I MUST ADMIT it was a fairly nasty shock. I had never realized before what an important part one’s complexion plays in life. I mean to say, Bertram Wooster with merely a pretty tan calling at the back door of Chuffnell Hall would have been received with respect and deference. Indeed, I shouldn’t wonder if a girl of the social standing of a scullerymaid might not actually have curtsied. And I don’t suppose matters would have been so substantially different if I had had an interesting pallor or pimples. But purely and simply because there happened to be a little boot polish on my face, here was this female tying herself in knots on the doormat and throwing fits up and down the passage.
Well, there was only one thing to do, of course. Already voices from along the corridor were making inquiries, and in another half-second I presumed that I might expect a regular susurration of domestics on the scene. I picked up the feet and pushed off. And, taking it that the neighbourhood of the back door was liable to be searched pretty soon, I hared round to the front and came to roost in a patch of bushes not far from the main entrance.
Here I paused. It seemed to me that before going any farther, I had better try to analyse the situation and find out what to do next.
In other circs – if, let us say, I had been reclining in a deck-chair with a cigarette, instead of squatting in a beastly jungle with beetles falling down my neck – I should probably have got a good deal of entertainment and uplift out of the scene and surroundings generally. I’ve always been rather a lad for the peace of the old-world English garden round about the time between the end of dinner and the mixing of the bedtime spot. From where I sat, I could see the great mass of the Hall standing out against the sky, and very impressive it was, too. Birds were rustling in the trees, and I think there must have been a flower bed fairly close by with stocks and tobacco plants in it, for the air was full of a pretty goodish sort of smell. Add the perfect stillness of a summer night, and there you are.
At the end of about ten minutes, however, the stillness of the summer night rather sprang a leak. From one of the rooms there proceeded a loud yelling. I recognized the voice of little Seabury, and I remembered feeling thankful that he had his troubles, too. After a bit, he cheesed it – I assumed the friction had arisen from the fact that somebody wanted to put him to bed and he didn’t want to go – and all was quiet again.
Directly after that there came a sound of footsteps. Somebody was walking up the drive to the front door.
My first idea was that it was Sergeant Voules. Chuffy, you see, is a local Justice of the Peace, and I imagined that one of the first things Voules would do after the affair at the cottage would be to call on the big chief and report. I wedged myself a bit tighter into the bushes.
No, it wasn’t Sergeant Voules. I had just got him against a patch of sky and I could see he was taller and not nearly so round. He went up the steps and started knocking at the door.
And when I say knocking I mean knocking. I had thought Voules’s performance at the cottage on the previous night a pretty good exhibition of wrist-work, but this chap put it all over him. In a different class, altogether. He was giving that knocker more exercise than I suppose it had ever had since the first Chuffnell, or whoever it was, had it screwed on.
In the intervals of slamming the knocker, he was also singing a hymn in a meditative sort of voice. It was, if I recollect rightly, ‘Lead, Kindly Light’, and it enabled me to place him. I had heard that reedy tenor before. One of the first things I had had to put my foot down about, on arriving at the cottage, was Brinkley’s habit of singing hymns in the kitchen while I was trying to play foxtrots on the banjolele in the sitting-room. There could not be two voices like that in Chuffnell Regis. This nocturnal visitor was none other than my plastered personal attendant, and what he wanted at the Hall was more than I could understand.
Lights flashed up in the house, and the front door was wrenched open. A voice spoke. It was a pretty peevish voice, and it was Chuffy’s. As a rule, of course, the Squire of Chuffnell Regis shoves the task of answering the door off on to the domestic staff, but I suppose he felt that a ghastly din like this constituted a special case. Anyway, here he was, and he didn’t seem too pleased.
‘What on earth are you making that foul noise for?’
‘Good evening, sir.’
‘What do you mean, good evening? What …’
I think he would have gone to some length, for he was evidently much stirred, but at this point Brinkley interrupted.
‘Is the Devil in?’
It was a simple question, capable of being answered with a Yes or No, but it seemed to take Chuffy aback somewhat.
‘Is – who?’
‘The Devil, sir.’
I must say I had never looked on old Chuffy as a fellow of very swift intelligence, he having always run rather to thews and sinews than the grey cells, but I’m bound to say that at this juncture he exhibited a keen intuition which did him credit.
‘You’re tight.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Chuffy seemed to explode like a paper bag. I could follow his mental processes, if you know what I mean, pretty clearly. Ever since that unfortunate episode at the cottage, when the girl he loved had handed him the mitten and gone out of his life, I imagine he had been seething and brooding and sizzling and what not like a soul in torment, yearning for some outlet for his repressed emotions, and here he had found one. Ever since that regrettable scene he had been wishing that he could work off the stored-up venom on somebody, and, by Jove, Heaven had sent this knocker-slamming inebriate.
To run Brinkley down the steps and up the drive, kicking him about every other yard, was with the fifth Baron Chuffnell the work of a moment. They passed my little clump of bushes at about forty MPH, and rolled away into the distance. And after a while I heard footsteps and the sound of someone whistling as if a bit of a load had been removed from his soul, and Chuffy came legging it back.
Just about opposite my lair he paused to light a cigarette, and it seemed to me that the moment had come to get in touch.
Mark you, I wasn’t any too keen on chatting with old Chuffy, for his manner at our last parting had been far from bonhomous, and had my outlook been a shade rosier I would most certainly have given him a miss. But he was by way of being my last hope. What with platoons of scullerymaids having hysterics every time I went near the back door, it seemed impossible to connect with Jeeves tonight. It was just as impossible to go the round of the neighbourhood, calling on perfect strangers and asking for butter. I mean, you know yourself how you feel when a fellow you’ve never met drops in at your house with his face all black and tries to touch you for a bit of butter. You just aren’t in sympathy.
No, everything pointed to Chuffy as the logical saviour of the situation. He was a man who had butter at his command, and it might be that, now that he had worked off some of the hard feelings on Brinkley, he would be in a frame of mind to oblige an old school friend with a quarter of a pound or so. So I crawled softly out of the undergrowth and came up in his immediate rear.
‘Chuffy!’ I said.
I can see now it would have been better to have given him a bit more warning of my presence. Nobody likes to have unexpected voices speaking suddenly down the back of their neck, and in calmer mood I should have recognized this. I don’t say it was exactly a repetition of the scullerymaid episode, but for a moment it looked like coming very near it. The poor old lad distinctly leaped. The cigarette flew out of his hand, his teeth came together with a snap, and he shook visibly. The whole effect being much as if I had spiked him in the trousering with a gimlet or bodkin. I have seen salmon behave in a rather similar way during the spawning season.
I did my best to lull the storm with soothing words.
‘It’s only me, Chuffy.’
‘Who?’
‘Bertie.’
‘Bertie?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Oh!’
I didn’t much like the sound of the ‘Oh!’ It hadn’t a welcoming ri
ng. One learns to sense when one is popular and when one is not. It was pretty plain to me at this point that I was not, and I thought it might be wise if, before proceeding to the main topic, I were to start off with a stately compliment.
‘You put it across the fellow properly, Chuffy,’ I said. ‘I liked your work. It was particularly agreeable to me to see him so adequately handled, because I had been wishing I had the nerve to kick him myself.’
‘Who was he?’
‘My man, Brinkley.’
‘What was he doing here?’
‘I fancy he was looking for me.’
‘Why wasn’t he at the cottage, then?’
I had been hoping for a good opportunity of breaking the news.
‘I’m afraid you’re a cottage short, Chuffy,’ I said. ‘I regret to report that Brinkley has just burned it down.’
‘What!’
‘Insured, I trust?’
‘He burned the cottage? How? why?’
‘Just a whim. I suppose it seemed a good idea to him at the moment.’
Chuffy took it rather hard. I could see that he was brooding, and I would have liked to allow him to brood all he wanted. But if I was going to catch that 10.21 it was necessary to push along. Time was of the essence.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I hate to bother you, old man –’
‘Why on earth should he burn a cottage?’
‘One cannot attempt to fathom the psychology of blokes like Brinkley. They move in a mysterious way their wonders to perform. Suffice it that he did.’
‘Are you sure it wasn’t you?’
‘My dear chap!’
‘It sounds the sort of silly, fat-headed thing you would do,’ said Chuffy, and I was distressed to note in his voice much evidence of the old rancour. ‘What do you want here, anyway? Who asked you to come? If you think, after what has happened, that you can stroll in and out –’
‘I know, I know. I understand. Painful misunderstanding. Coolness. A disposition to disapprove of Bertram. But –’
‘And where did you spring from just now? I never saw you.’
‘I was sitting in a bush.’
‘Sitting in a bush?’
The tone in which he said the words told me that, always too prone to misjudge an old friend, he had once more formed a wrong conclusion. I heard a match scratch on its box, and the next moment he was examining me by its light. The light went out, and I heard him breathing deeply in the darkness.
I could follow the workings of his mind. He was evidently struggling with his feelings. The disinclination to have anything more to do with me after last night’s painful rift was contending with the reflection that the fact that we had been pals for years carried with it a certain obligation. A chap, he was thinking, may have ceased to be on cordial terms with an old schoolmate, but he can hardly let him go wandering about the countryside in the condition he supposed I was in.
‘You’d better come in and sleep it off,’ he said in a weary sort of way. ‘Can you walk?’
‘It’s all right,’ I hastened to assure him. ‘It’s not what you think. Listen.’
And with convincing fluency I rattled off ‘British Constitution’, ‘She sells sea-shells’, and ‘He stood at the entrance of Burgess’s fish-sauce shop, welcoming him in’.
The demonstration had its effect.
‘Then you’re not tight?’
‘Not a bit.’
‘But you sit in bushes.’
‘Yes. But –’
‘And your face is black.’
‘I know. Hold the line, old man, and I will tell you all.’
I dare say you have had the experience of telling someone a longish story and getting on to the fact, half-way through, that you haven’t got the sympathy of the audience. Most unpleasant sensation. I had it now. It was not that he said anything. But a sort of deleterious animal magnetism seemed to exude from him as I passed from point to point. More and more, as I proceeded, did the conviction steal over me that I was getting the silent raspberry.
However, I carried on stoutly and, having related the salient facts, wound up with a pretty eloquent plea for the stearic matter.
‘Butter, Chuffy, old man,’ I said. ‘Slabs of butter. If you have butter, prepare to shed it now. I’ll just saunter about out here, shall I, while you pop to the kitchen and secure the stuff? And you realize, don’t you, that time is of the essence? I shall only just be able to catch that train, as it is.’
He did not speak for a moment or two. When he did, there was such a nasty tinkle in his voice that I confess the heart sank.
‘Let me get all this straight,’ he said. ‘You want me to bring you butter?’
‘That’s the idea.’
‘So that you can clean your face and go off on this train to London.’
‘Yes.’
‘Thus escaping from Mr Stoker.’
‘That’s right. Amazing the way you’ve followed it all,’ I said in a congratulatory sort of voice, deeming it best to suck up a bit and apply the old salve. ‘I don’t suppose I know six fellows who would have grasped the plot with the same unerring accuracy. I’ve always thought highly of your intelligence, Chuffy, old man – very highly.’
But the heart was still sinking. And when I heard him snort emotionally in the darkness it touched a new low.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘In other words, you wish me to help you back out of your honourable obligations, what?’
‘What?’
‘That’s what I said – “What?” Good God!’ cried Chuffy, and I dare say he quivered from head to foot, but I couldn’t see properly, it being too dark. ‘I didn’t interrupt when you were telling me your degrading story, because I wanted to get it quite clear. Now, perhaps, you will let me say a word.’
He snorted a bit more.
‘You want to catch trains to London, do you? I see. Well, I don’t know what you think of yourself, Wooster, but, if you would care to know how your conduct strikes a perfectly unprejudiced outsider, I don’t mind informing you that in my opinion you are behaving like a hound, a skunk, a worm, a tick, and a wart-hog. Good gosh! This beautiful girl loves you. Her father very decently consents to an early wedding. And instead of being delighted and pleased and tickled as – er – as anybody else would be, you are planning to edge away.’
‘But, Chuffy –’
‘I repeat, to edge away. You are brutally and callously scheming to oil out, leaving this lovely girl to break her heart – deserted, abandoned, flung aside like a … like a … I shall forget my own name next … like a soiled glove.’
‘But, Chuffy –’
‘Don’t try to deny it.’
‘But, dash it, it isn’t as if she were in love with me.’
‘Ha! Isn’t she so infatuated with you that she swims ashore from yachts to get at you?’
‘She loves you.’
‘Ha!’
‘She does, I tell you. It was you she swam ashore last night to see. And she only took on this binge of marrying me to score off you because you doubted her.’
‘Ha!’
‘So take the sensible viewpoint, old man, and bring me butter.’
‘Ha!’
‘I wish you wouldn’t keep saying “Ha!” It doesn’t advance the issue, and it sounds rotten. I must have butter, Chuffy. It is of the essence. If it be only a small pat, bring it out. Wooster speaking, old man – the chap you were at school with, the fellow you’ve known since he was so high.’
I paused. For a moment I had an idea that this had done the trick. I felt his hand fall on my shoulder with a distinct kneading movement. At that instant I would have put my shirt on it that he was softened.
And so he was, but not along the right lines.
‘I will tell you exactly how I feel about all this, Bertie,’ he said, and there was a sort of beastly gentleness in his manner. ‘I won’t pretend that I don’t love this girl. Even after what has happened, I still love her. I shall always love her. I loved her from the firs
t moment we met. It was at the Savoy Grill, I remember, and she was sitting on one of those chairs in that lobby place half-way through a medium dry Martini, because Sir Roderick and I were a bit late getting there and her father had thought they might as well be having a cocktail instead of just sitting. Our eyes met, and I knew that I had found the only girl in the world for me, not having the foggiest that she was really crazy about you.’
‘She isn’t!’
‘I realize it now, and I know, of course, that I can never win her for myself. But I can do this, Bertie. Having this great love for her, I can see to it that she is not robbed of her happiness. If she is happy, that is all that matters. For some reason her heart is set on being your wife. Why, one cannot say, and we need not go into it. But for some unexplained reason she wants you, and she shall jolly well get you. Funny that you should have come to me, of all people, to help you shatter her girlish dreams and rob her of her sweet, childlike trust in the goodness of human nature! You think I will sit in with you on this foul project? My left foot I will! You get no butter from me, my lad. You will remain exactly as you are, and, after thinking it over, I have no doubt that you will find your better self pointing the way and that you will go back to the yacht, prepared to fulfil your obligations like an English gentleman.’
‘But, Chuffy –’
‘And, if you wish, I will be your best man. Agony, of course, but I’ll do it if you want me to.’
I clutched at his arm.
‘Butter, Chuffy!’
He shook his head.
‘No butter, Wooster. You are better without it.’
And, flinging aside my hand like a soiled glove, he stalked past me into the night.
I don’t know how long it was that I stood there, rooted to the s. It may have been a short time. It may have been quite a stretch. Despair was gripping me, and when that happens you don’t keep looking at your watch.
Let us say, then, that at some point – five, ten, fifteen, or it may have been twenty minutes, later – I became aware of somebody coughing softly at my side like a respectful sheep trying to attract the attention of its shepherd, and how can I describe with what thankfulness and astonishment I perceived Jeeves.
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 1: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.1 Page 14