanthus border joined to a multifoil plate, the palin top with upcurved rim?’
He paused for a reply, but the ancestor did not speak immediately, her aspect that of one who has been run over by a municipal tram. Odd, really, because she must have been listening to that sort of thing from Uncle Tom for years. Finally she mumbled that she wouldn’t be surprised or she wouldn’t wonder or something like that.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ she said.
‘I fancy it must be the same, madam. You mentioned a workman of Dutch origin. Would the name be Hans Conrael Brechtel of the Hague?’
‘I couldn’t tell you. I know it wasn’t Smith or Jones or Robinson, and that’s as far as I go. But what’s all this in aid of? What does it matter if the stand is of tazza form or if the palin top has an upcurved rim?’
‘Exactly,’ I said, thoroughly concurring. ‘Or if the credit for these tazza forms and palin tops has to be chalked up to Hans Conrael Brechtel of the Hague. The point, Jeeves, is not what particular porringer the ancestor has pinched, but how far she was justified in pinching any porringer at all when its owner was a guest of hers. I hold that it was a breach of hospitality and the thing must be returned. Am I right?’
‘Well, sir …’
‘Go on, Jeeves,’ said the ancestor. ‘Say I’m a crook who ought to be drummed out of the Market Snodsbury Ladies Social and Cultural Garden Club.’
‘Not at all, madam.’
‘Then what were you going to say when you hesitated?’
‘Merely that in my opinion no useful end
will be served by retaining the object.’
‘I don’t follow you. How about that bargaining point?’
‘It will, I fear, avail you little, madam. As I understand Mr Wooster, the sum you are hoping to obtain from Mr Runkle amounts to a good many thousand pounds.’
‘Fifty at least, if not a hundred.’
‘Then I cannot envisage him complying with your demands. Mr Runkle is a shrewd financier—’
‘Born out of wedlock.’
‘Very possibly you are right, madam, nevertheless he is a man well versed in weighing profit and loss. According to Sotheby’s catalogue the price at which the object was sold at the auction sale was nine thousand pounds. He will scarcely disburse a hundred or even fifty thousand in order to recover it.’
‘Of course he won’t,’ I said, as enchanted with his lucidity as he had been with mine. It was the sort of thing you have to pay topnotchers at the Bar a king’s ransom for. ‘He’ll simply say “Easy come, easy go” and write it off as a business loss, possibly consulting his legal adviser as to whether he can deduct it from his income tax. Thank you, Jeeves. You’ve straightened everything out in your customary masterly manner. You’re a … what were you saying the other day about Daniel somebody?’
‘A Daniel come to judgment, sir?’
‘That was it. You’re a Daniel come to judgment.’
‘It is very kind of you to say so, sir.’
‘Not at all. Well-deserved tribute.’
I shot a glance at the aged relative. It is notoriously difficult to change the trend of an aunt’s mind when that mind is made up about this or that, but I could see at a g that Jeeves had done it. I hadn’t expected her to look pleased, and she didn’t, but it was evident that she had accepted what is sometimes called the inevitable. I would describe her as not having a word to say, had she not at this moment said one, suitable enough for the hunting field but on the strong side for mixed company. I registered it in my memory as something to say to Spode some time, always provided it was on the telephone.
‘I suppose you’re right, Jeeves,’ she said, heavy-hearted, though bearing up stoutly. ‘It seemed a good idea at the time, but I agree with you that it isn’t as watertight as I thought it. It’s so often that way with one’s golden dreams. The—’
‘—best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley,’ I said helping her out. ‘See the poet Burns. I’ve often wondered why Scotsmen say “gang”. I asked you once, Jeeves, if you recall, and you said they had not confided in you. You were saying, ancestor?’
‘I was about to say—’
‘Or, for that matter, “agley”.’
‘I was about to say—’
‘Or “aft” for “often”.’
‘I was about to say,’ said the relative, having thrown her Rex Stout at me, fortunately with a less accurate aim than the other time, ‘that there’s nothing to be done but for me to put the thing back in Runkle’s room where I took it from.’
‘Whence I took it’ would have been better, but it was not to comment on her prose style that I interposed. I was thinking that if she was allowed to do the putting back, she might quite possibly change her mind on the way to Runkle’s room and decide to stick to the loot after all. Jeeves’s arguments had been convincing to the last drop, but you can never be sure that the effect of convincing arguments won’t wear off, especially with aunts who don’t know the difference between right and wrong, and it might be that she would take the view that if she pocketed the porringer and kept it among her souvenirs, she would at least be saving something from the wreck. ‘Always difficult to know what to give Tom for his birthday,’ she might say to herself. ‘This will be just the thing.’
‘I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘Unless you’d rather, Jeeves.’
‘No, thank you, sir.’
‘Only take a minute of your time.’
‘No, thank you, sir.’
‘Then you may leave us, Jeeves. Much obliged for your Daniel come to judgmenting.’
‘A pleasure, sir.’
‘Give Uncle Charlie my love.’
‘I will indeed, sir.’
As the door closed behind him, I started to make my plans and dispositions, as I believe the word is, and I found the blood relation docile and helpful. Runkle’s room, she told me, was the one known as the Blue Room, and the porringer should be inserted in the left top drawer of the chest of drawers, whence she had removed it. I asked if she was sure he was still in the hammock, and she said he must be, because on her departure he was bound to have gone to sleep again. Taking a line through the cat Augustus, I found this plausible. With these traumatic symplegia cases waking is never more than a temporary thing. I have known Augustus to resume his slumbers within fifteen seconds of having had a shopping bag containing tins of cat food fall on him. A stifled oath, and he was off to dreamland once more.
As I climbed the stairs, I was impressed by the fact that L. P. Runkle had been given the Blue Room, for in this house it amounted to getting star billing. It was the biggest and most luxurious of the rooms allotted to bachelors. I once suggested to the aged relative that I be put there, but all she said was ‘You?’ and the conversation turned to other topics. Runkle having got it in spite of the presence on the premises of a seventh Earl showed how determined the a.r. had been that no stone should be left unturned and no avenue unexplored in her efforts to soften him up; and it seemed ironical that all her carefully thought-out plans should have gone agley. Just shows Burns knew what he was talking about. You can generally rely on these poets to hit the mark and entitle themselves to a cigar or coconut according to choice.
The old sweats will remember, though later arrivals will have to be told, that this was not the first time I had gone on a secret mission to the Blue Room. That other visit, the old sweats will recall, had ended in disaster and not knowing which way to look, for Mrs Homer Cream, the well-known writer of suspense novels, had found me on the floor with a chair round my neck, and it had not been easy to explain. This was no doubt why on the present occasion I approached the door with emotions somewhat similar to those I had had in the old days when approaching that of Arnold Abney M.A. at the conclusion of morning prayers. A voice seemed to whisper in my ear that beyond that door there lurked something that wasn’t going to do me a bit of good.
The voice was perfectly right. It had got its facts correct first shot. What met my eyes as I entered was L. P. Runkle asleep on the bed, and with my customary quickness I divined what must have happened. After being cornered there by the old ancestor he must have come to the conclusion that a hammock out in the middle of a lawn, with access to it from all directions, was no place for a man who wanted peace and seclusion, and that these were to be obtained only in his bedroom. Thither, accordingly, he had gone, and there he was. Voilà tout, as one might say if one had made a study of the French language.
The sight of this sleeping beauty had, of course, given me a nasty start, causing my heart to collide rather violently with my front teeth, but it was only for a moment that I was unequal to what I have heard Jeeves call the intellectual pressure of the situation. It is pretty generally recognized in the circles in which I move that Bertram Wooster, though he may be down, is never out, the betting being odds on that, given time to collect his thoughts and stop his head spinning, he will rise on stepping stones of his dead self to higher things, as the fellow said, and it was so now. I would have preferred, of course, to operate in a room wholly free from the presence of L. P. Runkle, but I realized that as long as he remained asleep there was nothing to keep me from carrying on. All that was required was that my activities should be conducted in absolute silence. And it was thus that I was conducting them, more like a spectre or wraith than a chartered member of the Drones Club, when the air was rent, as the expression is, by a sharp yowl such as you hear when a cougar or a snow leopard stubs its toe on a rock, and I became aware that I had trodden on the cat Augustus, who had continued to follow me, still, I suppose, under th
e mistaken impression that I had kippered herrings on my person and might at any moment start loosening up.
In normal circumstances I would have hastened to make my apologies and to endeavour by tickling him behind the ear to apply balm to his wounded feelings, but at this moment L. P. Runkle sat up, said ‘Wah-wah-wah’, rubbed his eyes, gave me an unpleasant look with them and asked me what the devil I was doing in his room.
It was not an easy question to answer. There had been nothing in our relations since we first swam into each other’s ken to make it seem likely that I had come to smooth his pillow or ask him if he would like a cooling drink, and I did not put forward these explanations. I was thinking how right the ancestor had been in predicting that, if aroused suddenly, he would wake up cross. His whole demeanour was that of a man who didn’t much like the human race as a whole but was particularly allergic to Woosters. Not even Spode could have made his distaste for them plainer.
I decided to see what could be done with suavity. It had answered well in the case of Ginger, and there was no saying that it might not help to ease the current situation.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said with an enchanting smile, ‘I’m afraid I woke you.’
‘Yes, you did. And stop grinning at me like a half-witted ape.’
‘Right ho,’ I said. I removed the enchanting smile. It came off quite easily. ‘I don’t wonder you’re annoyed. But I’m more to be pitied than censured. I inadvertently trod on the cat.’
A look of alarm spread over his face. It had a long way to go, but it spread all right.
‘Hat?’ he quavered, and I could see that he feared for the well-being of his Panama with the pink ribbon.
I lost no time in reassuring him.
‘Not hat. Cat.’
‘What cat?’
‘Oh, haven’t you met? Augustus his name is, though for purposes of conversation this is usually shortened to Gus. He and I have been buddies since he was a kitten. He must have been following me when I came in here.’
It was an unfortunate way of putting it, for it brought him back to his original theme.
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 5: (Jeeves & Wooster) Page 14