Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (17 page)

As I
entered it, Aunt Dahlia in a maroon dressing-gown rose from the chair in which
she had been sitting and fixed me with a blazing eye, struggling for utterance.

‘Well!’
she said, choking on the word like a Pekingese on a chump chop too large for
its frail strength. After which, speech failing her, she merely stood and gargled.

I must
say that this struck me as in the circs a bit thick. I mean, if anyone was
entitled to have blazing eyes and trouble with the vocal cords, it was, as I
saw it, me. I mean, consider the facts. Owing to this woman’s cloth-headed
blundering when issuing divisional orders, I was slated to walk down the aisle
with Florence Craye and had been subjected to an ordeal which might well have
done permanent damage to the delicate nerve centres. I was strongly of the
opinion that so far from being glared and gargled at I was in a position to
demand a categorical explanation and to see that I got it.

As I
cleared my throat in order to put this to her, she mastered her emotion
sufficiently to be able to speak.

‘Well!’
she said, looking like a female minor prophet about to curse the sins of the
people. ‘May I trespass on your valuable time long enough to ask you what in
the name of everything bloodsome you think you’re playing at, young pie-faced
Bertie? It is now some twenty minutes past one o’clock in the morning, and not
a spot of action on your part. Do you expect me to sit up all night waiting for
you to get around to a simple, easy task which a crippled child of six could
have had all done and washed up in a quarter of an hour? I suppose this is just
the shank of the evening to you dissipated Londoners, but we rustics like to
get our sleep. What’s the idea? Why the delay? What on earth have you been
doing all this while, you revolting young piece of cheese?’

I
laughed a hollow, mirthless laugh. Getting quite the wrong angle on it, she
begged me to postpone my farmyard imitations to a more suitable moment. I told
myself that I must be calm … calm.

‘Before
replying to your questions, aged relative,’ I said, holding myself in with a
strong effort, ‘let me put one to you. Would you mind informing me in a few
simple words why you told me that your window was the end one on the left?’

‘It is
the end one on the left.’

‘Pardon
me.’

‘Looking
from the house.’

‘Oh,
looking
from
the house?’ A great light dawned on me. ‘I thought you
meant looking
at
the house.’

‘Looking
at the house it would of course be …’ She broke off with a startled yowl,
staring at me with quite a good deal of that wild surmise stuff. ‘Don’t tell me
you got into the wrong room?’

‘It
could scarcely have been wronger.’

‘Whose
was it?’

‘Florence
Craye’s.’

She
whistled. It was plain that the drama of the situation had not escaped her.

‘Was
she in bed?’

‘With a
pink boudoir cap on.’

‘And
she woke up and found you there?’

‘Almost
immediately. I knocked over a table or something.’ She whistled again.

‘You’ll
have to marry the girl.’ ‘Quite.’

‘Though
I doubt if she would have you.’

‘I have
positive inside information to the contrary. ‘‘You fixed it up?’

‘She
fixed it up. We are affianced.’

‘In
spite of that moustache?’

‘She
likes the moustache.’

‘She
does? Morbid. But what about Cheesewright? I thought he and she were affianced,
as you call it?’

‘No
longer. It’s off.’

‘They’ve
bust up?’

‘Completely.’

‘And
now she’s taken you on?’

‘That’s
right.’

A look
of concern came into her face. Despite the occasional brusqueness of her
manner, and the fruity names she sees fit to call me from time to time, she
loves me dearly and my well—being is very near her heart.

‘She’s
pretty highbrow for you, isn’t she? If I know her, she’ll have you reading W.H.
Auden before you can say “What ho”.’

‘She
rather hinted at some such contingency, though, if I recollect, T.S. Eliot was
the name that was mentioned.’

‘She
proposes to mould you?’

‘I
gathered so.’

‘You
won’t like that.’

‘No.’

She
nodded understandingly.

‘Men
don’t. I attribute my own happy marriage to the fact that I have never so much
as laid a finger on old Tom. Agatha is trying to mould Worplesdon, and I
believe his agonies are frightful. She made him knock off smoking the other
day, and he behaved like a cinnamon bear with its foot in a trap. Has Florence
told you to knock off smoking?’

‘Not
yet.’

‘She
will. And after that it’ll be cocktails.’ She gazed at me with a good deal of
what-do-you-call-it. You could see that remorse had her in its grip. ‘I’m
afraid I’ve got you into a bit of a jam, my poppet.’

‘Don’t
give it a thought, old blood relation,’ I said. ‘These things happen. It is
your predicament, not mine, that is exercising me. We’ve got to get you out of
your sea of troubles, as Jeeves calls it. Everything else is relatively
unimportant. My thoughts of self are merely in about the proportion of the
vermouth to the gin in a strongish dry martini.

She was
plainly touched. Unless I am very much mistaken, her eyes were wet with unshed
tears.

‘That’s
very altruistic of you, Bertie dear.’

‘Not at
all, not at all.’

‘One
wouldn’t think it, to look at you, but you have a noble soul.’

‘Who
wouldn’t think it, to look at me?’

‘And if
that’s the way you feel, all I can say is that it does you credit and let’s get
going. You’d better go and shift that ladder to the right window.’

‘You
mean the left window.’

‘Well,
let’s call it the correct window.’

I
braced myself to break the bad news.

‘Ah,’ I
said, ‘but what you’re overlooking — possibly because I forgot to tell you — is
that a snag has arisen which threatens to do our aims and objects a bit of no
good. The ladder isn’t there.’

‘Where?’

‘Under
the right window, or perhaps I should say the wrong window. When I looked out,
it was gone.‘

‘Nonsense.
Ladders don’t melt into thin air.’

‘They
do, I assure you, at Brinkley Court, Brinkley-cum-Snodsfield-in—the—Marsh. I
don’t know what conditions prevail elsewhere, but at Brinkley Court they vanish
if you take your eye off them for so much as an instant.’

‘You
mean the ladder’s disappeared?’

‘That
is precisely the point I was endeavouring to establish. It has folded its tents
like the Arabs and silently stolen away.’

She
turned bright mauve, and I think was about to rap out something in the nature
of a Quorn—and—Pytchley expletive, for she is a woman who seldom minces her
words when stirred, but at this juncture the door opened and Uncle Tom came in.
I was too distrait to be able to discern whether or not he was pottering, but a
glance was enough to show me that he was definitely all of a doodah.

‘Dahlia!’
he exclaimed. ‘I thought I heard your voice. What are you doing up at this
hour?’

‘Bertie
had a headache,’ replied the old relative, a quick thinker. ‘I have been giving
him an aspirin. The head a little better now, Bertie?’

‘One notes
a slight improvement,’ I assured her, being a quick thinker myself. ‘You’re out
and about a bit late, aren’t you, Uncle Tom?’

‘Yes,’
said Aunt Dahlia. ‘What are
you
doing up at this hour, my old
for—better—or—for—worser? You ought to have been asleep ages ago.’

Uncle
Tom shook his head. His air was grave.

‘Asleep,
old girl? I shan’t get any sleep tonight. Far too worried. The place is alive
with burglars.’

‘Burglars?
What gives you that idea? I haven’t seen any burglars. Have you, Bertie?’

‘Not
one. I remember thinking how odd it was.’

‘You
probably saw an owl or something, Tom.’

‘I saw
a ladder. When I was taking my stroll in the garden before going to bed. Propped
up against one of the windows. I took it away in the nick of time. A minute
later, and burglars would have been streaming up it in their thousands.’

Aunt
Dahlia and I exchanged a glance. I think we were both feeling happier now that
the mystery of the vanishing 1. had been solved. It’s an odd thing, but however
much of an
aficionado
one may be of mysteries in book form, when they
pop up in real life they seldom fail to give one the pip.

She
endeavoured to soothe his agitation.

‘Probably
just a ladder one of the gardeners was using and forgot to put back where it
belonged. Though, of course,’ she went on thoughtfully, feeling no doubt that a
spot of paving the way would do no harm, ‘I suppose there is always a chance of
a cracksman having a try for that valuable pearl necklace of mine. I had
forgotten that.’

‘I
hadn’t,’ said Uncle Tom. ‘It was the first thing I thought of. I went straight
to your room and got it and locked it up in the safe in the hall. A burglar
will have to be pretty smart to get it out of there,’ he added with modest
pride, and pushed off, leaving behind him what I have sometimes heard called a
pregnant silence.

Aunt
looked at nephew, nephew looked at aunt.

‘Hell’s
whiskers!’ said the former, starting the conversation going again. ‘Now what do
we do?’

I
agreed that the situation was sticky. Indeed, off-hand it was difficult to see
how it could have been more glutinous.

‘What
are the chances of finding out the combination?’

‘Not a
hope.’

‘I
wonder if Jeeves can crack a safe.’

She
brightened.

‘I’ll
bet he can. There’s nothing Jeeves can’t do. Go and fetch him.’

I
Lord-love-a-duck-ed impatiently.

‘How
the dickens can I fetch him? I don’t know which his room is. Do you?’

‘No.’

‘Well,
I can’t go from door to door, rousing the whole domestic staff. Who do you
think I am? Paul Revere?’

I
paused for a reply, and as I did so who should come in but Jeeves in person.
Late though it was, the hour had produced the man.

‘Excuse
me, sir,’ he said. ‘I am happy to find that I have not interrupted your
slumbers. I ventured to come to inquire whether matters had developed
satisfactorily. Were you successful in your enterprise, sir?’

I shook
the coconut.

‘No,
Jeeves. I moved in a mysterious way my wonders to perform, but was impeded by a
number of Acts of God,’ I said, and in a few crisp words put him abreast. ‘So
the necklace is now in the safe,’ I concluded, ‘and the problem as I see it,
and as Aunt Dahlia sees it, is how the dickens to get it out. You grasp the
position?’

‘Yes,
sir. It is disturbing.’

Aunt
Dahlia uttered a passionate cry.

‘Don’t
do
it!’ she boomed with extraordinary vehemence. ‘If I hear that word
“disturbing” once more … Can you bust a safe, Jeeves?’

‘No,
madam.’

‘Don’t
say “No, madam” in that casual way. How do you know you can’t?’

‘It
requires a specialized education and upbringing, madam.’

‘Then
I’m for it,’ said Aunt Dahlia, making for the door. Her face was grim and set.
She might have been a marquise about to hop into the tumbril at the time when
there was all that unpleasantness over in France. ‘You weren’t through the San
Francisco earthquake, were you, Jeeves?’

‘No,
madam. I have never visited the western coastal towns of the United States.’

‘I was
only thinking that if you had been, what’s going to happen tomorrow when this
Lord Sidcup arrives and tells Tom the awful truth would have reminded you of
old times. Well, good night, all. I’ll be running along and getting my beauty
sleep.’

She
buzzed off, a gallant figure. The Quorn trains its daughters well. No weakness
there. In the fell clutch of circumstance, as I remember Jeeves putting it
once, they do not wince or cry aloud. I mentioned this to him as the door
closed, and he agreed that it was substantially so.

‘Under
the tiddly-poms of whatever-it-is … How does the rest of it go?’

‘Under
the bludgeonings of chance their heads are … pardon me … bloody but
unbowed, sir.’

‘That’s
right. Your own?’

‘No,
sir. The late William Ernest Henley, 1849—1903.’

‘Ah?’

‘The
title of the poem is “Invictus”. But did I understand Mrs. Travers to say that
Lord Sidcup was expected, sir?’

‘He
arrives tomorrow.’