‘Now, listen …’ I was beginning, with a generous strength, when the words froze on my lips.
The fellow who was joggling my arm was Chuffy.
9
* * *
Lovers’ Meetings
IT HAS BEEN well said of Bertram Wooster that he is a man who is at all times glad to see his friends and can be relied upon to greet them with a cheery smile and a gay quip. But though in the main this is correct, I make one proviso – viz that the conditions be right. On the present occasion they were not. When an old schoolmate’s fiancée is roosting in your bed in a suit of your personal pyjamas, it is hard to frisk round this old schoolmate with any abandon when he suddenly appears in the immediate vicinity.
I uttered, accordingly, no gay quip. I couldn’t even manage the cheery smile. I just sat goggling at the man, wondering how he had got there, how long he proposed to remain, and what the chances were of Pauline Stoker suddenly shoving her head out of the window and shouting to me to come and grapple with a mouse.
Chuffy was bending over me with a sort of bedside manner. In the background I could see Sergeant Voules hovering with something of the air of a trained nurse. What had become of Constable Dobson, I did not know. It seemed too jolly to think that he was dead, so I took it that he had returned to his beat.
‘It’s all right, Bertie,’ said Chuffy soothingly. ‘It’s me, old man.’
‘I found his lordship by the side of the harbour,’ explained the sergeant.
I must say I chafed a bit. I saw what had happened. When you tear a lover of Chuffy’s calibre from the girl of his heart, he does not just mix himself a final spot and turn in – he goes and stands beneath her window. And if she’s on a yacht, anchored out in the middle of a harbour, this can only be done, of course, by infesting the water-front. All quite in order, no doubt, but in the present circs dashed inconvenient, to use the mildest term. And what was making me chafe was the thought that if only he had got to his parking place a bit earlier he would have been in a position to welcome the girl as she came ashore, thus obviating all the present awkwardness.
‘The sergeant was worried about you, Bertie. He seemed to think your manner was strange. So he brought me along to have a look at you. Very sensible of you, Voules.’
‘Thank you, m’lord.’
‘A sound move.’
‘Thank you, m’lord.’
‘You couldn’t have done a wiser thing.’
‘Thank you, m’lord.
It was sickening to hear them.
‘So you’ve got a touch of the sun, Bertie?’
‘I have not got a touch of any bally sun.’
‘Voules thought so.’
‘Voules is an ass.’
The sergeant bridled somewhat.
‘Begging your pardon, sir, you informed me that your head throbbed, and I assumed that the brain was addled.’
‘Exactly. You must have gone slightly off your rocker, old chap,’ said Chuffy gently, ‘mustn’t you? To be sleeping out here, I mean, what?’
‘Why shouldn’t I sleep out here?’
I saw Chuffy and the sergeant exchange glances.
‘But you’ve got a bedroom, old fellow. You’ve got a nice bedroom, haven’t you? I should have thought you would have found it so much snugger and jollier in your cosy little bedroom.’
The Woosters have all been pretty quick thinkers. I saw that I had got to make this move of mine seem plausible.
‘There’s a spider in my bedroom.’
‘A spider, eh? Pink?’
‘Pinkish.’
‘With long legs?’
‘Fairly long legs.’
‘And hairy, I shouldn’t wonder?’
‘Very hairy.’
The rays of the lantern were falling on Chuffy’s face, and at this point I observed a subtle change come into his expression. A moment before, he had been solicitous old Doctor Chuffnell, gravely concerned about the sorely sick patient whom he had been called in to treat. He now grinned in a most unpleasant manner and, rising, drew Sergeant Voules aside and addressed a remark to him which told me that he had placed an entirely wrong construction on the matter.
‘It’s all right, Sergeant. Nothing to worry about. He’s simply as tight as an owl.’
I think he imagined he was speaking in a tactful undertone, but his words came clearly to my ears, as did the sergeant’s reply.
‘Is that so, m’lord?’ said Sergeant Voules. And his voice was the voice of a sergeant to whom all things have been made clear.
‘That’s all that’s the trouble. Completely boiled. You notice the glassy look in the eyes?’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘I’ve seen him like this before. Once, after a bump-supper at Oxford, he insisted that he was a mermaid and wanted to dive into the college fountain and play the harp there.’
‘Young gents will be young gents,’ said Sergeant Voules in a tolerant and broadminded manner.
‘We must put him to bed.’
I jumped up. Horror-stricken. Trembling like a leaf.
‘I don’t want to go to bed!’
Chuffy stroked my arm soothingly.
‘It’s all right, Bertie. Quite all right. We understand. No wonder you were frightened. Beastly great spider. Enough to frighten any one. But it’s all right now. Voules and I will come up to your room with you and kill it. You aren’t scared of spiders, Voules?’
‘No, m’lord.
‘You hear that, Bertie? Voules will stand by you. Voules can tackle any spider. How many spiders was it you were telling me you took on in India once, Voules?’
‘Ninety-six, m’lord.’
‘Big ones, if I remember rightly?’
‘Whackers, m’lord.’
‘There, Bertie. You see there’s nothing to be afraid of. You take this arm, Sergeant. I’ll take the other. Just relax, Bertie. We’ll hold you up.’
Looking back, I am not certain whether I didn’t do the wrong thing at this juncture. It may be that a few well-chosen words would have served me better. But you know how it is about well-chosen words. When you need them most, you can’t find any. The sergeant had begun to freeze on to my left arm, and I couldn’t think of a single remark. So, in lieu of conversation, I punched him in the tummy and made a dash for the open spaces.
Well, you can’t go far at a high rate of speed in a dark shed littered with the belongings of a by-the-day gardener. I suppose there were quite half a dozen things I could have come a purler over. The one which actually caused me to take the toss was a watering-can. I fell with a dull, sickening thud, and when reason returned to her throne I found I was being carried through the summer night in the direction of the house. Chuffy had got me under the arms, and Sergeant Voules was attached to my feet. And, thus linked, we passed through the front door and up the stairs. It wasn’t, perhaps, actually the frog’s march, but it was quite near enough to it to wound my amour propre.
Not that I was thinking such a frightful lot about my amour propre at the moment. We had reached the bedroom door now, and what I was asking myself was, What would the harvest be when Chuffy opened it and noted contents?
‘Chuffy,’ I said, and I spoke earnestly, ‘don’t go into that room!’
But it’s no good speaking earnestly if your head’s hanging down and your tongue has got tangled up with your back teeth. All that actually emerged was a sort of gargle, and Chuffy completely misunderstood it.
‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘Never mind. Soon be in beddy-bye now.’
I considered his manner offensive, and would have said so, but at this moment speech was, so to speak, wiped from my lips, as it were, by amazement. With a quick heave, my bearers had suddenly dumped me on the bed, and all that the frame had encountered was a blanket and pillow. Of anything in the nature of a girl in heliotrope pyjamas there was absolutely no trace.
I lay there, wondering. Chuffy had found the candle and lighted it, and I was now in a position to look about me.
Pauline Stoker had absolutely disappeared. Leaving not a wrack behind, as I remember Jeeves saying once.
Dashed odd.
Chuffy was dismissing his assistant.
‘Thanks, Sergeant. I can manage now.’
‘You’re sure, m’lord?’
‘Yes, it’s quite all right. He always drops off to sleep on these occasions.’
‘Then I think I’ll be going, m’lord. It’s a bit late for me.’
‘Yes, pop off. Good night.’
‘Good night, m’lord.’
The sergeant clumped down the stairs, making enough row for two sergeants, and Chuffy, with something of the air of a mother brooding over a sleeping child, took off my boots.
‘That’s my little man,’ he said. ‘Now you lie quite quiet, Bertie, and take things easy.’
It is a thing I have often wondered, whether I would or would not have commented upon what I considered the insufferably patronizing note in his voice as he called me his little man. I wanted to, but I saw that it would be fruitless unless I could think of something more than a little biting: and it was while I was searching in my mind for the telling phrase that the door of the hanging cupboard outside the room opened and Pauline Stoker came strolling in as if she hadn’t a care in the world. In fact, she seemed distinctly entertained.
‘What a night, what a night!’ she said amusedly. ‘A close call that, Bertie. Who were those men I heard going out?’
And then she suddenly sighted Chuffy, gave a kind of gasping squeak, and the love light came into her eyes as if somebody had pressed a switch.
‘Marmaduke!’ she cried, and stood there, staring.
But, by Jove, it was the poor old schoolmate who was doing the real staring, in the truest and fullest sense of the word. I’ve seen starers in my time, many of them, but never one who came within a mile of putting up the performance which Chuffy did then. The eyebrows had shot up, the jaw had fallen, and the eyes were protruding from one to two inches from the parent sockets. He also appeared to be trying to say something, but in this he flopped badly. Nothing came through except a rather unpleasant whistling sound, not quite so loud as the row your radio makes when you twiddle the twiddler a bit too hard but in other respects closely resembling it.
Pauline, meanwhile, had begun to advance with the air of a woman getting together with her demon lover, and a sort of pity for the girl shot through the Wooster bosom. I mean to say, any observant outsider like myself could see so clearly that she had got quite the wrong angle on the situation. I could read Chuffy like a book, and I knew that she was totally mistaken in what she supposed to be his emotions at this juncture. That odd noise he was making I could diagnose, not as the love call which she appeared to think it, but as the stern and censorious gruffle of a man who, finding his loved one on alien premises in heliotrope pyjamas, is stricken to the core, cut to the quick, and as sore as a gumboil.
But she, poor simp, being so dashed glad to behold him, had not so much as begun to suspect that he, the circs being what they were, might possibly not be equally glad to behold her. With the result that when at this juncture he stepped back and folded his arms with a bitter sneer, it was as if he had jabbed her in the eye with a burnt stick. The light faded from her face, and in its stead there appeared the hurt, bewildered look of a barefoot dancer who, while half-way through The Vision of Salome, steps on a tin tack.
‘Marmaduke!’
Chuffy unleashed another bitter sneer.
‘So!’ he said, finding speech – if you can call that speech.
‘What do you mean? Why are you looking like that?’
I thought it about time that I put in a word. I had risen from the bed on Pauline’s entry and for some moments had been teetering towards the door with a sort of sketchy idea of making for the great open spaces. But partly because I felt that it ill beseemed a Wooster to leg it at such a time and partly because I had not boots on, I had decided to remain. I now intervened, coming across with the word in season.
‘What you want on an occasion like this, Chuffy, old man,’ I said, ‘is simple faith. The poet Tennyson tells us …’
‘Shut up,’ said Chuffy. ‘I don’t want to hear anything from you.’
‘Right ho,’ I said. ‘But, all the same, simple faith is better than Norman blood, and you can’t get away from it.’
Pauline was looking a bit fogged.
‘Simple faith? What … Oh!’ she said, abruptly signing off. And I noted that the features were suffused with a crimson blush.
‘Oh!’ she said.
The cheeks continued to glow. But now it was not the blush of modesty that hotted them up. That first ‘Oh!’ I take it, had been caused by her catching sight of her pyjamaed limbs and suddenly getting on to the equivocal nature of her position. The second one was different. It was the heart cry of a woman who is madder than a hornet.
I mean, you know how it is. A sensitive and high-spirited girl goes through the deuce of an ordeal to win through to the bloke she loves, jumping off yachts, swimming through dashed cold water, climbing into cottages, and borrowing other people’s pyjamas, and then, when she has come to journey’s end, so to speak, and is expecting the tender smile and the whispered endearments, gets instead the lowering frown, the curled lip, the suspicious eye, and – in a word – the raspberry. Naturally, she’s a bit upset.
‘Oh!’ she said, for the third time, and her teeth gave a little click, most unpleasant. ‘So that’s what you think?’
Chuffy shook his head in an impatient sort of way.
‘Of course I don’t.’
‘You do.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘I don’t think anything of the kind,’ said Chuffy. ‘I know that Bertie has been –’
‘– Scrupulously correct in his behaviour throughout,’ I suggested.
‘– sleeping in a potting shed,’ continued Chuffy, and I must say it didn’t sound half as good as my version. ‘That’s not the point. The fact remains that in spite of being engaged to me and pretending this afternoon that you were tickled pink to be engaged to me, you are still so much in love with Bertie that you can’t keep away from him. You think I don’t know all about your being engaged to him in New York, but I do. Oh, I’m not complaining,’ said Chuffy, looking rather like Saint Sebastian on receipt of about the fifteenth arrow. ‘You have a perfect right to love who you like –’
‘Whom, old man,’ I couldn’t help saying. Jeeves has made me rather a purist in these matters.
‘Will you keep quiet!’
‘Of course, of course.’
‘You keep shoving your oar in –’
‘Sorry, sorry. Shan’t occur again.’
Chuffy, who had been gazing at me as if he would have liked to strike me with a blunt instrument, gazed once more at Pauline as if he would have liked to strike her with a blunt instrument.
‘But …’ He paused. ‘Now you’ve made me forget what I was going to say,’ he said in a rather peevish manner.
Pauline took the floor. She was still on the pink side, and her eyes were gleaming glitteringly. I’ve seen my Aunt Agatha’s eyes gleam just like that when she prepared to tick me off for some fancied misdemeanour. Of the love light no traces remained.
‘Well, then, perhaps you’ll listen to what I’m going to say. I suppose you have no objection to my putting in a word?’
‘None,’ said Chuffy.
‘None, none,’ I said.
Pauline was beyond a question stirred to the core. I could see her toes wiggling.
‘In the first place, you make me sick!’
‘Indeed?’
‘Yes, indeed. In the second place, I hope I shall never see you again in this world or the next.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. I hate you. I wish I’d never met you. I think you’re a worse pig than any you’ve got up at that beastly house of yours.’
This interested me.
‘I didn’t know you kept pigs, Chuffy.’
‘Black Berkshires,’ he said absently. ‘Well, if that’s how you …’
‘There’s money in pigs.’
‘Well, all right,’ said Chuffy. ‘If that’s how you feel, well, all right.’
‘You bet it’s all right.’
‘That’s what I said, it’s all right.’
‘My Uncle Henry …’
‘Bertie,’ said Chuffy.
‘Hallo?’
‘I don’t want to hear about your Uncle Henry. I am not interested in your Uncle Henry. It will be all right with me if your damned Uncle Henry trips over his feet and breaks his blasted neck.’
‘Too late, old man. He passed away three years ago. Pneumonia. I was only saying he kept pigs. Made a good thing out of them, too.’
‘Will you stop …’
‘Yes, and will you,’ said Pauline. ‘Are you going to spend the night here? I wish you would leave off talking and go.’
‘I will,’ said Chuffy.
‘Do,’ said Pauline.
‘Good night,’ said Chuffy.
He strode to the head of the stairs.
‘But one last word …’ he said with a wide, passionate gesture.
Well, I could have told the poor old chap that you can’t do that sort of thing in these old-world country cottages. His knuckles hit a projecting beam, he danced in agony, over-balanced, and the next moment was on his way to the ground floor like a sack of coals.
Pauline Stoker ran to the banisters and looked over.
‘Are you hurt?’ she cried.
‘Yes,’ yelled Chuffy.
‘Good,’ cried Pauline.
She came back into the room and the front door slammed like the bursting of an overwrought heart.
10
* * *
Another Visitor
I DREW A deepish breath. With the departure of the male half of the sketch a certain strain seemed to have gone out of the atmosphere. Excellent companion though I had always found him in the past, Chuffy had not shown himself at his chummiest during the recent scene, with the result that for some little time I had been feeling rather like Daniel in the lions’ den.
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 1: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.1 Page 9