-19-

   Most chaps in my position, I imagine, would have pondered all the rest of the evening without getting a bite, but we Woosters have an uncanny knack of going straight to the heart of things, and I don't suppose it was much more than ten minutes after I had started pondering before I saw what had to be done.
   What was needed to straighten matters out, I perceived, was a heart-to-heart talk with Angela. She had caused all the trouble by her mutton-headed behaviour in saying “Yes” instead of “No” when Gussie, in the grip of mixed drinks and cerebral excitement, had suggested teaming up. She must obviously be properly ticked off and made to return him to store. A quarter of an hour later, I had tracked her down to the summer-house in which she was taking a cooler and was seating myself by her side.
   “Angela,” I said, and if my voice was stern, well, whose wouldn't have been, “this is all perfect drivel.”
   She seemed to come out of a reverie. She looked at me inquiringly.
   “I'm sorry, Bertie, I didn't hear. What were you talking drivel about?”
   “I was not talking drivel.”
   “Oh, sorry, I thought you said you were.”
   “Is it likely that I would come out here in order to talk drivel?”
   “Very likely.”
   I thought it best to haul off and approach the matter from another angle.
   “I've just been seeing Tuppy.”
   “Oh?”
   “And Gussie Fink-Nottle.”
   “Oh, yes?”
   “It appears that you have gone and got engaged to the latter.”
   “Quite right.”
   “Well, that's what I meant when I said it was all perfect drivel. You can't possibly love a chap like Gussie.”
   “Why not?”
   “You simply can't.”
   Well, I mean to say, of course she couldn't. Nobody could love a freak like Gussie except a similar freak like the Bassett. The shot wasn't on the board. A splendid chap, of course, in many ways—courteous, amiable, and just the fellow to tell you what to do till the doctor came, if you had a sick newt on your hands—but quite obviously not of Mendelssohn's March timber. I have no doubt that you could have flung bricks by the hour in England's most densely populated districts without endangering the safety of a single girl capable of becoming Mrs. Augustus Fink-Nottle without an anaesthetic.
   I put this to her, and she was forced to admit the justice of it.
   “All right, then. Perhaps I don't.”
   “Then what,” I said keenly, “did you want to go and get engaged to him for, you unreasonable young fathead?”
   “I thought it would be fun.”
   “Fun!”
   “And so it has been. I've had a lot of fun out of it. You should have seen Tuppy's face when I told him.”
   A sudden bright light shone upon me.
   “Ha! A gesture!”
   “What?”
   “You got engaged to Gussie just to score off Tuppy?”
   “I did.”
   “Well, then, that was what I was saying. It was a gesture.”
   “Yes, I suppose you could call it that.”
   “And I'll tell you something else I'll call it—viz. a dashed low trick. I'm surprised at you, young Angela.”
   “I don't see why.”
   I curled the lip about half an inch. “Being a female, you wouldn't. You gentler sexes are like that. You pull off the rawest stuff without a pang. You pride yourselves on it. Look at Jael, the wife of Heber.”
   “Where did you ever hear of Jael, the wife of Heber?”
   “Possibly you are not aware that I once won a Scripture-knowledge prize at school?”
   “Oh, yes. I remember Augustus mentioning it in his speech.”
   “Quite,” I said, a little hurriedly. I had no wish to be reminded of Augustus's speech. “Well, as I say, look at Jael, the wife of Heber. Dug spikes into the guest's coconut while he was asleep, and then went swanking about the place like a Girl Guide. No wonder they say, 'Oh, woman, woman!'“
   “Who?”
   “The chaps who do. Coo, what a sex! But you aren't proposing to keep this up, of course?”
   “Keep what up?”
   “This rot of being engaged to Gussie.”
   “I certainly am.”
   “Just to make Tuppy look silly.”
   “Do you think he looks silly?”
   “I do.”
   “So he ought to.”
   I began to get the idea that I wasn't making real headway. I remember when I won that Scripture-knowledge prize, having to go into the facts about Balaam's ass. I can't quite recall what they were, but I still retain a sort of general impression of something digging its feet in and putting its ears back and refusing to co-operate; and it seemed to me that this was what Angela was doing now. She and Balaam's ass were, so to speak, sisters under the skin. There's a word beginning with r—“re” something—“recal” something—No, it's gone. But what I am driving at is that is what this Angela was showing herself.
   “Silly young geezer,” I said.
   She pinkened.
   “I'm not a silly young geezer.”
   “You are a silly young geezer. And, what's more, you know it.”
   “I don't know anything of the kind.”
   “Here you are, wrecking Tuppy's life, wrecking Gussie's life, all for the sake of a cheap score.”
   “Well, it's no business of yours.”
   I sat on this promptly:
   “No business of mine when I see two lives I used to go to school with wrecked? Ha! Besides, you know you're potty about Tuppy.”
   “I'm not!”
   “Is that so? If I had a quid for every time I've seen you gaze at him with the lovelight in your eyes—”
   She gazed at me, but without the lovelight.
   “Oh, for goodness sake, go away and boil your head, Bertie!”
   I drew myself up.
   “That,” I replied, with dignity, “is just what I am going to go away and boil. At least, I mean, I shall now leave you. I have said my say.”
   “Good.”
   “But permit me to add—”
   “I won't.”
   “Very good,” I said coldly. “In that case, tinkerty tonk.”
   And I meant it to sting.
   “Moody” and “discouraged” were about the two adjectives you would have selected to describe me as I left the summer-house. It would be idle to deny that I had expected better results from this little chat.
   I was surprised at Angela. Odd how you never realize that every girl is at heart a vicious specimen until something goes wrong with her love affair. This cousin and I had been meeting freely since the days when I wore sailor suits and she hadn't any front teeth, yet only now was I beginning to get on to her hidden depths. A simple, jolly, kindly young pimple she had always struck me as—the sort you could more or less rely on not to hurt a fly. But here she was now laughing heartlessly—at least, I seemed to remember hearing her laugh heartlessly—like something cold and callous out of a sophisticated talkie, and fairly spitting on her hands in her determination to bring Tuppy's grey hairs in sorrow to the grave.
   I've said it before, and I'll say it again—girls are rummy. Old Pop Kipling never said a truer word than when he made that crack about the f. of the s. being more d. than the m.
   It seemed to me in the circs. that there was but one thing to do—that is head for the dining-room and take a slash at the cold collation of which Jeeves had spoken. I felt in urgent need of sustenance, for the recent interview had pulled me down a bit. There is no gainsaying the fact that this naked-emotion stuff reduces a chap's vitality and puts him in the vein for a good whack at the beef and ham.
   To the dining-room, accordingly, I repaired, and had barely crossed the threshold when I perceived Aunt Dahlia at the sideboard, tucking into salmon mayonnaise.
   The spectacle drew from me a quick “Oh, ah,” for I was somewhat embarrassed. The last time this relative and I had enjoyed atete-a-tete,it will be remembered, she had sketched out plans for drowning me in the kitchen-garden pond, and I was not quite sure what my present standing with her was.
   I was relieved to find her in genial mood. Nothing could have exceeded the cordiality with which she waved her fork.
   “Hallo, Bertie, you old ass,” was her very matey greeting. “I thought I shouldn't find you far away from the food. Try some of this salmon. Excellent.”
   “Anatole's?” I queried.
   “No. He's still in bed. But the kitchen maid has struck an inspired streak. It suddenly seems to have come home to her that she isn't catering for a covey of buzzards in the Sahara Desert, and she has put out something quite fit for human consumption. There is good in the girl, after all, and I hope she enjoys herself at the dance.”
   I ladled out a portion of salmon, and we fell into pleasant conversation, chatting of this servants' ball at the Stretchley-Budds and speculating idly, I recall, as to what Seppings, the butler, would look like, doing the rumba.
   It was not till I had cleaned up the first platter and was embarking on a second that the subject of Gussie came up. Considering what had passed at Market Snodsbury that afternoon, it was one which I had been expecting her to touch on earlier. When she did touch on it, I could see that she had not yet been informed of Angela's engagement.
   “I say, Bertie,” she said, meditatively chewing fruit salad. “This Spink-Bottle.”
   “Nottle.”
   “Bottle,” insisted the aunt firmly. “After that exhibition of his this afternoon, Bottle, and nothing but Bottle, is how I shall always think of him. However, what I was going to say was that, if you see him, I wish you would tell him that he has made an old woman very, very happy. Except for the time when the curate tripped over a loose shoelace and fell down the pulpit steps, I don't think I have ever had a more wonderful moment than when good old Bottle suddenly started ticking Tom off from the platform. In fact, I thought his whole performance in the most perfect taste.”
   I could not but demur.
   “Those references to myself—”
   “Those were what I liked next best. I thought they were fine. Is it true that you cheated when you won that Scripture-knowledge prize?”
   “Certainly not. My victory was the outcome of the most strenuous and unremitting efforts.”
   “And how about this pessimism we hear of? Are you a pessimist, Bertie?”
   I could have told her that what was occurring in this house was rapidly making me one, but I said no, I wasn't.
   “That's right. Never be a pessimist. Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. It's a long lane that has no turning. It s always darkest before the dawn. Have patience and all will come right. The sun will shine, although the day's a grey one.... Try some of this salad.”
   I followed her advice, but even as I plied the spoon my thoughts were elsewhere. I was perplexed. It may have been the fact that I had recently been hobnobbing with so many bowed-down hearts that made this cheeriness of hers seem so bizarre, but bizarre was certainly what I found it.
   “I thought you might have been a trifle peeved,” I said.
   “Peeved?”
   “By Gussie's manoeuvres on the platform this afternoon. I confess that I had rather expected the tapping foot and the drawn brow.”
   “Nonsense. What was there to be peeved about? I took the whole thing as a great compliment, proud to feel that any drink from my cellars could have produced such a majestic jag. It restores one's faith in post-war whisky. Besides, I couldn't be peeved at anything tonight. I am like a little child clapping its hands and dancing in the sunshine. For though it has been some time getting a move on, Bertie, the sun has at last broken through the clouds. Ring out those joy bells. Anatole has withdrawn his notice.”
   “What? Oh, very hearty congratulations.”
   “Thanks. Yes, I worked on him like a beaver after I got back this afternoon, and finally, vowing he would ne'er consent, he consented. He stays on, praises be, and the way I look at it now is that God's in His heaven and all's right with—”
   She broke off. The door had opened, and we were plus a butler.
   “Hullo, Seppings,” said Aunt Dahlia. “I thought you had gone.”
   “Not yet, madam.”
   “Well, I hope you will all have a good time.”
   “Thank you, madam.”
   “Was there something you wanted to see me about?”
   “Yes, madam. It is with reference to Monsieur Anatole. Is it by your wish, madam, that Mr. Fink-Nottle is making faces at Monsieur Anatole through the skylight of his bedroom?”

-20-

   There was one of those long silences. Pregnant, I believe, is what they're generally called. Aunt looked at butler. Butler looked at aunt. I looked at both of them. An eerie stillness seemed to envelop the room like a linseed poultice. I happened to be biting on a slice of apple in my fruit salad at the moment, and it sounded as if Carnera had jumped off the top of the Eiffel Tower on to a cucumber frame.
   Aunt Dahlia steadied herself against the sideboard, and spoke in a low, husky voice:
   “Faces?”
   “Yes, madam.”
   “Through the skylight?”
   “Yes, madam.”
   “You mean he's sitting on the roof?”
   “Yes, madam. It has upset Monsieur Anatole very much.”
   I suppose it was that word “upset” that touched Aunt Dahlia off. Experience had taught her what happened when Anatole got upset. I had always known her as a woman who was quite active on her pins, but I had never suspected her of being capable of the magnificent burst of speed which she now showed. Pausing merely to get a rich hunting-field expletive off her chest, she was out of the room and making for the stairs before I could swallow a sliver of—I think—banana. And feeling, as I had felt when I got that telegram of hers about Angela and Tuppy, that my place was by her side, I put down my plate and hastened after her, Seppings following at a loping gallop.
   I say that my place was by her side, but it was not so dashed easy to get there, for she was setting a cracking pace. At the top of the first flight she must have led by a matter of half a dozen lengths, and was still shaking off my challenge when she rounded into the second. At the next landing, however, the gruelling going appeared to tell on her, for she slackened off a trifle and showed symptoms of roaring, and by the time we were in the straight we were running practically neck and neck. Our entry into Anatole's room was as close a finish as you could have wished to see.
   Result:
   1.Aunt Dahlia.
   2.Bertram.
   3.Seppings.
   Won by a short head. Half a staircase separated second and third.
   The first thing that met the eye on entering was Anatole. This wizard of the cooking-stove is a tubby little man with a moustache of the outsize or soup-strainer type, and you can generally take a line through it as to the state of his emotions. When all is well, it turns up at the ends like a sergeant-major's. When the soul is bruised, it droops.
   It was drooping now, striking a sinister note. And if any shadow of doubt had remained as to how he was feeling, the way he was carrying on would have dispelled it. He was standing by the bed in pink pyjamas, waving his fists at the skylight. Through the glass, Gussie was staring down. His eyes were bulging and his mouth was open, giving him so striking a resemblance to some rare fish in an aquarium that one's primary impulse was to offer him an ant's egg.
   Watching this fist-waving cook and this goggling guest, I must say that my sympathies were completely with the former. I considered him thoroughly justified in waving all the fists he wanted to.
   Review the facts, I mean to say. There he had been, lying in bed, thinking idly of whatever French cooks do think about when in bed, and he had suddenly become aware of that frightful face at the window. A thing to jar the most phlegmatic. I know I should hate to be lying in bed and have Gussie popping up like that. A chap's bedroom—you can't get away from it—is his castle, and he has every right to look askance if gargoyles come glaring in at him.
   While I stood musing thus, Aunt Dahlia, in her practical way, was coming straight to the point:
   “What's all this?”
   Anatole did a sort of Swedish exercise, starting at the base of the spine, carrying on through the shoulder-blades and finishing up among the back hair.
   Then he told her.
   In the chats I have had with this wonder man, I have always found his English fluent, but a bit on the mixed side. If you remember, he was with Mrs. Bingo Little for a time before coming to Brinkley, and no doubt he picked up a good deal from Bingo. Before that, he had been a couple of years with an American family at Nice and had studied under their chauffeur, one of the Maloneys of Brooklyn. So, what with Bingo and what with Maloney, he is, as I say, fluent but a bit mixed.
   He spoke, in part, as follows:
   “Hot dog! You ask me what is it? Listen. Make some attention a little. Me, I have hit the hay, but I do not sleep so good, and presently I wake and up I look, and there is one who make faces against me through the dashed window. Is that a pretty affair? Is that convenient? If you think I like it, you jolly well mistake yourself. I am so mad as a wet hen. And why not? I am somebody, isn't it? This is a bedroom, what-what, not a house for some apes? Then for what do blighters sit on my window so cool as a few cucumbers, making some faces?”
   “Quite,” I said. Dashed reasonable, was my verdict.
   He threw another look up at Gussie, and did Exercise 2—the one where you clutch the moustache, give it a tug and then start catching flies.
   “Wait yet a little. I am not finish. I say I see this type on my window, making a few faces. But what then? Does he buzz off when I shout a cry, and leave me peaceable? Not on your life. He remain planted there, not giving any damns, and sit regarding me like a cat watching a duck. He make faces against me and again he make faces against me, and the more I command that he should get to hell out of here, the more he do not get to hell out of here. He cry something towards me, and I demand what is his desire, but he do not explain. Oh, no, that arrives never. He does but shrug his head. What damn silliness! Is this amusing for me? You think I like it? I am not content with such folly. I think the poor mutt's loony.Je me fiche de ce type infect. C'est idiot de faire comme ca l'oiseau.... Allez-vous-en, louffier.... Tell the boob to go away. He is mad as some March hatters.”
   I must say I thought he was making out a jolly good case, and evidently Aunt Dahlia felt the same. She laid a quivering hand on his shoulder.
   “I will, Monsieur Anatole, I will,” she said, and I couldn't have believed that robust voice capable of sinking to such an absolute coo. More like a turtle dove calling to its mate than anything else. “It's quite all right.”
   She had said the wrong thing. He did Exercise 3.
   “All right?Nom d'un nom d'un nom! The hell you say it's all right! Of what use to pull stuff like that? Wait one half-moment. Not yet quite so quick, my old sport. It is by no means all right. See yet again a little. It is some very different dishes of fish. I can take a few smooths with a rough, it is true, but I do not find it agreeable when one play larks against me on my windows. That cannot do. A nice thing, no. I am a serious man. I do not wish a few larks on my windows. I enjoy larks on my windows worse as any. It is very little all right. If such rannygazoo is to arrive, I do not remain any longer in this house no more. I buzz off and do not stay planted.”
   Sinister words, I had to admit, and I was not surprised that Aunt Dahlia, hearing them, should have uttered a cry like the wail of a master of hounds seeing a fox shot. Anatole had begun to wave his fists again at Gussie, and she now joined him. Seppings, who was puffing respectfully in the background, didn't actually wave his fists, but he gave Gussie a pretty austere look. It was plain to the thoughtful observer that this Fink-Nottle, in getting on to that skylight, had done a mistaken thing. He couldn't have been more unpopular in the home of G.G. Simmons.
   “Go away, you crazy loon!” cried Aunt Dahlia, in that ringing voice of hers which had once caused nervous members of the Quorn to lose stirrups and take tosses from the saddle.
   Gussie's reply was to waggle his eyebrows. I could read the message he was trying to convey.
   “I think he means,” I said—reasonable old Bertram, always trying to throw oil on the troubled w's—“that if he does he will fall down the side of the house and break his neck.”
   “Well, why not?” said Aunt Dahlia.
   I could see her point, of course, but it seemed to me that there might be a nearer solution. This skylight happened to be the only window in the house which Uncle Tom had not festooned with his bally bars. I suppose he felt that if a burglar had the nerve to climb up as far as this, he deserved what was coming to him.
   “If you opened the skylight, he could jump in.”
   The idea got across.
   “Seppings, how does this skylight open?”
   “With a pole, madam.”
   “Then get a pole. Get two poles. Ten.”
   And presently Gussie was mixing with the company, Like one of those chaps you read about in the papers, the wretched man seemed deeply conscious of his position.
   I must say Aunt Dahlia's bearing and demeanour did nothing to assist toward a restored composure. Of the amiability which she had exhibited when discussing this unhappy chump's activities with me over the fruit salad, no trace remained, and I was not surprised that speech more or less froze on the Fink-Nottle lips. It isn't often that Aunt Dahlia, normally as genial a bird as ever encouraged a gaggle of hounds to get their noses down to it, lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.
   “Well?” she said.
   In answer to this, all that Gussie could produce was a sort of strangled hiccough.
   “Well?”
   Aunt Dahlia's face grew darker. Hunting, if indulged in regularly over a period of years, is a pastime that seldom fails to lend a fairly deepish tinge to the patient's complexion, and her best friends could not have denied that even at normal times the relative's map tended a little toward the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on so pronounced a richness as now. She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.
   “Well?”
   Gussie tried hard. And for a moment it seemed as if something was going to come through. But in the end it turned out nothing more than a sort of death-rattle.
   “Oh, take him away, Bertie, and put ice on his head,” said Aunt Dahlia, giving the thing up. And she turned to tackle what looked like the rather man's size job of soothing Anatole, who was now carrying on a muttered conversation with himself in a rapid sort of way.
   Seeming to feel that the situation was one to which he could not do justice in Bingo-cum-Maloney Anglo-American, he had fallen back on his native tongue. Words like “marmiton de Domange,” “pignouf,” “hurluberlu” and “roustisseur” were fluttering from him like bats out of a barn. Lost on me, of course, because, though I sweated a bit at the Gallic language during that Cannes visit, I'm still more or less in the Esker-vous-avez stage. I regretted this, for they sounded good.
   I assisted Gussie down the stairs. A cooler thinker than Aunt Dahlia, I had already guessed the hidden springs and motives which had led him to the roof. Where she had seen only a cockeyed reveller indulging himself in a drunken prank or whimsy, I had spotted the hunted fawn.
   “Was Tuppy after you?” I asked sympathetically.
   What I believe is called afrissonshook him.
   “He nearly got me on the top landing. I shinned out through a passage window and scrambled along a sort of ledge.”
   “That baffled him, what?”
   “Yes. But then I found I had stuck. The roof sloped down in all directions. I couldn't go back. I had to go on, crawling along this ledge. And then I found myself looking down the skylight. Who was that chap?”
   “That was Anatole, Aunt Dahlia's chef.”
   “French?”
   “To the core.”
   “That explains why I couldn't make him understand. What asses these Frenchmen are. They don't seem able to grasp the simplest thing. You'd have thought if a chap saw a chap on a skylight, the chap would realize the chap wanted to be let in. But no, he just stood there.”
   “Waving a few fists.”
   “Yes. Silly idiot. Still, here I am.”
   “Here you are, yes—for the moment.”
   “Eh?”
   “I was thinking that Tuppy is probably lurking somewhere.”
   He leaped like a lamb in springtime.
   “What shall I do?”
   I considered this.
   “Sneak back to your room and barricade the door. That is the manly policy.”
   “Suppose that's where he's lurking?”
   “In that case, move elsewhere.”
   But on arrival at the room, it transpired that Tuppy, if anywhere, was infesting some other portion of the house. Gussie shot in, and I heard the key turn. And feeling that there was no more that I could do in that quarter, I returned to the dining-room for further fruit salad and a quiet think. And I had barely filled my plate when the door opened and Aunt Dahlia came in. She sank into a chair, looking a bit shopworn.
   “Give me a drink, Bertie.”
   “What sort?”
   “Any sort, so long as it's strong.”
   Approach Bertram Wooster along these lines, and you catch him at his best. St. Bernard dogs doing the square thing by Alpine travellers could not have bustled about more assiduously. I filled the order, and for some moments nothing was to be heard but the sloshing sound of an aunt restoring her tissues.
   “Shove it down, Aunt Dahlia,” I said sympathetically. “These things take it out of one, don't they? You've had a toughish time, no doubt, soothing Anatole,” I proceeded, helping myself to anchovy paste on toast. “Everything pretty smooth now, I trust?”
   She gazed at me in a long, lingering sort of way, her brow wrinkled as if in thought.
   “Attila,” she said at length. “That's the name. Attila, the Hun.”
   “Eh?”
   “I was trying to think who you reminded me of. Somebody who went about strewing ruin and desolation and breaking up homes which, until he came along, had been happy and peaceful. Attila is the man. It's amazing.” she said, drinking me in once more. “To look at you, one would think you were just an ordinary sort of amiable idiot—certifiable, perhaps, but quite harmless. Yet, in reality, you are worse a scourge than the Black Death. I tell you, Bertie, when I contemplate you I seem to come up against all the underlying sorrow and horror of life with such a thud that I feel as if I had walked into a lamp post.”
   Pained and surprised, I would have spoken, but the stuff I had thought was anchovy paste had turned out to be something far more gooey and adhesive. It seemed to wrap itself round the tongue and impede utterance like a gag. And while I was still endeavouring to clear the vocal cords for action, she went on:
   “Do you realize what you started when you sent that Spink-Bottle man down here? As regards his getting blotto and turning the prize-giving ceremonies at Market Snodsbury Grammar School into a sort of two-reel comic film, I will say nothing, for frankly I enjoyed it. But when he comes leering at Anatole through skylights, just after I had with infinite pains and tact induced him to withdraw his notice, and makes him so temperamental that he won't hear of staying on after tomorrow—”
   The paste stuff gave way. I was able to speak:
   “What?”
   “Yes, Anatole goes tomorrow, and I suppose poor old Tom will have indigestion for the rest of his life. And that is not all. I have just seen Angela, and she tells me she is engaged to this Bottle.”
   “Temporarily, yes,” I had to admit.
   “Temporarily be blowed. She's definitely engaged to him and talks with a sort of hideous coolness of getting married in October. So there it is. If the prophet Job were to walk into the room at this moment, I could sit swapping hard-luck stories with him till bedtime. Not that Job was in my class.”
   “He had boils.”
   “Well, what are boils?”
   “Dashed painful, I understand.”
   “Nonsense. I'd take all the boils on the market in exchange for my troubles. Can't you realize the position? I've lost the best cook to England. My husband, poor soul, will probably die of dyspepsia. And my only daughter, for whom I had dreamed such a wonderful future, is engaged to be married to an inebriated newt fancier. And you talk about boils!”
   I corrected her on a small point:
   “I don't absolutely talk about boils. I merely mentioned that Job had them. Yes, I agree with you, Aunt Dahlia, that things are not looking too oojah-cum-spiff at the moment, but be of good cheer. A Wooster is seldom baffled for more than the nonce.”
   “You rather expect to be coming along shortly with another of your schemes?”
   “At any minute.”
   She sighed resignedly.
   “I thought as much. Well, it needed but this. I don't see how things could possibly be worse than they are, but no doubt you will succeed in making them so. Your genius and insight will find the way. Carry on, Bertie. Yes, carry on. I am past caring now. I shall even find a faint interest in seeing into what darker and profounder abysses of hell you can plunge this home. Go to it, lad.... What's that stuff you're eating?”
   “I find it a little difficult to classify. Some sort of paste on toast. Rather like glue flavoured with beef extract.”
   “Gimme,” said Aunt Dahlia listlessly.
   “Be careful how you chew,” I advised. “It sticketh closer than a brother.... Yes, Jeeves?”
   The man had materialized on the carpet. Absolutely noiseless, as usual.
   “A note for you, sir.”
   “A note for me, Jeeves?”
   “A note for you, sir.”
   “From whom, Jeeves?”
   “From Miss Bassett, sir.”
   “From whom, Jeeves?”
   “From Miss Bassett, sir.”
   “From Miss Bassett, Jeeves?”
   “From Miss Bassett, sir.”
   At this point, Aunt Dahlia, who had taken one nibble at her whatever-it-was-on-toast and laid it down, begged us—a little fretfully, I thought—for heaven's sake to cut out the cross-talk vaudeville stuff, as she had enough to bear already without having to listen to us doing our imitation of the Two Macs. Always willing to oblige, I dismissed Jeeves with a nod, and he flickered for a moment and was gone. Many a spectre would have been less slippy.
   “But what,” I mused, toying with the envelope, “can this female be writing to me about?”
   “Why not open the damn thing and see?”
   “A very excellent idea,” I said, and did so.
   “And if you are interested in my movements,” proceeded Aunt Dahlia, heading for the door, “I propose to go to my room, do some Yogi deep breathing, and try to forget.”
   “Quite,” I said absently, skimming p. l. And then, as I turned over, a sharp howl broke from my lips, causing Aunt Dahlia to shy like a startled mustang.
   “Don't do it!” she exclaimed, quivering in every limb.
   “Yes, but dash it—”
   “What a pest you are, you miserable object,” she sighed. “I remember years ago, when you were in your cradle, being left alone with you one day and you nearly swallowed your rubber comforter and started turning purple. And I, ass that I was, took it out and saved your life. Let me tell you, young Bertie, it will go very hard with you if you ever swallow a rubber comforter again when only I am by to aid.”
   “But, dash it!” I cried. “Do you know what's happened? Madeline Bassett says she's going to marry me!”
   “I hope it keeps fine for you,” said the relative, and passed from the room looking like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story.

-21-

   I don't suppose I was looking so dashed unlike something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story myself, for, as you can readily imagine, the news item which I have just recorded had got in amongst me properly. If the Bassett, in the belief that the Wooster heart had long been hers and was waiting ready to be scooped in on demand, had decided to take up her option, I should, as a man of honour and sensibility, have no choice but to come across and kick in. The matter was obviously not one that could be straightened out with a curtnolle prosequi. All the evidence, therefore, seemed to point to the fact that the doom had come upon me and, what was more, had come to stay.
   And yet, though it would be idle to pretend that my grip on the situation was quite the grip I would have liked it to be, I did not despair of arriving at a solution. A lesser man, caught in this awful snare, would no doubt have thrown in the towel at once and ceased to struggle; but the whole point about the Woosters is that they are not lesser men.
   By way of a start, I read the note again. Not that I had any hope that a second perusal would enable me to place a different construction on its contents, but it helped to fill in while the brain was limbering up. I then, to assist thought, had another go at the fruit salad, and in addition ate a slice of sponge cake. And it was as I passed on to the cheese that the machinery started working. I saw what had to be done.
   To the question which had been exercising the mind—viz., can Bertram cope?—I was now able to reply with a confident “Absolutely.”
   The great wheeze on these occasions of dirty work at the crossroads is not to lose your head but to keep cool and try to find the ringleaders. Once find the ringleaders, and you know where you are.
   The ringleader here was plainly the Bassett. It was she who had started the whole imbroglio by chucking Gussie, and it was clear that before anything could be done to solve and clarify, she must be induced to revise her views and take him on again. This would put Angela back into circulation, and that would cause Tuppy to simmer down a bit, and then we could begin to get somewhere.
   I decided that as soon as I had had another morsel of cheese I would seek this Bassett out and be pretty eloquent.
   And at this moment in she came. I might have foreseen that she would be turning up shortly. I mean to say, hearts may ache, but if they know that there is a cold collation set out in the dining-room, they are pretty sure to come popping in sooner or later.
   Her eyes, as she entered the room, were fixed on the salmon mayonnaise, and she would no doubt have made a bee-line for it and started getting hers, had I not, in the emotion of seeing her, dropped a glass of the best with which I was endeavouring to bring about a calmer frame of mind. The noise caused her to turn, and for an instant embarrassment supervened. A slight flush mantled the cheek, and the eyes popped a bit.
   “Oh!” she said.
   I have always found that there is nothing that helps to ease you over one of these awkward moments like a spot of stage business. Find something to do with your hands, and it's half the battle. I grabbed a plate and hastened forward.
   “A touch of salmon?”
   “Thank you.”
   “With a suspicion of salad?”
   “If you please.”
   “And to drink? Name the poison.”
   “I think I would like a little orange juice.”
   She gave a gulp. Not at the orange juice, I don't mean, because she hadn't got it yet, but at all the tender associations those two words provoked. It was as if someone had mentioned spaghetti to the relict of an Italian organ-grinder. Her face flushed a deeper shade, she registered anguish, and I saw that it was no longer within the sphere of practical politics to try to confine the conversation to neutral topics like cold boiled salmon.
   So did she, I imagine, for when I, as a preliminary to getting down to brass tacks, said “Er,” she said “Er,” too, simultaneously, the brace of “Ers” clashing in mid-air.
   “I'm sorry.”
   “I beg your pardon.”
   “You were saying—”
   “You were saying—”
   “No, please go on.”
   “Oh, right-ho.”
   I straightened the tie, my habit when in this girl's society, and had at it:
   “With reference to yours of even date—”
   She flushed again, and took a rather strained forkful of salmon.
   “You got my note?”
   “Yes, I got your note.”
   “I gave it to Jeeves to give it to you.”
   “Yes, he gave it to me. That's how I got it.”
   There was another silence. And as she was plainly shrinking from talking turkey, I was reluctantly compelled to do so. I mean, somebody had got to. Too dashed silly, a male and female in our position simply standing eating salmon and cheese at one another without a word.
   “Yes, I got it all right.”
   “I see. You got it.”
   “Yes, I got it. I've just been reading it. And what I was rather wanting to ask you, if we happened to run into each other, was—well, what about it?”
   “What about it?”
   “That's what I say: What about it?”
   “But it was quite clear.”
   “Oh, quite. Perfectly clear. Very well expressed and all that. But—I mean—Well, I mean, deeply sensible of the honour, and so forth—but—Well, dash it!”
   She had polished off her salmon, and now put the plate down.
   “Fruit salad?”
   “No, thank you.”
   “Spot of pie?”
   “No, thanks.”
   “One of those glue things on toast?”
   “No, thank you.”
   She took a cheese straw. I found a cold egg which I had overlooked. Then I said “I mean to say” just as she said “I think I know", and there was another collision.
   “I beg your pardon.”
   “I'm sorry.”
   “Do go on.”
   “No, you go on.”
   I waved my cold egg courteously, to indicate that she had the floor, and she started again:
   “I think I know what you are trying to say. You are surprised.”
   “Yes.”
   “You are thinking of—”
   “Exactly.”
   “—Mr. Fink-Nottle.”
   “The very man.”
   “You find what I have done hard to understand.”
   “Absolutely.”
   “I don't wonder.”
   “I do.”
   “And yet it is quite simple.”
   She took another cheese straw. She seemed to like cheese straws.
   “Quite simple, really. I want to make you happy.”
   “Dashed decent of you.”
   “I am going to devote the rest of my life to making you happy.”
   “A very matey scheme.”
   “I can at least do that. But—may I be quite frank with you, Bertie?”
   “Oh, rather.”
   “Then I must tell you this. I am fond of you. I will marry you. I will do my best to make you a good wife. But my affection for you can never be the flamelike passion I felt for Augustus.”
   “Just the very point I was working round to. There, as you say, is the snag. Why not chuck the whole idea of hitching up with me? Wash it out altogether. I mean, if you love old Gussie—”
   “No longer.”
   “Oh, come.”
   “No. What happened this afternoon has killed my love. A smear of ugliness has been drawn across a thing of beauty, and I can never feel towards him as I did.”
   I saw what she meant, of course. Gussie had bunged his heart at her feet; she had picked it up, and, almost immediately after doing so, had discovered that he had been stewed to the eyebrows all the time. The shock must have been severe. No girl likes to feel that a chap has got to be thoroughly plastered before he can ask her to marry him. It wounds the pride.
   Nevertheless, I persevered.
   “But have you considered,” I said, “that you may have got a wrong line on Gussie's performance this afternoon? Admitted that all the evidence points to a more sinister theory, what price him simply having got a touch of the sun? Chaps do get touches of the sun, you know, especially when the weather's hot.”
   She looked at me, and I saw that she was putting in a bit of the old drenched-irises stuff.
   “It was like you to say that, Bertie. I respect you for it.”
   “Oh, no.”
   “Yes. You have a splendid, chivalrous soul.”
   “Not a bit.”
   “Yes, you have. You remind me of Cyrano.”
   “Who?”
   “Cyrano de Bergerac.”
   “The chap with the nose?”
   “Yes.”
   I can't say I was any too pleased. I felt the old beak furtively. It was a bit on the prominent side, perhaps, but, dash it, not in the Cyrano class. It began to look as if the next thing this girl would do would be to compare me to Schnozzle Durante.
   “He loved, but pleaded another's cause.”
   “Oh, I see what you mean now.”
   “I like you for that, Bertie. It was fine of you—fine and big. But it is no use. There are things which kill love. I can never forget Augustus, but my love for him is dead. I will be your wife.”
   Well, one has to be civil.
   “Right ho,” I said. “Thanks awfully.”
   Then the dialogue sort of poofed out once more, and we stood eating cheese straws and cold eggs respectively in silence. There seemed to exist some little uncertainty as to what the next move was.
   Fortunately, before embarrassment could do much more supervening, Angela came in, and this broke up the meeting. Then Bassett announced our engagement, and Angela kissed her and said she hoped she would be very, very happy, and the Bassett kissed her and said she hoped she would be very, very happy with Gussie, and Angela said she was sure she would, because Augustus was such a dear, and the Bassett kissed her again, and Angela kissed her again and, in a word, the whole thing got so bally feminine that I was glad to edge away.
   I would have been glad to do so, of course, in any case, for if even there was a moment when it was up to Bertram to think, and think hard, this moment was that moment.
   It was, it seemed to me, the end. Not even on the occasion, some years earlier, when I had inadvertently become betrothed to Tuppy's frightful Cousin Honoria, had I experienced a deeper sense of being waist high in the gumbo and about to sink without trace. I wandered out into the garden, smoking a tortured gasper, with the iron well embedded in the soul. And I had fallen into a sort of trance, trying to picture what it would be like having the Bassett on the premises for the rest of my life and at the same time, if you follow me, trying not to picture what it would be like, when I charged into something which might have been a tree, but was not—being, in point of fact, Jeeves.
   “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said. “I should have moved to one side.”
   I did not reply. I stood looking at him in silence. For the sight of him had opened up a new line of thought.
   This Jeeves, now, I reflected. I had formed the opinion that he had lost his grip and was no longer the force he had been, but was it not possible, I asked myself, that I might be mistaken? Start him off exploring avenues and might he not discover one through which I would be enabled to sneak off to safety, leaving no hard feelings behind? I found myself answering that it was quite on the cards that he might.
   After all, his head still bulged out at the back as of old. One noted in the eyes the same intelligent glitter.
   Mind you, after what had passed between us in the matter of that white mess-jacket with the brass buttons, I was not prepared absolutely to hand over to the man. I would, of course, merely take him into consultation. But, recalling some of his earlier triumphs—the Sipperley Case, the Episode of My Aunt Agatha and the Dog McIntosh, and the smoothly handled Affair of Uncle George and The Barmaid's Niece were a few that sprang to my mind—I felt justified at least in offering him the opportunity of coming to the aid of the young master in his hour of peril.
   But before proceeding further, there was one thing that had got to be understood between us, and understood clearly.
   “Jeeves,” I said, “a word with you.”
   “Sir?”
   “I am up against it a bit, Jeeves.”
   “I am sorry to hear that, sir. Can I be of any assistance?”
   “Quite possibly you can, if you have not lost your grip. Tell me frankly, Jeeves, are you in pretty good shape mentally?”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “Still eating plenty of fish?”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “Then it may be all right. But there is just one point before I begin. In the past, when you have contrived to extricate self or some pal from some little difficulty, you have frequently shown a disposition to take advantage of my gratitude to gain some private end. Those purple socks, for instance. Also the plus fours and the Old Etonian spats. Choosing your moment with subtle cunning, you came to me when I was weakened by relief and got me to get rid of them. And what I am saying now is that if you are successful on the present occasion there must be no rot of that description about that mess-jacket of mine.”
   “Very good, sir.”
   “You will not come to me when all is over and ask me to jettison the jacket?”
   “Certainly not, sir.”
   “On that understanding then, I will carry on. Jeeves, I'm engaged.”
   “I hope you will be very happy, sir.”
   “Don't be an ass. I'm engaged to Miss Bassett.”
   “Indeed, sir? I was not aware—”
   “Nor was I. It came as a complete surprise. However, there it is. The official intimation was in that note you brought me.”
   “Odd, sir.”
   “What is?”
   “Odd, sir, that the contents of that note should have been as you describe. It seemed to me that Miss Bassett, when she handed me the communication, was far from being in a happy frame of mind.”
   “She is far from being in a happy frame of mind. You don't suppose she really wants to marry me, do you? Pshaw, Jeeves! Can't you see that this is simply another of those bally gestures which are rapidly rendering Brinkley Court a hell for man and beast? Dash all gestures, is my view.”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “Well, what's to be done?”
   “You feel that Miss Bassett, despite what has occurred, still retains a fondness for Mr. Fink-Nottle, sir?”
   “She's pining for him.”
   “In that case, sir, surely the best plan would be to bring about a reconciliation between them.”
   “How? You see. You stand silent and twiddle the fingers. You are stumped.”
   “No, sir. If I twiddled my fingers, it was merely to assist thought.”
   “Then continue twiddling.”
   “It will not be necessary, sir.”
   “You don't mean you've got a bite already?”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “You astound me, Jeeves. Let's have it.”
   “The device which I have in mind is one that I have already mentioned to you, sir.”
   “When did you ever mention any device to me?”
   “If you will throw your mind back to the evening of our arrival, sir. You were good enough to inquire of me if I had any plan to put forward with a view to bringing Miss Angela and Mr. Glossop together, and I ventured to suggest—”
   “Good Lord! Not the old fire-alarm thing?”
   “Precisely, sir.”
   “You're still sticking to that?”
   “Yes, sir.”
   It shows how much the ghastly blow I had received had shaken me when I say that, instead of dismissing the proposal with a curt “Tchah!” or anything like that, I found myself speculating as to whether there might not be something in it, after all.
   When he had first mooted this fire-alarm scheme of his, I had sat upon it, if you remember, with the maximum of promptitude and vigour. “Rotten” was the adjective I had employed to describe it, and you may recall that I mused a bit sadly, considering the idea conclusive proof of the general breakdown of a once fine mind. But now it somehow began to look as if it might have possibilities. The fact of the matter was that I had about reached the stage where I was prepared to try anything once, however goofy.
   “Just run through that wheeze again, Jeeves,” I said thoughtfully. “I remember thinking it cuckoo, but it may be that I missed some of the finer shades.”
   “Your criticism of it at the time, sir, was that it was too elaborate, but I do not think it is so in reality. As I see it, sir, the occupants of the house, hearing the fire bell ring, will suppose that a conflagration has broken out.”
   I nodded. One could follow the train of thought.
   “Yes, that seems reasonable.”
   “Whereupon Mr. Glossop will hasten to save Miss Angela, while Mr. Fink-Nottle performs the same office for Miss Bassett.”
   “Is that based on psychology?”
   “Yes, sir. Possibly you may recollect that it was an axiom of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, that the instinct of everyone, upon an alarm of fire, is to save the object dearest to them.”
   “It seems to me that there is a grave danger of seeing Tuppy come out carrying a steak-and-kidney pie, but resume, Jeeves, resume. You think that this would clean everything up?”
   “The relations of the two young couples could scarcely continue distant after such an occurrence, sir.”
   “Perhaps you're right. But, dash it, if we go ringing fire bells in the night watches, shan't we scare half the domestic staff into fits? There is one of the housemaids—Jane, I believe—who already skips like the high hills if I so much as come on her unexpectedly round a corner.”
   “A neurotic girl, sir, I agree. I have noticed her. But by acting promptly we should avoid such a contingency. The entire staff, with the exception of Monsieur Anatole, will be at the ball at Kingham Manor tonight.”
   “Of course. That just shows the condition this thing has reduced me to. Forget my own name next. Well, then, let's just try to envisage. Bong goes the bell. Gussie rushes and grabs the Bassett.... Wait. Why shouldn't she simply walk downstairs?”
   “You are overlooking the effect of sudden alarm on the feminine temperament, sir.”
   “That's true.”
   “Miss Bassett's impulse, I would imagine, sir, would be to leap from her window.”
   “Well, that's worse. We don't want her spread out in a sort ofpureeon the lawn. It seems to me that the flaw in this scheme of yours, Jeeves, is that it's going to litter the garden with mangled corpses.”
   “No, sir. You will recall that Mr. Travers's fear of burglars has caused him to have stout bars fixed to all the windows.”
   “Of course, yes. Well, it sounds all right,” I said, though still a bit doubtfully. “Quite possibly it may come off. But I have a feeling that it will slip up somewhere. However, I am in no position to cavil at even a 100 to 1 shot. I will adopt this policy of yours, Jeeves, though, as I say, with misgivings. At what hour would you suggest bonging the bell?”
   “Not before midnight, sir.”
   “That is to say, some time after midnight.”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “Right-ho, then. At 12.30 on the dot, I will bong.”
   “Very good, sir.”

-22-

   I Don't know why it is, but there's something about the rural districts after dark that always has a rummy effect on me. In London I can stay out till all hours and come home with the milk without a tremor, but put me in the garden of a country house after the strength of the company has gone to roost and the place is shut up, and a sort of goose-fleshy feeling steals over me. The night wind stirs the tree-tops, twigs crack, bushes rustle, and before I know where I am, the morale has gone phut and I'm expecting the family ghost to come sneaking up behind me, making groaning noises. Dashed unpleasant, the whole thing, and if you think it improves matters to know that you are shortly about to ring the loudest fire bell in England and start an all-hands-to-the-pumps panic in that quiet, darkened house, you err.
   I knew all about the Brinkley Court fire bell. The dickens of a row it makes. Uncle Tom, in addition to not liking burglars, is a bloke who has always objected to the idea of being cooked in his sleep, so when he bought the place he saw to it that the fire bell should be something that might give you heart failure, but which you couldn't possibly mistake for the drowsy chirping of a sparrow in the ivy.
   When I was a kid and spent my holidays at Brinkley, we used to have fire drills after closing time, and many is the night I've had it jerk me out of the dreamless like the Last Trump.
   I confess that the recollection of what this bell could do when it buckled down to it gave me pause as I stood that night at 12.30 p.m. prompt beside the outhouse where it was located. The sight of the rope against the whitewashed wall and the thought of the bloodsome uproar which was about to smash the peace of the night into hash served to deepen that rummy feeling to which I have alluded.
   Moreover, now that I had had time to meditate upon it, I was more than ever defeatist about this scheme of Jeeves's.
   Jeeves seemed to take it for granted that Gussie and Tuppy, faced with a hideous fate, would have no thought beyond saving the Bassett and Angela.
   I could not bring myself to share his sunny confidence.
   I mean to say, I know how moments when they're faced with a hideous fate affect chaps. I remember Freddie Widgeon, one of the most chivalrous birds in the Drones, telling me how there was an alarm of fire once at a seaside hotel where he was staying and, so far from rushing about saving women, he was down the escape within ten seconds of the kick-off, his mind concerned with but one thing—viz., the personal well-being of F. Widgeon.
   As far as any idea of doing the delicately nurtured a bit of good went, he tells me, he was prepared to stand underneath and catch them in blankets, but no more.
   Why, then, should this not be so with Augustus Fink-Nottle and Hildebrand Glossop?
   Such were my thoughts as I stood toying with the rope, and I believe I should have turned the whole thing up, had it not been that at this juncture there floated into my mind a picture of the Bassett hearing that bell for the first time. Coming as a wholly new experience, it would probably startle her into a decline.
   And so agreeable was this reflection that I waited no longer, but seized the rope, braced the feet and snapped into it.
   Well, as I say, I hadn't been expecting that bell to hush things up to any great extent. Nor did it. The last time I had heard it, I had been in my room on the other side of the house, and even so it had hoiked me out of bed as if something had exploded under me. Standing close to it like this, I got the full force and meaning of the thing, and I've never heard anything like it in my puff.
   I rather enjoy a bit of noise, as a general rule. I remember Cats-meat Potter-Pirbright bringing a police rattle into the Drones one night and loosing it off behind my chair, and I just lay back and closed my eyes with a pleasant smile, like someone in a box at the opera. And the same applies to the time when my Aunt Agatha's son, young Thos., put a match to the parcel of Guy Fawkes Day fireworks to see what would happen.
   But the Brinkley Court fire bell was too much for me. I gave about half a dozen tugs, and then, feeling that enough was enough, sauntered round to the front lawn to ascertain what solid results had been achieved.
   Brinkley Court had given of its best. A glance told me that we were playing to capacity. The eye, roving to and fro, noted here Uncle Tom in a purple dressing gown, there Aunt Dahlia in the old blue and yellow. It also fell upon Anatole, Tuppy, Gussie, Angela, the Bassett and Jeeves, in the order named. There they all were, present and correct.
   But—and this was what caused me immediate concern—I could detect no sign whatever that there had been any rescue work going on.
   What I had been hoping, of course, was to see Tuppy bending solicitously over Angela in one corner, while Gussie fanned the Bassett with a towel in the other. Instead of which, the Bassett was one of the group which included Aunt Dahlia and Uncle Tom and seemed to be busy trying to make Anatole see the bright side, while Angela and Gussie were, respectively, leaning against the sundial with a peeved look and sitting on the grass rubbing a barked shin. Tuppy was walking up and down the path, all by himself.
   A disturbing picture, you will admit. It was with a rather imperious gesture that I summoned Jeeves to my side.
   “Well, Jeeves?”
   “Sir?”
   I eyed him sternly. “Sir?” forsooth!
   “It's no good saying 'Sir?' Jeeves. Look round you. See for yourself. Your scheme has proved a bust.”
   “Certainly it would appear that matters have not arranged themselves quite as we anticipated, sir.”
   “We?”
   “As I had anticipated, sir.”
   “That's more like it. Didn't I tell you it would be a flop?”
   “I remember that you did seem dubious, sir.”
   “Dubious is no word for it, Jeeves. I hadn't a scrap of faith in the idea from the start. When you first mooted it, I said it was rotten, and I was right. I'm not blaming you, Jeeves. It is not your fault that you have sprained your brain. But after this—forgive me if I hurt your feelings, Jeeves—I shall know better than to allow you to handle any but the simplest and most elementary problems. It is best to be candid about this, don't you think? Kindest to be frank and straightforward?”
   “Certainly, sir.”
   “I mean, the surgeon's knife, what?”
   “Precisely, sir.”
   “I consider—”
   “If you will pardon me for interrupting you, sir, I fancy Mrs. Travers is endeavouring to attract your attention.”
   And at this moment a ringing “Hoy!” which could have proceeded only from the relative in question, assured me that his view was correct.
   “Just step this way a moment, Attila, if you don't mind,” boomed that well-known—and under certain conditions, well-loved—voice, and I moved over.
   I was not feeling unmixedly at my ease. For the first time it was beginning to steal upon me that I had not prepared a really good story in support of my questionable behaviour in ringing fire bells at such an hour, and I have known Aunt Dahlia to express herself with a hearty freedom upon far smaller provocation.
   She exhibited, however, no signs of violence. More a sort of frozen calm, if you know what I mean. You could see that she was a woman who had suffered.
   “Well, Bertie, dear,” she said, “here we all are.”
   “Quite,” I replied guardedly.
   “Nobody missing, is there?”
   “I don't think so.”
   “Splendid. So much healthier for us out in the open like this than frowsting in bed. I had just dropped off when you did your bell-ringing act. For it was you, my sweet child, who rang that bell, was knot?”
   “I did ring the bell, yes.”
   “Any particular reason, or just a whim?”
   “I thought there was a fire.”
   “What gave you that impression, dear?”
   “I thought I saw flames.”
   “Where, darling? Tell Aunt Dahlia.”
   “In one of the windows.”
   “I see. So we have all been dragged out of bed and scared rigid because you have been seeing things.”
   Here Uncle Tom made a noise like a cork coming out of a bottle, and Anatole, whose moustache had hit a new low, said something about “some apes” and, if I am not mistaken, a “rogommier”—whatever that is.
   “I admit I was mistaken. I am sorry.”
   “Don't apologize, ducky. Can't you see how pleased we all are? What were you doing out here, anyway?”
   “Just taking a stroll.”
   “I see. And are you proposing to continue your stroll?”
   “No, I think I'll go in now.”
   “That's fine. Because I was thinking of going in, too, and I don't believe I could sleep knowing you were out here giving rein to that powerful imagination of yours. The next thing that would happen would be that you would think you saw a pink elephant sitting on the drawing-room window-sill and start throwing bricks at it.... Well, come on, Tom, the entertainment seems to be over.... But wait. The newt king wishes a word with us.... Yes, Mr. Fink-Nottle?”
   Gussie, as he joined our little group, seemed upset about something.
   “I say!”
   “Say on, Augustus.”
   “I say, what are we going to do?”
   “Speaking for myself, I intend to return to bed.”
   “But the door's shut.”
   “What door?”
   “The front door. Somebody must have shut it.”
   “Then I shall open it.”
   “But it won't open.”
   “Then I shall try another door.”
   “But all the other doors are shut.”
   “What? Who shut them?”
   “I don't know.”
   I advanced a theory!
   “The wind?”
   Aunt Dahlia's eyes met mine.
   “Don't try me too high,” she begged. “Not now, precious.” And, indeed, even as I spoke, it did strike me that the night was pretty still.
   Uncle Tom said we must get in through a window. Aunt Dahlia sighed a bit.
   “How? Could Lloyd George do it, could Winston do it, could Baldwin do it? No. Not since you had those bars of yours put on.”
   “Well, well, well. God bless my soul, ring the bell, then.”
   “The fire bell?”
   “The door bell.”
   “To what end, Thomas? There's nobody in the house. The servants are all at Kingham.”
   “But, confound it all, we can't stop out here all night.”
   “Can't we? You just watch us. There is nothing—literally nothing—which a country house party can't do with Attila here operating on the premises. Seppings presumably took the back-door key with him. We must just amuse ourselves till he comes back.”
   Tuppy made a suggestion:
   “Why not take out one of the cars and drive over to Kingham and get the key from Seppings?”
   It went well. No question about that. For the first time, a smile lit up Aunt Dahlia's drawn face. Uncle Tom grunted approvingly. Anatole said something in Provencal that sounded complimentary. And I thought I detected even on Angela's map a slight softening.
   “A very excellent idea,” said Aunt Dahlia. “One of the best. Nip round to the garage at once.”
   After Tuppy had gone, some extremely flattering things were said about his intelligence and resource, and there was a disposition to draw rather invidious comparisons between him and Bertram. Painful for me, of course, but the ordeal didn't last long, for it couldn't have been more than five minutes before he was with us again.
   Tuppy seemed perturbed.
   “I say, it's all off.”
   “Why?”
   “The garage is locked.”
   “Unlock it.”
   “I haven't the key.”
   “Shout, then, and wake Waterbury.”
   “Who's Waterbury?”
   “The chauffeur, ass. He sleeps over the garage.”
   “But he's gone to the dance at Kingham.”
   It was the final wallop. Until this moment, Aunt Dahlia had been able to preserve her frozen calm. The dam now burst. The years rolled away from her, and she was once more the Dahlia Wooster of the old yoicks-and-tantivy days—the emotional, free-speaking girl who had so often risen in her stirrups to yell derogatory personalities at people who were heading hounds.
   “Curse all dancing chauffeurs! What on earth does a chauffeur want to dance for? I mistrusted that man from the start. Something told me he was a dancer. Well, this finishes it. We're out here till breakfast-time. If those blasted servants come back before eight o'clock, I shall be vastly surprised. You won't get Seppings away from a dance till you throw him out. I know him. The jazz'll go to his head, and he'll stand clapping and demanding encores till his hands blister. Damn all dancing butlers! What is Brinkley Court? A respectable English country house or a crimson dancing school? One might as well be living in the middle of the Russian Ballet. Well, all right. If we must stay out here, we must. We shall all be frozen stiff, except”—here she directed at me not one of her friendliest glances—“except dear old Attila, who is, I observe, well and warmly clad. We will resign ourselves to the prospect of freezing to death like the Babes in the Wood, merely expressing a dying wish that our old pal Attila will see that we are covered with leaves. No doubt he will also toll that fire bell of his as a mark of respect—And what might you want, my good man?”
   She broke off, and stood glaring at Jeeves. During the latter portion of her address, he had been standing by in a respectful manner, endeavouring to catch the speaker's eye.
   “If I might make a suggestion, madam.”
   I am not saying that in the course of our long association I have always found myself able to view Jeeves with approval. There are aspects of his character which have frequently caused coldnesses to arise between us. He is one of those fellows who, if you give them a thingummy, take a what-d'you-call-it. His work is often raw, and he has been known to allude to me as “mentally negligible”. More than once, as I have shown, it has been my painful task to squelch in him a tendency to get uppish and treat the young master as a serf or peon.
   These are grave defects.
   But one thing I have never failed to hand the man. He is magnetic. There is about him something that seems to soothe and hypnotize. To the best of my knowledge, he has never encountered a charging rhinoceros, but should this contingency occur, I have no doubt that the animal, meeting his eye, would check itself in mid-stride, roll over and lie purring with its legs in the air.
   At any rate he calmed down Aunt Dahlia, the nearest thing to a charging rhinoceros, in under five seconds. He just stood there looking respectful, and though I didn't time the thing—not having a stop-watch on me—I should say it wasn't more than three seconds and a quarter before her whole manner underwent an astounding change for the better. She melted before one's eyes.
   “Jeeves! You haven't got an idea?”
   “Yes, madam.”
   “That great brain of yours has really clicked as ever in the hour of need?”
   “Yes, madam.”
   “Jeeves,” said Aunt Dahlia in a shaking voice, “I am sorry I spoke so abruptly. I was not myself. I might have known that you would not come simply trying to make conversation. Tell us this idea of yours, Jeeves. Join our little group of thinkers and let us hear what you have to say. Make yourself at home, Jeeves, and give us the good word. Can you really get us out of this mess?”
   “Yes, madam, if one of the gentlemen would be willing to ride a bicycle.”
   “A bicycle?”
   “There is a bicycle in the gardener's shed in the kitchen garden, madam. Possibly one of the gentlemen might feel disposed to ride over to Kingham Manor and procure the back-door key from Mr. Seppings.”
   “Splendid, Jeeves!”
   “Thank you, madam.”
   “Wonderful!”
   “Thank you, madam.”
   “Attila!” said Aunt Dahlia, turning and speaking in a quiet, authoritative manner.
   I had been expecting it. From the very moment those ill-judged words had passed the fellow's lips, I had had a presentiment that a determined effort would be made to elect me as the goat, and I braced myself to resist and obstruct.
   And as I was about to do so, while I was in the very act of summoning up all my eloquence to protest that I didn't know how to ride a bike and couldn't possibly learn in the brief time at my disposal, I'm dashed if the man didn't go and nip me in the bud.
   “Yes, madam, Mr. Wooster would perform the task admirably. He is an expert cyclist. He has often boasted to me of his triumphs on the wheel.”
   I hadn't. I hadn't done anything of the sort. It's simply monstrous how one's words get twisted. All I had ever done was to mention to him—casually, just as an interesting item of information, one day in New York when we were watching the six-day bicycle race—that at the age of fourteen, while spending my holidays with a vicar of sorts who had been told off to teach me Latin, I had won the Choir Boys' Handicap at the local school treat.
   A different thing from boasting of one's triumphs on the wheel.
   I mean, he was a man of the world and must have known that the form of school treats is never of the hottest. And, if I'm not mistaken, I had specifically told him that on the occasion referred to I had received half a lap start and that Willie Punting, the odds-on favourite to whom the race was expected to be a gift, had been forced to retire, owing to having pinched his elder brother's machine without asking the elder brother, and the elder brother coming along just as the pistol went and giving him one on the side of the head and taking it away from him, thus rendering him a scratched-at-the-post non-starter. Yet, from the way he talked, you would have thought I was one of those chaps in sweaters with medals all over them, whose photographs bob up from time to time in the illustrated press on the occasion of their having ridden from Hyde Park Corner to Glasgow in three seconds under the hour, or whatever it is.
   And as if this were not bad enough, Tuppy had to shove his oar in.
   “That's right,” said Tuppy. “Bertie has always been a great cyclist. I remember at Oxford he used to take all his clothes off on bump-supper nights and ride around the quad, singing comic songs. Jolly fast he used to go too.”
   “Then he can go jolly fast now,” said Aunt Dahlia with animation. “He can't go too fast for me. He may also sing comic songs, if he likes.... And if you wish to take your clothes off, Bertie, my lamb, by all means do so. But whether clothed or in the nude, whether singing comic songs or not singing comic songs, get a move on.”
   I found speech:
   “But I haven't ridden for years.”
   “Then it's high time you began again.”
   “I've probably forgotten how to ride.”
   “You'll soon get the knack after you've taken a toss or two. Trial and error. The only way.”
   “But it's miles to Kingham.”
   “So the sooner you're off, the better.”
   “But—”
   “Bertie, dear.”
   “But, dash it—”
   “Bertie, darling.”
   “Yes, but dash it—”
   “Bertie, my sweet.”
   And so it was arranged. Presently I was moving sombrely off through the darkness, Jeeves at my side, Aunt Dahlia calling after me something about trying to imagine myself the man who brought the good news from Ghent to Aix. The first I had heard of the chap.
   “So, Jeeves,” I said, as we reached the shed, and my voice was cold and bitter, “this is what your great scheme has accomplished! Tuppy, Angela, Gussie and the Bassett not on speaking terms, and self faced with an eight-mile ride—”
   “Nine, I believe, sir.”
   “—a nine-mile ride, and another nine-mile ride back.”
   “I am sorry, sir.”
   “No good being sorry now. Where is this foul bone-shaker?”
   “I will bring it out, sir.”
   He did so. I eyed it sourly.
   “Where's the lamp?”
   “I fear there is no lamp, sir.”
   “No lamp?”
   “No, sir.”
   “But I may come a fearful stinker without a lamp. Suppose I barge into something.”
   I broke off and eyed him frigidly.
   “You smile, Jeeves. The thought amuses you?”
   “I beg your pardon, sir. I was thinking of a tale my Uncle Cyril used to tell me as a child. An absurd little story, sir, though I confess that I have always found it droll. According to my Uncle Cyril, two men named Nicholls and Jackson set out to ride to Brighton on a tandem bicycle, and were so unfortunate as to come into collision with a brewer's van. And when the rescue party arrived on the scene of the accident, it was discovered that they had been hurled together with such force that it was impossible to sort them out at all adequately. The keenest eye could not discern which portion of the fragments was Nicholls and which Jackson. So they collected as much as they could, and called it Nixon. I remember laughing very much at that story when I was a child, sir.”
   I had to pause a moment to master my feelings.
   “You did, eh?”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “You thought it funny?”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “And your Uncle Cyril thought it funny?”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “Golly, what a family! Next time you meet your Uncle Cyril, Jeeves, you can tell him from me that his sense of humour is morbid and unpleasant.”
   “He is dead, sir.”
   “Thank heaven for that.... Well, give me the blasted machine.”
   “Very good, sir.”
   “Are the tyres inflated?”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “The nuts firm, the brakes in order, the sprockets running true with the differential gear?”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “Right ho, Jeeves.”
   In Tuppy's statement that, when at the University of Oxford, I had been known to ride a bicycle in the nude about the quadrangle of our mutual college, there had been, I cannot deny, a certain amount of substance. Correct, however, though his facts were, so far as they went, he had not told all. What he had omitted to mention was that I had invariably been well oiled at the time, and when in that condition a chap is capable of feats at which in cooler moments his reason would rebel.
   Stimulated by the juice, I believe, men have even been known to ride alligators.
   As I started now to pedal out into the great world, I was icily sober, and the old skill, in consequence, had deserted me entirely. I found myself wobbling badly, and all the stories I had ever heard of nasty bicycle accidents came back to me with a rush, headed by Jeeves's Uncle Cyril's cheery little anecdote about Nicholls and Jackson.
   Pounding wearily through the darkness, I found myself at a loss to fathom the mentality of men like Jeeves's Uncle Cyril. What on earth he could see funny in a disaster which had apparently involved the complete extinction of a human creature—or, at any rate, of half a human creature and half another human creature—was more than I could understand. To me, the thing was one of the most poignant tragedies that had ever been brought to my attention, and I have no doubt that I should have continued to brood over it for quite a time, had my thoughts not been diverted by the sudden necessity of zigzagging sharply in order to avoid a pig in the fairway.
   For a moment it looked like being real Nicholls-and-Jackson stuff, but, fortunately, a quick zig on my part, coinciding with an adroit zag on the part of the pig, enabled me to win through, and I continued my ride safe, but with the heart fluttering like a captive bird.
   The effect of this narrow squeak upon me was to shake the nerve to the utmost. The fact that pigs were abroad in the night seemed to bring home to me the perilous nature of my enterprise. It set me thinking of all the other things that could happen to a man out and about on a velocipede without a lamp after lighting-up time. In particular, I recalled the statement of a pal of mine that in certain sections of the rural districts goats were accustomed to stray across the road to the extent of their chains, thereby forming about as sound a booby trap as one could well wish.
   He mentioned, I remember, the case of a friend of his whose machine got entangled with a goat chain and who was dragged seven miles—like skijoring in Switzerland—so that he was never the same man again. And there was one chap who ran into an elephant, left over from a travelling circus.
   Indeed, taking it for all in all, it seemed to me that, with the possible exception of being bitten by sharks, there was virtually no front-page disaster that could not happen to a fellow, once he had allowed his dear ones to override his better judgment and shove him out into the great unknown on a push-bike, and I am not ashamed to confess that, taking it by and large, the amount of quailing I did from this point on was pretty considerable.
   However, in respect to goats and elephants, I must say things panned out unexpectedly well.
   Oddly enough, I encountered neither. But when you have said that you have said everything, for in every other way the conditions could scarcely have been fouler.
   Apart from the ceaseless anxiety of having to keep an eye skinned for elephants, I found myself much depressed by barking dogs, and once I received a most unpleasant shock when, alighting to consult a signpost, I saw sitting on top of it an owl that looked exactly like my Aunt Agatha. So agitated, indeed, had my frame of mind become by this time that I thought at first it was Aunt Agatha, and only when reason and reflection told me how alien to her habits it would be to climb signposts and sit on them, could I pull myself together and overcome the weakness.
   In short, what with all this mental disturbance added to the more purely physical anguish in the billowy portions and the calves and ankles, the Bertram Wooster who eventually toppled off at the door of Kingham Manor was a very different Bertram from the gay and insouciantboulevardierof Bond Street and Piccadilly.
   Even to one unaware of the inside facts, it would have been evident that Kingham Manor was throwing its weight about a bit tonight. Lights shone in the windows, music was in the air, and as I drew nearer my ear detected the sibilant shuffling of the feet of butlers, footmen, chauffeurs, parlourmaids, housemaids, tweenies and, I have no doubt, cooks, who were busily treading the measure. I suppose you couldn't sum it up much better than by saying that there was a sound of revelry by night.
   The orgy was taking place in one of the ground-floor rooms which had French windows opening on to the drive, and it was to these French windows that I now made my way. An orchestra was playing something with a good deal of zip to it, and under happier conditions I dare say my feet would have started twitching in time to the melody. But I had sterner work before me than to stand hoofing it by myself on gravel drives.
   I wanted that back-door key, and I wanted it instanter.
   Scanning the throng within, I found it difficult for a while to spot Seppings. Presently, however, he hove in view, doing fearfully lissom things in mid-floor. I “Hi-Seppings!”-ed a couple of times, but his mind was too much on his job to be diverted, and it was only when the swirl of the dance had brought him within prodding distance of my forefinger that a quick one to the lower ribs enabled me to claim his attention.
   The unexpected buffet caused him to trip over his partner's feet, and it was with marked austerity that he turned. As he recognized Bertram, however, coldness melted, to be replaced by astonishment.
   “Mr. Wooster!”
   I was in no mood for bandying words.
   “Less of the 'Mr. Wooster' and more back-door keys,” I said curtly. “Give me the key of the back door, Seppings.”
   He did not seem to grasp the gist.
   “The key of the back door, sir?”
   “Precisely. The Brinkley Court back-door key.”
   “But it is at the Court, sir.”
   I clicked the tongue, annoyed.
   “Don't be frivolous, my dear old butler,” I said. “I haven't ridden nine miles on a push-bike to listen to you trying to be funny. You've got it in your trousers pocket.”
   “No, sir. I left it with Mr. Jeeves.”
   “You did—what?”
   “Yes, sir. Before I came away. Mr. Jeeves said that he wished to walk in the garden before retiring for the night. He was to place the key on the kitchen window-sill.”
   I stared at the man dumbly. His eye was clear, his hand steady. He had none of the appearance of a butler who has had a couple.
   “You mean that all this while the key has been in Jeeves's possession?”??
   “Yes, sir.”
   I could speak no more. Emotion had overmastered my voice. I was at a loss and not abreast; but of one thing, it seemed to me, there could be no doubt. For some reason, not to be fathomed now, but most certainly to be gone well into as soon as I had pushed this infernal sewing-machine of mine over those nine miles of lonely, country road and got within striking distance of him, Jeeves had been doing the dirty. Knowing that at any given moment he could have solved the whole situation, he had kept Aunt Dahlia and others roosting out on the front lawnen deshabilleand, worse still, had stood calmly by and watched his young employer set out on a wholly unnecessary eighteen-mile bicycle ride.
   I could scarcely believe such a thing of him. Of his Uncle Cyril, yes. With that distorted sense of humour of his, Uncle Cyril might quite conceivably have been capable of such conduct. But that it should be Jeeves—
   I leaped into the saddle and, stifling the cry of agony which rose to the lips as the bruised person touched the hard leather, set out on the homeward journey.

-23-

   I remember Jeeves saying on one occasion—I forgot how the subject had arisen—he may simply have thrown the observation out, as he does sometimes, for me to take or leave—that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. And until tonight I had always felt that there was a lot in it. I had never scorned a woman myself, but Pongo Twistleton once scorned an aunt of his, flatly refusing to meet her son Gerald at Paddington and give him lunch and see him off to school at Waterloo, and he never heard the end of it. Letters were written, he tells me, which had to be seen to be believed. Also two very strong telegrams and a bitter picture post card with a view of the Little Chilbury War Memorial on it.
   Until tonight, therefore, as I say, I had never questioned the accuracy of the statement. Scorned women first and the rest nowhere, was how it had always seemed to me.
   But tonight I revised my views. If you want to know what hell can really do in the way of furies, look for the chap who has been hornswoggled into taking a long and unnecessary bicycle ride in the dark without a lamp.
   Mark that word “unnecessary”. That was the part of it that really jabbed the iron into the soul. I mean, if it was a case of riding to the doctor's to save the child with croup, or going off to the local pub to fetch supplies in the event of the cellar having run dry, no one would leap to the handlebars more readily than I. Young Lochinvar, absolutely. But this business of being put through it merely to gratify one's personal attendant's diseased sense of the amusing was a bit too thick, and I chafed from start to finish.
   So, what I mean to say, although the providence which watches over good men saw to it that I was enabled to complete the homeward journey unscathed except in the billowy portions, removing from my path all goats, elephants, and even owls that looked like my Aunt Agatha, it was a frowning and jaundiced Bertram who finally came to anchor at the Brinkley Court front door. And when I saw a dark figure emerging from the porch to meet me, I prepared to let myself go and uncork all that was fizzing in the mind.
   “Jeeves!” I said.
   “It is I, Bertie.”
   The voice which spoke sounded like warm treacle, and even if I had not recognized it immediately as that of the Bassett, I should have known that it did not proceed from the man I was yearning to confront. For this figure before me was wearing a simple tweed dress and had employed my first name in its remarks. And Jeeves, whatever his moral defects, would never go about in skirts calling me Bertie.
   The last person, of course, whom I would have wished to meet after a long evening in the saddle, but I vouchsafed a courteous “What ho!”
   There was a pause, during which I massaged the calves. Mine, of course, I mean.
   “You got in, then?” I said, in allusion to the change of costume.
   “Oh, yes. About a quarter of an hour after you left Jeeves went searching about and found the back-door key on the kitchen window-sill.”
   “Ha!”
   “What?”
   “Nothing.”
   “I thought you said something.”
   “No, nothing.”
   And I continued to do so. For at this juncture, as had so often happened when this girl and I were closeted, the conversation once more went blue on us. The night breeze whispered, but not the Bassett. A bird twittered, but not so much as a chirp escaped Bertram. It was perfectly amazing, the way her mere presence seemed to wipe speech from my lips—and mine, for that matter, from hers. It began to look as if our married life together would be rather like twenty years among the Trappist monks.
   “Seen Jeeves anywhere?” I asked, eventually coming through.
   “Yes, in the dining-room.”
   “The dining-room?”
   “Waiting on everybody. They are having eggs and bacon and champagne.... What did you say?”
   I had said nothing—merely snorted. There was something about the thought of these people carelessly revelling at a time when, for all they knew, I was probably being dragged about the countryside by goats or chewed by elephants, that struck home at me like a poisoned dart. It was the sort of thing you read about as having happened just before the French Revolution—the haughty nobles in their castles callously digging in and quaffing while the unfortunate blighters outside were suffering frightful privations.
   The voice of the Bassett cut in on these mordant reflections:
   “Bertie.”
   “Hullo!”
   Silence.
   “Hullo!” I said again.
   No response. Whole thing rather like one of those telephone conversations where you sit at your end of the wire saying: “Hullo! Hullo!” unaware that the party of the second part has gone off to tea.
   Eventually, however, she came to the surface again:
   “Bertie, I have something to say to you.”
   “What?”
   “I have something to say to you.”
   “I know. I said 'What?'“
   “Oh, I thought you didn't hear what I said.”
   “Yes, I heard what you said, all right, but not what you were going to say.”
   “Oh, I see.”
   “Right-ho.”
   So that was straightened out. Nevertheless, instead of proceeding she took time off once more. She stood twisting the fingers and scratching the gravel with her foot. When finally she spoke, it was to deliver an impressive boost:
   “Bertie, do you read Tennyson?”
   “Not if I can help.”
   “You remind me so much of those Knights of the Round Table in the 'Idylls of the King'.”
   Of course I had heard of them—Lancelot, Galahad and all that lot, but I didn't see where the resemblance came in. It seemed to me that she must be thinking of a couple of other fellows.
   “How do you mean?”
   “You have such a great heart, such a fine soul. You are so generous, so unselfish, so chivalrous. I have always felt that about you—that you are one of the few really chivalrous men I have ever met.”
   Well, dashed difficult, of course, to know what to say when someone is giving you the old oil on a scale like that. I muttered an “Oh, yes?” or something on those lines, and rubbed the billowy portions in some embarrassment. And there was another silence, broken only by a sharp howl as I rubbed a bit too hard.
   “Bertie.”
   “Hullo?”
   I heard her give a sort of gulp.
   “Bertie, will you be chivalrous now?”
   “Rather. Only too pleased. How do you mean?”
   “I am going to try you to the utmost. I am going to test you as few men have ever been tested. I am going—”
   I didn't like the sound of this.
   “Well,” I said doubtfully, “always glad to oblige, you know, but I've just had the dickens of a bicycle ride, and I'm a bit stiff and sore, especially in the—as I say, a bit stiff and sore. If it's anything to be fetched from upstairs—”
   “No, no, you don't understand.”
   “I don't, quite, no.”
   “Oh, it's so difficult.... How can I say it?... Can't you guess?”
   “No. I'm dashed if I can.”
   “Bertie—let me go!”
   “But I haven't got hold of you.”
   “Release me!”
   “Re—”
   And then I suddenly got it. I suppose it was fatigue that had made me so slow to apprehend the nub.
   “What?”
   I staggered, and the left pedal came up and caught me on the shin. But such was the ecstasy in the soul that I didn't utter a cry.
   “Release you?”
   “Yes.”
   I didn't want any confusion on the point.
   “You mean you want to call it all off? You're going to hitch up with Gussie, after all?”
   “Only if you are fine and big enough to consent.”
   “Oh, I am.”
   “I gave you my promise.”
   “Dash promises.”
   “Then you really—”
   “Absolutely.”
   “Oh, Bertie!”
   She seemed to sway like a sapling. It is saplings that sway, I believe.
   “A very parfait knight!” I heard her murmur, and there not being much to say after that, I excused myself on the ground that I had got about two pecks of dust down my back and would like to go and get my maid to put me into something loose.
   “You go back to Gussie,” I said, “and tell him that all is well.”
   She gave a sort of hiccup and, darting forward, kissed me on the forehead. Unpleasant, of course, but, as Anatole would say, I can take a few smooths with a rough. The next moment she was legging it for the dining-room, while I, having bunged the bicycle into a bush, made for the stairs.
   I need not dwell upon my buckedness. It can be readily imagined. Talk about chaps with the noose round their necks and the hangman about to let her go and somebody galloping up on a foaming horse, waving the reprieve—not in it. Absolutely not in it at all. I don't know that I can give you a better idea of the state of my feelings than by saying that as I started to cross the hall I was conscious of so profound a benevolence toward all created things that I found myself thinking kindly thoughts even of Jeeves.
   I was about to mount the stairs when a sudden “What ho!” from my rear caused me to turn. Tuppy was standing in the hall. He had apparently been down to the cellar for reinforcements, for there were a couple of bottles under his arm.
   “Hullo, Bertie,” he said. “You back?” He laughed amusedly. “You look like the Wreck of the Hesperus. Get run over by a steam-roller or something?”
   At any other time I might have found his coarse badinage hard to bear. But such was my uplifted mood that I waved it aside and slipped him the good news.
   “Tuppy, old man, the Bassett's going to marry Gussie Fink-Nottle.”
   “Tough luck on both of them, what?”
   “But don't you understand? Don't you see what this means? It means that Angela is once more out of pawn, and you have only to play your cards properly—”
   He bellowed rollickingly. I saw now that he was in the pink. As a matter of fact, I had noticed something of the sort directly I met him, but had attributed it to alcoholic stimulant.
   “Good Lord! You're right behind the times, Bertie. Only to be expected, of course, if you will go riding bicycles half the night. Angela and I made it up hours ago.”
   “What?”
   “Certainly. Nothing but a passing tiff. All you need in these matters is a little give and take, a bit of reasonableness on both sides. We got together and talked things over. She withdrew my double chin. I conceded her shark. Perfectly simple. All done in a couple of minutes.”
   “But—”
   “Sorry, Bertie. Can't stop chatting with you all night. There is a rather impressive beano in progress in the dining-room, and they are waiting for supplies.”
   Endorsement was given to this statement by a sudden shout from the apartment named. I recognized—as who would not—Aunt Dahlia's voice:
   “Glossop!”
   “Hullo?”
   “Hurry up with that stuff.”
   “Coming, coming.”
   “Well, come, then. Yoicks! Hard for-rard!”
   “Tallyho, not to mention tantivy. Your aunt,” said Tuppy, “is a bit above herself. I don't know all the facts of the case, but it appears that Anatole gave notice and has now consented to stay on, and also your uncle has given her a cheque for that paper of hers. I didn't get the details, but she is much braced. See you later. I must rush.”
   To say that Bertram was now definitely nonplussed would be but to state the simple truth. I could make nothing of this. I had left Brinkley Court a stricken home, with hearts bleeding wherever you looked, and I had returned to find it a sort of earthly paradise. It baffled me.
   I bathed bewilderedly. The toy duck was still in the soap-dish, but I was too preoccupied to give it a thought. Still at a loss, I returned to my room, and there was Jeeves. And it is proof of my fogged condish that my first words to him were words not of reproach and stern recrimination but of inquiry:
   “I say, Jeeves!”
   “Good evening, sir. I was informed that you had returned. I trust you had an enjoyable ride.”
   At any other moment, a crack like that would have woken the fiend in Bertram Wooster. I barely noticed it. I was intent on getting to the bottom of this mystery.
   “But I say, Jeeves, what?”
   “Sir?”
   “What does all this mean?”
   “You refer, sir—”
   “Of course I refer. You know what I'm talking about. What has been happening here since I left? The place is positively stiff with happy endings.”
   “Yes, sir. I am glad to say that my efforts have been rewarded.”
   “What do you mean, your efforts? You aren't going to try to make out that that rotten fire bell scheme of yours had anything to do with it?”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “Don't be an ass, Jeeves. It flopped.”
   “Not altogether, sir. I fear, sir, that I was not entirely frank with regard to my suggestion of ringing the fire bell. I had not really anticipated that it would in itself produce the desired results. I had intended it merely as a preliminary to what I might describe as the real business of the evening.”
   “You gibber, Jeeves.”
   “No, sir. It was essential that the ladies and gentlemen should be brought from the house, in order that, once out of doors, I could ensure that they remained there for the necessary period of time.”
   “How do you mean?”
   “My plan was based on psychology, sir.”
   “How?”
   “It is a recognized fact, sir, that there is nothing that so satisfactorily unites individuals who have been so unfortunate as to quarrel amongst themselves as a strong mutual dislike for some definite person. In my own family, if I may give a homely illustration, it was a generally accepted axiom that in times of domestic disagreement it was necessary only to invite my Aunt Annie for a visit to heal all breaches between the other members of the household. In the mutual animosity excited by Aunt Annie, those who had become estranged were reconciled almost immediately. Remembering this, it occurred to me that were you, sir, to be established as the person responsible for the ladies and gentlemen being forced to spend the night in the garden, everybody would take so strong a dislike to you that in this common sympathy they would sooner or later come together.”
   I would have spoken, but he continued:
   “And such proved to be the case. All, as you see, sir, is now well. After your departure on the bicycle, the various estranged parties agreed so heartily in their abuse of you that the ice, if I may use the expression, was broken, and it was not long before Mr. Glossop was walking beneath the trees with Miss Angela, telling her anecdotes of your career at the university in exchange for hers regarding your childhood; while Mr. Fink-Nottle, leaning against the sundial, held Miss Bassett enthralled with stories of your schooldays. Mrs. Travers, meanwhile, was telling Monsieur Anatole—”
   I found speech.
   “Oh?” I said. “I see. And now, I suppose, as the result of this dashed psychology of yours, Aunt Dahlia is so sore with me that it will be years before I can dare to show my face here again—years, Jeeves, during which, night after night, Anatole will be cooking those dinners of his—”
   “No, sir. It was to prevent any such contingency that I suggested that you should bicycle to Kingham Manor. When I informed the ladies and gentlemen that I had found the key, and it was borne in upon them that you were having that long ride for nothing, their animosity vanished immediately, to be replaced by cordial amusement. There was much laughter.”
   “There was, eh?”
   “Yes, sir. I fear you may possibly have to submit to a certain amount of good-natured chaff, but nothing more. All, if I may say so, is forgiven, sir.”
   “Oh?”
   “Yes, sir.”
   I mused awhile.
   “You certainly seem to have fixed things.”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “Tuppy and Angela are once more betrothed. Also Gussie and the Bassett; Uncle Tom appears to have coughed up that money forMilady's Boudoir. And Anatole is staying on.”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “I suppose you might say that all's well that ends well.”
   “Very apt, sir.”
   I mused again.
   “All the same, your methods are a bit rough, Jeeves.”
   “One cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs, sir.”
   I started.
   “Omelette! Do you think you could get me one?”
   “Certainly, sir.”
   “Together with half a bot. of something?”
   “Undoubtedly, sir.”
   “Do so, Jeeves, and with all speed.”
   I climbed into bed and sank back against the pillows. I must say that my generous wrath had ebbed a bit. I was aching the whole length of my body, particularly toward the middle, but against this you had to set the fact that I was no longer engaged to Madeline Bassett. In a good cause one is prepared to suffer. Yes, looking at the thing from every angle, I saw that Jeeves had done well, and it was with an approving beam that I welcomed him as he returned with the needful.
   He did not check up with this beam. A bit grave, he seemed to me to be looking, and I probed the matter with a kindly query:
   “Something on your mind, Jeeves?”
   “Yes, sir. I should have mentioned it earlier, but in the evening's disturbance it escaped my memory, I fear I have been remiss, sir.”
   “Yes, Jeeves?” I said, champing contentedly.
   “In the matter of your mess-jacket, sir.”
   A nameless fear shot through me, causing me to swallow a mouthful of omelette the wrong way.
   “I am sorry to say, sir, that while I was ironing it this afternoon I was careless enough to leave the hot instrument upon it. I very much fear that it will be impossible for you to wear it again, sir.”
   One of those old pregnant silences filled the room.
   “I am extremely sorry, sir.”
   For a moment, I confess, that generous wrath of mine came bounding back, hitching up its muscles and snorting a bit through the nose, but, as we say on the Riviera,a quoi sert-il? There was nothing to be gained by g.w. now.
   We Woosters can bite the bullet. I nodded moodily and speared another slab of omelette.
   “Right ho, Jeeves.”
   “Very good, sir.”

Jeeves in the offing

P. G. Wodehouse


Jeeves and Wooster

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P.G.Wodehouse. Jeeves in the offing, 1960

1

   Jeeves placed the sizzling eggs and b. on the breakfast table, and Reginald ('Kipper') Herring and I, licking the lips, squared our elbows and got down to it. A lifelong buddy of mine, this Herring, linked to me by what are called imperishable memories. Years ago, when striplings, he and I had done a stretch together at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, the preparatory school conducted by that prince of stinkers, Aubrey Upjohn MA, and had frequently stood side by side in the Upjohn study awaiting the receipt of six of the juiciest from a cane of the type that biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder, as the fellow said. So we were, you might say, rather like a couple of old sweats who had fought shoulder to shoulder on Crispin's Day, if I've got the name right.
   The plat du jour having gone down the hatch, accompanied by some fluid ounces of strengthening coffee, I was about to reach for the marmalade, when I heard the telephone tootling out in the hall and rose to attend to it.
   'Bertram Wooster's residence, 'I said, having connected with the instrument. 'Wooster in person at this end. Oh hullo, ' I added, for the voice that boomed over the wire was that of Mrs Thomas Portarlington Travers of Brinkley Court, Market Snodsbury, near Droitwich – or, putting it another way, my good and deserving Aunt Dahlia. 'A very hearty pip-pip to you, old ancestor, ' I said, well pleased, for she is a woman with whom it is always a privilege to chew the fat.
   'And a rousing toodle-oo to you, you young blot on the landscape,' she replied cordially. 'I'm surprised to find you up as early as this. Or have you just got in from a night on the tiles?'
   I hastened to rebut this slur.
   'Certainly not. Nothing of that description whatsoever. I've been upping with the lark this last week, to keep Kipper Herring company. He's staying with me till he can get into his new flat. You remember old Kipper? I brought him down to Brinkley one summer. Chap with a cauliflower ear.'
   'I know who you mean. Looks like Jack Dempsey.'
   'That's right. Far more, indeed, than Jack Dempsey does. He's on the staff of the Thursday Review, a periodical of which you may or may not be a reader, and has to clock in at the office at daybreak. No doubt, when I apprise him of your call, he will send you his love, for I know he holds you in high esteem. The perfect hostess, he often describes you as. Well, it's nice to hear your voice again, old flesh-and-blood. How's everything down Market Snodsbury way?'
   'Oh, we're jogging along. But I'm not speaking from Brinkley. I'm in London.'
   'Till when?'
   'Driving back this afternoon.'
   'I'll give you lunch.'
   'Sorry, can't manage it. I'm putting on the nosebag with Sir Roderick Glossop.'
   This surprised me. The eminent brain specialist to whom she alluded was a man I would not have cared to lunch with myself, our relations having been on the stiff side since the night at Lady Wickham's place in Hertfordshire when, acting on the advice of my hostess's daughter Roberta, I had punctured his hot-water bottle with a darning needle in the small hours of the morning. Quite unintentional, of course. I had planned to puncture the h-w-b of his nephew Tuppy Glossop, with whom I had a feud on, and unknown to me they had changed rooms, fust one of those unfortunate misunderstandings.
   'What on earth are you doing that for?'
   'Why shouldn't I? He's paying.'
   I saw her point – a penny saved is a penny earned and all that sort of thing – but I continued surprised. It amazed me that Aunt Dahlia, presumably a free agent, should have selected this very formidable loony-doctor to chew the mid-day chop with. However, one of the first lessons life teaches us is that aunts will be aunts, so I merely shrugged a couple of shoulders.
   'Well, it's up to you, of course, but it seems a rash act. Did you come to London just to revel with Glossop?'
   'No, I'm here to collect my new butler and take him home with me.'
   'New butler? What's become of Seppings?'
   'He's gone.'
   I clicked the tongue. I was very fond of the major-domo in question, having enjoyed many a port in his pantry, and this news saddened me.
   'No, really?' I said. 'Too bad. I thought he looked a little frail when I last saw him. Well, that's how it goes. All flesh is grass, I often say.'
   'To Bognor Regis, for his holiday.'
   I unclicked the tongue.
   'Oh, I see. That puts a different complexion on the matter. Odd how all these pillars of the home seem to be dashing away on toots these days. It's like what Jeeves was telling me about the great race movements of the Middle Ages. Jeeves starts his holiday this morning. He's off to Herne Bay for the shrimping, and I'm feeling like that bird in the poem who lost his pet gazelle or whatever the animal was. I don't know what I'm going to do without him.'
   'I'll tell you what you're going to do. Have you a clean shirt?'
   'Several.'
   'And a toothbrush?'
   'Two, both of the finest quality.'
   'Then pack them. You're coming to Brinkley tomorrow.'
   The gloom which always envelops Bertram Wooster like a fog when Jeeves is about to take his annual vacation lightened perceptibly. There are few things I find more agreeable than a sojourn at Aunt Dahlia's rural lair. Picturesque scenery, gravel soil, main drainage, company's own water and, above all, the superb French cheffing of her French chef Anatole, God's gift to the gastric juices. A full hand, as you might put it.
   'What an admirable suggestion,' I said. 'You solve all my problems and bring the blue bird out of a hat. Rely on me. You will observe me bowling up in the Wooster sports model tomorrow afternoon with my hair in a braid and a song on my lips. My presence will, I feel sure, stimulate Anatole to new heights of endeavour. Got anybody else staying at the old snake pit?'
   'Five inmates in all.'
   'Five?' I resumed my tongue-clicking. 'Golly! Uncle Tom must be frothing at the mouth a bit,' I said, for I knew the old buster's distaste for guests in the home. Even a single weekender is sometimes enough to make him drain the bitter cup.
   'Tom's not there. He's gone to Harrogate with Cream.'
   'You mean lumbago.'
   'I don't mean lumbago. I mean Cream. Homer Cream. Big American tycoon, who is visiting these shores. He suffers from ulcers, and his medicine man has ordered him to take the waters at Harrogate. Tom has gone with him to hold his hand and listen to him of an evening while he tells him how filthy the stuff tastes.'
   'Antagonistic.'
   'What?'
   'I mean altruistic. You are probably not familiar with the word, but it's one I've heard Jeeves use. It's what you say of a fellow who gives selfless service, not counting the cost.'
   'Selfless service, my foot! Tom's in the middle of a very important business deal with Cream. If it goes through, he'll make a packet free of income tax. So he's sucking up to him like a Hollywood Yes-man.'
   I gave an intelligent nod, though this of course was wasted on her because she couldn't see me. I could readily understand my uncle-by– marriage's mental processes. T. Portarlington Travers is a man who has accumulated the pieces of eight in sackfuls, but he is always more than willing to shove a bit extra away behind the brick in the fireplace, feeling – and rightly –that every little bit added to what you've got makes just a little bit more. And if there's one thing that's right up his street, it is not paying income tax. He grudges every penny the Government nicks him for.
   'That is why, when kissing me goodbye, he urged me with tears in his eyes to lush Mrs Cream and her son Willie up and treat them like royalty. So they're at Brinkley, dug into the woodwork.'
   'Willie, did you say?'
   'Short for Wilbert.'
   I mused. Willie Cream. The name seemed familiar somehow. I seemed to have heard it or seen it in the papers somewhere. But it eluded me.
   'Adela Cream writes mystery stories. Are you a fan of hers? No? Well, start boning up on them, directly you arrive, because every little helps. I've bought a complete set. They're very good.'
   'I shall be delighted to run an eye over her material,' I said, for I am what they call an a-something of novels of suspense. Aficionado, would that be it? 'I can always do with another corpse or two. We have established, then, that among the inmates are this Mrs Cream and her son Wilbert. Who are the other three?'
   'Well, there's Lady Wickham's daughter Roberta.'
   I started violently, as if some unseen hand had goosed me.
   'What! Bobbie Wickham? Oh, my gosh!'
   'Why the agitation? Do you know her?'
   'You bet I know her.'
   'I begin to see Is she one of the gaggle of girls you've been engaged to?'
   'Not actually, no. We were never engaged. But that was merely because she wouldn't meet me half-way.'
   'Turned you down, did she?'
   'Yes, thank goodness '
   'Why thank goodness? She's a one-girl beauty chorus '
   'She doesn't try the eyes, I agree.'
   'A pippin, if ever there was one.'
   'Very true, but is being a pippin everything? What price the soul?'
   'Isn't her soul like mother makes?'
   'Far from it. Much below par. What I could tell you … But no, let it go Painful subj.'
   I had been about to mention fifty-seven or so of the reasons why the prudent operator, if he valued his peace of mind, deemed it best to stay well away from the red-headed menace under advisement, but realized that at a moment when I was wanting to get back to the marmalade it would occupy too much time. It will be enough to say that I had long since come out of the ether and was fully cognizant of the fact that in declining to fall in with my suggestion that we should start rounding up clergymen and bridesmaids, the beasel had rendered me a signal service, and I'll tell you why.
   Aunt Dahlia, describing this young blister as a one-girl beauty chorus, had called her shots perfectly correctly. Her outer crust was indeed of a nature to cause those beholding it to rock back on their heels with a startled whistle But while equipped with eyes like twin stars, hair ruddier than the cherry, oomph, espieglene and all the fixings, B. Wickham had also the disposition and general outlook on life of a ticking bomb In her society you always had the uneasy feeling that something was likely to go off at any moment with a pop. You never knew what she was going to do next or into what murky depths of soup she would carelessly plunge you.
   'Miss Wickham, sir,' Jeeves had once said to me warningly at the time when the fever was at its height, 'lacks seriousness She is volatile and frivolous. I would always hesitate to recommend as a life partner a young lady with quite such a vivid shade of red hair.'
   His judgment was sound I have already mentioned how with her subtle wiles this girl had induced me to sneak into Sir Roderick Glossop's sleeping apartment and apply the darning needle to his hot-water bottle, and that was comparatively mild going for her. In a word, Roberta, daughter of the late Sir Cuthbert and Lady Wickham of Skeldings Hall, Herts, was pure dynamite and better kept at a distance by all those who aimed at leading the peaceful life The prospect of being immured with her in the same house, with all the facilities a country-house affords an enterprising girl for landing her nearest and dearest in the mulligatawny, made me singularly dubious about the shape of things to come.
   And I was tottering under this blow when the old relative administered another, and it was a haymaker.
   'And there's Aubrey Upjohn and his stepdaughter Phyllis Mills,' she said That's the lot What's the matter with you? Got asthma?'
   I took her to be alluding to the sharp gasp which had escaped my lips, and I must confess that it had come out not unlike the last words of a dying duck. But I felt perfectly justified in gasping A weaker man would have howled like a banshee. There floated into my mind something Kipper Herring had once said to me. 'You know, Bertie,' he had said, in philosophical mood, 'we have much to be thankful for in this life of ours, you and I However rough the going, there is one sustaining thought to which we can hold. The storm clouds may lower and the horizon grow dark, we may get a nail in our shoe and be caught in the rain without an umbrella, we may come down to breakfast and find that someone else has taken the brown egg, but at least we have the consolation of knowing that we shall never see Aubrey Gawd-help-us Upjohn again. Always remember this in times of despondency,' he said, and I always had. And now here the bounder was, bobbing up right in my midst. Enough to make the stoutest-hearted go into his dying-duck routine.
   'Aubrey Upjohn?' I quavered. 'You mean my Aubrey Upjohn?'
   'That's the one. Soon after you made your escape from his chain gang he married Jane Mills, a friend of mine with a colossal amount of money. She died, leaving a daughter. I'm the daughter's godmother. Upjohn's retired now and going in for politics. The hot tip is that the boys in the back room are going to run him as the Conservative candidate in the Market Snodsbury division at the next by-election. What a thrill it'll be for you, meeting him again. Or does the prospect scare you?'
   'Certainly not. We Woosters are intrepid. But what on earth did you invite him to Brinkley for?'
   'I didn't. I only wanted Phyllis, but he came along, too.'
   'You should have bunged him out.'
   'I hadn't the heart to.'
   'Weak, very weak.'
   'Besides, I needed him in my business. He's going to present the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School. We've been caught short as usual, and somebody has got to make a speech on ideals and the great world outside to those blasted boys, so he fits in nicely. I believe he's a very fine speaker. His only trouble is that he's stymied unless he has his speech with him and can read it. Calls it referring to his notes. Phyllis told me that. She types the stuff for him.'
   'A thoroughly low trick,' I said severely. 'Even I, who have never soared above the Yeoman's Wedding Song at a village concert, wouldn't have the crust to face my public unless I'd taken the trouble to memorize the words, though actually with the Yeoman's Wedding Song it is possible to get by quite comfortably by keeping singing «Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong, I hurry along». In short…'
   I would have spoken further, but at this point, after urging me to put a sock in it, and giving me a kindly word of warning not to step on any banana skins, she rang off.

2

   I came away from the telephone on what practically amounted to leaden feet. Here, I was feeling, was a nice bit of box fruit. Bobbie Wickham, with her tendency to stir things up and with each new day to discover some new way of staggering civilization, would by herself have been bad enough. Add Aubrey Upjohn, and the mixture became too rich. I don't know if Kipper, when I rejoined him, noticed that my brow was sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, as I have heard Jeeves put it. Probably not, for he was tucking into toast and marmalade at the moment, but it was. As had happened so often in the past, I was conscious of an impending doom. Exactly what form this would take I was of course unable to say – it might be one thing or it might be another – but a voice seemed to whisper to me that somehow at some not distant date Bertram was slated to get it in the gizzard.
   'That was Aunt Dahlia, Kipper,' I said.
   'Bless her jolly old heart,' he responded. 'One of the very best, and you can quote me as saying so. I shall never forget those happy days at Brinkley, and shall be glad at any time that suits her to cadge another invitation. Is she up in London?'
   'Till this afternoon.'
   'We fill her to the brim with rich foods, of course?'
   'No, she's got a lunch date. She's browsing with Sir Roderick Glossop, the loony-doctor. You don't know him, do you?'
   'Only from hearing you speak of him. A tough egg, I gather.'
   'One of the toughest.'
   'He was the chap, wasn't he, who found the twenty-four cats in your bedroom?'
   'Twenty-three,' I corrected. I like to get things right. 'They were not my cats. They had been deposited there by my Cousins Claude and Eustace. But I found them difficult to explain. He's a rather bad listener. I hope I shan't find him at Brinkley, too.'
   'Are you going to Brinkley?'
   'Tomorrow afternoon.'
   'You'll enjoy that.'
   'Well, shall I? The point is a very moot one.'
   'You're crazy. Think of Anatole. Those dinners of his! Is the name of the Peri who stood disconsolate at the gate of Eden familiar to you?'
   'I've heard Jeeves mention her.'
   'Well, that's how I feel when I remember Anatole's dinners. When I reflect that every night he's dishing them up and I'm not there, I come within a very little of breaking down. What gives you the idea that you won't enjoy yourself? Brinkley Court's an earthly Paradise.'
   'In many respects, yes, but life there at the moment has its drawbacks. There's far too much of that where-every-prospect-pleases– and-only-man-is-vile stuff buzzing around for my taste. Who do you think is staying at the old dosshouse? Aubrey Upjohn.'
   It was plain that I had shaken him. His eyes widened, and an astonished piece of toast fell from his grasp.
   'Old Upjohn? You're kidding.'
   'No, he's there. Himself, not a picture. And it seems only yesterday that you were buoying me up by telling me I'd never have to see him again. The storm clouds may lower, you said, if you recollect…'
   'But how does he come to be at Brinkley?'
   'Precisely what I asked the aged relative, and she had an explanation that seems to cover the facts. Apparently after we took our eye off him he married a friend of hers, one Jane Mills, and acquired a stepdaughter, Phyllis Mills, whose godmother Aunt Dahlia is. The ancestor invited the Mills girl to Brinkley, and Upjohn came along for the ride.'
   'I see. I don't wonder you're trembling like a leaf.'
   'Not like a leaf, exactly, but… yes, I think you might describe me as trembling. One remembers that fishy eye of his.'
   'And the wide, bare upper lip. It won't be pleasant having to gaze at those across the dinner table. Still, you'll like Phyllis.'
   'Do you know her?'
   'We met out in Switzerland last Christmas. Slap her on the back, will you, and give her my regards. Nice girl, though goofy. She never told me she was related to Upjohn.'
   'She would naturally keep a thing like that dark.'
   'Yes, one sees that. Just as one would have tried to keep it dark if one had been mixed up in any way with Palmer the poisoner. What ghastly garbage that was he used to fling at us when we were serving our sentence at Malvern House. Remember the sausages on Sunday? And the boiled mutton with caper sauce?'
   'And the margarine. Recalling this last, it's going to be a strain having to sit and watch him getting outside pounds of best country butter. Oh, Jeeves,' I said, as he shimmered in to clear the table, 'you never went to a preparatory school on the south coast of England, did you?'
   'No, sir, I was privately educated.'
   'Ah, then you wouldn't understand. Mr Herring and I were discussing our former prep-school beak, Aubrey Upjohn, MA. By the way, Kipper, Aunt Dahlia was telling me something about him which I never knew before and which ought to expose him to the odium of all thinking men. You remember those powerful end-of-term addresses he used to make to us? Well, he couldn't have made them if he hadn't had the stuff all typed out in his grasp, so that he could read it. Without his notes, as he calls them, he's a spent force. Revolting, that, Jeeves, don't you think?'
   'Many orators are, I believe, similarly handicapped, sir.'
   'Too tolerant, Jeeves, far too tolerant. You must guard against this lax outlook. However, the reason I mention Upjohn to you is that he has come back into my life, or will be so coming in about two ticks. He's staying at Brinkley, and I shall be going there tomorrow. That was Aunt Dahlia on the phone just now, and she demands my presence. Will you pack a few necessaries in a suitcase or so?'
   'Very good, sir.'
   'When are you leaving on your Herne Bay jaunt?'
   'I was thinking of taking a train this morning, sir, but if you would prefer that I remained till tomorrow –'
   'No, no, perfectly all right. Start as soon as you like. What's the joke?' I asked, as the door closed behind him, for I observed that Kipper was chuckling softly. Not an easy thing to do, of course, when your mouth's full of toast and marmalade, but he was doing it.
   'I was thinking of Upjohn,' he said.
   I was amazed. It seemed incredible to me that anyone who had done time at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, could chuckle, softly or otherwise, when letting the mind dwell on that outstanding menace. It was like laughing lightly while contemplating one of those horrors from outer space which are so much with us at the moment on the motion– picture screen.
   'I envy you, Bertie,' he went on, continuing to chuckle. 'You have a wonderful treat in store. You are going to be present at the breakfast table when Upjohn opens his copy of this week's Thursday Review and starts to skim through the pages devoted to comments on current literature. I should explain that among the books that recently arrived at the office was a slim volume from his pen dealing with the Preparatory School and giving it an enthusiastic build-up. The formative years which we spent there, he said, were the happiest of our life.'
   'Gadzooks!'
   'He little knew that his brain child would be given to one of the old lags of Malvern House to review. I'll tell you something, Bertie, that every young man ought to know. Never be a stinker, because if you are, though you may flourish for a time like a green bay tree, sooner or later retribution will overtake you. I need scarcely tell you that I ripped the stuffing out of the beastly little brochure. The thought of those sausages on Sunday filled me with the righteous fury of a Juvenal.'
   'Of a who?'
   'Nobody you know. Before your time. I seemed inspired. Normally, I suppose, a book like that would get me a line and a half in the Other Recent Publications column, but I gave it six hundred words of impassioned prose. How extraordinarily fortunate you are to be in a position to watch his face as he reads them.'
   'How do you know he'll read them?'
   'He's a subscriber. There was a letter from him on the correspondence page a week or two ago, in which he specifically stated that he had been one for years.'
   'Did you sign the thing?'
   'No. Ye Ed is not keen on underlings advertising their names.'
   'And it was really hot stuff?'
   'Red hot. So eye him closely at the breakfast table. Mark his reaction. I confidently expect the blush of shame and remorse to mantle his cheek.'
   'The only catch is that 1 don't come down to breakfast when I'm at Brinkley. Still, I suppose I could make a special effort.'
   'Do so. You will find it well worth while,' said Kipper and shortly afterwards popped off to resume the earning of the weekly envelope.
   He had been gone about twenty minutes when Jeeves came in, bowler hat in hand, to say goodbye. A solemn moment, taxing our self-control to the utmost. However, we both kept the upper lip stiff, and after we had kidded back and forth for a while he started to withdraw. He had reached the door when it suddenly occurred to me that he might have inside information about this Wilbert Cream of whom Aunt Dahlia had spoken. I have generally found that he knows everything about everyone.
   'Oh, Jeeves,' I said. 'Half a jiffy.'
   'Sir?'
   'Something I want to ask you. It seems that among my fellow-guests at Brinkley will be a Mrs Homer Cream, wife of an American big butter and egg man, and her son Wilbert, commonly known as Willie, and the name Willie Cream seemed somehow to touch a chord. Rightly or wrongly I associate it with trips we have taken to New York, but in what connection I haven't the vaguest. Does it ring a bell with you?'
   'Why yes, sir. References to the gentleman are frequent in the tabloid newspapers of New York, notably in the column conducted by Mr Walter Winchell. He is generally alluded to under the sobriquet of Broadway Willie.'
   'Of course! It all comes back to me. He's what they call a playboy.'
   'Precisely, sir. Notorious for his escapades.'
   'Yes, I've got him placed now. He's the fellow who likes to let off stink bombs in night clubs, which rather falls under the head of carrying coals to Newcastle and seldom cashes a cheque at his bank without producing a gat and saying, «This is a stick-up."'
   'And… No, sir, I regret that it has for the moment escaped my memory.'
   'What has?'
   'Some other little something, sir, that I was told regarding Mr Cream. Should I recall it, I will communicate with you.'
   'Yes, do. One wants the complete picture. Oh, gosh!'
   'Sir?'
   'Nothing, Jeeves. Just a thought has floated into my mind. All right, push off, or you'll miss your train. Good luck to your shrimping net.'
   I'll tell you what the thought was that had floated. I have already indicated my qualms at the prospect of being cooped up in the same house with Bobbie Wickham and Aubrey Upjohn, for who could tell what the harvest might be? If in addition to these two heavies I was also to be cheek by jowl with a New York playboy apparently afflicted with bats in the belfry, it began to look as if this visit would prove too much for Bertram's frail strength, and for an instant I toyed with the idea of sending a telegram of regret and oiling out.
   Then I remembered Anatole's cooking and was strong again. Nobody who has once tasted them would wantonly deprive himself of that wizard's smoked offerings. Whatever spiritual agonies I might be about to undergo at Brinkley Court, Market Snodsbury, near Droitwich, residence there would at least put me several Supremes de fois gras au champagne and Mignonettes de Poulet Petit Duc ahead of the game. Nevertheless, it would be paltering with the truth to say that I was at my ease as I thought of what lay before me in darkest Worcestershire, and the hand that lit the after-breakfast gasper shook quite a bit.
   At this moment of nervous tension the telephone suddenly gave tongue again, causing me to skip like the high hills, as if the Last Trump had sounded. I went to the instrument all of a twitter.
   Some species of butler appeared to be at the other end.
   'Mr Wooster?'
   'On the spot.'
   'Good morning, sir. Her ladyship wishes to speak to you. Lady Wickham, sir. Here is Mr Wooster, m'lady.'
   And Bobbie's mother came on the air.
   I should have mentioned, by the way, that during the above exchange of ideas with the butler I had been aware of a distant sound of sobbing, like background music, and it now became apparent that it was from the larynx of the relict of the late Sir Cuthbert that it was proceeding. There was a short intermission before she got the vocal cords working, and while I was waiting for her to start the dialogue I found myself wrestling with two problems that presented themselves – the first, What on earth is this woman ringing me up for?, the second, Having got the number, why does she sob?
   It was Problem A that puzzled me particularly, for ever since that hot-water-bottle episode my relations with this parent of Bobbie's had been on the strained side. It was, indeed, an open secret that my standing with her was practically that of a rat of the underworld. I had had this from Bobbie, whose impersonation of her mother discussing me with sympathetic cronies had been exceptionally vivid, and I must confess that I wasn't altogether surprised. No hostess, I mean to say, extending her hospitality to a friend of her daughter's, likes to have the young visitor going about the place puncturing people's water– bottles and leaving at three in the morning without stopping to say good-bye. Yes, I could see her side of the thing all right, and I found it extraordinary that she should be seeking me out on the telephone in this fashion. Feeling as she did so allergic to Bertram, I wouldn't have thought she'd have phoned me with a ten-foot pole.
   However, there beyond a question she was.
   'Mr Wooster?'
   'Oh, hullo, Lady Wickham.'
   'Are you there?'
   I put her straight on this point, and she took time out to sob again. She then spoke in a hoarse, throaty voice, like Tallulah Bankhead after swallowing a fish bone the wrong way.
   'Is this awful news true?'
   'Eh?'
   'Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!'
   'I don't quite follow.'
   'In this morning's Times.'
   I'm pretty shrewd, and it seemed to me, reading between the lines, that there must have been something in the issue of The Times published that morning that for some reason had upset her, though why she should have chosen me to tell her troubles to was a mystery not easy to fathom. I was about to institute inquiries in the hope of spearing a solution, when in addition to sobbing she started laughing in a hyaena– esque manner, making it clear to my trained ear that she was having hysterics. And before I could speak there was a dull thud suggestive of some solid body falling to earth, I knew not where, and when the dialogue was resumed, I found that the butler had put himself on as an understudy.
   'Mr Wooster?'
   'Still here.'
   'I regret to say that her ladyship has fainted.'
   'It was she I heard going bump?'
   'Precisely, sir. Thank you very much, sir. Good-bye.'
   He replaced the receiver and went about his domestic duties, these no doubt including the loosening of the stricken woman's corsets and burning feathers under her nose, leaving me to chew on the situation without further bulletins from the front.
   It seemed to me that the thing to do here was to get hold of The Times and see what it had to offer in the way of enlightenment. It's a paper I don't often look at, preferring for breakfast reading the Mirror and the Mail, but Jeeves takes it in and I have occasionally borrowed his copy with a view to having a shot at the crossword puzzle. It struck me as a possibility that he might have left today's issue in the kitchen, and so it proved. I came back with it, lowered myself into a chair, lit another cigarette and proceeded to cast an eye on its contents.
   At a cursory glance what might be called swoon material appeared to be totally absent from its columns. The Duchess of something had been opening a bazaar at Wimbledon in aid of a deserving charity, there was an article on salmon fishing on the Wye, and a Cabinet Minister had made a speech about conditions in the cotton industry, but I could see nothing in these items to induce a loss of consciousness. Nor did it seem probable that a woman would have passed out cold on reading that Herbert Robinson (26) of Grove Road, Ponder's End, had been jugged for stealing a pair of green and yellow checked trousers. I turned to the cricket news. Had some friend of hers failed to score in one of yesterday's county matches owing to a doubtful l.b.w. decision?
   It was just after I had run the eye down the Births and Marriages that I happened to look at the Engagements, and a moment later I was shooting out of my chair as if a spike had come through its cushioned seat and penetrated the fleshy parts.
   'Jeeves!' I yelled, and then remembered that he had long since gone with the wind. A bitter thought, for if ever there was an occasion when his advice and counsel were of the essence, this occ. was that occ. The best I could do, tackling it solo, was to utter a hollow g. and bury the face in the hands. And though I seem to hear my public tut-tutting in disapproval of such neurotic behaviour, I think the verdict of history will be that the paragraph on which my gaze had rested was more than enough to excuse a spot of face-burying.
   It ran as follows:
   FORTHCOMING MARRIAGES
   The engagement is announced between Bertram Wilberforce Wooster of Berkeley Mansions, W.1, and Roberta, daughter of the late Sir Cuthbert Wickham and Lady Wickham of Skeldings Hall, Herts.

3

   Well, as I was saying, I had several times when under the influence of her oomph taken up with Roberta Wickham the idea of such a merger, but – and here is the point I would stress – I could have sworn that on each occasion she had declined to co-operate, and that in a manner which left no room for doubt regarding her views. I mean to say, when a girl, offered a good man's heart, laughs like a bursting paper bag and tells him not to be a silly ass, the good man is entitled, I think, to assume that the whole thing is off. In the light of this announcement in The Times I could only suppose that on one of these occasions, unnoticed by me possibly because my attention had wandered, she must have drooped her eyes and come through with a murmured 'Right-ho.' Though when this could have happened, I hadn't the foggiest.
   It was, accordingly, as you will readily imagine, a Bertram Wooster with dark circles under his eyes and a brain threatening to come apart at the seams who braked the sports model on the following afternoon at the front door of Brinkley Court – a Bertram, in a word, who was asking himself what the dickens all this was about. Non-plussed more or less sums it up. It seemed to me that my first move must be to get hold of my fiancee and see if she had anything to contribute in the way of clarifying the situation.
   As is generally the case at country-houses on a fine day, there seemed to be nobody around. In due season the gang would assemble for tea on the lawn, but at the moment I could spot no friendly native to tell me where I might find Bobbie. I proceeded, therefore, to roam hither and thither about the grounds and messuages in the hope of locating her, wishing that I had a couple of bloodhounds to aid me in my task, for the Travers demesne is a spacious one and there was a considerable amount of sunshine above, though none, I need scarcely mention, in my heart.
   And I was tooling along a mossy path with the brow a bit wet with honest sweat, when there came to my ears the unmistakable sound of somebody reading poetry to someone, and the next moment I found myself confronting a mixed twosome who had dropped anchor beneath a shady tree in what is known as a leafy glade.
   They had scarcely swum into my ken when the welkin started ringing like billy-o. This was due to the barking of a small dachshund, who now advanced on me with the apparent intention of seeing the colour of my insides. Milder counsels, however, prevailed, and on arriving at journey's end he merely rose like a rocket and licked me on the chin, seeming to convey the impression that in Bertram Wooster he had found just what the doctor ordered. I have noticed before in dogs this tendency to form a beautiful friendship immediately on getting within sniffing distance of me. Something to do, no doubt, with the characteristic Wooster smell, which for some reason seems to speak to their deeps. I tickled him behind the right ear and scratched the base of his spine for a moment or two: then, these civilities concluded, switched my attention to the poetry group.
   It was the male half of the sketch who had been doing the reading, a willowy bird of about the tonnage and general aspect of David Niven with ginger hair and a small moustache. As he was unquestionably not Aubrey Upjohn, I assumed that this must be Willie Cream, and it surprised me a bit to find him dishing out verse. One would have expected a New York playboy, widely publicized as one of the lads, to confine himself to prose, and dirty prose, at that. But no doubt these playboys have their softer moments.
   His companion was a well-stacked young featherweight, who could be none other than the Phyllis Mills of whom Kipper had spoken. Nice but goofy, Kipper had said, and a glance told me that he was right. One learns, as one goes through life, to spot goofiness in the other sex with an unerring eye, and this exhibit had a sort of mild, Soul's Awakening kind of expression which made it abundantly clear that, while not a super-goof like some of the female goofs I'd met, she was quite goofy enough to be going on with. Her whole aspect was that of a girl who at the drop of a hat would start talking baby talk.
   This she now proceeded to do, asking me if I didn't think that Poppet, the dachshund, was a sweet little doggie. I assented rather austerely, for I prefer the shorter form more generally used, and she said she supposed I was Mrs Travers's nephew Bertie Wooster, which, as we knew, was substantially the case.
   'I heard you were expected today. I'm Phyllis Mills,' she said, and I said I had divined as much and that Kipper had told me to slap her on the back and give her his best, and she said, 'Oh, Reggie Herring? He's a sweetie-pie, isn't he?' and I agreed that Kipper was one of the sweetie-pies and not the worst of them, and she said, 'Yes, he's a lambkin.'
   This duologue had, of course, left Wilbert Cream a bit out of it, just painted on the backdrop as you might say, and for some moments, knitting his brow, plucking at his moustache, shuffling the feet and allowing the limbs to twitch, he had been giving abundant evidence that in his opinion three was a crowd and that what the leafy glade needed to make it all that a leafy glade should be was a complete absence of Woosters. Taking advantage of a lull in the conversation, he said:
   'Are you looking for someone?'
   I replied that I was looking for Bobbie Wickham.
   'I'd go on looking, if I were you. Bound to find her somewhere.'
   'Bobbie?' said Phyllis Mills. 'She's down at the lake, fishing.'
   'Then what you do,' said Wilbert Cream, brightening, 'is follow this path, bend right, sharp left, bend right again and there you are. You can't miss. Start at once, is my advice.'
   I must say I felt that, related as I was by ties of blood, in a manner of speaking, to this leafy glade, it was a bit thick being practically bounced from it by a mere visitor, but Aunt Dahlia had made it clear that the Cream family must not be thwarted or put upon in any way, so I did as he suggested, picking up the feet without anything in the nature of back chat. As I receded, I could hear in my rear the poetry breaking out again.
   The lake at Brinkley calls itself a lake, but when all the returns are in it's really more a sort of young pond. Big enough to mess about on in a punt, though, and for the use of those wishing to punt a boat– house has been provided with a small pier or landing stage attached to it. On this, rod in hand, Bobbie was seated, and it was with me the work of an instant to race up and breathe down the back of her neck.
   'Hey!' I said.
   'Hey to you with knobs on,' she replied. 'Oh, hullo, Bertie. You here?'
   'You never spoke a truer word. If you can spare me a moment of your valuable time, young Roberta –'
   'Half a second, I think I've got a bite. No, false alarm. What were you saying?'
   'I was saying –'
   'Oh, by the way, I heard from Mother this morning.'
   'I heard from her yesterday morning.'
   'I was kind of expecting you would. You saw that thing in The Times?'
   'With the naked eye.'
   'Puzzled you for a moment, perhaps?'
   'For several moments.'
   'Well, I'll tell you all about that. The idea came to me in a flash.'
   'You mean it was you who shoved that communique in the journal?'
   'Of course.'
   'Why?' I said, getting right down to it in my direct way.
   I thought I had her there, but no.
   'I was paving the way for Reggie.'
   I passed a hand over my fevered brow.
   'Something seems to have gone wrong with my usually keen hearing,' I said. 'It sounds just as if you were saying «I was paving the way for Reggie."'
   'I was. I was making his path straight. Softening up Mother on his behalf.'
   I passed another hand over my f.b.
   'Now you seem to be saying «Softening up Mother on his behalf."'
   'That's what I am saying. It's perfectly simple. I'll put it in words of one syllable for you. I love Reggie. Reggie loves me.'
   'Reggie,' of course, is two syllables, but I let it go.
   'Reggie who?'
   'Reggie Herring.'
   I was amazed.
   'You mean old Kipper?'
   'I wish you wouldn't call him Kipper.'
   'I always have. Dash it,' I said with some warmth, 'if a fellow shows up at a private school on the south coast of England with a name like Herring, what else do you expect his playmates to call him? But how do you mean you love him and he loves you? You've never met him.'
   'Of course I've met him. We were in the same hotel in Switzerland last Christmas. I taught him to ski,' she said, a dreamy look coming into her twin starlikes. 'I shall never forget the day I helped him unscramble himself after he had taken a toss on the beginners' slope. He had both legs wrapped round his neck. I think that is when love dawned. My heart melted as I sorted him out.'
   'You didn't laugh?'
   'Of course I didn't laugh. I was all sympathy and understanding.'
   For the first time the thing began to seem plausible to me. Bobbie is a fun-loving girl, and the memory of her reaction when in the garden at Skeldings I had once stepped on the teeth of a rake and had the handle jump up and hit me on the tip of the nose was still laid away among my souvenirs. She had been convulsed with mirth. If, then, she had refrained from guffawing when confronted with the spectacle of Reginald Herring with both legs wrapped round his neck, her emotions must have been very deeply involved.
   'Well, all right,' I said. 'I accept your statement that you and Kipper are that way. But why, that being so, did you blazon it forth to the world, if blazoning forth is the expression I want, that you were engaged to me?'
   'I told you. It was to soften Mother up.'
   'Which sounded to me like delirium straight from the sick bed.'
   'You don't get the subtle strategy?'
   'Not by several parasangs.'
   'Well, you know how you stand with Mother.'
   'Our relations are a bit distant.'
   'She shudders at the mention of your name. So I thought if she thought I was going to marry you and then found I wasn't, she'd be so thankful for the merciful escape I'd had that she'd be ready to accept anyone as a son-in-law, even someone like Reggie, who, though a wonder man, hasn't got his name in Debrett and isn't any too hot financially. Mother's idea of a mate for me has always been a well-to-do millionaire or a Duke with a large private income. Now do you follow?'
   'Oh yes, I follow all right. You've been doing what Jeeves does, studying the psychology of the individual. But do you think it'll work?'
   'Bound to. Let's take a parallel case. Suppose your Aunt Dahlia read in the paper one morning that you were going to be shot at sunrise.'
   'I couldn't be. I'm never up so early.'
   'But suppose she did? She'd be pretty worked up about it, wouldn't she?'
   'Extremely, one imagines, for she loves me dearly. I'm not saying her manner toward me doesn't verge at times on the brusque. In childhood days she would occasionally clump me on the side of the head, and since I have grown to riper years she has more than once begged me to tie a brick around my neck and go and drown myself in the pond in the kitchen garden. Nevertheless, she loves her Bertram, and if she heard I was to be shot at sunrise, she would, as you say, be as sore as a gum-boil. But why? What's that got to do with it?'
   'Well, suppose she then found out it was all a mistake and it wasn't you but somebody else who was to face the firing squad. That would make her happy, wouldn't it?'
   'One can picture her dancing all over the place on the tips of her toes.'
   'Exactly. She'd be so all over you that nothing you did would be wrong in her eyes. Whatever you wanted to do would be all right with her. Go to it, she would say. And that's how Mother will feel when she learns that I'm not marrying you after all. She'll be so relieved.'
   I agreed that the relief would, of course, be stupendous.
   'But you'll be giving her the inside facts in a day or two?' I said, for I was anxious to have assurance on this point. A man with an Engagement notice in The Times hanging over him cannot but feel uneasy.
   'Well, call it a week or two. No sense in rushing things.'
   'You want me to sink in?'
   'That's the idea.'
   'And meanwhile what's the drill? Do I kiss you a good deal from time to time?'
   'No, you don't.'
   'Right-ho. I just want to know where I stand.'
   'An occasional passionate glance will be ample.'
   'It shall be attended to. Well, I'm delighted about you and Kipper or, as you would prefer to say, Reggie. There's nobody I'd rather see you centre-aisle-ing with.'
   'It's very sporting of you to take it like this.'
   'Don't give it a thought.'
   'I'm awfully fond of you, Bertie.'
   'Me, too, of you.'
   'But I can't marry everybody, can I?'
   'I wouldn't even try. Well, now that we've got all that straight, I suppose I'd better be going and saying «Come aboard» to Aunt Dahlia.'
   'What's the time?'
   'Close on five.'
   'I must run like a hare. I'm supposed to be presiding at the tea table.'
   'You? Why you?'
   'Your aunt's not here. She found a telegram when she got back yesterday saying that her son Bonzo was sick of a fever at his school, and dashed off to be with him. She asked me to deputy-hostess for her till her return, but I shan't be able to for the next few days. I've got to dash back to Mother. Ever since she saw that thing in The Times, she's been wiring me every hour on the hour to come home for a round– table conference. What's a guffin?'
   'I don't know. Why?'
   'That's what she calls you in her latest 'gram. Quote. «Cannot understand how you can be contemplating marrying that guffin.» Close quote. I suppose it's more of less the same as a gaby, which was how you figured in one of her earlier communications.'
   'That sounds promising.'
   'Yes, I think the thing's in the bag. After you, Reggie will come to her like rare and refreshing fruit. She'll lay down the red carpet for him.'
   And with a brief 'Whoopee!' she shot off in the direction of the house at forty or so m.p.h. I followed more slowly, for she had given me much food for thought, and I was musing.
   Strange, I was feeling, this strong pro-Kipper sentiment in the Wickham bosom. I mean, consider the facts. What with that espieglerie of hers, which was tops, she had been pretty extensively wooed in one quarter and another for years, and no business had resulted, so that it was generally assumed that only something extra special in the way of suitors would meet her specifications and that whoever eventually got his nose under the wire would be a king among men and pretty warm stuff. And she had gone and signed up with Kipper Herring.
   Mind you, I'm not saying a word against old Kipper. The salt of the earth. But nobody could have called him a knock-out in the way of looks. Having gone in a lot for boxing from his earliest years, he had the cauliflower ear of which I had spoken to Aunt Dahlia and in addition to this a nose which some hidden hand had knocked slightly out of the straight. He would, in short, have been an unsafe entrant to have backed in a beauty contest, even if the only other competitors had been Boris Karloff, King Kong and Oofy Prosser of the Drones.
   But then, of course, one had to remind oneself that looks aren't everything. A cauliflower ear can hide a heart of gold, as in Kipper's case it did, his being about as gold as they come. His brain, too, might have helped to do the trick. You can't hold down an editorial post on an important London weekly paper without being fairly well fixed with the little grey cells, and girls admire that sort of thing. And one had to remember that most of the bimbos to whom Roberta Wickham had been giving the bird through the years had been of the huntin', shootin' and fishin' type, fellows who had more or less shot their bolt after saying 'Eh, what?' and slapping their leg with a hunting crop. Kipper must have come as a nice change.
   Still, the whole thing provided, as I say, food for thought, and I was in what is called a reverie as I made my way to the house, a reverie so profound that no turf accountant would have given any but the shortest odds against my sooner or later bumping into something. And this, to cut a long story s., I did. It might have been a tree, a bush or a rustic seat. In actual fact it turned out to be Aubrey Upjohn. I came on him round a comer and rammed him squarely before I could put the brakes on. I clutched him round the neck and he clutched me about the middle, and for some moments we tottered to and fro, linked in a close embrace. Then, the mists clearing from my eyes, I saw who it was that I had been treading the measure with.
   Seeing him steadily and seeing him whole, as I have heard Jeeves put it, I was immediately struck by the change that had taken place in his appearance since those get-togethers in his study at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, when with a sinking heart I had watched him reach for the whangee and start limbering up the shoulder muscles with a few trial swings. At that period of our acquaintance he had been an upstanding old gentleman about eight feet six in height with burning eyes, foam-flecked lips and flame coming out of both nostrils. He had now shrunk to a modest five foot seven or there-abouts, and I could have felled him with a single blow.
   Not that I did, of course. But I regarded him without a trace of the old trepidation. It seemed incredible that I could ever have considered this human shrimp a danger to pedestrians and traffic.
   I think this was partly due to the fact that at some point in the fifteen years since our last meeting he had grown a moustache. In the Malvern House epoch what had always struck a chill into the plastic mind had been his wide, bare upper lip, a most unpleasant spectacle to behold, especially when twitching. I wouldn't say the moustache softened his face, but being of the walrus or soup-strainer type it hid some of it, which was all to the good. The up-shot was that instead of quailing, as I had expected to do when we met, I was suave and debonair, possibly a little too much so.
   'Oh, hullo, Upjohn!' I said. 'Yoo-hoo!'
   'Who you?' he responded, making it sound like a reverse echo.
   'Wooster is the name.'
   'Oh, Wooster?' he said, as if he had been hoping it would be something else, and one could understand his feelings, of course. No doubt he, like me, had been buoying himself up for years with the thought that we should never meet again and that, whatever brickbats life might have in store for him, he had at least got Bertram out of his system. A nasty jar it must have been for the poor bloke having me suddenly pop up from a trap like this.
   'Long time since we met,' I said.
   'Yes,' he agreed in a hollow voice, and it was so plain that he was wishing it had been longer that conversation flagged, and there wasn't much in the way of feasts of reason and flows of the soul as we covered the hundred yards to the lawn where the tea table awaited us. I think I may have said 'Nice day, what?' and he may have grunted, but nothing more.
   Only Bobbie was present when we arrived at the trough. Wilbert and Phyllis were presumably still in the leafy glade, and Mrs Cream, Bobbie said, worked in her room every afternoon on her new spine-freezer and seldom knocked off for a cuppa. We seated ourselves and had just started sipping, when the butler came out of the house bearing a bowl of fruit and hove to beside the table with it.
   Well, when I say 'butler', I use the term loosely. He was dressed like a butler and he behaved like a butler, but in the deepest and truest sense of the word he was not a butler.
   Reading from left to right, he was Sir Roderick Glossop.

4

   At the Drones Club and other places I am accustomed to frequent you will often hear comment on Bertram Wooster's self-control or sang froid, as it's sometimes called, and it is generally agreed that this is considerable. In the eyes of many people, I suppose, I seem one of those men of chilled steel you read about, and I'm not saying I'm not. But it is possible to find a chink in my armour, and this can be done by suddenly springing eminent loony-doctors on me in the guise of butlers.
   It was out of the q. that I could have been mistaken in supposing that it was Sir Roderick Glossop who, having delivered the fruit, was now ambling back to the house. There could not be two men with that vast bald head and those bushy eyebrows, and it would be deceiving the customers to say that I remained unshaken. The effect the apparition had on me was to make me start violently, and we all know what happens when you start violently while holding a full cup of tea. The contents of mine flew through the air and came to rest on the trousers of Aubrey Upjohn, MA, moistening them to no little extent. Indeed, it would scarcely be distorting the facts to say that he was now not so much wearing trousers as wearing tea.
   I could see the unfortunate man felt his position deeply, and I was surprised that he contented himself with a mere 'Ouch!' But I suppose these solid citizens have to learn to curb the tongue. Creates a bad impression, I mean, if they start blinding and stiffing as those more happily placed would be.
   But words are not always needed. In the look he now shot at me I seemed to read a hundred unspoken expletives. It was the sort of look the bucko mate of a tramp steamer would have given an able-bodied seaman who for one reason or another had incurred his displeasure.
   'I see you have not changed since you were with me at Malvern House,' he said in an extremely nasty voice, dabbing at the trousers with a handkerchief. 'Bungling Wooster we used to call him,' he went on, addressing his remarks to Bobbie and evidently trying to enlist her sympathy. 'He could not perform the simplest action such as holding a cup without spreading ruin and disaster on all sides. It was an axiom at Malvern House that if there was a chair in any room in which he happened to be, Wooster would trip over it. The child,' said Aubrey Upjohn, 'is the father of the man.'
   'Frightfully sorry,' I said.
   'Too late to be sorry now. A new pair of trousers ruined. It is doubtful if anything can remove the stain of tea from white flannel. Still, one must hope for the best.'
   Whether I was right or wrong at this point in patting him on the shoulder and saying 'That's the spirit!' I find it difficult to decide. Wrong, probably, for it did not seem to soothe. He gave me another of those looks and strode off, smelling strongly of tea.
   'Shall I tell you something, Bertie?' said Bobbie, following him with a thoughtful eye. 'That walking tour Upjohn was going to invite you to take with him is off. You will get no Christmas present from him this year, and don't expect him to come and tuck you up in bed tonight.'
   I upset the milk jug with an imperious wave of the hand.
   'Never mind about Upjohn and Christmas presents and walking tours. What is Pop Glossop doing here as the butler?'
   'Ah! I thought you might be going to ask that. I was meaning to tell you some time.'
   'Tell me now.'
   'Well, it was his idea.'
   I eyed her sternly. Bertram Wooster has no objection to listening to drivel, but it must not be pure babble from the padded cell, as this appeared to be.
   'His idea?'
   'Yes.'
   'Are you asking me to believe that Sir Roderick Glossop got up one morning, gazed at himself in the mirror, thought he was looking a little pale and said to himself, «I need a change. I think I'll try being a butler for awhile»?'
   'No, not that, but… I don't know where to begin.'
   'Begin at the beginning. Come on now, young B. Wickham, smack into it,' I said, and took a piece of cake in a marked manner.
   The austerity of my tone seemed to touch a nerve and kindle the fire that always slept in this vermilion-headed menace to the common weal, for she frowned a displeased frown and told me for heaven's sake to stop goggling like a dead halibut.
   'I have every right to goggle like a dead halibut,' I said coldly, 'and I shall continue to do so as long as I see fit. I am under a considerable nervous s. As always seems to happen when you are mixed up in the doings, life has become one damn thing after another, and I think I am justified in demanding an explanation. I await your statement.'
   'Well, let me marshal my thoughts.'
   She did so, and after a brief intermission, during which I finished my piece of cake, proceeded.
   'I'd better begin by telling you about Upjohn, because it all started through him. You see, he's egging Phyllis on to marry Wilbert Cream.'
   'When you say egging –'
   'I mean egging. And when a man like that eggs, something has to give, especially when the girl's a pill like Phyllis, who always does what Daddy tells her.'
   'No will of her own?'
   'Not a smidgeon. To give you an instance, a couple of days ago he took her to Birmingham to see the repertory company's performance of Chekhov's Seagull, because he thought it would be educational. I'd like to catch anyone trying to make me see Chekhov's Seagull, but Phyllis just bowed her head and said, «Yes, Daddy.» Didn't even attempt to put up a fight. That'll show you how much of a will of her own she's got.'
   It did indeed. Her story impressed me profoundly. I knew Chekhov's Seagull. My Aunt Agatha had once made me take her son Thos to a performance of it at the Old Vic, and what with the strain of trying to follow the cock-eyed goings-on of characters called Zarietchnaya and Medvienko and having to be constantly on the alert to prevent Thos making a sneak for the great open spaces, my suffering had been intense. I needed no further evidence to tell me that Phyllis Mills was a girl whose motto would always be 'Daddy knows best'. Wilbert had only got to propose and she would sign on the dotted line because Upjohn wished it.
   'Your aunt's worried sick about it.'
   'She doesn't approve?'
   'Of course she doesn't approve. You must have heard of Willie Cream, going over to New York so much.'
   'Why yes, news of his escapades has reached me. He's a playboy.'
   'Your aunt thinks he's a screwball.'
   'Many playboys are, I believe. Well, that being so, one can understand why she doesn't want those wedding bells to ring out. But,' I said, putting my finger on the res in my unerring way, 'that doesn't explain where Pop Glossop comes in.'
   'Yes, it does. She got him here to observe Wilbert.'
   I found myself fogged.
   'Cock an eye at him, you mean? Drink him in, as it were? What good's that going to do?'
   She snorted impatiently.
   'Observe in the technical sense. You know how these brain specialists work. They watch the subject closely. They engage him in conversation. They apply subtle tests. And sooner or later –'
   'I begin to see. Sooner or later he lets fall an incautious word to the effect that he thinks he's a poached egg, and then they've got him where they want him.'
   'Well, he does something which tips them off. Your aunt was moaning to me about the situation, and I suddenly had this inspiration of bringing Glossop here. You know how I get sudden inspirations.'
   'I do. That hot-water-bottle episode.'
   'Yes, that was one of them.'
   'Ha!'
   'What did you say?'
   'Just «Ha!"'
   'Why «Ha!»?'
   'Because when I think of that night of terror, I feel like saying «Ha!"'
   She seemed to see the justice of this. Pausing merely to eat a cucumber sandwich, she proceeded.
   'So I said to your aunt, «I'll tell you what to do,» I said. «Get Glossop here,» I said, «and have him observe Wilbert Cream. Then you'll be in a position to go to Upjohn and pull the rug from under him."'
   Again I was not abreast. There had been, as far as I could recollect, no mention of any rug.
   'How do you mean?'
   'Well, isn't it obvious? «Rope in old Glossop,» I said, «and let him observe. Then you'll be in a position,» I said, «to go to Upjohn and tell him that Sir Roderick Glossop, the greatest alienist in England, is convinced that Wilbert Cream is round the bend and to ask him if he proposes to marry his stepdaughter to a man who at any moment may be marched off and added to the membership list of Colney Hatch.» Even Upjohn would shrink from doing a thing like that. Or don't you think so?'
   I weighed this.
   'Yes,' I said, 'I should imagine you were right. Quite possibly Upjohn has human feelings, though I never noticed them when I was in statu pupillari, as I believe the expression is. One sees now why Glossop is at Brinkley Court. What one doesn't see is why one finds him buttling.'
   'I told you that was his idea. He thought he was such a celebrated figure that it would arouse Mrs Cream's suspicions if he came here under his own name.'
   'I see what you mean. She would catch him observing Wilbert and wonder why-'
   ' – and eventually put two and two together –'
   ' – and start Hey-what's-the-big-idea-ing.'
   'Exactly. No mother likes to find that her hostess has got a brain specialist down to observe the son who is the apple of her eye. It hurts her feelings.'
   'Whereas, if she catches the butler observing him, she merely says to herself, «Ah, an observant butler.» Very sensible. With this deal Uncle Tom's got on with Homer Cream, it would be fatal to risk giving her the pip in any way. She would kick to Homer, and Homer would draw himself up and say «After what has occurred, Travers, I would prefer to break off the negotiations,» and Uncle Tom would lose a packet. What is this deal they've got on, by the way? Did Aunt Dahlia tell you?'
   'Yes, but it didn't penetrate. It's something to do with some land your uncle owns somewhere, and Mr Cream is thinking of buying it and putting up hotels and things. It doesn't matter, anyway. The fundamental thing, the thing to glue the eye on, is that the Cream contingent have to be kept sweetened at any cost. So not a word to a soul.'
   'Quite. Bertram Wooster is not a babbler. No spiller of the beans he. But why are you so certain that Wilbert Cream is loopy? He doesn't look loopy to me.'
   'Have you met him?'
   'Just for a moment. He was in a leafy glade, reading poetry to the Mills girl.'
   She took this big.
   'Reading poetry? To Phyllis?'
   'That's right. I thought it odd that a chap like him should be doing such a thing. Limericks, yes. If he had been reciting limericks to her, I could have understood it. But this was stuff from one of those books they bind in limp purple leather and sell at Christmas. I wouldn't care to swear to it, but it sounded to me extremely like Omar Khayyam.'
   She continued to take it big.
   'Break it up, Bertie, break it up! There's not a moment to be lost. You must go and break it up immediately.'
   'Who, me? Why me?'
   'That's what you're here for. Didn't your aunt tell you? She wants you to follow Wilbert Cream and Phyllis about everywhere and see that he doesn't get a chance of proposing.'
   'You mean that I'm to be a sort of private eye or shamus, tailing them up? I don't like it,' I said dubiously.
   'You don't have to like it,' said Bobbie. 'You just do it.'