Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (16 page)

‘What
do you want?’

‘I have
brought your letters.’

‘Leave
them on the mat.’

‘I will
not leave them on the mat. I wish to confront you in person.’

‘At
this time of night! You aren’t coming in here!’

‘That,’
said Stilton crisply, ‘is where you make your ruddy error. I
am
coming
in there.’

I
remember Jeeves saying something once about the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy
rolling and glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. It was in much
the same manner that Florence’s eye now rolled and glanced. I could see what
was disturbing her, of course. It was that old problem which always bothers
chaps in mystery thrillers — viz, how to get rid of the body — in this case,
that of Bertram. If Stilton proposed to enter, it was essential that Bertram be
placed in storage somewhere for the time being, but the question that arose was
where.

There
was a cupboard on the other side of the room, and she nipped across and flung
open the door.

‘Quick!’
she hissed, and it’s all rot to say you can’t hiss a word that hasn’t an ‘s’ in
it. She did it on her head.

‘In
here!’

The
suggestion struck me as a good one. I popped in and she closed the door behind
me.

Well,
actually, the fingers being, I suppose, nerveless, she didn’t, but left it
ajar. I was able, consequently, to follow the ensuing conversation as clearly
as if it had been coming over the wireless.

Stilton
began it.

‘Here
are your letters,’ he said stiffly.

‘Thank
you,’ she said stiffly.

‘Don’t
mention it,’ he said stiffly.

‘Put
them on the dressing-table,’ she said stiffly.

‘Right
ho!’ he said stiffly.

I don’t
know when I’ve known a bigger night for stiff speakers. After a brief interval,
during which I presumed that he was depositing the correspondence as directed,
Stilton resumed.

‘You
got my telegram?’

‘Of
course I got your telegram.’

‘You
notice I have shaved my moustache?’

‘I do.’

‘It was
my first move on finding out about your underhanded skulduggery.’

‘What
do you mean, my underhanded skulduggery?’

‘If you
don’t call it underhanded skulduggery, sneaking off to night clubs with the
louse Wooster, it would be extremely entertaining to be informed how you would
describe it.’

‘You
know perfectly well that I wanted atmosphere for my book.’

‘Ho!’

‘And
don’t say “Ho”.’

‘I will
say “Ho”!’ retorted Stilton with spirit. ‘Your book, my foot! I don’t believe
there is any book. I don’t believe you’ve ever written a book.’

‘Indeed?
How about
Spindrift,
now in its fifth edition and soon to be translated
into the Scandinavian?‘

‘Probably
the work of the louse Gorringe.’

I
imagine that at this coarse insult Florence’s eyes flashed fire. The voice in
which she spoke certainly suggested it.

‘Mr.
Cheesewright, you have had a couple!’

‘Nothing
of the kind.’

‘Then
you must be insane, and I wish you would have the courtesy to take that pumpkin
head of yours out of here.’

I
rather think, though I can’t be sure, that at these words Stilton ground his
teeth. Certainly there was a peculiar sound, as if a coffee mill had sprung
into action. The voice that filtered through to my cosy retreat quivered
hoarsely.

‘My
head is not like a pumpkin!’

‘It is,
too, like a pumpkin.’

‘It is
not like a pumpkin at all. I have this on the authority of Bertie Wooster, who
says it is more like the dome of St. Paul’s.’ He broke off, and there was a
smacking sound. He had apparently smitten his brow. ‘Wooster!’ he cried,
emitting an animal snarl. ‘I didn’t come here to talk about my head, I came to
talk about Wooster, the slithery serpent who slinks behind chaps’ backs,
stealing fellows’ girls from them. Wooster the home-wrecker! Wooster the snake
in the grass from whom no woman is safe! Wooster the modern Don
what’s-his-name! You’ve been conducting a clandestine intrigue with him right
along. You thought you were fooling me, didn’t you? You thought I didn’t see
through your pitiful … your pitiful … Dammit, what’s the word? … your
pitiful … No, it’s gone.’

‘I wish
you would follow its excellent example.’

‘Subterfuges!
I knew I’d get it. Do you think I didn’t see through your pitiful subterfuges?
All that bilge about wanting me to grow a moustache. Do you think I’m not on to
it that the whole of that moustache sequence was just a ruse to enable you to
break it off with me and switch over to the grass snake Wooster? “How can I get
rid of this Cheesewright?” you said to yourself. “Ha, I have it!” you said to
yourself. “I’ll tell him he’s got to grow a moustache. He’ll say like hell
he’ll grow any bally moustache. And then I’ll say Ho! You won’t, won’t you? All
right, then all is over between us. That’ll fix it.” It must have been a nasty
shock to you when I yielded to your request. Upset your plans quite a bit, I
imagine? You hadn’t bargained for that, had you?’

Florence
spoke in a voice that would have frozen an Eskimo.

‘The
door is just behind you, Mr. Cheesewright. It opens if you turn the handle.’

He came
right back at her.

‘Never
mind the door. I’m talking about you and the leper Wooster. I suppose you will
now hitch on to him, or what’s left of him after I’ve finished stepping on his
face. Am I right?’

‘You
are.’

‘It is
your intention to marry this human gumboil?’

‘It is.’

‘Ho!’

Well, I
don’t know how you would have behaved in my place, hearing these words and
realizing for the first time that the evil had spread as far as this. You would
probably have started violently, as I did. No doubt I ought to have spotted the
impending doom, but for some reason or other, possibly because I had been
devoting so much thought to Stilton, I hadn’t. This abrupt announcement of my
betrothal to a girl of whom I took the gravest view shook me to my depths,
with the result, as I say, that I started violently.

And, of
course, the one place where it is unwise to start violently, if you wish to
remain unobserved and incognito, is a cupboard in a female’s bedroom. What
exactly it was that now rained down on me, dislodged by my sudden movement, I
cannot say, but I think it was hat-boxes. Whatever it was, it sounded in the
stilly night like coal being lowered down a chute into a cellar, and I heard a
sharp exclamation. A moment later a hand wrenched open the door and a suffused
face glared in on me as I brushed the hat-boxes, if they were hat-boxes, from
my hair.

‘Ho!’
said Stilton, speaking with difficulty like a cat with a fishbone in its
throat. ‘Come on out of there, serpent,’ he added, attaching himself to my left
ear and pulling vigorously.

I
emerged like a cork out of a bottle.

14

It is always a bit
difficult to know just what to say on occasions like this. I said, ‘Oh, there you
are, Stilton. Nice evening’, but it seemed to be the wrong thing, for he merely
quivered as if he had got a beetle down his back and increased the
incandescence of his gaze. I saw that it was going to require quite a good deal
of suavity and tact on my part to put us all at our ease.

‘You
are doubtless surprised —‘ I began, but he held up a hand as if he had been
back in the Force directing the traffic. He then spoke in a quiet, if rumbling,
voice.

‘You
will find me waiting in the corridor, Wooster,’ he said, and strode out.

I
understood the spirit which had prompted the words. It was the
preux
chevalier
in him coming to the surface. You can stir up a Cheesewright till
he froths at the mouth, but you cannot make him forget that he is an Old
Etonian and a pukka Sahib. Old Etonians do not brawl in the presence of the
other sex. Nor do pukka Sahibs. They wait till they are alone with the party of
the second part in some secluded nook.

I
thoroughly approved of this fineness of feeling, for it had left me sitting on
top of the world. It would now, I saw, be possible for me to avoid anything in
the nature of unpleasantness by executing one of those subtle rearward
movements which great Generals keep up their sleeves for moments when things
are beginning to get too hot. You think you have got one of these Generals
cornered and are all ready to swoop on him, and it is with surprise and chagrin
that, just as you are pulling up your socks and putting a final polish on your
weapons, you observe that he isn’t there. He has withdrawn on his strategic
railway, taking his troops with him.

With
that ladder waiting in readiness for me, I was in a similarly agreeable
position. Corridors meant nothing to me. I didn’t need to go into any
corridors. All I had to do was slide through the window, place my foot on the
top rung and carry on with a light heart to terra firma.

But
there is one circumstance which can dish the greatest of Generals — viz. if,
toddling along to the station to buy his ticket, he finds that since he last
saw it the strategic railway has been blown up. That is the time when you will
find him scratching his head and chewing the lower lip. And it was a disaster
of this nature that now dished me. Approaching the window and glancing out, I
saw that the ladder was no longer there. At some point in the course of the
recent conversations it had vanished, leaving not a wrack behind.

What
had become of it was a mystery I found myself unable to solve, but that was a
thing that could be gone into later. At the moment it was plain that the cream
of the Wooster brain must be given to a more urgent matter — to wit, the
question of how I was to get out of the room without passing through the door
and finding myself alone in a confined space with Stilton, the last person in
his present frame of mind with whom a man of slender physique would wish to be
alone in confined spaces. I put this to Florence, and she agreed, like Sherlock
Holmes, that the problem was one which undoubtedly presented certain points of
interest.

‘You
can’t stay here all night,’ she said.

I
admitted the justice of this, but added that I didn’t at the moment see what
the dickens else I could do.

‘You
wouldn’t care to knot your sheets and lower me to the ground with them?’

‘No, I
wouldn’t. Why don’t you jump?’

‘And
smash myself to hash?’

‘You
might not.’

‘On the
other hand, I might.’

‘Well,
you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’

I gave
her a look. It seemed to me the silliest thing I had ever heard a girl say, and
I have heard girls say some pretty silly things in my time. I was on the point
of saying ‘You and your bally omelettes!’ when something seemed to go off with
a pop in my brain and it was as though I had swallowed a brimming dose of some
invigorating tonic, the sort of pick-me-up that makes a bedridden invalid rise
from his couch and dance the Carioca. Bertram was himself again. With a steady
hand I opened the door. And when Stilton advanced on me like a mass murderer
about to do his stuff, I quelled him with the power of the human eye.

‘Just a
moment, Stilton,’ I said suavely. ‘Before you give rein, if that’s the
expression I want, to your angry passions, don’t forget you’ve drawn me in the
Drones Club Darts sweep.’

It was
enough. Halting abruptly, as if he had walked into a lamp—post, he stood
goggling like a cat in an adage. Cats in adages, Jeeves tells me, let ‘I dare
not’ wait upon ‘I would’, and I could see with the naked eye that this was what
Stilton was doing.

Flicking
a speck of dust from my sleeve and smiling a quiet smile, I proceeded to rub it
in.

‘You
appreciate the position of affairs?’ I said. ‘By drawing my name, you have set
yourself apart from ordinary men. To make it clear to the meanest intelligence …
I allude to yours, my dear Cheesewright … where the ordinary man, seeing me
strolling along Piccadilly, merely says “Ah, there goes Bertie Wooster”, you,
having drawn me in the sweep, say “There goes my fifty-six pounds ten
shillings”, and you probably run after me to tell me to be very careful when
crossing the street because the traffic nowadays is so dangerous.’

He
raised a hand and fingered his chin. I could see that my words were not being
wasted. Shooting my cuffs, I resumed.

‘In
what sort of condition shall I be to win, that Darts tourney and put nearly
sixty quid in your pocket, if you pull the strong-arm stuff you are
contemplating? Try that one on your bazooka, my dear Cheesewright.’

It was
a tense struggle, of course, but it didn’t last long. Reason prevailed. With a
low grunt which spoke eloquently of the overwrought soul, he stepped back, and
with a cheery ‘Well, good night, old man’ and a benevolent wave of the hand I
left him and made my way to my room.