This duologue had, of course, left Wilbert Cream a bit out of it, just painted on the backdrop as you might say, and for some moments, knitting his brow, plucking at his moustache, shuffling the feet and allowing the limbs to twitch, he had been giving abundant evidence that in his opinion three was a crowd and that what the leafy glade needed to make it all that a leafy glade should be was a complete absence of Woosters. Taking advantage of a lull in the conversation, he said:
'Are you looking for someone?'
I replied that I was looking for Bobbie Wickham.
'I'd go on looking, if I were you. Bound to find her somewhere.'
'Bobbie?' said Phyllis Mills. 'She's down at the lake, fishing.'
'Then what you do,' said Wilbert Cream, brightening, 'is follow this path, bend right, sharp left, bend right again and there you are. You can't miss. Start at once, is my advice.'
I must say I felt that, related as I was by ties of blood, in a manner of speaking, to this leafy glade, it was a bit thick being practically bounced from it by a mere visitor, but Aunt Dahlia had made it clear that the Cream family must not be thwarted or put upon in any way, so I did as he suggested, picking up the feet without anything in the nature of back chat. As I receded, I could hear in my rear the poetry breaking out again.
The lake at Brinkley calls itself a lake, but when all the returns are in it's really more a sort of young pond. Big enough to mess about on in a punt, though, and for the use of those wishing to punt a boat– house has been provided with a small pier or landing stage attached to it. On this, rod in hand, Bobbie was seated, and it was with me the work of an instant to race up and breathe down the back of her neck.
'Hey!' I said.
'Hey to you with knobs on,' she replied. 'Oh, hullo, Bertie. You here?'
'You never spoke a truer word. If you can spare me a moment of your valuable time, young Roberta –'
'Half a second, I think I've got a bite. No, false alarm. What were you saying?'
'I was saying –'
'Oh, by the way, I heard from Mother this morning.'
'I heard from her yesterday morning.'
'I was kind of expecting you would. You saw that thing in The Times?'
'With the naked eye.'
'Puzzled you for a moment, perhaps?'
'For several moments.'
'Well, I'll tell you all about that. The idea came to me in a flash.'
'You mean it was you who shoved that communique in the journal?'
'Of course.'
'Why?' I said, getting right down to it in my direct way.
I thought I had her there, but no.
'I was paving the way for Reggie.'
I passed a hand over my fevered brow.
'Something seems to have gone wrong with my usually keen hearing,' I said. 'It sounds just as if you were saying «I was paving the way for Reggie."'
'I was. I was making his path straight. Softening up Mother on his behalf.'
I passed another hand over my f.b.
'Now you seem to be saying «Softening up Mother on his behalf."'
'That's what I am saying. It's perfectly simple. I'll put it in words of one syllable for you. I love Reggie. Reggie loves me.'
'Reggie,' of course, is two syllables, but I let it go.
'Reggie who?'
'Reggie Herring.'
I was amazed.
'You mean old Kipper?'
'I wish you wouldn't call him Kipper.'
'I always have. Dash it,' I said with some warmth, 'if a fellow shows up at a private school on the south coast of England with a name like Herring, what else do you expect his playmates to call him? But how do you mean you love him and he loves you? You've never met him.'
'Of course I've met him. We were in the same hotel in Switzerland last Christmas. I taught him to ski,' she said, a dreamy look coming into her twin starlikes. 'I shall never forget the day I helped him unscramble himself after he had taken a toss on the beginners' slope. He had both legs wrapped round his neck. I think that is when love dawned. My heart melted as I sorted him out.'
'You didn't laugh?'
'Of course I didn't laugh. I was all sympathy and understanding.'
For the first time the thing began to seem plausible to me. Bobbie is a fun-loving girl, and the memory of her reaction when in the garden at Skeldings I had once stepped on the teeth of a rake and had the handle jump up and hit me on the tip of the nose was still laid away among my souvenirs. She had been convulsed with mirth. If, then, she had refrained from guffawing when confronted with the spectacle of Reginald Herring with both legs wrapped round his neck, her emotions must have been very deeply involved.
'Well, all right,' I said. 'I accept your statement that you and Kipper are that way. But why, that being so, did you blazon it forth to the world, if blazoning forth is the expression I want, that you were engaged to me?'
'I told you. It was to soften Mother up.'
'Which sounded to me like delirium straight from the sick bed.'
'You don't get the subtle strategy?'
'Not by several parasangs.'
'Well, you know how you stand with Mother.'
'Our relations are a bit distant.'
'She shudders at the mention of your name. So I thought if she thought I was going to marry you and then found I wasn't, she'd be so thankful for the merciful escape I'd had that she'd be ready to accept anyone as a son-in-law, even someone like Reggie, who, though a wonder man, hasn't got his name in Debrett and isn't any too hot financially. Mother's idea of a mate for me has always been a well-to-do millionaire or a Duke with a large private income. Now do you follow?'
'Oh yes, I follow all right. You've been doing what Jeeves does, studying the psychology of the individual. But do you think it'll work?'
'Bound to. Let's take a parallel case. Suppose your Aunt Dahlia read in the paper one morning that you were going to be shot at sunrise.'
'I couldn't be. I'm never up so early.'
'But suppose she did? She'd be pretty worked up about it, wouldn't she?'
'Extremely, one imagines, for she loves me dearly. I'm not saying her manner toward me doesn't verge at times on the brusque. In childhood days she would occasionally clump me on the side of the head, and since I have grown to riper years she has more than once begged me to tie a brick around my neck and go and drown myself in the pond in the kitchen garden. Nevertheless, she loves her Bertram, and if she heard I was to be shot at sunrise, she would, as you say, be as sore as a gum-boil. But why? What's that got to do with it?'
'Well, suppose she then found out it was all a mistake and it wasn't you but somebody else who was to face the firing squad. That would make her happy, wouldn't it?'
'One can picture her dancing all over the place on the tips of her toes.'
'Exactly. She'd be so all over you that nothing you did would be wrong in her eyes. Whatever you wanted to do would be all right with her. Go to it, she would say. And that's how Mother will feel when she learns that I'm not marrying you after all. She'll be so relieved.'
I agreed that the relief would, of course, be stupendous.
'But you'll be giving her the inside facts in a day or two?' I said, for I was anxious to have assurance on this point. A man with an Engagement notice in The Times hanging over him cannot but feel uneasy.
'Well, call it a week or two. No sense in rushing things.'
'You want me to sink in?'
'That's the idea.'
'And meanwhile what's the drill? Do I kiss you a good deal from time to time?'
'No, you don't.'
'Right-ho. I just want to know where I stand.'
'An occasional passionate glance will be ample.'
'It shall be attended to. Well, I'm delighted about you and Kipper or, as you would prefer to say, Reggie. There's nobody I'd rather see you centre-aisle-ing with.'
'It's very sporting of you to take it like this.'
'Don't give it a thought.'
'I'm
awfully fond of you, Bertie.'
'Me, too, of you.'
'But I can't marry everybody, can I?'
'I wouldn't even try. Well, now that we've got all that straight, I suppose I'd better be going and saying «Come aboard» to Aunt Dahlia.'
'What's the time?'
'Close on five.'
'I must run like a hare. I'm supposed to be presiding at the tea table.'
'You? Why you?'
'Your aunt's not here. She found a telegram when she got back yesterday saying that her son Bonzo was sick of a fever at his school, and dashed off to be with him. She asked me to deputy-hostess for her till her return, but I shan't be able to for the next few days. I've got to dash back to Mother. Ever since she saw that thing in The Times, she's been wiring me every hour on the hour to come home for a round– table conference. What's a guffin?'
'I don't know. Why?'
'That's what she calls you in her latest 'gram. Quote. «Cannot understand how you can be contemplating marrying that guffin.» Close quote. I suppose it's more of less the same as a gaby, which was how you figured in one of her earlier communications.'
'That sounds promising.'
'Yes, I think the thing's in the bag. After you, Reggie will come to her like rare and refreshing fruit. She'll lay down the red carpet for him.'
And with a brief 'Whoopee!' she shot off in the direction of the house at forty or so m.p.h. I followed more slowly, for she had given me much food for thought, and I was musing.
Strange, I was feeling, this strong pro-Kipper sentiment in the Wickham bosom. I mean, consider the facts. What with that espieglerie of hers, which was tops, she had been pretty extensively wooed in one quarter and another for years, and no business had resulted, so that it was generally assumed that only something extra special in the way of suitors would meet her specifications and that whoever eventually got his nose under the wire would be a king among men and pretty warm stuff. And she had gone and signed up with Kipper Herring.
Mind you, I'm not saying a word against old Kipper. The salt of the earth. But nobody could have called him a knock-out in the way of looks. Having gone in a lot for boxing from his earliest years, he had the cauliflower ear of which I had spoken to Aunt Dahlia and in addition to this a nose which some hidden hand had knocked slightly out of the straight. He would, in short, have been an unsafe entrant to have backed in a beauty contest, even if the only other competitors had been Boris Karloff, King Kong and Oofy Prosser of the Drones.
But then, of course, one had to remind oneself that looks aren't everything. A cauliflower ear can hide a heart of gold, as in Kipper's case it did, his being about as gold as they come. His brain, too, might have helped to do the trick. You can't hold down an editorial post on an important London weekly paper without being fairly well fixed with the little grey cells, and girls admire that sort of thing. And one had to remember that most of the bimbos to whom Roberta Wickham had been giving the bird through the years had been of the huntin', shootin' and fishin' type, fellows who had more or less shot their bolt after saying 'Eh, what?' and slapping their leg with a hunting crop. Kipper must have come as a nice change.
Still, the whole thing provided, as I say, food for thought, and I was in what is called a reverie as I made my way to the house, a reverie so profound that no turf accountant would have given any but the shortest odds against my sooner or later bumping into something. And this, to cut a long story s., I did. It might have been a tree, a bush or a rustic seat. In actual fact it turned out to be Aubrey Upjohn. I came on him round a comer and rammed him squarely before I could put the brakes on. I clutched him round the neck and he clutched me about the middle, and for some moments we tottered to and fro, linked in a close embrace. Then, the mists clearing from my eyes, I saw who it was that I had been treading the measure with.
Seeing him steadily and seeing him whole, as I have heard Jeeves put it, I was immediately struck by the change that had taken place in his appearance since those get-togethers in his study at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, when with a sinking heart I had watched him reach for the whangee and start limbering up the shoulder muscles with a few trial swings. At that period of our acquaintance he had been an upstanding old gentleman about eight feet six in height with burning eyes, foam-flecked lips and flame coming out of both nostrils. He had now shrunk to a modest five foot seven or there-abouts, and I could have felled him with a single blow.
Not that I did, of course. But I regarded him without a trace of the old trepidation. It seemed incredible that I could ever have considered this human shrimp a danger to pedestrians and traffic.
I think this was partly due to the fact that at some point in the fifteen years since our last meeting he had grown a moustache. In the Malvern House epoch what had always struck a chill into the plastic mind had been his wide, bare upper lip, a most unpleasant spectacle to behold, especially when twitching. I wouldn't say the moustache softened his face, but being of the walrus or soup-strainer type it hid some of it, which was all to the good. The up-shot was that instead of quailing, as I had expected to do when we met, I was suave and debonair, possibly a little too much so.
'Oh, hullo, Upjohn!' I said. 'Yoo-hoo!'
'Who you?' he responded, making it sound like a reverse echo.
'Wooster is the name.'
'Oh, Wooster?' he said, as if he had been hoping it would be something else, and one could understand his feelings, of course. No doubt he, like me, had been buoying himself up for years with the thought that we should never meet again and that, whatever brickbats life might have in store for him, he had at least got Bertram out of his system. A nasty jar it must have been for the poor bloke having me suddenly pop up from a trap like this.
'Long time since we met,' I said.
'Yes,' he agreed in a hollow voice, and it was so plain that he was wishing it had been longer that conversation flagged, and there wasn't much in the way of feasts of reason and flows of the soul as we covered the hundred yards to the lawn where the tea table awaited us. I think I may have said 'Nice day, what?' and he may have grunted, but nothing more.
Only Bobbie was present when we arrived at the trough. Wilbert and Phyllis were presumably still in the leafy glade, and Mrs Cream, Bobbie said, worked in her room every afternoon on her new spine-freezer and seldom knocked off for a cuppa. We seated ourselves and had just started sipping, when the butler came out of the house bearing a bowl of fruit and hove to beside the table with it.
Well, when I say 'butler', I use the term loosely. He was dressed like a butler and he behaved like a butler, but in the deepest and truest sense of the word he was not a butler.
Reading from left to right, he was Sir Roderick Glossop.
4
At the Drones Club and other places I am accustomed to frequent you will often hear comment on Bertram Wooster's self-control or sang froid, as it's sometimes called, and it is generally agreed that this is considerable. In the eyes of many people, I suppose, I seem one of those men of chilled steel you read about, and I'm not saying I'm not. But it is possible to find a chink in my armour, and this can be done by suddenly springing eminent loony-doctors on me in the guise of butlers.
It was out of the q. that I could have been mistaken in supposing that it was Sir Roderick Glossop who, having delivered the fruit, was now ambling back to the house. There could not be two men with that vast bald head and those bushy eyebrows, and it would be deceiving the customers to say that I remained unshaken. The effect the apparition had on me was to make me start violently, and we all know what happens when you start violently while holding a full cup of tea. The contents of mine flew through the air and came to rest on the trousers of Aubrey Upjohn, MA, moistening them to no little extent. Indeed, it would scarcely be distorting the facts to say that he was now not so much wearing trousers as wearing tea.
I could see the unfortunate man felt his position deeply, and I was surprised that he contented himself with a mere 'Ouch!' But I suppose these solid cit
izens have to learn to curb the tongue. Creates a bad impression, I mean, if they start blinding and stiffing as those more happily placed would be.
But words are not always needed. In the look he now shot at me I seemed to read a hundred unspoken expletives. It was the sort of look the bucko mate of a tramp steamer would have given an able-bodied seaman who for one reason or another had incurred his displeasure.
'I see you have not changed since you were with me at Malvern House,' he said in an extremely nasty voice, dabbing at the trousers with a handkerchief. 'Bungling Wooster we used to call him,' he went on, addressing his remarks to Bobbie and evidently trying to enlist her sympathy. 'He could not perform the simplest action such as holding a cup without spreading ruin and disaster on all sides. It was an axiom at Malvern House that if there was a chair in any room in which he happened to be, Wooster would trip over it. The child,' said Aubrey Upjohn, 'is the father of the man.'
'Frightfully sorry,' I said.
'Too late to be sorry now. A new pair of trousers ruined. It is doubtful if anything can remove the stain of tea from white flannel. Still, one must hope for the best.'
Whether I was right or wrong at this point in patting him on the shoulder and saying 'That's the spirit!' I find it difficult to decide. Wrong, probably, for it did not seem to soothe. He gave me another of those looks and strode off, smelling strongly of tea.
'Shall I tell you something, Bertie?' said Bobbie, following him with a thoughtful eye. 'That walking tour Upjohn was going to invite you to take with him is off. You will get no Christmas present from him this year, and don't expect him to come and tuck you up in bed tonight.'
I upset the milk jug with an imperious wave of the hand.
'Never mind about Upjohn and Christmas presents and walking tours. What is Pop Glossop doing here as the butler?'
'Ah! I thought you might be going to ask that. I was meaning to tell you some time.'
Jeeves in the offing jaw-12 Page 3