15

   With self all eagerness and enthusiasm for the work in hand, straining at the leash, as you might say, and full of the will to win, it came as a bit of a damper when I found on the following afternoon that Jeeves didn't think highly of Operation Upjohn. I told him about it just before starting out for the tryst, feeling that it would be helpful to have his moral support, and was stunned to see that his manner was austere and even puff-faced. He was giving me a description at the time of how it felt to act as judge at a seaside bathing belles contest, and it was with regret that I was compelled to break into this, for he had been holding me spellbound.
   'I'm sorry, Jeeves,' I said, consulting my watch, 'but I shall have to be dashing off. Urgent appointment. You must tell me the rest later.'
   'At any time that suits you, sir.'
   'Are you doing anything for the next half-hour or so?'
   'No, sir.'
   'Not planning to curl up in some shady nook with a cigarette and Spinoza?'
   'No, sir.'
   'Then I strongly advise you to come down to the lake and witness a human drama.'
   And in a few brief words I outlined the programme and the events which had led up to it. He listened attentively and raised his left eyebrow a fraction of an inch.
   'Was this Miss Wickham's idea, sir?'
   'No. I agree that it sounds like one of hers, but actually it was Sir Roderick Glossop who suggested it. By the way, you were probably surprised to find him buttling here.'
   'It did occasion me a momentary astonishment, but Sir Roderick explained the circumstances.'
   'Fearing that if he didn't let you in on it, you might unmask him in front of Mrs Cream?'
   'No doubt, sir. He would naturally wish to take all precautions. I gathered from his remarks that he has not yet reached a definite conclusion regarding the mental condition of Mr Cream.'
   'No, he's still observing. Well, as I say, it was from his fertile bean that the idea sprang. What do you think of it?'
   'Ill-advised, sir, in my opinion.'
   I was amazed. I could hardly b. my e.
   'Ill-advised?'
   'Yes, sir.'
   'But it worked without a hitch in the case of Bertha Simmons, George Lanchester and old Mr Simmons.'
   'Very possibly, sir.'
   Then why this defeatist attitude?'
   'It is merely a feeling, sir, due probably to my preference for finesse. I mistrust these elaborate schemes. One cannot depend on them. As the poet Burns says, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.'
   'Scotch, isn't it, that word?'
   'Yes, sir.'
   'I thought as much. The «gang» told the story. Why do Scotsmen say gang?'
   'I have no information, sir. They have not confided in me.'
   I was getting a bit peeved by now, not at all liking the sniffiness of his manner. I had expected him to speed me on my way with words of encouragement and.uplift, not to go trying to blunt the keen edge of my zest like this. I was rather in the position of a child who runs to his mother hoping for approval and endorsement of something he's done, and is awarded instead a brusque kick in the pants. It was with a good deal of warmth that I came back at him.
   'So you think the poet Burns would look askance at this enterprise of ours, do you? Well, you can tell him from me he's an ass. We've thought the thing out to the last detail. Miss Wickham asks Mr Upjohn to come for a stroll with her. She leads him to the lake. I am standing on the brink, ostensibly taking a look at the fishes playing amongst the reeds. Kipper, ready to the last button, is behind a neighbouring tree. On the cue «Oh, look!» from Miss Wickham, accompanied by business of pointing with girlish excitement at something in the water, Upjohn bends over to peer. I push, Kipper dives in, and there we are. Nothing can possibly go wrong.'
   'Just as you say, sir. But I still have that feeling.'
   The blood of the Woosters is hot, and I was about to tell him in set terms what I thought of his bally feeling, when I suddenly spotted what it was that was making him crab the act. The green-eyed monster had bitten him. He was miffed because he wasn't the brains behind this binge, the blue prints for it having been laid down by a rival. Even great men have their weaknesses. So I held back the acid crack I might have made, and went off with a mere 'Oh, yeah?' No sense in twisting the knife in the wound, I mean.
   All the same, I remained a bit hot under the collar, because when you're all strung up and tense and all that, the last thing you want is people upsetting you by bringing in the poet Burns. I hadn't told him, but our plans had already nearly been wrecked at the outset by the unfortunate circumstance of Upjohn, while in the metropolis, having shaved his moustache, this causing Kipper to come within a toucher of losing his nerve and calling the whole thing off. The sight of that bare expanse or steppe of flesh beneath the nose, he said, did something to him, bringing back the days when he had so often found his blood turning to ice on beholding it. It had required quite a series of pep talks to revive his manly spirits.
   However, there was good stuff in the lad, and though for a while the temperature of his feet had dropped sharply, threatening to reduce him to the status of a non-co-operative cat in an adage, at 3.30 Greenwich Mean Time he was at his post behind the selected tree, resolved to do his bit. He poked his head round the tree as I arrived, and when I waved a cheery hand at him, waved a fairly cheery hand at me. Though I only caught a glimpse of him, I could see that his upper lip was stiff.
   There being no signs as yet of the female star and her companion, I deduced that I was a bit on the early side. I lit a cigarette and stood awaiting their entrance, and was pleased to note that conditions could scarcely have been better for the coming water fete. Too often on an English summer day you find the sun going behind the clouds and a nippy wind springing up from the north-east, but this afternoon was one of those still, sultry afternoons when the slightest movement brings the persp. in beads to the brow, an afternoon, in short, when it would be a positive pleasure to be shoved into a lake. 'Most refreshing,' Upjohn would say to himself as the cool water played about his limbs.
   I was standing there running over the stage directions in my mind to see that I had got them all clear, when I beheld Wilbert Cream approaching, the dog Poppet curvetting about his ankles. On seeing me, the hound rushed forward with uncouth cries as was his wont, but on heaving alongside and getting a whiff of Wooster Number Five calmed down, and I was at liberty to attend to Wilbert, who I could see desired speech with me.
   He was looking, I noticed, fairly green about the gills, and he conveyed the same suggestion of having just swallowed a bad oyster which I had observed in Kipper on his arrival at Brinkley. It was plain that the loss of Phyllis Mills, goofy though she unquestionably was, had hit him a shrewd wallop, and I presumed that he was coming to me for sympathy and heart balm, which I would have been only too pleased to dish out. I hoped, of course, that he would make it crisp and remove himself at an early date, for when the moment came for the balloon to go up I didn't want to be hampered by an audience. When you're pushing someone into a lake, nothing embarrasses you more than having the front seats filled up with goggling spectators.
   It was not, however, on the subject of Phyllis that he proceeded to touch.
   'Oh, Wooster,' he said, 'I was talking to my mother a night or two ago.'
   'Oh, yes?' I said, with a slight wave of the hand intended to indicate that if he liked to talk to his mother anywhere, all over the house, he had my approval.
   'She tells me you are interested in mice.'
   I didn't like the trend the conversation was taking, but I preserved my aplomb.
   'Why, yes, fairly interested.'
   'She says she found you trying to catch one in my bedroom!'
   'Yes, that's right.'
   'Good of you to bother.'
   'Not at all. Always a pleasure.'
   'She says you seemed to be making a very thorough search of my room.'
   'Oh, well, you know, when one sets one's hand to the plough.'
   'You didn't find a mouse?'
   'No, no mouse. Sorry.'
   'I wonder if by any chance you happened to find an eighteenth– century cow-creamer?'
   'Eh?'
   'A silver jug shaped like a cow.'
   'No. Why, was it on the floor somewhere?'
   'It was in a drawer of the bureau.'
   'Ah, then I would have missed it.'
   'You'd certainly miss it now. It's gone.'
   'Gone?'
   'Gone.'
   'You mean disappeared, as it were?'
   'I do.'
   'Strange.'
   'Very strange.'
   'Yes, does seem extremely strange, doesn't it?'
   I had spoken with all the old Wooster coolness, and I doubt if a casual observer would have detected that Bertram was not at his ease, but I can assure my public that he wasn't by a wide margin. My heart had leaped in the manner popularized by Kipper Herring and Scarface McColl, crashing against my front teeth with a thud which must have been audible in Market Snodsbury. A far less astute man would have been able to divine what had happened. Not knowing the score owing to having missed the latest stop-press news and looking on the cow-creamer purely in the light of a bit of the swag collected by Wilbert in the course of his larcenous career, Pop Glossop, all zeal, had embarked on the search he had planned to make, and intuition, developed by years of hunt-the– slipper, had led him to the right spot. Too late I regretted sorely that, concentrating so tensely on Operation Upjohn, I had failed to place the facts before him. Had he but known, about summed it up.
   'I was going to ask you,' said Wilbert, 'if you think I should inform Mrs Travers.'
   The cigarette I was smoking was fortunately one of the kind that make you nonchalant, so it was nonchalantly – or fairly nonchalantly – that I was able to reply.
   'Oh, I wouldn't do that.'
   'Why not?'
   'Might upset her.'
   'You consider her a sensitive plant?'
   'Oh, very. Rugged exterior, of course, but you can't go by that. No, I'd just wait a while, if I were you. I expect it'll turn out that the thing's somewhere you put it but didn't think you'd put it. I mean, you often put a thing somewhere and think you've put it somewhere else and then find you didn't put it somewhere else but somewhere. I don't know if you follow me?'
   'I don't.'
   'What I mean is, just stick around and you'll probably find the thing.'
   'You think it will return?'
   'I do.'
   'Like a homing pigeon?'
   'That's the idea.'
   'Oh?' said Wilbert, and turned away to greet Bobbie and Upjohn, who had just arrived on the boat-house landing stage. I had found his manner a little peculiar, particularly that last 'Oh?' but I was glad that there was no lurking suspicion in his mind that I had taken the bally thing. He might so easily have got the idea that Uncle Tom, regretting having parted with his ewe lamb, had employed me to recover it privily, this being the sort of thing, I believe, that collectors frequently do. Nevertheless, I was still much shaken, and I made a mental note to tell Roddy Glossop to slip it back among his effects at the earliest possible moment.
   I shifted over to where Bobbie and Upjohn were standing, and though up and doing with a heart for any fate couldn't help getting that feeling you get at times like this of having swallowed a double portion of butterflies. My emotions were somewhat similar to those I had experienced when I first sang the Yeoman's Wedding Song. In public, I mean, for of course I had long been singing it in my bath.
   'Hullo, Bobbie,' I said.
   'Hullo, Bertie,' she said.
   'Hullo, Upjohn,' I said.
   The correct response to this would have been 'Hullo, Wooster', but he blew up in his lines and merely made a noise like a wolf with its big toe caught in a trap. Seemed a bit restive, I thought, as if wishing he were elsewhere.
   Bobbie was all girlish animation.
   'I've been telling Mr Upjohn about that big fish we saw in the lake yesterday, Bertie.'
   'Ah yes, the big fish.'
   'It was a whopper, wasn't it?'
   'Very well-developed.'
   'I brought him down here to show it to him.'
   'Quite right. You'll enjoy the big fish, Upjohn.'
   I had been perfectly correct in supposing him to be restive. He did his wolf impersonation once more.
   'I shall do nothing of the sort,' he said, and you couldn't find a better word than 'testily' to describe the way he spoke. 'It is most inconvenient for me to be away from the house at this time. I am expecting a telephone call from my lawyer.'
   'Oh, I wouldn't bother about telephone calls from lawyers,' said heartily. 'These legal birds never say anything worth listening to. Just gab gab gab. You'll never forgive yourself if you miss the big fish. You were saying, Upjohn?' I broke off courteously, for he had spoken.
   'I am saying, Mr Wooster, that both you and Miss Wickham are labouring under a singular delusion in supposing that I am interested in fish, whether large or small. I ought never to have left the house. I shall return there at once.'
   'Oh, don't go yet,' said.
   'Wait for the big fish,' said Bobbie.
   'Bound to be along shortly,' I said.
   'At any moment now,' said Bobbie.
   Her eyes met mine, and I read in them the message she was trying to convey – viz. that the time had come to act. There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Not my own. Jeeves's. She bent over and pointed with an eager finger.
   'Oh, look!' she cried.
   This, as I had explained to Jeeves, should have been the cue for Upjohn to bend over, too, thus making it a simple task for me to do my stuff, but he didn't bend over an inch. And why? Because at this moment the goof Phyllis, suddenly appearing in our midst, said:
   'Daddy, dear, you're wanted on the telephone.'
   Upon which, standing not on the order of his going, Upjohn was off as if propelled from a gun. He couldn't have moved quicker if he had been the dachshund Poppet, who at this juncture was running round in circles, trying, if I read his thoughts aright, to work off the rather heavy lunch he had had earlier in the afternoon.
   One began to see what the poet Burns had meant. I don't know anything that more promptly gums up a dramatic sequence than the sudden and unexpected exit of an important member of the cast at a critical point in the proceedings. I was reminded of the time when we did Charley's Aunt at the Market Snodsbury Town Hall in aid of the local church organ fund and half-way through the second act, just when we were all giving of our best, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, who was playing Lord Fancourt Babberley, left the stage abruptly to attend to an unforeseen nose bleed.
   As far as Bobbie and I were concerned, silence reigned, this novel twist in the scenario having wiped speech from our lips, as the expression is, but Phyllis continued vocal.
   'I found this darling pussycat in the garden,' she said, and for the first time I observed that she was bearing Augustus in her arms. He was looking a bit disgruntled, and one could readily see why. He wanted to catch up with his sleep and was being kept awake by the endearments she was murmuring in his ear.
   She lowered him to the ground.
   'I brought him here to talk to Poppet. Poppet loves cats, don't you angel? Come and say how-d'you-do to the sweet pussykins, darling.'
   I shot a quick look at Wilbert Cream, to see how he was reacting to this. It was the sort of observation which might well have quenched the spark of love in his bosom, for nothing tends to cool the human heart more swiftly than babytalk. But so far from being revolted he was gazing yearningly at her as if her words were music to his ears. Very odd, I felt, and I was just saying to myself that you never could tell, when I became aware of a certain liveliness in my immediate vicinity.
   At the moment when Augustus touched ground and curling himself into a ball fell into a light doze, Poppet had completed his tenth lap and was preparing to start on his eleventh. Seeing Augustus, he halted in mid-stride, smiled broadly, turned his ears inside out, stuck his tail straight up at right angles to the parent body and bounded forward, barking merrily.
   I could have told the silly ass his attitude was all wrong. Roused abruptly from slumber, the most easy-going cat is apt to wake up cross. Already Augustus had had much to endure from Phyllis, who had doubtless jerked him out of dreamland when scooping him up in the garden, and all this noise and heartiness breaking out just as he dropped off again put the lid on his sullen mood. He spat peevishly, there was a sharp yelp, and something long and brown came shooting between my legs, precipitating itself and me into the depths. The waters closed about me, and for an instant I knew no more.
   When I rose to the surface, I found that Poppet and I were not the only bathers. We had been joined by Wilbert Cream, who had dived in, seized the hound by the scruff of the neck, and was towing him at a brisk pace to the shore. And by one of those odd coincidences I was at this moment seized by the scruff of the neck myself.
   'It's all right, Mr Upjohn, keep quite cool, keep quite … What the hell are you doing here, Bertie?' said Kipper, for it was he. I may have been wrong, but it seemed to me that he spoke petulantly.
   I expelled a pint or so of H2O.
   'You may well ask,' I said, moodily detaching a water beetle from my hair. 'I don't know if you know the meaning of the word «agley», Kipper, but that, to put it in a nutshell, is the way things have ganged.'

16

   Reaching the mainland some moments later and squelching back to the house, accompanied by Bobbie, like a couple of Napoleons squelching back from Moscow, we encountered Aunt Dahlia, who, wearing that hat of hers that looks like one of those baskets you carry fish in, was messing about in the herbaceous border by the tennis lawn. She gaped at us dumbly for perhaps five seconds, then uttered an ejaculation, far from suitable to mixed company, which she had no doubt picked up from fellow-Nimrods in her hunting days. Having got this off the chest, she said:
   'What's been going on in this joint? Wilbert Cream came by here just now, soaked to the eyebrows, and now you two appear, leaking at every seam. Have you all been playing water polo with your clothes on?'
   'Not so much water polo, more that seaside bathing belles stuff,' I said. 'But it's a long story, and one feels that the cagey thing for Kipper and me to do now is to nip along and get into some dry things, not to linger conferring with you, much,' I added courteously, 'as we always enjoy your conversation.'
   'The extraordinary thing is that I saw Upjohn not long ago, and he was as dry as a bone. How was that? Couldn't you get him to play with you?'
   'He had to go and talk to his lawyer on the phone,' I said, and leaving Bobbie to place the facts before her, we resumed our squelching. And I was in my room, having shed the moistened outer crust and substituted something a bit more sec in pale flannel, when there was a knock on the door. I flung wide the gates and found Bobbie and Kipper on the threshold.
   The first thing I noticed about their demeanour was the strange absence of gloom, despondency and what not. I mean, considering that it was little more than a quarter of an hour since all our hopes and dreams had taken the knock, one would have expected their hearts to be bowed down with weight of woe, but their whole aspect was one of buck and optimism. It occurred to me as a possible solution that with that bulldog spirit of never admitting defeat which has made Englishmen – and, of course, Englishwomen – what they are they had decided to have another go along the same lines at some future date, and I asked if this was the case.
   The answer was in the negative. Kipper said No, there was no likelihood of getting Upjohn down to the lake again, and Bobbie said that even if they did, it wouldn't be any good, because I would be sure to mess things up once more.
   This stung me, I confess.
   'How do you mean, mess things up?'
   'You'd be bound to trip over your flat feet and fall in, as you did today.'
   'Pardon me,' I said, preserving with an effort the polished suavity demanded from an English gentleman when chewing the rag with one of the other sex, 'you're talking through the back of your fatheaded little neck. I did not trip over my flat feet. I was hurled into the depths by an Act of God, to wit, a totally unexpected dachshund getting between my legs. If you're going to blame anyone blame the goof Phyllis for bringing Augustus there and calling him in his hearing a sweet pussykins. Naturally it made him sore and disinclined to stand any lip from barking dogs.'
   'Yes,' said Kipper, always the staunch pal. 'It wasn't Bertie's fault, angel. Say what you will of dachshunds, their peculiar shape makes them the easiest breed of dog to trip over in existence. I feel that Bertie emerges without a stain on his character.'
   'I don't,' said Bobbie. 'Still, it doesn't matter.'
   'No, it doesn't really matter,' said Kipper, 'because your aunt has suggested a scheme that's just as good as the Lanchester-Simmons thing, if not better. She was telling Bobbie about the time when Boko Fittleworth was trying to ingratiate himself with your Uncle Percy, and you very sportingly offered to go and call your Uncle Percy a lot of offensive names, so that Boko, hovering outside the door, could come in and stick up for him, thus putting himself in solid with him. You probably remember the incident?'
   I quivered. I remembered the incident all right.
   'She thinks the same treatment would work with Upjohn, and I'm sure she's right. You know how you feel when you suddenly discover you've a real friend, a fellow who thinks you're terrific and won't hear a word said against you. It touches you. If you had anything in the nature of a prejudice against the chap, you change your opinion of him. You feel you can't do anything to injure such a sterling bloke. And that's how Upjohn is going to feel about me, Bertie, when I come in and lend him my sympathy and support as you stand there calling him all the names you can think of. You must have picked up dozens from your aunt. She used to hunt, and if you hunt, you have to know all the names there are because people are always riding over hounds and all that. Ask her to jot down a few of the best on a half-sheet of notepaper.'
   'He won't need that,' said Bobbie. 'He's probably got them all tucked away in his mind.'
   'Of course. Learned them at her knee as a child. Well, that's the set-up, Bertie. You wait your opportunity and corner Upjohn somewhere and tower over him-'
   'As he crouches in his chair.'
   ' – and shake your finger in his face and abuse him roundly. And when he's quailing beneath your scorn and wishing some friend in need would intervene and save him from this terrible ordeal, I come in, having heard all. Bobbie suggests that I knock you down, but I don't think I could do that. The recollection of our ancient friendship would make me pull my punch. I shall simply rebuke you. «Wooster,» I shall say, «I am shocked. Shocked and astounded. I cannot understand how you can talk like that to a man I have always respected and looked up to, a man in whose preparatory school I spent the happiest years of my life. You strangely forget yourself, Wooster.» Upon which, you slink out, bathed in shame and confusion, and Upjohn thanks me brokenly and says if there is anything he can do for me, I have only to name it.'
   'I still think you ought to knock him down.'
   'Having endeared myself to him thus –'
   'Much more box-office.'
   'Having endeared myself to him thus, I lead the conversation round to the libel suit.'
   'One good punch in the eye would do it.'
   'I say that I have seen the current issue of the Thursday Review, and I can quite understand him wanting to mulct the journal in substantial damages, but «Don't forget, Mr Upjohn,» I say, «that when a weekly paper loses a chunk of money, it has to retrench, and the way it retrenches is by getting rid of the more junior members of its staff. You wouldn't want me to lose my job, would you, Mr Upjohn?» He starts. «Are you on the staff of the Thursday Review?» he says. «For the time being, yes,» I say. «But if you bring that suit, I shall be selling pencils in the street.» This is the crucial moment. Looking into his eyes, I can see that he is thinking of that five thousand quid, and for an instant quite naturally he hesitates. Then his better self prevails. His eyes soften. They fill with tears. He clasps my hand. He tells me he could use five thousand quid as well as the next man, but no money in the world would make him dream of doing an injury to the fellow who championed him so stoutly against the louse Wooster, and the scene ends with our going off together to Swordfish's pantry for a drop of port, probably with our arms round each other's waists, and that night he writes a letter to his lawyer telling him to call the suit off. Any questions?'
   'Not from me. It isn't as if he could find out that it was you who wrote that review. It wasn't signed.'
   'No, thank heaven for the editorial austerity that prevented that.'
   'I can't see a flaw in the scenario. He'll have to withdraw the suit.'
   'In common decency, one would think. The only thing that remains is to choose a time and place for Bertie to operate.'
   'No time like the present.'
   'But how do we locate Upjohn?'
   'He's in Mr Travers's study. I saw him through the french window.'
   'Excellent. Then, Bertie, if you're ready…'
   It will probably have been noticed that during these exchanges I had taken no part in the conversation. This was because I was fully occupied with envisaging the horror that lay before me. I knew that it did lie before me, of course, for where the ordinary man would have met the suggestion they had made with a firm nolle prosequi, I was barred from doing this by the code of the Woosters, which, as is pretty generally known, renders it impossible for me to let a pal down. If the only way of saving a boyhood friend from having to sell pencils in the street – though I should have thought that blood oranges would have been a far more lucrative line – was by wagging my finger in the face of Aubrey Upjohn and calling him names, that finger would have to be wagged and those names called. The ordeal would whiten my hair from the roots up and leave me a mere shell of my former self, but it was one that I must go through. Mine not to reason why, as the fellow said.
   So I uttered a rather husky 'Right-ho' and tried not to think of how the Upjohn face looked without its moustache. For what chilled the feet most was the mental picture of that bare upper lip which he had so often twitched at me in what are called days of yore. Dimly, as we started off for the arena, I could hear Bobbie saying 'My hero!' and Kipper asking anxiously if I was in good voice, but it would have taken a fat lot more than my-hero-ing and solicitude about my vocal cords to restore tone to Bertram's nervous system. I was, in short, feeling like an inexperienced novice going up against the heavyweight champion when in due course I drew up at the study door, opened it and tottered in. I could not forget that an Aubrey Upjohn who for years had been looking strong parents in the eye and making them wilt, and whose toughness was a byword in Bramley-on-Sea, was not a man lightly to wag a finger in the face of.
   Uncle Tom's study was a place I seldom entered during my visits to Brinkley Court, because when I did go there he always grabbed me and started to talk about old silver, whereas if he caught me in the open he often touched on other topics, and the way I looked at it was that there was no sense in sticking one's neck out. It was more than a year since I had been inside this sanctum, and I had forgotten how extraordinarily like its interior was to that of Aubrey Upjohn's lair at Malvern House. Discovering this now and seeing Aubrey Upjohn seated at the desk as I had so often seen him sit on the occasions when he had sent for me to discuss some recent departure of mine from the straight and narrow path, I found what little was left of my sang froid expiring with a pop. And at the same time I spotted the flaw in this scheme I had undertaken to sit in on – viz. that you can't just charge into a room and start calling someone names – out of a blue sky, as it were – you have to lead up to the thing. Pourparlers, in short, are of the essence.
   So I said 'Oh, hullo,' which seemed to me about as good a pourparler as you could have by way of an opener. I should imagine that those statesmen of whom I was speaking always edge into their conferences conducted in an atmosphere of the utmost cordiality in some such manner.
   'Reading?' I said.
   He lowered his book – one of Ma Cream's, I noticed –and flashed an upper lip at me.
   'Your powers of observation have not led you astray, Wooster. I am reading.'
   'Interesting book?'
   'Very. I am counting the minutes until I can resume its perusal undisturbed.'
   I'm pretty quick, and I at once spotted that the atmosphere was not of the utmost cordiality. He hadn't spoken matily, and he wasn't eyeing me matily. His whole manner seemed to suggest that he felt that I was taking up space in the room which could have been better employed for other purposes.
   However, I persevered.
   'I see you've shaved off your moustache.'
   'I have. You do not feel, I hope, that I pursued a mistaken course?'
   'Oh no, rather not. I grew a moustache myself last year, but had to get rid of it.'
   'Indeed?'
   'Public sentiment was against it.'
   'I see. Well, I should be delighted to hear more of your reminiscences, Wooster, but at the moment I am expecting a telephone call from my lawyer.'
   'I thought you'd had one.'
   'I beg your pardon?'
   'When you were down by the lake, didn't you go off to talk to him?'
   'I did. But when I reached the telephone, he had grown tired of waiting and had rung off. I should never have allowed Miss Wickham to take me away from the house.'
   'She wanted you to see the big fish.'
   'So I understood her to say.'
   'Talking of fish, you must have been surprised to find Kipper here.'
   'Kipper?'
   'Herring.'
   'Oh, Herring,' he said, and one spotted the almost total lack of animation in his voice. And conversation had started to flag, when the door flew open and the goof Phyllis bounded in, full of girlish excitement.
   'Oh, Daddy,' she burbled, 'are you busy?'
   'No, my dear.'
   'Can I speak to you about something?'
   'Certainly. Goodbye, Wooster.'
   I saw what this meant. He didn't want me around. There was nothing for it but to ooze out through the french window, so I oozed, and had hardly got outside when Bobbie sprang at me like a leopardess.
   'What on earth are you fooling about for like this, Bertie?' she stage-whispered. 'All that rot about moustaches. I thought you'd be well into it by this time.'
   I pointed out that as yet Aubrey Upjohn had not given me a cue.
   'You and your cues!'
   'All right, me and my cues. But I've got to sort of lead the conversation in the right direction, haven't I?'
   'I see what Bertie means, darling,' said Kipper. 'He wants –'
   'A point d'appui.'
   'A what?' said Bobbie.
   'Sort of jumping-off place.'
   The beasel snorted.
   'If you ask me, he's lost his nerve. I knew this would happen. The worm has got cold feet.'
   I could have crushed her by drawing her attention to the fact that worms don't have feet, cold or piping hot, but I had no wish to bandy words.
   'I must ask you, Kipper,' I said with frigid dignity, 'to request your girl friend to preserve the decencies of debate. My feet are not cold. I am as intrepid as a lion and only too anxious to get down to brass tacks, but just as I was working round to the res, Phyllis came in. She said she had something she wanted to speak to him about.'
   Bobbie snorted again, this time in a despairing sort of way.
   'She'll be there for hours. It's no good waiting.'
   'No,' said Kipper. 'May as well call it off for the moment. We'll let you know time and place of next fixture, Bertie.'
   'Oh, thanks,' I said, and they drifted away.
   And about a couple of minutes later, as I stood there brooding on Kipper's sad case, Aunt Dahlia came along. I was glad to see her. I thought she might possibly come across with aid and comfort, for though, like the female in the poem I was mentioning, she sometimes inclined to be a toughish egg in hours of ease, she could generally be relied on to be there with the soothing solace when one had anything wrong with one's brow.
   As she approached, I got the impression that her own brow had for some reason taken it on the chin. Quite a good deal of that upon-which– all-the-ends-of-the-earth-are-come stuff, it seemed to me.
   Nor was I mistaken.
   'Bertie,' she said, heaving to beside me and waving a trowel in an overwrought manner, 'do you know what?'
   'No, what?'
   'I'll tell you what,' said the aged relative, rapping out a sharp monosyllable such as she might have uttered in her Quorn and Pytchley days on observing a unit of the pack of hounds chasing a rabbit. 'That ass Phyllis has gone and got engaged to Wilbert Cream!'

17

   Her words gave me quite a wallop. I don't say I reeled, and everything didn't actually go black, but I was shaken, as what nephew would not have been. When a loved aunt has sweated herself to the bone trying to save her god-child from the clutches of a New York playboy and learns that all her well-meant efforts have gone blue on her, it's only natural for her late brother's son to shudder in sympathy.
   'You don't mean that?' I said. 'Who told you?'
   'She did.'
   'In person?'
   'In the flesh. She came skipping to me just now, clapping her little hands and bleating about how very, very happy she was, dear Mrs Travers. The silly young geezer. I nearly conked her one with my trowel. I'd always thought her half-baked, but now I think they didn't even put her in the oven.'
   'But how did it happen?'
   'Apparently that dog of hers joined you in the water.'
   'Yes, that's right, he took his dip with the rest of us. But what's that got to do with it?'
   'Wilbert Cream dived in and saved him.'
   'He could have got ashore perfectly well under his own steam. In fact, he was already on his way, doing what looked like an Australian crawl.'
   'That wouldn't occur to a pinhead like Phyllis. To her Wilbert Cream is the man who rescued her dachshund from a watery grave. So she's going to marry him.'
   'But you don't marry fellows because they rescue dachshunds.'
   'You do, if you've a mentality like hers.'
   'Seems odd.'
   'And is. But that's how it goes. Girls like Phyllis Mills are an open book to me. For four years I was, if you remember, the proprietor and editress of a weekly paper for women.' She was alluding to the periodical entitled Milady's Boudoir, to the Husbands and Brothers page of which I once contributed an article or 'piece' on What The Well– Dressed Man Is Wearing. It had recently been sold to a mug up Liverpool way, and I have never seen Uncle Tom look chirpier than when the deal went through, he for those four years having had to foot the bills.
   'I don't suppose,' she continued, 'that you were a regular reader, so for your information there appeared in each issue a short story, and in seventy per cent of those short stories the hero won the heroine's heart by saving her dog or her cat or her canary or whatever foul animal she happened to possess. Well, Phyllis didn't write all those stories, but she easily might have done, for that's the way her mind works. When I say mind,' said the blood relation, 'I refer to the quarter-teaspoonful of brain which you might possibly find in her head if you sank an artesian well. Poor Jane!'
   'Poor who?'
   'Her mother. Jane Mills.'
   'Oh, ah, yes. She was a pal of yours, you told me.'
   'The best I ever had, and she was always saying to me «Dahlia, old girl, if I pop off before you, for heaven's sake look after Phyllis and see that she doesn't marry some ghastly outsider. She's sure to want to. Girls always do, goodness knows why,» she said, and I knew she was thinking of her first husband, who was a heel to end all heels and a constant pain in the neck to her till one night he most fortunately walked into the River Thames while under the influence of the sauce and didn't come up for days. «Do stop her,» she said, and I said «Jane, you can rely on me.» And now this happens.'
   I endeavoured to soothe.
   'You can't blame yourself.'
   'Yes, I can.'
   'It isn't your fault.'
   'I invited Wilbert Cream here.'
   'Merely from a wifely desire to do Uncle Tom a bit of good.'
   'And I let Upjohn stick around, always at her elbow egging her on.'
   'Yes, Upjohn's the bird I blame.'
   'Me, too.'
   'But for his – undue influence, do they call it? – Phyllis would have remained a bachelor or spinster or whatever it is. «Thou art the man, Upjohn!» seems to me the way to sum it up. He ought to be ashamed of himself.'
   'And am I going to tell him so! I'd give a tenner to have Aubrey Upjohn here at this moment.'
   'You can get him for nothing. He's in Uncle Tom's study.'
   Her face lit up.
   'He is?' She threw her head back and inflated the lungs. 'UPJOHN!' she boomed, rather like someone calling the cattle home across the sands of Dee, and I issued a kindly word of warning.
   'Watch that blood pressure, old ancestor.'
   'Never you mind my blood pressure. You let it alone, and it'll leave you alone. UPJOHN!'
   He appeared in the french window, looking cold and severe, as I had so often seen him look when hobnobbing with him in his study at Malvern House, self not there as a willing guest but because I'd been sent for. ('I should like to see Wooster in my study immediately after morning prayers' was the formula.)
   'Who is making that abominable noise? Oh, it's you, Dahlia.'
   'Yes, it's me.'
   'You wished to see me?'
   'Yes, but not the way you're looking now. I'd have preferred you to have fractured your spine or at least to have broken a couple of ankles and got a touch of leprosy.'
   'My dear Dahlia!'
   'I'm not your dear Dahlia. I'm a seething volcano. Have you seen Phyllis?'
   'She has just left me.'
   'Did she tell you?'
   'That she was engaged to Wilbert Cream? Certainly.'
   'And I suppose you're delighted?'
   'Of course I am.'
   'Yes, of course you are! I can well imagine that it's your dearest wish to see that unfortunate muttonheaded girl become the wife of a man who lets off stink bombs in night clubs and pinches the spoons and has had three divorces already and who, if the authorities play their cards right, will end up cracking rocks in Sing-Sing. That is unless the loony-bin gets its bid in first. Just a Prince Charming, you might say.'
   'I don't understand you.'
   'Then you're an ass.'
   'Well, really!' said Aubrey Upjohn, and there was a dangerous note in his voice. I could see that the relative's manner, which was not affectionate, and her words, which lacked cordiality, were peeving him. It looked like an odds-on shot that in about another two ticks he would be giving her the Collect for the Day to write out ten times or even instructing her to bend over while he fetched his whangee. You can push these preparatory schoolmasters just so far.
   'A fine way for Jane's daughter to end up. Mrs Broadway Willie!'
   'Broadway Willie?'
   'That's what he's called in the circles in which he moves, into which he will now introduce Phyllis. «Meet the moll,» he'll say, and then he'll teach her in twelve easy lessons how to make stink bombs, and the children, if and when, will be trained to pick people's pockets as they dandle them on their knee. And you'll be responsible, Aubrey Upjohn!'
   I didn't like the way things were trending. Admittedly the aged relative was putting up a great show and it was a pleasure to listen to her, but I had seen Upjohn's lip twitch and that look of smug satisfaction come into his face which I had so often seen when he had been counsel for the prosecution in some case in which I was involved and had spotted a damaging flaw in my testimony. The occasion when I was on trial for having broken the drawing-room window with a cricket ball springs to the mind. It was plain to an eye as discerning as mine that he was about to put it across the old flesh-and-blood properly, making her wish she hadn't spoken. I couldn't see how, but the symptoms were all there.
   I was right. That twitching lip had not misled me.
   'If I might be allowed to make a remark, my dear Dahlia,' he said, 'I think we are talking at cross purposes. You appear to be under the impression that Phyllis is marrying Wilbert's younger brother Wilfred, the notorious playboy whose escapades have caused the family so much distress and who, as you are correct in saying, is known to his disreputable friends as Broadway Willie. Wilfred, I agree, would make – and on three successive occasions has made – a most undesirable husband, but no one to my knowledge has ever spoken a derogatory word of Wilbert. I know few young men who are more generally respected. He is a member of the faculty of one of the greatest American universities, over in this country on his sabbatical. He teaches romance languages.'
   Stop me if I've told you this before, I rather fancy I have, but once when I was up at Oxford and chatting on the river bank with a girl called something that's slipped my mind there was a sound of barking and a great hefty dog of the Hound of the Baskervilles type came galloping at me, obviously intent on mayhem, its whole aspect that of a dog that has no use for Woosters. And I was just commending my soul to God and thinking that this was where my new flannel trousers got about thirty bobs' worth of value bitten out of them, when the girl, waiting till she saw the whites of its eyes, with extraordinary presence of mind opened a coloured Japanese umbrella in the animal's face. Upon which, with a startled exclamation it did three back somersaults and retired into private life.
   And the reason I bring this up now is that, barring the somersaults, Aunt Dahlia's reaction to this communique was precisely that of the above hound to the Japanese umbrella. The same visible taken-abackness. She has since told me that her emotions were identical with those she had experienced when she was out with the Pytchley and riding over a ploughed field in rainy weather, and the horse of a sports-lover in front of her suddenly kicked three pounds of wet mud into her face.
   She gulped like a bulldog trying to swallow a sirloin steak many sizes too large for its thoracic cavity.
   'You mean there are two of them?'
   'Exactly.'
   'And Wilbert isn't the one I thought he was?'
   'You have grasped the position of affairs to a nicety. You will appreciate now, my dear Dahlia,' said Upjohn, speaking with the same unction, if that's the word, with which he had spoken when unmasking his batteries and presenting unshakable proof that yours was the hand, Wooster, which propelled this cricket ball, 'that your concern, though doing you the greatest credit, has been needless. I could wish Phyllis no better husband. Wilbert has looks, brains, character … and excellent prospects,' he added, rolling the words round his tongue like vintage port. 'His father, I should imagine, would be worth at least twenty million dollars, and Wilbert is the elder son. Yes, most satisfactory, most…'
   As he spoke, the telephone rang, and with a quick 'Ha!' he shot back into the study like a homing rabbit.

18

   For perhaps a quarter of a minute after he had passed from the scene the aged relative stood struggling for utterance. At the end of this period she found speech.
   'Of all the damn silly fatheaded things!' she vociferated, if that's the word. 'With a million ruddy names to choose from, these ruddy Creams call one ruddy son Wilbert and the other ruddy son Wilfred, and both these ruddy sons are known as Willie. Just going out of their way to mislead the innocent bystander. You'd think people would have more consideration.'
   Again I begged her to keep an eye on her blood pressure and not get so worked up, and once more she brushed me off, this time with a curt request that I would go and boil my head.
   'You'd be worked up if you had just been scored off by Aubrey Upjohn, with that loathsome self-satisfied look on his face as if he'd been rebuking a pimply pupil at his beastly school for shuffling his feet in church.'
   'Odd, that,' I said, struck by the coincidence. 'He once rebuked me for that very reason. And I had pimples.'
   'Pompous ass!'
   'Shows what a small world it is.'
   'What's he doing here anyway? I didn't invite him.'
   'Bung him out. I took this point up with you before, if you remember. Cast him into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.'
   'I will, if he gives me any more of his lip.'
   'I can see you're in a dangerous mood.'
   'You bet I'm in a dangerous … My God! He's with us again!'
   And A. Upjohn was indeed filtering through the french window. But he had lost the look of which the ancestor had complained, the one he was wearing now seeming to suggest that since last heard from something had occurred to wake the fiend that slept in him.
   'Dahlia!' he … yes better make it vociferated once more, I'm pretty sure it's the word I want.
   The fiend that slept in Aunt Dahlia was also up on its toes. She gave him a look which, if directed at an erring member of the personnel of the Quorn or Pytchley hound ensemble, would have had that member sticking his tail between his legs and resolving for the future to lead a better life.
   'Now what?'
   Just as Aunt Dahlia had done, Aubrey Upjohn struggled for utterance. Quite a bit of utterance-struggling there had been around these parts this summer afternoon.
   'I have just been speaking to my lawyer on the telephone,' he said, getting going after a short stage wait. 'I had asked him to make inquiries and ascertain the name of the author of that libellous attack on me in the columns of the Thursday Review. He did so, and has now informed me that it was the work of my former pupil, Reginald Herring.'
   He paused at this point, to let us chew it over, and the heart sank. Mine, I mean. Aunt Dahlia's seemed to be carrying on much as usual. She scratched her chin with her trowel, and said:
   'Oh, yes?'
   Upjohn blinked, as if he had been expecting something better than this in the way of sympathy and concern.
   'Is that all you can say?'
   That's the lot.'
   'Oh? Well, I am suing the paper for heavy damages, and furthermore, I refuse to remain in the same house with Reginald Herring. Either he goes, or I go.'
   There was the sort of silence which I believe cyclones drop into for a second or two before getting down to it and starting to give the populace the works. Throbbing? Yes, throbbing wouldn't be a bad word to describe it. Nor would electric, for the matter of that, and if you care to call it ominous, it will be all right with me. It was a silence of the type that makes the toes curl and sends a shiver down the spinal cord as you stand waiting for the bang. I could see Aunt Dahlia swelling slowly like a chunk of bubble gum, and a less prudent man than Bertram Wooster would have warned her again about her blood pressure.
   'I beg your pardon?' she said.
   He repeated the key words.
   'Oh?' said the relative, and went off with a pop. I could have told Upjohn he was asking for it. Normally as genial a soul as ever broke biscuit, this aunt, when stirred, can become the haughtiest of grandes dames before whose wrath the stoutest quail, and she doesn't, like some, have to use a lorgnette to reduce the citizenry to pulp, she does it all with the naked eye. 'Oh?' she said. 'So you have decided to revise my guest list for me? You have the nerve, the – the –'
   I saw she needed helping out.
   'Audacity,' I said, throwing her the line.
   'The audacity to dictate to me who I shall have in my house.'
   It should have been 'whom', but I let it go.
   'You have the –'
   'Crust.'
   '– the immortal rind,' she amended, and I had to admit it was stronger, 'to tell me whom' – she got it right that time – 'I may entertain at Brinkley Court and who' – wrong again – 'I may not. Very well, if you feel unable to breathe the same air as my friends, you must please yourself. I believe the «Bull and Bush» in Market Snodsbury is quite comfortable.'
   'Well spoken of in the Automobile Guide,' I said.
   'I shall go there,' said Upjohn. 'I shall go there as soon as my things are packed. Perhaps you will be good enough to tell your butler to pack them.'
   He strode off, and she went into Uncle Tom's study, me following, she still snorting. She rang the bell.
   Jeeves appeared.
   'Jeeves?' said the relative, surprised. 'I was ringing for-'
   'It is Sir Roderick's afternoon off, madam.'
   'Oh? Well, would you mind packing Mr Upjohn's things, Jeeves? He is leaving us.'
   'Very good, madam.'
   'And you can drive him to Market Snodsbury, Bertie.'
   'Right-ho,' I said, not much liking the assignment, but liking less the idea of endeavouring to thwart this incandescent aunt in her current frame of mind.
   Safety first, is the Wooster slogan.

19

   It isn't much of a run from Brinkley Court to Market Snodsbury and I deposited Upjohn at the 'Bull and Bush' and started m.-p.-h.-ing homeward in what you might call a trice. We parted, of course, on rather distant terms, but the great thing when you've got an Upjohn on your books is to part and not be fussy about how it's done, and had it not been for all this worry about Kipper, for whom I was now mourning in spirit more than ever, I should have been feeling fine.
   I could see no happy issue for him from the soup in which he was immersed. No words had been exchanged between Upjohn and self on the journey out, but the glimpses I had caught of his face from the corner of the eyes had told me that he was grim and resolute, his supply of the milk of human kindness plainly short by several gallons. No hope, it seemed to me, of turning him from his fell purpose.
   I garaged the car and went to Aunt Dahlia's sanctum to ascertain whether she had cooled off at all since I had left her, for I was still anxious about that blood pressure of hers. One doesn't want aunts going up in a sheet of flame all over the place.
   She wasn't there, having, I learned later, withdrawn to her room to bathe her temples with eau de Cologne and do Yogi deep-breathing, but Bobbie was, and not only Bobbie but Jeeves. He was handing her something in an envelope, and she was saying 'Oh, Jeeves, you've saved a human life,' and he was saying 'Not at all, miss.' The gist, of course, escaped me, but I had no leisure to probe into gists.
   'Where's Kipper?' I asked, and was surprised to note that Bobbie was dancing round the room on the tips of her toes uttering animal cries, apparently ecstatic in their nature.
   'Reggie?' she said, suspending the farmyard imitations for a moment. 'He went for a walk.'
   'Does he know that Upjohn's found out he wrote that thing?'
   'Yes, your aunt told him.'
   'Then we ought to be in conference.'
   'About Upjohn's libel action? It's all right about that. Jeeves has pinched his speech.'
   I could make nothing of this. It seemed to me that the beasel spoke in riddles.
   'Have you an impediment in your speech, Jeeves?'
   'No, sir.'
   'Then what, if anything, does the young prune mean?'
   'Miss Wickham's allusion is to the typescript of the speech which Mr Upjohn is to deliver tomorrow to the scholars of Market Snodsbury Grammar School, sir.'
   'She said you'd pinched it.'
   'Precisely, sir.'
   I started.
   'You don't mean –'
   'Yes, he does,' said Bobbie, resuming the Ballet Russe movements. 'Your aunt told him to pack Upjohn's bags, and the first thing he saw when he smacked into it was the speech. He trousered it and brought it along to me.'
   I raised an eyebrow.
   'Well, really, Jeeves!'
   'I deemed it best, sir.'
   'And did you deem right!' said Bobbie, executing a Nijinsky what– ever-it's-called. 'Either Upjohn agrees to drop that libel suit or he doesn't get these notes, as he calls them, and without them he won't be able to utter a word. He'll have to come across with the price of the papers. Won't he, Jeeves?'
   'He would appear to have no alternative, miss.'
   'Unless he wants to get up on that platform and stand there opening and shutting his mouth like a goldfish. We've got him cold.'
   'Yes, but half a second,' I said.
   I spoke reluctantly. I didn't want to damp the young ball of worsted in her hour of joy, but a thought had occurred to me.
   'I see the idea, of course. I remember Aunt Dahlia telling me about this strange inability of Upjohn's to be silver-tongued unless he has the material in his grasp, but suppose he says he's ill and can't appear.'
   'He won't.'
   'I would.'
   'But you aren't trying to get the Conservative Association of the Market Snodsbury division to choose you as their candidate at the coming by-election. Upjohn is, and it's vitally important for him to address the multitude tomorrow and make a good impression, because half the selection committee have sons at the school and will be there, waiting to judge for themselves how good he is as a speaker. Their last nominee stuttered, and they didn't discover it till the time came for him to dish it out to the constituents. They don't want to make a mistake this time.'
   'Yes, I get you now,' I said. I remembered that Aunt Dahlia had spoken to me of Upjohn's political ambitions.
   'So that fixes that,' said Bobbie. 'His future hangs on this speech, and we've got it and he hasn't. We take it from there.'
   'And what exactly is the procedure?'
   'That's all arranged. He'll be ringing up any moment now, making inquiries. When he does, you step to the telephone and outline the position of affairs to him.'
   'Me?'
   'That's right.'
   'Why me?'
   'Jeeves deems it best.'
   'Well, really, Jeeves! Why not Kipper?'
   'Mr Herring and Mr Upjohn are not on speaking terms, sir.'
   'So you can see what would happen if he heard Reggie's voice. He would hang up haughtily, and all the weary work to do again. Whereas he'll drink in your every word.'
   'But, dash it-'
   'And, anyway, Reggie's gone for a walk and isn't available. I do wish you wouldn't always be so difficult, Bertie. Your aunt tells me it was just the same when you were a child. She'd want you to eat your cereal, and you would stick your ears back and be stubborn and non-co– operative, like Jonah's ass in the Bible.'
   I could not let this go uncorrected. It's pretty generally known that when at school I won a prize for Scripture Knowledge.
   'Balaam's ass. Jonah was the chap who had the whale. Jeeves!'
   'Sir?'
   'To settle a bet, wasn't it Balaam's ass that entered the nolle prosequi?'
   'Yes, sir.'
   'I told you so,' I said to Bobbie, and would have continued grinding her into the dust, had not the telephone at this moment tinkled, diverting my mind from the point at issue. The sound sent a sudden chill through the Wooster limbs, for I knew what it portended.
   Bobbie, too, was not unmoved.
   'Hullo!' she said. 'This, if I mistake not, is our client now. In you go, Bertie. Over the top and best of luck.'
   I have mentioned before that Bertram Wooster, chilled steel when dealing with the sterner sex, is always wax in a woman's hands, and the present case was no exception to the r. Short of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, I could think of nothing I wanted to do less than chat with Aubrey Upjohn at this juncture, especially along the lines indicated, but having been requested by one of the delicately nurtured to take on the grim task, I had no option. I mean, either a chap's preux or he isn't, as the Chevalier Bayard used to say.
   But as I approached the instrument and unhooked the thing you unhook, I was far from being at my most nonchalant, and when I heard Upjohn are-you-there-ing at the other end my manly spirit definitely blew a fuse. For I could tell by his voice that he was in the testiest of moods. Not even when conferring with me at Malvern House, Bramley-on– Sea, on the occasion when I put sherbet in the ink, had I sensed in him a more marked stirred-up-ness.
   'Hullo? Hullo? Hullo? Are you there? Will you kindly answer me? This is Mr Upjohn speaking.'
   They always say that when the nervous system isn't all it should be the thing to do is to take a couple of deep breaths. I took six, which of course occupied a certain amount of time, and the delay noticeably increased his umbrage. Even at this distance one could spot what I believe is called the deleterious animal magnetism.
   'Is that Brinkley Court?'
   I could put him straight there. None other, I told him.
   'Who are you?'
   I had to think for a moment. Then I remembered.
   'This is Wooster, Mr Upjohn,'
   'Well, listen to me carefully, Wooster.'
   'Yes, Mr Upjohn. How do you like the «Bull and Bush»? Everything pretty snug?'
   'What did you say?'
   'I was asking if you like the «Bull and Bush».'
   'Never mind the «Bull and Bush».'
   'No, Mr Upjohn.'
   'This is of vital importance. I wish to speak to the man who packed my things.'
   'Jeeves.'
   'What?'
   'Jeeves.'
   'What do you mean by Jeeves?'
   'Jeeves.'
   'You keep saying «Jeeves» and it makes no sense. Who packed my belongings?'
   'Jeeves.'
   'Oh, Jeeves is the man's name?'
   'Yes, Mr Upjohn.'
   'Well, he carelessly omitted to pack the notes for my speech at Market Snodsbury Grammar School tomorrow.'
   'No, really! I don't wonder you're sore.'
   'Saw whom?'
   'Sore with an r.'
   'What?'
   'No, sorry. I mean with an o-r-e.'
   'Wooster!'
   'Yes, Mr Upjohn.'
   'Are you intoxicated?'
   'No, Mr Upjohn.'
   'Then you are drivelling. Stop drivelling, Wooster.'
   'Yes, Mr Upjohn.'
   'Send for this man Jeeves immediately and ask him what he did with the notes for my speech.'
   'Yes, Mr Upjohn.'
   'At once! Don't stand there saying «Yes, Mr Upjohn».'
   'No, Mr Upjohn.'
   'It is imperative that I have them in my possession immediately.'
   'Yes, Mr Upjohn.'
   Well, I suppose, looking at it squarely, I hadn't made much real progress and a not too close observer might quite possibly have got the impression that I had lost my nerve and was shirking the issue, but that didn't in my opinion justify Bobbie at this point in snatching the receiver from my grasp and bellowing the word 'Worm!' at me.
   'What did you call me?' said Upjohn.
   'I didn't call you anything,' I said. 'Somebody called me something.'
   'I wish to speak to this man Jeeves.'
   'You do, do you?' said Bobbie. 'Well, you're going to speak to me. This is Roberta Wickham, Upjohn. If I might have your kind attention for a moment.'
   I must say that, much as I disapproved in many ways of this carrot– topped Jezebel, as she was sometimes called, there was no getting away from it that she had mastered the art of talking to retired preparatory schoolmasters. The golden words came pouring out like syrup. Of course, she wasn't handicapped, as I had been, by having sojourned for some years beneath the roof of Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, and having at a malleable age associated with this old Frankenstein's monster when he was going good, but even so her performance deserved credit.
   Beginning with a curt 'Listen, Buster,' she proceeded to sketch out with admirable clearness the salient points in the situation as she envisaged it, and judging from the loud buzzing noises that came over the wire, clearly audible to me though now standing in the background, it was evident that the nub was not escaping him. They were the buzzing noises of a man slowly coming to the realization that a woman's hand had got him by the short hairs.
   Presently they died away, and Bobbie spoke.
   'That's fine,' she said. 'I was sure you'd come round to our view. Then I will be with you shortly. Mind there's plenty of ink in your fountain pen.'
   She hung up and legged it from the room, once more giving vent to those animal cries, and I turned to Jeeves as I had so often turned to him before when musing on the activities of the other sex.
   'Women, Jeeves!'
   'Yes, sir.'
   'Were you following all that?'
   'Yes, sir.'
   'I gather that Upjohn, vowing … How does it go?'
   'Vowing he would ne'er consent, consented, sir.'
   'He's withdrawing the suit.'
   'Yes, sir. And Miss Wickham prudently specified that he do so in writing.'
   'Thus avoiding all rannygazoo?'
   'Yes, sir.'
   'She thinks of everything.'
   'Yes, sir.'
   'I thought she was splendidly firm.'
   'Yes, sir.'
   'It's the red hair that does it, I imagine.'
   'Yes, sir.'
   'If anyone had told me that I should live to hear Aubrey Upjohn addressed as «Buster» …'
   I would have spoken further, but before I could get under way the door opened, revealing Ma Cream, and he shimmered silently from the room. Unless expressly desired to remain, he always shimmers off when what is called the Quality arrive.

20

   This was the first time I had seen Ma Cream today, she having gone off around noon to lunch with some friends in Birmingham, and I would willingly not have seen her now, for something in her manner seemed to suggest that she spelled trouble. She was looking more like Sherlock Holmes than ever. Slap a dressing-gown on her and give her a violin, and she could have walked straight into Baker Street and no questions asked. Fixing me with a penetrating eye, she said:
   'Oh, there you are, Mr Wooster. I was looking for you.'
   'You wished speech with me?'
   'Yes. I wanted to say that now perhaps you'd believe me.'
   'I beg your pardon?'
   'About that butler.'
   'What about him?'
   'I'll tell you about him. I'd sit down, if I were you. It's a long story.'
   I sat down. Clad to, as a matter of fact, for the legs were feeling weak.
   'You remember I told you I mistrusted him from the first?'
   'Oh ah, yes. You did, didn't you?'
   'I said he had a criminal face.'
   'He can't help his face.'
   'He can help being a crook and an impostor. Calls himself a butler, does he? The police could shake that story. He's no more a butler than I am.'
   I did my best.
   'But think of those references of his.'
   'I am thinking of them.'
   'He couldn't have stuck it out as major-domo to a man like Sir Roderick Glossop, if he'd been dishonest.'
   'He didn't.'
   'But Bobbie said –'
   'I remember very clearly what Miss Wickham said. She told me he had been with Sir Roderick Glossop for years.'
   'Well, then.'
   'You think that puts him in the clear?'
   'Certainly.'
   'I don't, and I'll tell you why. Sir Roderick Glossop has a large clinic down in Somersetshire at a place called Chuffnell Regis, and a friend of mine is there. I wrote to her asking her to see Lady Glossop and get all the information she could about a former butler of hers named Swordfish. When I got back from Birmingham just now, I found a letter from her. She says that Lady Glossop told her she had never employed a butler called Swordfish. Try that one on for size.'
   I continued to do my best. The Woosters never give up.
   'You don't know Lady Glossop, do you?'
   'Of course I don't, or I'd have written to her direct.'
   'Charming woman, but with a memory like a sieve. The sort who's always losing one glove at the theatre. Naturally she wouldn't remember a butler's name. She probably thought all along it was Fotheringay or Binks or something. Very common, that sort of mental lapse. I was up at Oxford with a man called Robinson, and I was trying to think of his name the other day and the nearest I could get to it was Fosdyke. It only came back to me when I saw in The Times a few days ago that Herbert Robinson (26) of Grove Road, Ponder's End, had been had up at Bosher Street police court, charged with having stolen a pair of green and yellow checked trousers. Not the same chap, of course, but you get the idea. I've no doubt that one of these fine mornings Lady Glossop will suddenly smack herself on the forehead and cry «Swordfish! Of course! And all this time I've been thinking of the honest fellow as Catbird!"'
   She sniffed. And if I were to say that I liked the way she sniffed, I would be wilfully deceiving my public. It was the sort of sniff Sherlock Holmes would have sniffed when about to clap the darbies on the chap who had swiped the Maharajah's ruby.
   'Honest fellow, did you say? Then how do you account for this? I saw Willie just now, and he tells me that a valuable eighteenth-century cow– creamer which he bought from Mr Travers is missing. And where is it, you ask? At this moment it is tucked away in Swordfish's bedroom in a drawer under his clean shirts.'
   In stating that the Woosters never give up, I was in error. These words caught me amidships and took all the fighting spirit out of me, leaving me a spent force.
   'Oh, is it?' I said. Not good, but the best I could do.
   'Yes, sir, that's where it is. Directly Willie told me the thing had gone, I knew where it had gone to. I went to this man Swordfish's room and searched it, and there it was. I've sent for the police.'
   Again I had that feeling of having been spiritually knocked base over apex. I gaped at the woman.
   'You've sent for the police?'
   'I have, and they're sending a sergeant. He ought to be here at any moment. And shall I tell you something? I'm going now to stand outside Swordfish's door, to see that nobody tampers with the evidence. I'm not going to take any chances. I wouldn't want to say anything to suggest that I don't trust you implicitly, Mr Wooster, but I don't like the way you've been sticking up for this fellow. You've been far too sympathetic with him for my taste.'
   'It's just that I think he may have yielded to sudden temptation and all that.'
   'Nonsense. He's probably been acting this way all his life. I'll bet he was swiping things as a small boy.'
   'Only biscuits.'
   'I beg your pardon?'
   'Or crackers you would call them, wouldn't you? He was telling me he occasionally pinched a cracker or two in his salad days.'
   'Well, there you are. You start with crackers and you end up with silver jugs. That's life,' she said, and buzzed off to keep her vigil, leaving me kicking myself because I'd forgotten to say anything about the quality of mercy not being strained. It isn't, as I dare say you know, and a mention of this might just have done the trick.
   I was still brooding on this oversight and wondering what was to be done for the best, when Bobbie and Aunt Dahlia came in, looking like a young female and an elderly female who were sitting on top of the world.
   'Roberta tells me she has got Upjohn to withdraw the libel suit,' said Aunt Dahlia. 'I couldn't be more pleased, but I'm blowed if I can imagine how she did it.'
   'Oh, I just appealed to his better feelings,' said Bobbie, giving me one of those significant glances. I got the message. The ancestor, she was warning me, must never learn that she had achieved her ends by jeopardizing the delivery of the Upjohn speech to the young scholars of Market Snodsbury Grammar School on the morrow. 'I told him that the quality of mercy … What's the matter, Bertie?'
   'Nothing. Just starting.'
   'What do you want to start for?'
   'I believe Brinkley Court is open for starting in at about this hour, is it not? The quality of mercy, you were saying?'
   'Yes. It isn't strained.'
   'I believe not.'
   'And in case you didn't know, it's twice bless'd and becomes the throned monarch better than his crown. I drove over to the «Bull and Bush» and put this to Upjohn, and he saw my point. So now everything's fine.'
   I uttered a hacking laugh.
   'No,' I said, in answer to a query from Aunt Dahlia. 'I have not accidentally swallowed my tonsils, I was merely laughing hackingly. Ironical that the young blister should say that everything is fine, for at this very moment disaster stares us in the eyeball. I have a story to relate which I think you will agree falls into the fretful porpentine class,' I said, and without further pourparlers I unshipped my tale.
   I had anticipated that it would shake them to their foundation garments, and it did. Aunt Dahlia reeled like an aunt struck behind the ear with a blunt instrument, and Bobbie tottered like a red-haired girl who hadn't known it was loaded.
   'You see the set-up,' I continued, not wanting to rub it in but feeling that they should be fully briefed. 'Glossop will return from his afternoon off to find the awful majesty of the Law waiting for him, complete with handcuffs. We can hardly expect him to accept an exemplary sentence without a murmur, so his first move will be to establish his innocence by revealing all. «True,» he will say, «I did pinch this bally cow-creamer, but merely because I thought Wilbert had pinched it and it ought to be returned to store,» and he will go on to explain his position in the house – all this, mind you, in front of Ma Cream. So what ensues? The sergeant removes the gloves from his wrists, and Ma Cream asks you if she may use your telephone for a moment, as she wishes to call her husband on long distance. Pop Cream listens attentively to the tale she tells, and when Uncle Tom looks in on him later, he finds him with folded arms and a forbidding scowl. «Travers,» he says, «the deal's off.» «Off ?» quivers Uncle Tom. «Off,» says Cream. «O-ruddy-double-f. I don't do business with guys whose wives bring in loony-doctors to observe my son.» A short while ago Ma Cream was urging me to try something on for size. I suggest that you do the same for this.'
   Aunt Dahlia had sunk into a chair and was starting to turn purple. Strong emotion always has this effect on her.
   'The only thing left, it seems to me,' I said, 'is to put our trust in a higher power.'
   'You're right,' said the relative, fanning her brow. 'Go and fetch Jeeves, Roberta. And what you do, Bertie, is get out that car of yours and scour the countryside for Glossop. It may be possible to head him off. Come on, come on, let's have some service. What are you waiting for?'
   I hadn't exactly been waiting. I'd only been thinking that the enterprise had more than a touch of looking for a needle in a haystack about it. You can't find loony-doctors on their afternoon off just by driving around Worcestershire in a car; you need bloodhounds and handkerchiefs for them to sniff at and all that professional stuff. Still, there it was.
   'Right-ho,' I said. 'Anything to oblige.'

21

   And, of course, as I had anticipated from the start, the thing was a wash-out. I stuck it out for about an hour and then, apprised by a hollow feeling in the midriff that the dinner hour was approaching, laid a course for home.
   Arriving there, I found Bobbie in the drawing-room. She had the air of a girl who was waiting for something, and when she told me that the cocktails would be coming along in a moment, I knew what it was.
   'Cocktails, eh? I could do with one or possibly more,' I said. 'My fruitless quest has taken it out of me. I couldn't find Glossop anywhere. He must be somewhere, of course, but Worcestershire hid its secret well.'
   'Glossop?' she said, seeming surprised. 'Oh, he's been back for ages.'
   She wasn't half as surprised as I was. The calm with which she spoke amazed me.
   'Good Lord! This is the end.'
   'What is?'
   'This is. Has he been pinched?'
   'Of course not. He told them who he was and explained everything.'
   'Oh, gosh!'
   'What's the matter? Oh, of course, I was forgetting. You don't know the latest developments. Jeeves solved everything.'
   'He did?'
   'With a wave of the hand. It was so simple, really. One wondered why one hadn't thought of it oneself. On his advice, Glossop revealed his identity and said your aunt had got him down here to observe you.'
   I reeled, and might have fallen, had I not clutched at a photograph on a near-by table of Uncle Tom in the uniform of the East Worcestershire Volunteers.
   'No?' I said.
   'And of course it carried immediate conviction with Mrs Cream. Your aunt explained that she had been uneasy about you for a long time, because you were always doing extraordinary things like sliding down water pipes and keeping twenty-three cats in your bedroom and all that, and Mrs Cream recalled the time when she had found you hunting for mice under her son's dressing-table, so she quite agreed that it was high time you were under the observation of an experienced eye like Glossop's. She was greatly relieved when Glossop assured her that he was confident of effecting a cure. She said we must all be very, very kind to you. So everything's nice and smooth. It's extraordinary how things turn out for the best, isn't it?' she said, laughing merrily.
   Whether I would or would not at this juncture have taken her in an iron grasp and shaken her till she frothed is a point on which I can make no definite announcement. The chivalrous spirit of the Woosters would probably have restrained me, much as I resented that merry laughter, but as it happened the matter was not put to the test, for at this moment Jeeves entered, bearing a tray on which were glasses and a substantial shaker filled to the brim with the juice of the juniper berry. Bobbie drained her beaker with all possible speed and left us, saying that if she didn't get dressed, she'd be late for dinner, and Jeeves and I were alone, like a couple of bimbos in one of those movies where two strong men stand face to face and might is the only law.
   'Well, Jeeves,' I said.
   'Sir?'
   'Miss Wickham has been telling me all.'
   'Ah yes, sir.'
   'The words «Ah yes, sir» fall far short of an adequate comment on the situation. A nice … what is it? Begins with an i… im– something.'
   'Imbroglio, sir?'
   'That's it. A nice imbroglio you've landed me in. Thanks to you …'
   'Yes, sir.'
   'Don't say «Yes, sir.» Thanks to you I have been widely publicized as off my rocker.'
   'Not widely, sir. Merely to your immediate circle now resident at Brinkley Court.'
   'You have held me up at the bar of world opinion as a man who has not got all his marbles.'
   'It was not easy to think of an alternative scheme, sir.'
   'And let me tell you,' said, and I meant this to sting, 'it's amazing that you got away with it.'
   'Sir?'
   'There's a flaw in your story that sticks up like a sore thumb.'
   'Sir?'
   'It's no good standing there saying «Sir?», Jeeves. It's obvious. The cow-creamer was in Glossop's bedroom. How did he account for that?'
   'On my suggestion, sir, he explained that he had removed it from your room, where he had ascertained that you had hidden it after purloining it from Mr Cream.'
   I started.
   'You mean,' I… yes, thundered would be the word, 'You mean that I am now labelled not only as a loony in a general sort of way but also as a klept-whatever-it-is?'
   'Merely to your immediate circle now resident at Brinkley Court, sir.'
   'You keep saying that, and you must know it's the purest apple sauce. You don't really think the Creams will maintain a tactful reserve? They'll dine out on it for years. Returning to America, they'll spread the story from the rock-bound coasts of Maine to the Everglades of Florida, with the result that when I go over there again, keen looks will be shot at me at every house I go into and spoons counted before I leave. And do you realize that in a few shakes I've got to show up at dinner and have Mrs Cream being very, very kind to me? It hurts the pride of the Woosters, Jeeves.'
   'My advice, sir, would be to fortify yourself for the ordeal.'
   'How?'
   'There are always cocktails, sir. Should I pour you another?'
   'You should.'
   'And we must always remember what the poet Longfellow said, sir.'
   'What was that?'
   'Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose. You have the satisfaction of having sacrificed yourself in the interests of Mr Travers.'
   He had found a talking point. He had reminded me of those postal orders, sometimes for as much as ten bob, which Uncle Torn had sent me in the Malvern House days. I softened. Whether or not a tear rose to my eye, I cannot say, but it may be taken as official that I softened.
   'How right you are, Jeeves!' I said.

Much obliged, Jeeves

P. G. Wodehouse


Jeeves and Wooster

P.G.Wodehouse. Much obliged, Jeeves
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P.G.Wodehouse. Much obliged, Jeeves

1

   As I slid into my chair at the breakfast table and started to deal with the toothsome eggs and bacon which Jeeves had given of his plenty, I was conscious of a strange exhilaration, if I've got the word right. Pretty good the set-up looked to me. Here I was, back in the old familiar headquarters, and the thought that I had seen the last of Totleigh Towers, of Sir Watkyn Bassett, of his daughter Madeline and above all of the unspeakable Spode, or Lord Sidcup as he now calls himself, was like the medium dose for adults of one of those patent medicines which tone the system and impart a gentle glow.
   'These eggs, Jeeves,' I said. 'Very good. Very tasty.'
   'Yes, sir?'
   'Laid, no doubt, by contented hens. And the coffee, perfect. Nor must I omit to give a word of praise to the bacon. I wonder if you notice anything about me this morning.'
   'You seem in good spirits, sir.'
   'Yes, Jeeves, I am happy today.'
   'I am very glad to hear it, sir.'
   'You might say I'm sitting on top of the world with a rainbow round my shoulder.'
   'A most satisfactory state of affairs, sir.'
   'What's the word I've heard you use from time to time – begins with eu?'
   'Euphoria, sir?'
   'That's the one. I've seldom had a sharper attack of euphoria. I feel full to the brim of Vitamin B. Mind you, I don't know how long it will last. Too often it is when one feels fizziest that the storm clouds begin doing their stuff.'
   'Very true, sir. Full many a glorious morning have I seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, kissing with golden face the meadows green, gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy, Anon permit the basest clouds to ride with ugly rack on his celestial face and from the forlorn world his visage hide, stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.'
   'Exactly,' I said. I couldn't have put it better myself. 'One always has to budget for a change in the weather. Still, the thing to do is to keep on being happy while you can.'
   'Precisely, sir. Carpe diem, the Roman poet Horace advised. The English poet Herrick expressed the same sentiment when he suggested that we should gather rosebuds while we may. Your elbow is in the butter, sir.'
   'Oh, thank you, Jeeves.'Well, all right so far. Off to a nice start. But now we come to something which gives me pause. In recording the latest instalment of the Bertram Wooster Story, a task at which I am about to have a pop, I don't see how I can avoid delving into the past a good deal, touching on events which took place in previous instalments, and explaining who's who and what happened when and where and why, and this will make it heavy going for those who have been with me from the start. 'Old hat' they will cry or, if French, 'Deja vu'.
   On the other hand, I must consider the new customers. I can't just leave the poor perishers to try to puzzle things out for themselves. If I did, the exchanges in the present case would run somewhat as follows.
   SELF: The relief I felt at having escaped from Totleigh Towers was stupendous.
   NEW C: What's Totleigh Towers?
   SELF: For one thing it had looked odds on that I should have to marry Madeline.
   NEW C: Who's Madeline?
   SELF: Gussie Fink-Nottle, you see, had eloped with the cook.
   NEW C: Who's Gussie Fink-Nottle?
   SELF: But most fortunately Spode was in the offing and scooped her up, saving me from the scaffold.
   NEW C: Who's Spode?
   You see. Hopeless. Confusion would be rife, as one might put it. The only way out that I can think of is to ask the old gang to let their attention wander for a bit – there are heaps of things they can be doing; washing the car, solving the crossword puzzle, taking the dog for a run – while I place the facts before the newcomers.
   Briefly, then, owing to circumstances I needn't go into, Madeline Bassett daughter of Sir Watkyn Bassett of Totleigh Towers, Glos. had long been under the impression that I was hopelessly in love with her and had given to understand that if ever she had occasion to return her betrothed, Gussie Fink-Nottle, to store, she would marry me. Which wouldn't have fitted in with my plans at all, she though physically in the pin-up class, being as mushy a character as ever broke biscuit, convinced that the stars are God's daisy chain and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born. The last thing, as you can well imagine, one would want about the home.
   So when Gussie unexpectedly eloped with the cook, it looked as though Bertram was for it. If a girl thinks you're in love with her and says she will marry you, you can't very well voice a preference for being dead in a ditch. Not, I mean, if you want to regard yourself as a preux chevalier, as the expression is, which is always my aim. But just as I was about to put in my order for sackcloth and ashes, up, as I say, popped Spode, now going about under the alias of Lord Sidcup. He had loved her since she was so high but had never got around to mentioning it, and when he did so now, they clicked immediately. And the thought that she was safely out of circulation and no longer a menace was possibly the prime ingredient in my current euphoria.
   I think that makes everything clear to the meanest intelligence, does it not? Right ho, so we can go ahead. Where were we? Ah yes, I had just told Jeeves that I was sitting on top of the world with a rainbow round my shoulder, but expressing a doubt as to whether this state of things would last, and how well-founded that doubt proved to be; for scarcely a forkful of eggs and b later it was borne in upon me that life was not the grand sweet song I had supposed it to be, but, as you might say, stern and earnest and full of bumps.
   'Was I mistaken, Jeeves,' I said, making idle conversation as I sipped my coffee, 'or as the mists of sleep shredded away this morning did I hear your typewriter going?'
   'Yes, sir. I was engaged in composition.'
   'A dutiful letter to Charlie Silversmith?' I said, alluding to his uncle who held the post of butler at Deverill Hall, where we had once been pleasant visitors. 'Or possibly a lyric in the manner of the bloke who advocates gathering rosebuds?'
   'Neither, sir. I was recording the recent happenings at Totleigh Towers for the club book.'
   And here, dash it, I must once more ask what I may call the old sweats to let their attention wander while I put the new arrivals abreast.
   Jeeves, you must know (I am addressing the new arrivals), belongs to a club for butlers and gentlemen's gentlemen round Curzon Street way, and one of the rules there is that every member must contribute to the club book the latest information concerning the fellow he's working for, the idea being to inform those seeking employment of the sort of thing they will be taking on. If a member is contemplating signing up with someone, he looks him up in the club book, and if he finds that he puts out crumbs for the birdies every morning and repeatedly saves golden-haired children from being run over by automobiles, he knows he is on a good thing and has no hesitation in accepting office. Whereas if the book informs him that the fellow habitually kicks starving dogs and generally begins the day by throwing the breakfast porridge at his personal attendant, he is warned in time to steer clear of him.
   Which is all very well and one follows the train of thought, but in my opinion such a book is pure dynamite and ought not to be permitted. There are, Jeeves has informed me, eleven pages in it about me; and what will the harvest be, I ask him, if it falls into the hands of my Aunt Agatha, with whom my standing is already low. She spoke her mind freely enough some years ago when – against my personal wishes – I was found with twenty-three cats in my bedroom and again when I was accused – unjustly, I need hardly say – of having marooned A. B. Filmer, the Cabinet minister, on an island in her lake. To what heights of eloquence would she not soar, if informed of my vicissitudes at Totleigh Towers? The imagination boggles, Jeeves, I tell him.
   To which he replies that it won't fall into the hands of my Aunt Agatha, she not being likely to drop in at the Junior Ganymede, which is what his club is called, and there the matter rests. His reasoning is specious and he has more or less succeeded in soothing my tremors, but I still can't help feeling uneasy, and my manner, as I addressed him now, had quite a bit of agitation in it.
   'Good Lord!' I ejaculated, if ejaculated is the word I want. 'Are you really writing up that Totleigh business?'
   'Yes, sir.'
   'All the stuff about my being supposed to have pinched old Bassett's amber statuette?'
   'Yes, sir.'
   'And the night I spent in a prison cell? Is this necessary? Why not let the dead past bury its dead? Why not forget all about it?'
   'Impossible, sir.'
   'Why impossible? Don't tell me you can't forget things. You aren't an elephant.'
   I thought I had him there, but no.
   'It is my membership in the Junior Ganymede which restrains me from obliging you, sir. The rules with reference to the club book are very strict and the penalty for omitting to contribute to it severe. Actual expulsion has sometimes resulted.'
   'I see,' I said. I could appreciate that this put him in quite a spot, the feudal spirit making him wish to do the square thing by the young master, while a natural disinclination to get bunged out of a well-loved club urged him to let the young master boil his head. The situation seemed to me to call for what is known as a compromise.
   'Well, couldn't you water the thing down a bit? Omit one or two of the juiciest episodes?'
   'I fear not, sir. The full facts are required. The committee insists on this.'
   I suppose I ought not at this point to have expressed a hope that his blasted committee would trip over banana skins and break their ruddy necks, for I seemed to detect on his face a momentary look of pain. But he was broadminded and condoned it.
   'Your chagrin does not surprise me, sir. One can, however, understand their point of view. The Junior Ganymede club book is a historic document. It has been in existence more than eighty years.'
   'It must be the size of a house.'
   'No, sir, the records are in several volumes. The present one dates back some twelve years. And one must remember that it is not every employer who demands a great deal of space.'
   'Demands!'
   'I should have said «requires». As a rule, a few lines suffice. Your eighteen pages are quite exceptional.'
   'Eighteen? I thought it was eleven.'
   'You are omitting to take into your calculations the report of your misadventures at Totleigh Towers, which I have nearly completed. I anticipate that this will run to approximately seven. If you will permit me, sir, I will pat your back.'
   He made this kindly offer because I had choked on a swallow of coffee. A few pats and I was myself again and more than a little incensed, as always happens when we are discussing his literary work. Eighteen pages, I mean to say, and every page full of stuff calculated, if thrown open to the public, to give my prestige the blackest of eyes. Conscious of a strong desire to kick the responsible parties in the seat of the pants, I spoke with a generous warmth.
   'Well, I call it monstrous. There's no other word for it. Do you know what that blasted committee of yours are inviting? Blackmail, that's what they're inviting. Let some man of ill will get his hooks on that book, and what'll be the upshot? Ruin, Jeeves, that's what'll be the upshot.'
   I don't know if he drew himself to his full height, because I was lighting a cigarette at the moment and wasn't looking, but I think he must have done, for his voice, when he spoke, was the chilly voice of one who has drawn himself to his full height.
   'There are no men of ill will in the Junior Ganymede, sir.'
   I contested this statement hotly.
   That's what you think. How about Brinkley?' I said, my allusion being to a fellow the agency had sent me some years previously when Jeeves and I had parted company temporarily because he didn't like me playing the banjolele. 'He's a member, isn't he?'
   'A county member, sir. He rarely comes to the club. In passing, sir, his name is not Brinkley, it is Bingley.'
   I waved an impatient cigarette holder. I was in no mood to split straws. Or is it hairs?
   'His name is not of the essence, Jeeves. What is of the e is that he went off on his afternoon out, came back in an advanced state of intoxication, set the house on fire and tried to dismember me with a carving knife.'
   'A most unpleasant experience, sir.'
   'Having heard noises down below, I emerged from my room and found him wrestling with the grandfather clock, with which he appeared to have had a difference. He then knocked over a lamp and leaped up the stairs at me, complete with cutlass. By a miracle I avoided becoming the late Bertram Wooster, but only by a miracle. And you say there are no men of ill will in the Junior Ganymede club. Tchah!' I said. It is an expression I don't often use, but the situation seemed to call for it.
   Things had become difficult. Angry passions were rising and dudgeon bubbling up a bit. It was fortunate that at this juncture the telephone should have tootled, causing a diversion.
   'Mrs Travers, sir,' said Jeeves, having gone to the instrument.

2

   I had already divined who was at the other end of the wire, my good and deserving Aunt Dahlia having a habit of talking on the telephone with the breezy vehemence of a hog-caller in the western states of America calling his hogs to come and get it. She got this way through hunting a lot in her youth with the Quorn and the Pytchley. What with people riding over hounds and hounds taking time off to chase rabbits, a girl who hunts soon learns to make herself audible. I believe that she, when in good voice, could be heard in several adjoining counties.
   I stepped to the telephone, well pleased. There are few males or females whose society I enjoy more than that of this genial sister of my late father, and it was quite a time since we had foregathered. She lives near the town of Market Snodsbury in Worcestershire and sticks pretty closely to the rural seat, while I, as Jeeves had just recorded in the club book, had had my time rather full elsewhere of late. I was smiling sunnily as I took up the receiver. Not much good, of course, as she couldn't see me, but it's the spirit that counts.
   'Hullo, aged relative.'
   'Hullo to you, you young blot. Are you sober?'
   I felt a natural resentment at being considered capable of falling under the influence of the sauce at ten in the morning, but I reminded myself that aunts will be aunts. Show me an aunt, I've often said, and I will show you someone who doesn't give a hoot how much her obiter dicta may wound a nephew's sensibilities. With a touch of hauteur I reassured her on the point she had raised and asked her in what way I could serve her.
   'How about lunch?'
   'I'm not in London. I'm at home. And you can serve me, as you call it, by coming here. Today, if possible.'
   'Your words are music to my ears, old ancestor. Nothing could tickle me pinker,' I said, for I am always glad to accept her hospitality and to renew my acquaintance with the unbeatable eatables dished up by her superb French chef Anatole, God's gift to the gastric juices. I have often regretted that I have but one stomach to put at his disposal. 'Staying how long?'
   'As long as you like, my beamish boy. I'll let you know when the time comes to throw you out. The great thing is to get you here.'
   I was touched, as who would not have been, by the eagerness she showed for my company. Too many of my circle are apt when inviting me to their homes to stress the fact that they are only expecting me for the week-end and to dwell with too much enthusiasm on the excellence of the earlier trains back to the metropolis on Monday morning. The sunny smile widened an inch or two.
   'Awfully good of you to have me, old blood relation.'
   'It is, rather.'
   'I look forward to seeing you.'
   'Who wouldn't?'
   'Each minute will seem like an hour till we meet. How's Anatole?'
   'Greedy young pig, always thinking of Anatole.'
   'Difficult to help it. The taste lingers. How is his art these days?'
   'At its peak.'
   'That's good.'
   'Ginger says his output has been a revelation to him.'
   I asked her to repeat this. It had sounded to me just as if she had said 'Ginger says his output has been a revelation to him', and I knew this couldn't be the case. It turned out, however, that it was.
   'Ginger?' I said, not abreast.
   'Harold Winship. He told me to call him Ginger. He's staying here. He says he's a friend of yours, which he would scarcely admit unless he knew it could be proved against him. You do know him, don't you? He speaks of having been at Oxford with you.'
   I uttered a joyful cry, and she said if I did it again, she would sue me, it having nearly cracked her eardrum. A notable instance of the pot calling the kettle black, as the old saying has it, she having been cracking mine since the start of the proceedings.
   'Know him?' I said. 'You bet I know him. We were like … Jeeves!'
   'Sir?'
   'Who were those two fellows?'
   'Sir?'
   'Greek, if I remember correctly. Always mentioned when the subject of bosom pals comes up.'
   'Would you be referring to Damon and Pythias, sir?'
   'That's right. We were like Damon and Pythias, old ancestor. But what's he doing chez you? I wasn't aware that you and he had ever met.'
   'We hadn't. But his mother was an old school friend of mine.'
   'I see.'
   'And when I heard he was standing for Parliament in the by– election at Market Snodsbury, I wrote to him and told him to make my house his base. Much more comfortable than dossing at a pub.'
   'Oh, you've got a by-election at Market Snodsbury, have you?'
   'Under full steam.'
   'And Ginger's one of the candidates?'
   'The Conservative one. You seem surprised.'
   'I am. You might say stunned. I wouldn't have thought it was his dish at all. How's he doing?'
   'Difficult to say so far. Anyway, he needs all the help he can get, so I want you to come and canvass for him.'
   This made me chew the lower lip for a moment. One has to exercise caution at a time like this, or where is one?
   'What does it involve?' I asked guardedly. 'I shan't have to kiss babies, shall I?'
   'Of course you won't, you abysmal chump.'
   'I've always heard that kissing babies entered largely into these things.'
   'Yes, but it's the candidate who does it, poor blighter. All you have to do is go from house to house urging the inmates to vote for Ginger.'
   'Then rely on me. Such an assignment should be well within my scope. Old Ginger!' I said, feeling emotional. 'It will warm the what-d'you-call-its of my heart to see him again.'
   'Well, you'll have the opportunity of hotting them up this very afternoon. He's gone to London for the day and wants you to lunch with him.'
   'Does he, egad! That's fine. What time?'
   'One-thirty.'
   'At what spot?'
   'Barribault's grill-room.'
   'I'll be there. Jeeves,' I said, hanging up, 'You remember Ginger Winship, who used to play Damon to my Pythias?'
   'Yes, indeed, sir.'
   'They've got an election on at Market Snodsbury, and he's standing in the Conservative interest.'
   'So I understood Madam to say, sir.'
   'Oh, you caught her remarks?'
   'With little or no difficulty, sir. Madam has a penetrating voice.'
   'It does penetrate, doesn't it,' I said, massaging the ear I had been holding to the receiver. 'Good lung power.'
   'Extremely, sir.'
   'I wonder whether she ever sang lullabies to me in my cradle. If so, it must have scared me cross-eyed, giving me the illusion that the boiler had exploded. However, that is not germane to the issue, which is that we leave for her abode this afternoon. I shall be lunching with Ginger. In my absence, pack a few socks and toothbrushes, will you.'
   'Very good, sir,' he replied, and we did not return to the subject of the club book.