'What on earth can Jeeves do?'
'Well, now you put it that way, I'm bound to admit that I don't know. It's just that one drops into the habit of sending for Jeeves whenever things have gone agley, if that's the word I'm thinking of. Scotch, isn't it? Agley, I mean. It sounds Scotch to me. However, passing lightly over that, the thing to do when you want the low-down is to go to the fountainhead and get it straight from the horse's mouth. Kipper can solve this mystery. I'll pop along and find him.'
I was, however, spared the trouble of popping, for at this moment he entered left centre.
'Oh, there you are, Bertie,' he said. 'I heard you were back. I was looking for you.'
He had spoken in a low, husky sort of way, like a voice from the tomb, and I now saw that he was exhibiting all the earmarks of a man who has recently had a bomb explode in his vicinity. His shoulders sagged and his eyes were glassy. He looked, in short, like the fellow who hadn't started to take Old Doctor Gordon's Bile Magnesia, and I snapped into it without preamble. This was no time for being tactful and pretending not to notice.
'What's all this strained-relations stuff between you and Bobbie, Kipper?' I said, and when he said, 'Oh, nothing,' rapped the table sharply and told him to cut out the coy stuff and come clean.
'Yes,' said Aunt Dahlia. 'What's happened, young Herring?'
I think for a moment he was about to draw himself up with hauteur and say he would prefer, if we didn't mind, not to discuss his private affairs, but when he was half-way up he caught Aunt Dahlia's eye and returned to position one. Aunt Dahlia's eye, while not in the same class as that of my Aunt Agatha, who is known to devour her young and conduct human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, has lots of authority. He subsided into a chair and sat there looking filleted.
'Well, if you must know,' he said, 'she's broken the engagement.'
This didn't get us any farther. We had assumed as much. You don't go calling people rats if love still lingers.
'But it's only an hour or so,' I said, 'since I left her outside a hostelry called the «Fox and Goose», and she had just been giving you a rave notice. What came unstuck? What did you do to the girl?'
'Oh, nothing.'
'Come, come!'
'Well, it was this way.'
There was a pause here while he said that he would give a hundred quid for a stiff whisky-and-soda, but as this would have involved all the delay of ringing for Pop Glossop and having it fetched from the lowest bin, Aunt Dahlia would have none of it. In lieu of the desired refreshment she offered him a cold crumpet, which he declined, and told him to get on with it.
'Where I went wrong,' he said, still speaking in that low, husky voice as if he had been a ghost suffering from catarrh, 'was in getting engaged to Phyllis Mills.'
'What?' I cried.
'What?' cried Aunt Dahlia.
'Egad!' I said.
'What on earth did you do that for?' said Aunt Dahlia.
He shifted uneasily in his chair, like a man troubled with ants in the pants. 'It seemed a good idea at the time,' he said. 'Bobbie had told me on the telephone that she never wanted to speak to me again in this world or the next, and Phyllis had been telling me that, while she shrank from Wilbert Cream because of his murky past, she found him so magnetic that she knew she wouldn't be able to refuse him if he proposed, and I had been commissioned to stop him proposing, so I thought the simplest thing to do was to get engaged to her myself. So we talked it over, and having reached a thorough understanding that it was simply a ruse and nothing binding on either side, we announced it to Cream.'
'Very shrewd,' said Aunt Dahlia. 'How did he take it?'
'He reeled.'
'Lot of reeling there's been in this business,' I said. 'You reeled, if you recollect, when you remembered you'd written that letter to Bobbie.'
'And I reeled again when she suddenly appeared from nowhere just as I was kissing Phyllis.'
I pursed the lips. Getting a bit French, this sequence, it seemed to me.
'There was no need for you to do that.'
'No need, perhaps, but I wanted to make it look natural to Cream.'
'Oh, I see. Driving it home, as it were?'
'That was the idea. Of course I wouldn't have done it if I'd known that Bobbie had changed her mind and wanted things to be as they were before that telephone conversation. But I didn't know. It's just one of life's little ironies. You get the same sort of thing in Thomas Hardy.'
I knew nothing of this T. Hardy of whom he spoke, but I saw what he meant. It was like what's always happening in the novels of suspense, where the girl goes around saying, 'Had I but known.'
'Didn't you explain?'
He gave me a pitying look.
'Have you ever tried explaining something to a red-haired girl who's madder than a wet hen?'
I took his point.
'What happened then?'
'Oh, she was very lady-like. Talked amiably of this and that till Phyllis had left us. Then she started in. She said she had raced here with a heart overflowing with love, longing to be in my arms, and a jolly surprise it was to find those arms squeezing the stuffing out of another and … Oh, well, a lot more along those lines. The trouble is, she's always been a bit squiggle-eyed about Phyllis, because in Switzerland she held the view that we were a shade too matey. Nothing in it, of course.'
'Just good friends?'
'Exactly.'
'Well, if you want to know what I think,' said Aunt Dahlia.
But we never did get around to knowing what she thought, for at this moment Phyllis came in.
13
Giving the wench the once-over as she entered, I found myself well able to understand why Bobbie on observing her entangled with Kipper had exploded with so loud a report. I'm not myself, of course, an idealistic girl in love with a member of the staff of the Thursday Review and never have been, but if I were I know I'd get the megrims somewhat severely if I caught him in a clinch with anyone as personable as this stepdaughter of Aubrey Upjohn, for though shaky on the IQ, physically she was a pipterino of the first water. Her eyes were considerably bluer than the skies above, she was wearing a simple summer dress which accentuated rather than hid the graceful outlines of her figure, if you know what I mean, and it was not surprising that Wilbert Cream, seeing her, should have lost no time in reaching for the book of poetry and making a bee line with her to the nearest leafy glade.
'Oh, Mrs Travers,' she said, spotting Aunt Dahlia, 'I've just been talking to Daddy on the telephone.'
This took the old ancestor's mind right off the tangled affairs of the Kipper-Bobbie axis, to which a moment before she had been according her best attention, and I didn't wonder. With the prize-giving at Market Snodsbury Grammar School, a function at which all that was bravest and fairest in the neighbourhood would be present, only two days away, she must have been getting pretty uneasy about the continued absence of the big shot slated to address the young scholars on ideals and life in the world outside. If you are on the board of governors of a school and have contracted to supply an orator for the great day of the year, you can be forgiven for feeling a trifle jumpy when you learn that the silver-tongued one has gadded off to the metropolis, leaving no word as to when he will be returning, if ever. For all she knew, Upjohn might have got the holiday spirit and be planning to remain burning up the boulevards indefinitely, and of course nothing gives a big beano a black eye more surely than the failure to show up of the principal speaker. So now she quite naturally blossomed like a rose in June and asked if the old son of a bachelor had mentioned anything about when he was coming back.
'He's coming back tonight. He says he hopes you haven't been worrying.'
A snort of about the calibre of an explosion in an ammunition dump escaped my late father's sister.
'Oh, does he? Well, I've a piece of news for him. I have been worrying. What's kept him in London so long?'
'He's been seeing his lawyer about this libel action he's bringing against the Th
ursday Review.'
I have often asked myself how many inches it was that Kipper leaped from his chair at these words. Sometimes I think it was ten, sometimes only six, but whichever it was he unquestionably came up from the padded seat like an athlete competing in the Sitting High Jump event. Scarface McColl couldn't have risen more nippily.
'Against the Thursday Review?' said Aunt Dahlia. 'That's your rag, isn't it, young Herring? What have they done to stir him up?'
'It's this book Daddy wrote about preparatory schools. He wrote a book about preparatory schools. Did you know he had written a book about preparatory schools?'
'Hadn't an inkling. Nobody tells me anything.'
'Well, he wrote this book about preparatory schools. It was about preparatory schools.'
'About preparatory schools, was it?'
'Yes, about preparatory schools.'
'Thank God we've got that straightened out at last. I had a feeling we should get somewhere if we dug long enough. And – ?'
'And the Thursday Review said something libellous about it, and Daddy's lawyer says the jury ought to give Daddy at least five thousand pounds. Because they libelled him. So he's been in London all this time seeing his lawyer. But he's coming back tonight. He'll be here for the prize-giving, and I've got his speech all typed out and ready for him. Oh, there's my precious Poppet,' said Phyllis, as a distant barking reached the ears. 'He's asking for his dinner, the sweet little angel. All right, darling, Mother's coming,' she fluted, and buzzed off on the errand of mercy.
A brief silence followed her departure.
'I don't care what you say,' said Aunt Dahlia at length in a defiant sort of way. 'Brains aren't everything. She's a dear, sweet girl. I love her like a daughter, and to hell with anyone who calls her a half– wit. Why, hullo,' she proceeded, seeing that Kipper was slumped back in his chair trying without much success to hitch up a drooping lower jaw. 'What's eating you, young Herring?'
I could see that Kipper was in no shape for conversation, so took it upon myself to explain.
'A certain stickiness has arisen, aged relative. You heard what P. Mills said before going to minister to Poppet. Those words tell the story.'
'What do you mean?'
'The facts are readily stated. Upjohn wrote this slim volume, which, if you recall, was about preparatory schools, and in it, so Kipper tells me, said that the time spent in these establishments was the happiest of our lives. Ye Ed passed it on to Kipper for comment, and he, remembering the dark days at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, when he and I were plucking the gowans fine there, slated it with no uncertain hand. Correct, Kipper?'
He found speech, if you could call making a noise like a buffalo taking its foot out of a swamp finding speech.
'But, dash it,' he said, finding a bit more, 'it was perfectly legitimate criticism. I didn't mince my words, of course –'
'It would be interesting to find out what these unminced words were,' said Aunt Dahlia, 'for among them there appear to have been one or two which seem likely to set your proprietor back five thousand of the best and brightest. Bertie, get your car out and go to Market Snodsbury station and see if the bookstall has a copy of this week's … No, wait, hold the line. Cancel that order. I shan't be a minute,' she said, and went out, leaving me totally fogged as to what she was up to. What aunts are up to is never an easy thing to divine.
I turned to Kipper.
'Bad show,' I said.
From the way he writhed I gathered that he was feeling it could scarcely be worse.
'What happens when an editorial assistant on a weekly paper lets the bosses in for substantial libel damages?'
He was able to answer that one.
'He gets the push and, what's more, finds it pretty damned difficult to land another job. He's on the blacklist.'
I saw what he meant. These birds who run weekly papers believe in watching the pennies. They like to get all that's coming to them and when the stuff, instead of pouring in, starts pouring out as the result of an injudicious move on the part of a unit of the staff, what they do to that unit is plenty. I think Kipper's outfit was financed by some sort of board or syndicate, but boards and syndicates are just as sensitive about having to cough up as individual owners. As Kipper had indicated, they not only give the erring unit the heave-ho but pass the word round to the other boards and syndicates.
'Herring?' the latter say when Kipper comes seeking employment. 'Isn't he the bimbo who took the bread out of the mouths of the Thursday Review people? Chuck the blighter out of the window and we want to see him bounce.' If this action of Upjohn's went through, his chances of any sort of salaried post were meagre, if not slim. It might be years before all was forgiven and forgotten.
'Selling pencils in the gutter is about the best I'll be able to look forward to,' said Kipper, and he had just buried his face in his hands, as fellows are apt to do when contemplating a future that's a bit on the bleak side, when the door opened, to reveal not, as I had expected, Aunt Dahlia, but Bobbie.
'I got the wrong book,' she said. 'The one I wanted was –'
Then her eye fell on Kipper and she stiffened in every limb, rather like Lot's wife, who, as you probably know, did the wrong thing that time there was all that unpleasantness with the cities of the plain and got turned into a pillar of salt, though what was the thought behind this I've never been able to understand. Salt, I mean. Seems so bizarre somehow and not at all what you would expect.
'Oh!' she said haughtily, as if offended by this glimpse into the underworld, and even as she spoke a hollow groan burst from Kipper's interior and he raised an ashen face. And at the sight of that ashen f. the haughtiness went out of Roberta Wickham with a whoosh, to be replaced by all the old love, sympathy, womanly tenderness and what not, and she bounded at him like a leopardess getting together with a lost cub.
'Reggie! Oh, Reggie! Reggie, darling, what is it?' she cried, her whole demeanour undergoing a marked change for the better. She was, in short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex. Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with the one who said 'Oh, woman in our hours of ease turn tumty tiddly something please, when something something something something brow, a something something something thou.'
She turned on me with an animal snarl.
'What have you been doing to the poor lamb?' she demanded, giving me one of the nastiest looks seen that summer in the midland counties, and I had just finished explaining that it was not I but Fate or Destiny that had removed the sunshine from the poor lamb's life, when Aunt Dahlia returned. She had a slip of paper in her hand.
'I was right,' she said. 'I knew Upjohn's first move on getting a book published would be to subscribe to a press-cutting agency. I found this on the hall table. It's your review of his slim volume, young Herring, and having run an eye over it I'm not surprised that he's a little upset. I'll read it to you.'
As might have been expected, this having been foreshadowed a good deal in one way and another, what Kipper had written was on the severe side, and as far as I was concerned it fell into the rare and refreshing fruit class. I enjoyed every minute of it. It concluded as follows:
'Aubrey Upjohn might have taken a different view of preparatory schools if he had done a stretch at the Dotheboys Hall conducted by him at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, as we had the misfortune to do. We have not forgotten the sausages on Sunday, which were made not from contented pigs but from pigs which had expired, regretted by all, of glanders, the botts and tuberculosis.'
Until this passage left the aged relative's lips Kipper had been sitting with the tips of his fingers together, nodding from time to time as much as to say 'Caustic, yes, but perfectly legitimate criticism,' but on hearing this excerpt he did another of his sitting high jumps, lowering all previous records by several inches. It occurred to me as a passing thought that if all other sources of income failed, he had a promising future as an acrobat.
'But I never wrote that,' he gas
ped.
'Well, it's here in cold print.'
'Why, that's libellous!'
'So Upjohn and his legal eagle seem to feel. And I must say it reads like a pretty good five thousand pounds' worth to me.'
'Let me look at that,' yipped Kipper. 'I don't understand this. No, half a second, darling. Not now. Later. I want to concentrate,' he said, for Bobbie had flung herself on him and was clinging to him like the ivy on the old garden wall.
'Reggie!' she wailed – yes, wail's the word. 'It was me!'
'Eh?'
'That thing Mrs Travers just read. You remember you showed me the proof at lunch that day and told me to drop it off at the office, as you had to rush along to keep a golf date. I read it again after you'd gone, and saw you had left out that bit about the sausages – accidentally, I thought – and it seemed to me so frightfully funny and clever that… Well, I put it in at the end. I felt it just rounded the thing off.'
14
There was silence for some moments, broken only by the sound of an aunt saying 'Lord love a duck!' Kipper stood blinking, as I had sometimes seen him do at the boxing tourneys in which he indulged when in receipt of a shrewd buffet on some tender spot like the tip of the nose. Whether or not the idea of taking Bobbie's neck in both hands and twisting it into a spiral floated through his mind, I cannot say, but if so it was merely the ideal dream of a couple of seconds or so, for almost immediately love prevailed. She had described him as a lamb, and it was with all the mildness for which lambs are noted that he now spoke.
'Oh, I see. So that's how it was.'
'I'm so sorry.'
'Don't mention it.'
'Can you ever forgive me?'
'Oh, rather.'
'I meant so well.'
'Of course you did.'
Jeeves in the offing jaw-12 Page 11