‘It would indeed. But—’
‘You were about to say, sir, that in your opinion the rift is too serious for that?’
‘Well, isn’t it?’
‘I think not.’
‘Your blow by blow description of the hostilities certainly gave me the impression that they had parted brass rags pretty finally. How about that lily-livered poltroon?’
‘You have placed your finger on the real trouble, sir. Miss Cook applied that term to Mr Porter because of his refusal to approach her father and demand the money which the latter is holding in trust for him.’
‘Well, according to you he said he wouldn’t approach her father in a million years.’
‘The situation has been changed by your becoming affianced to the woman he loves. To restore himself to Miss Cook’s esteem he would face perils from which formerly he shrank.’
I got what he meant, but I didn’t buy the idea. I still saw Orlo shrinking.
‘Furthermore, sir, if you were to go to Mr Porter and point out to him that success might crown his efforts if he were to choose a moment shortly after dinner to approach Mr Cook, he would take the risk. A gentleman mellowed by a good dinner is always more amenable to overtures of any kind than one who is waiting for his food, as I understood from his conversation that Mr Cook was when Mr Porter discussed business with him on a former occasion.’
I started visibly. He had electrified me.
‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘I believe you’ve got something.’
‘I think so, sir.’
‘I’ll go and see Porter at once. He’s probably at the Goose and Grasshopper drowning his sorrows in gin and ginger ale. And let me say once more that you stand alone. You have made my day. I wish there was something I could do for you by way of return.’
‘There is, sir.’
‘It’s yours, even unto half my kingdom. Give me a name.’
‘I should be extremely grateful if you would allow me to spend the night at my aunt’s.’
‘You want to go to Liverpool? A long journey.’
‘No, sir. My aunt returned this morning and is at her home in the village.’
‘Then go to her, Jeeves, and heaven smile upon your reunion.’
‘Thank you very much, sir. Should you have need of my services, the address is Balmoral, Mafeking Road, care of Mrs P. B. Pigott.’
‘Oh, she isn’t a Jeeves?’
‘No, sir.’
He shimmered out, to return a moment later with the information that Mr Graham was in the kitchen and would be glad of a word with me. And it shows the extent to which the strain and rush of life at Maiden Eggesford had taken its toll that for a moment the name conveyed nothing to me. Then memory returned to its throne, and I felt as anxious to see Mr Graham as he apparently was to see me. Such was my confidence in him as a returner of cats that I could not imagine him failing in his mission, but I was naturally anxious to have the full details.
‘In the kitchen, you say?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then bung him in, Jeeves. There is no one I’d rather give audience to.’
And the hour, which was getting on for six o’clock, produced the man.
I was struck, as before, by the intense respectability of his appearance. He looked as though no rabbit or pheasant need entertain the slightest tremors in his presence, and one could readily picture him as the backbone of the choir when anthem time came along. His gentle ‘Good evening, sir’ was a treat to listen to.
‘Good evening,’ I said in my turn. ‘Well? You accomplished your mission? The cat is back at the old stand?’
His eyes darkened, as if I had brought to the surface a secret sorrow.
‘Well, yes and no, sir.’
‘How do you mean, yes and no?’
‘To the first of your questions the answer is in the affirmative. I did accomplish my mission. But unfortunately the cat is not at the old stand.’
‘I don’t get you.’
‘It is here, sir, in your kitchen. I took it to Eggesford Court as per contract and released it near the stables and started on my homeward journey, happy to have earned the money which you so generously paid me for my services. Picture my astonishment and dismay when on reaching the village I discovered that the cat had followed me. It is a very affectionate animal, and we had become great friends. Would you wish me to take it back again? Of course I should not feel justified in charging my full fee, so shall we say ten pounds?’
If you want to know how this proposition affected me, I can put it in a nutshell by saying that I read him like a book. Many people are led by my frank and open countenance into thinking that I am one of the mugs, but I know a twister when I see one and I was in no doubt that one of these stood before me now.
What stopped me drawing myself to my full height and denouncing him was the reflection that the blighter had me in a cleft stick. Refusal to come across would mean him going to Pop Cook and getting a handsome fee from him for revealing that the aged relative had paid him to purloin the cat, and in spite of what she had said about her popularity in Maiden Eggesford, resulting from her rendering ‘Every Nice Girl Loves A Sailor’ in a sailor suit, I knew that her name would be mud. I still wasn’t sure she couldn’t even be jugged, and what a sock in the eye that would give Uncle Tom’s digestion.
I disbursed the tenner. Not blithely, but I disbursed it, and he went on his way.
For some little time after he had left I sat wrapped in thought. And then, just as I was getting up to go and see Orlo, in came Vanessa Cook.
15
* * *
SHE WAS ACCOMPANIED by a dog of about the size of a young elephant, yellow in colour and with large ears sticking up, with whom I would willingly have fraternized, but after drinking in the delicious scent of my trouser legs for a brief moment it saw something out in the street which aroused its interest and left us.
Vanessa, meanwhile, had picked up my By Order Of The Czar, and I could see by the way she sniffed that she was about to become critical. There had always been a strong strain of book-reviewer blood in her.
‘Trash,’ she said. ‘It really is time you began reading something worth while. I don’t expect you to start off with Turgenev and Dostoievski,’ she said, evidently alluding to a couple of Russian exiles she had met in London who did a bit of writing on the side, ‘but there are plenty of good books which are easier and at the same time educational. I have brought one with me,’ she went on, and I saw that she was holding a slim volume bound in limp purple leather with some sort of decoration in gold on the cover, and I shuddered strongly. To a man who has seen as much of life as I have there is always something sinister in a book bound in limp purple leather. ‘It is a collection of whimsical essays, The Prose Rumblings Of A Rhymester, by Reginald Sprockett, a brilliant young poet from whom the critics expect great things. His style has been much praised, but it is the thought in these little gems to which I particularly call your attention. I will leave them here. I must be off. I only came to bring you the book …’
You probably think I reeled beneath this blow, but actually my heart was not so heavy as it might have been, for my quick brain had perceived how this would do me a bit of good. The revolting object would make an admirable Christmas present for my Aunt Agatha, always a difficult person to find Yuletide gifts for. I was warming myself with this thought, when Vanessa continued.
‘Be very careful not to lose it. It has Reginald’s autograph in it,’ and glancing at the title page I saw that this was indeed so, which would have bucked Aunt Agatha up no little, but in addition to inscribing the slim volume with his own foul name the blighter had inscribed Vanessa’s. ‘To Vanessa, the fairest of the fair, from a devoted admirer,’ he had written, dishing my plans completely. That was when my heart got heavy again. For though she hadn’t definitely said so, something told me that later on I would be expected to pass an examination on the little opus, and failure would have the worst effects.
Having said s
he must be off, she naturally stayed on for another half-hour, much of which time was devoted to pointing out additional defects in my spiritual make-up which had occurred to her since our last meeting. It just showed how strong the missionary spirit can be in women that she could contemplate the idea of teaming up with a dubious character like B. Wooster. Her best friends would have warned her against it. ‘Cast him into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth,’ they would have said. ‘No good trying to patch him up, he’s hopeless.’
It was my membership of the Drones Club that now formed the basis of her observations. She didn’t like the Drones Club, and she made it quite clear that at the conclusion of the honeymoon I would cross its threshold only over her dead body.
So, reckoning up the final score, the Bertram Wooster who signed the charge sheet in the vestry after the wedding ceremony would be a non-smoker, a teetotaller (for I knew it would come to that) and an ex-member of the Drones, in other words a mere shell of his former self. Little wonder that, as I listened to her, I gulped as Plank’s native bearer must have done when they were getting ready to bury him before sundown.
The prospect appalled me, and while it was appalling me Vanessa moved to the door, this time apparently really intending to be off. And she had opened the door, Bertram much too much of a shell of his former self to open it for her, when she started back with a gasping cry.
‘Father!’ she cried gaspingly. ‘He’s coming up the garden path.’
‘He’s coming up the garden path?’ I said. I was at a loss to imagine why Pop Cook should be calling on me. I mean to say we weren’t on those terms.
‘He’s stopped to tie his boot lace,’ she cried, gaspingly as before, and that concluded her share of the dialogue. With no further words she bounded into the kitchen like a fox pursued by both the Quorn and the Pytchley, slamming the door behind her.
I could appreciate her emotion. She was aware of her parent’s distaste for the last of the Woosters, a distaste so marked that he turned mauve and swallowed his lunch the wrong way at the mention of my name, and chez me was the last place he would wish to find her. Orlo Porter had thought the worst on learning of what he called her clandestine visits to the Wooster home, and a father would, of course, think worse than Orlo. Pure though I was as the driven s., a fat chance I had of persuading him that I wasn’t a modern Casa something. Not Casabianca. That was the chap who stood on the burning deck. Casanova. I knew I’d get it.
And what he would do to Vanessa in his wrath would be plenty. She was, as I have made clear, a proud beauty, but a father of the calibre of Pop Cook can make even a proud beauty wish she had thought twice before blotting her copy-book. He may not be able any longer to whale the tar out of her with his walking stick as in the good old days, but he can cut off her pocket money and send her to stay with her grandmother at Tunbridge Wells, where she will have to look after seven cats and attend divine service three times on Sunday. Yes, one could understand her being perturbed on seeing him tying up his boot lace outside Wee Nooke, which, I forgot to mention earlier, was the name of my G.H.Q. (It had been built, I learned subsequently, for a female cousin of Mrs Briscoe’s who painted water colours.)
And if she was perturbed, I was on the perturbed side, too. It was with some trepidation – in fact, quite a lot of it – that I awaited my visitor’s arrival, a trepidation that was not diminished when I saw that he had brought his hunting crop with him.
I hadn’t taken to him much at our previous meeting, and I had the feeling that I wasn’t going to get very fond of him now, but I will say this for him, that he didn’t waste time. He was a man of quick, decisive speech who had no use for tedious preliminaries but came to the point at once. I suppose you have to in order to run a big business successfully.
‘Well, Mr Wooster, as I understand you are calling yourself now, it may interest you to know that Major Plank, who had lost his memory, recovered it last night, and he told me all about you.’
It was a nasty knock, and the fact that I had been expecting it didn’t make it any better. Oddly enough, I felt no animosity towards Cook, holding Plank the bloke responsible for this awkward situation. Roaming through Africa knee-deep in poisonous snakes of every description and with more man-eating pumas around than you could shake a stick at, he could so easily have passed away, regretted by all. Instead of which, he survived and went about making life tough for harmless typical young men about town who simply wanted to be left alone to restore their delicate health.
Cook was continuing, and getting nastier every moment.
‘You are a notorious crook, known to your associates as Alpine Joe, and your latest crime was to try to sell Major Plank a valuable statuette which you had stolen from Sir Watkyn Bassett of Totleigh Towers. You were arrested by Inspector Witherspoon of Scotland Yard, fortunately before you had accomplished your nefarious ends. I presume from the fact that you are at large that you have served your sentence, and you are now in the pay of Colonel Briscoe, who has employed you to steal my cat. Have you anything to say?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘No, you haven’t,’ he said.
‘I can explain everything,’ I said.
‘No, you can’t,’ he said.
And, by Jove, I suddenly realized I couldn’t. It would have involved a long character analysis of Sir Watkyn Bassett, another of my Uncle Tom, a third of Stephanie (Stiffy) Byng, now Mrs Stinker Pinker, a fourth of Jeeves, and would have taken about two hours and a quarter, provided he listened attentively and didn’t interrupt, which of course he would have done.
Matters, therefore, seemed to be at what you might call a deadlock, and the thought had suggested itself to me that my best plan would be to leave his presence and start running and keep on running till I reached the northern fringe of Scotland, when a noise like an explosion in a gas works broke in on my reverie, and I saw that he was holding the slim volume which Vanessa, the silly ass, had omitted to take off-stage with her.
‘This book!’ he yowled.
I did my best.
‘Ah, yes,’ I said, ‘Reggie Sprockett’s latest. I always keep up with his work. A brilliant young poet of whom the critics expect great things. These, in case you are interested, are whimsical essays. They are superb. Not only the style, but the thought in these little gems …’
My voice died away. I had been about to urge him to buy a copy, but I saw that he was not in the mood. He was staring at the opening page with its inscription, and I knew that words would be wasted, as the expression is.
He gave the hunting crop a twitch.
‘My daughter has been here.’
‘She did look in.’
‘Ha!’
I knew what that ‘Ha!’ meant. It was short for ‘I shall now thrash you within an inch of your life.’ A moment later he used the longer version, as if in doubt as to whether he had made himself clear.
If you were to come to me and say ‘Wooster, to settle a bet, which would you estimate is to be preferred, having your insides torn out by somebody’s bare hands or being thrashed within an inch of your life?’, I would find it difficult to decide. Both are things you’d rather have happen to another chap. But I think I would give my vote in favour of the last-named, always provided the other fellow was doing it in a small room, for there he would find that he had set himself a testing task. The dimensions of the sitting-room of Wee Nooke did not permit of a full swing. Cook had to confine himself to chip shots, which an agile person like myself had little difficulty in eluding.
I eluded them, therefore, with no great expenditure of physical effort, but I would be deceiving my public if I said that I was enjoying the episode. It offends one’s pride when one has to leap like a lamb in Springtime at the bidding of an elderly little gawd-help-us with whom it is impossible to reason. And it was plain that Cook in his present frame of mind wouldn’t recognize reason if you served it up to him in an individual plate with watercress round it.
That, of course
, was what prevented me fulfilling myself in the encounter, the fact that he was an elderly little gawd-help-us. It was the combination of age and size that kept me from giving of my best. I might – indeed I would – have dotted in the eye a small young gawd-help-us or a gawd-help-us of riper years of the large economy size, but I couldn’t possibly get tough with an undersized little squirt who would never see fifty-five again. The chivalry of the Woosters couldn’t ever contemplate such an action.
I thought once or twice of adopting the policy which had occurred to me at the outset – viz. running up to the north of Scotland. I had often wondered, when I read about fellows getting horsewhipped on the steps of their club, why they didn’t just go up the steps and into the club, knowing that the chap behind the horsewhip wasn’t a member and wouldn’t have a chance of getting past the hall porter.
But the catch was that running up to Scotland would mean turning my back, a fatal move. So we just carried on with our rhythmic dance till my guardian angel, who until now had just been sitting there, decided – and about time, too – to take a hand in the proceedings. As might have been expected in a cottage called Wee Nooke, there was a grandfather clock over against the wall, and he now arranged that Cook should bump into this and come a purler. And while he was still on the floor I acted with the true Wooster resource.
I have stated that the previous owner of Wee Nooke expressed herself as a rule in water colours, but on one occasion she had changed her act. Over the mantelpiece there hung a large oil painting depicting a bloke in a three-cornered hat and riding breeches in conference with a girl in a bonnet and what looked like muslin, and as it caught my eye I suddenly remembered Gussie Fink-Nottle and the portrait at Aunt Dahlia’s place in Worcestershire.
Gussie – stop me if you’ve heard this before – while closely pursued by Spode, now Lord Sidcup, who, if memory serves me aright, wanted to break his neck, had taken refuge in my bedroom and was on the point of having his neck broken when he plucked a picture from the wall and brought it down on Spode’s head. The head came through the canvas, and Spode, momentarily bewildered at finding himself wearing a portrait of one of Uncle Tom’s ancestors round his neck like an Elizabethan ruff, gave me the opportunity of snatching a sheet from the bed and enveloping him in it, rendering him null and void, as the expression is.
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 5: (Jeeves & Wooster) Page 27