Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (15 page)

‘If it
were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly, sir.’

‘That’s
right. No sense in standing humming and hawing.’

‘No,
sir. There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on
to fortune.’

‘Exactly,’
I said.

I
couldn’t have put it better myself.

The
venture went with gratifying smoothness. I found the ladder, by the tool-shed
as foreshadowed, and lugged it across country to the desired spot. I propped it
up. I climbed it. In next to no time I was through the window and moving
silently across the floor.

Well,
not so dashed silently, as a matter of fact, because I collided with a table
which happened to be in the fairway and upset it with quite a bit of noise.

‘Who’s
there?’ asked a voice from the darkness in a startled sort of way.

This
tickled me. ‘Ah,’ I said to myself amusedly, ‘Aunt Dahlia throwing herself into
her part and giving the thing just the touch it needed to make it box-office.’
What an artist, I felt.

Then it
said ‘Who’s there?’ again, and it was as though a well-iced hand had been laid
upon my heart.

Because
the voice was not the voice of any ruddy aunt, it was the voice of Florence
Craye. The next moment light flooded the apartment and there she was, sitting
up in bed in a pink boudoir cap.

13

I don’t know if you happen
to be familiar with a poem called ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ by the bird
Tennyson whom Jeeves had mentioned when speaking of the fellow whose strength
was as the strength of ten. It is, I believe, fairly well known, and I used to
have to recite it at the age of seven or thereabouts when summoned to the
drawing-room to give visitors a glimpse of the young Wooster. ‘Bertie recites
so nicely,’ my mother used to say — getting her facts twisted, I may mention,
because I practically always fluffed my lines — and after trying to duck for
safety and being hauled back I would snap into it. And very unpleasant the
whole thing was, so people have told me.

Well,
what I was about to say, when I rambled off a bit on the subject of the dear
old days, was that though in the course of the years most of the poem of which
I speak has slid from the memory, I still recall its punch line. The thing
goes, as you probably know,

Tum tiddle umpty-pum

Tum tiddle umpty-pum

Tum tiddle umpty-pum

and this brought you to
the snapperoo or pay-off, which was

Someone
had blundered.

I
always remember that bit, and the reason I bring it up now is that, as I stood
blinking at this pink-boudoir—capped girl, I was feeling just as those Light
Brigade fellows must have felt. Obviously someone had blundered here, and that
someone was Aunt Dahlia. Why she should have told me that her window was the
last one on the left, when the last one on the left was what it was anything
but, was more than I could imagine. One sought in vain for what Stilton Cheesewright
would have called the ulterior motive.

However,
it is hopeless to try to fathom the mental processes of aunts, and anyway this
was no time for idle speculation. The first thing the man of sensibility has to
do on arriving like a sack of coals in a girl’s bedroom in the small hours is
to get the conversation going, and it was to this that I now addressed myself.
Nothing is worse on these occasions than the awkward pause and the embarrassed
silence.

‘Oh,
hullo,’ I said, as brightly and cheerily as I could manage. ‘I say, I’m most
frightfully sorry to pop in like this at a moment when you were doubtless
knitting up the ravelled sleave of care, but I went for a breather in the
garden and found I was locked out, so I thought my best plan was not to rouse
the house but to nip in through the first open window. You know how it is when
you rouse houses. They don’t like it.’

I would
have spoken further, developing the theme, for it seemed to me that I was on
the right lines … so much better, I mean to say, than affecting to be walking
in my sleep. All that ‘Where am I?’ stuff, I mean. Too damn silly … but she
suddenly gave one of those rippling laughs of hers.

‘Oh,
Bertie!’ she said, and not, mark you, with that sort of weary fed-up-ness with
which girls generally say ‘Oh, Bertie!’ to me. ‘What a romantic you are!’

‘Eh?’

She
rippled again. It was a relief, of course, to find that she did not propose to
yell for help and all that sort of thing, but I must say I found this mirth a
bit difficult to cope with. You’ve probably had the same experience yourself —
listening to people guffawing like hyenas and not having the foggiest what the
joke is. It makes you feel at a disadvantage.

She was
looking at me in an odd kind of way, as if at some child for whom, while
conceding that it had water on the brain, she felt a fondness.

‘Isn’t
this just the sort of thing you would do!’ she said. ‘I told you I was no
longer engaged to D’Arcy Cheesewright, and you had to fly to me. You couldn’t
wait till the morning, could you? I suppose you had some sort of idea of
kissing me softly while I slept?’

I
leaped perhaps six inches in the direction of the ceiling. I was appalled, and
I think not unjustifiably so. I mean, dash it, a fellow who has always prided
himself on the scrupulous delicacy of his relations with the other sex doesn’t
like to have it supposed that he deliberately shins up ladders at one in the
morning in order to kiss girls while they sleep.

‘Good
Lord, no!’ I said, replacing the chair which I had knocked over in my
agitation. ‘Nothing further from my thoughts. I take it your attention happened
to wander for a moment when I was outlining the facts, just now. What I was
saying, only you weren’t listening, was that I went for a breather in the
garden and found I was locked out —‘

She
rippled once more. That looking-fondly-at-idiot-child expression on her face
had become intensified.

‘You
don’t think I’m angry, do you? Of course I’m not. I’m very touched. Kiss me,
Bertie.’

Well,
one has to be civil. I did as directed, but with an uneasy feeling that this
was a bit above the odds. I didn’t at all like the general trend of affairs,
the whole thing seeming to me to be becoming far too French. When I broke out
of the clinch and stepped back, I found the expression on her face had changed.
She was now regarding me in a sort of speculative way, if you know what I mean,
rather like a governess taking a gander at the new pupil.

‘Mother’s
quite wrong,’ she said.

‘Mother?’

‘Your
Aunt Agatha.’

This
surprised me.

‘You
call her Mother? Oh, well, okay, if you like it. Up to you, of course. What was
she wrong about?’

‘You.
She keeps insisting that you are a vapid and irreflective nitwit who ought
years ago to have been put in some good mental home.’

I drew
myself up haughtily, cut more or less to the quick. So this was how the woman
was accustomed to shoot off her bally head about me in my absence, was it! A
pretty state of affairs. The woman, I’ll trouble you, whose repulsive son Thos
I had for years practically nursed in my bosom. That is to say, when he passed
through London on his way back to school, I put him up at my residence and not
only fed him luxuriously but with no thought of self took him to the Old Vic
and Madame Tussaud’s. Was there no gratitude in the world?

‘She
does, does she?’

‘She’s
awfully amusing about you.’

‘Amusing,
eh?’

‘It was
she who said that you had a brain like a peahen.’

Here,
of course, if I had wished to take it, was an admirable opportunity to go into
this matter of peahens and ascertain just where they stood in the roster of our
feathered friends as regarded the I.Q, but I let it go.

She
adjusted the boudoir cap, which the recent embrace had tilted a bit to one
side. She was still looking at me in that speculative way.

‘She
says you are a guffin.’

‘A
what?’

‘A
guffin.’

‘I
don’t understand you.’

‘It’s
one of those old-fashioned expressions. What she meant, I think, was that she
considered you a wet smack and a total loss. But I told her she was quite
mistaken and that there is a lot more in you than people suspect. I realized
that when I found you in that bookshop that day buying
Spindrift.
Do you
remember?’

I had
not forgotten the incident. The whole thing had been one of those unfortunate
misunderstandings. I had promised Jeeves to buy him the works of a cove of the
name of Spinoza — some kind of philosopher or something, I gathered — and the
chap at the bookshop, expressing the opinion that there was no such person as
Spinoza, had handed me
Spindrift
as being more probably what I was
after, and scarcely had I grasped it when Florence came in. To assume that I
had purchased the thing and to autograph it for me in green ink with her
fountain-pen had been with her the work of an instant.

‘I knew
then that you were groping dimly for the light and trying to educate yourself
by reading good literature, that there was something lying hidden deep down in
you that only needed bringing out. It would be a fascinating task, I told
myself, fostering the latent potentialities of your budding mind. Like watching
over some timid, backward flower.’

I
bridled pretty considerably. Timid, backward flower, my left eyeball, I was
thinking. I was on the point of saying something stinging like ‘Oh, yes?’ when
she proceeded.

‘I know
I can mould you, Bertie. You want to improve yourself, and that is half the
battle. What have you been reading lately?’

‘Well,
what with one thing and another, my reading has been a bit cut into these last
days, but I am in the process of plugging away at a thing called
The Mystery
of the Pink Crayfish.’

Her
slender frame was more or less hidden beneath the bedclothes, but I got the
impression that a shudder had run through it.

‘Oh,
Bertie!’ she said, this time with something more nearly approaching the normal
intonation.

‘Well,
it’s dashed good,’ I insisted stoutly. ‘This baronet, this Sir Eustace
Willoughby, is discovered in his library with his head bashed in _‘

A look
of pain came into her face.

‘Please!’
she sighed. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid it’s going to be uphill work
fostering the latent potentialities of your budding mind.’

‘I
wouldn’t try, if I were you. Give it a miss, is my advice.’

‘But I
hate to think of leaving you in the darkness, doing nothing but smoke and drink
at the Drones Club.’

I put
her straight about this. She had her facts wrong.

‘I also
play Darts.’

‘Darts!’

‘As a
matter of fact, I shall very soon be this year’s club champion. The event is a
snip for me. Ask anybody.’

‘How
can you fritter away your time like that, when you might be reading T.S. Eliot?
I would like to see you —What it was she would have liked to see me doing she
did not say, though I presumed it was something foul and educational, for at
this juncture someone knocked on the door.

It was
the last contingency I had been anticipating, and it caused my heart to leap
like a salmon in the spawning season and become entangled with my front teeth.
I looked at the door with what I have heard Jeeves call a wild surmise, the persp.
breaking out on my brow.

Florence,
I noticed, seemed a bit startled, too. One gathered that she hadn’t expected,
when setting out for Brinkley Court, that her bedroom was going to be such a
social centre. There’s a song I used to sing a good deal at one time, the
refrain or burthen of which began with the words ‘Let’s all go round to
Maud’s’. Much the same sentiment appeared to be animating the guests beneath
Aunt Dahlia’s roof, and it was, of course, upsetting for the poor child. At one
in the morning girls like a bit of privacy, and she couldn’t have had much less
privacy if she had been running a snack bar on a racecourse.

‘Who’s
that?’ she cried.

‘Me,’
responded a deep, resonant voice, and Florence clapped a hand to her throat, a
thing I didn’t know anybody ever did off the stage.

For the
d.r.v. was that of G. D’Arcy Cheesewright. To cut a long story short, the man
was in again.

It was
with a distinctly fevered hand that Florence reached out for a dressing-gown,
and in her deportment, as she hopped from between the sheets, I noted a marked
suggestion of a pea on a hot shovel. She is one of those cool, calm,
well-poised modern girls from whom as a rule you can seldom get more than a
raised eyebrow, but I could see that this thing of having Stilton a pleasant
visitor at a moment when her room was all cluttered up with Woosters had
rattled her more than slightly.