Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (20 page)

‘Exactly.’

‘He
would obliterate you with a single blow. He would break you in two with his
bare hands. He would tear you limb from limb.’

I
frowned slightly. I was glad to see that he appreciated the gravity of the
situation, but these crude physical details seemed to me uncalled for.

‘No
need to make a production number of it, Jeeves,’ I said with a touch of
coldness. ‘What I am driving at is that, armed with the cosh, I can face the
blighter without a tremor. You agree?’

‘Most
decidedly, sir.’

‘Then
shift-ho,’ I said, and hurled myself into the vacant seat.

This
cosh of which I have been speaking was a small rubber bludgeon which at first
sight you might have supposed unequal to the task of coping with an adversary
of Stilton Cheesewright’s tonnage. In repose, I mean to say, it didn’t look
like anything so frightfully hot. But I had seen it in action and was hep to
what Florence would have called its latent potentialities. At Deverill Hall one
night, for the soundest of reasons but too long to go into here, Jeeves had had
occasion to bean a policeman with it — Constable Dobbs, a zealous officer — and
the smitten slop had dropped as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place
beneath.

There
is a song, frequently sung by curates at village concerts, which runs:

I fear no foe in shining armour,

Though his lance be bright and keen.

Or is
it ‘swift and keen’? I can’t remember. Not that it matters. The point is that
those words summed up my attitude to a nicety. They put what I was feeling in a
nutshell. With that cosh on my person, I should feel debonair and confident, no
matter how many Cheesewrights came bounding at me with slavering jaws.

Everything
went according to plan. After an agreeable drive we dropped anchor at the door
of Berkeley Mansions and made our way to the flat. There, as foreshadowed, was
the cosh. Jeeves handed it over, I thanked him in a few well-chosen words, he
went off to his orgy, and I, after a bite of lunch at the Drones, settled
myself in the two-seater and turned its nose Worcestershirewards.

The first person I met as
I passed through the portals of Brinkley Court some hours later was Aunt
Dahlia. She was in the hall, pacing up and down like a distraught tigress. Her
exuberance of the morning had vanished completely, leaving her once more the
haggard aunt of yesterday, and I was conscious of a quick pang of concern.

‘Golly!’
I said. ‘What’s up, old relative? Don’t tell me that scheme of yours didn’t
work?’

She
kicked morosely at a handy chair, sending it flying into the unknown.

‘It
hasn’t had a chance to work.’

‘Why
not? Didn’t Spode turn up?’

She
gazed about her with sombre eyes, apparently in the hope of finding another
chair to kick. There not being one in her immediate sphere of influence, she
kicked the sofa.

‘He
turned up all right, and what happened? Before I could draw him aside and get
so much as a word in, Tom swooped on him and took him off to the collection
room to look at his foul silver. They’ve been in there for more than an hour,
and how much longer they’re going to be, Heaven knows.’

I
pursed the lips. One ought, I felt, to have anticipated something of this sort.

‘Can’t
you detach him?’

‘No
human power can detach a man to whom Tom is talking about his silver collection.
He holds him with a glittering eye. All I can hope is that he will be so
wrapped up in the silver end of the thing that he’ll forget all about the
necklace.’

The
last thing a nephew of the right sort wants to do is to shove a wallowing aunt
still more deeply beneath the surface of the slough of despond than she is
already, but I had to shake my head at this.

‘I
doubt it.’

She
gave the sofa another juicy one.

‘So do
I doubt it. That’s why I’m going steadily cuckoo and may at any moment start
howling like a banshee. Sooner or later he’ll remember to take Spode to the
safe, and what I am saying to myself is When? When? I feel like … who was the
man who sat with a sword dangling over him, suspended by a hair, wondering how
long it was going to be before it dropped and gave him a nasty flesh wound?’

She had
me there. Nobody I had met. Certainly not one of the fellows at the Drones.

‘I
couldn’t tell you, I’m afraid. Jeeves might know.’

At the
mention of that honoured name her eyes lit up.

‘Jeeves!
Of course! He’s the man I want. Where is he?’

‘In
London. He asked me if he could take the day off. It was the Junior Ganymede
monthly luncheon today.’

She
uttered a cry which might have been the howl of the banshee to which she had
alluded, and gave me the sort of look which in the old tally-ho days she would
have given a mentally deficient hound which she had observed suspending its
professional activities in order to chase a rabbit.

‘You
let Jeeves go away at a time like this, when one has never needed him more?’

‘I
hadn’t the heart to refuse. He was taking the chair. He’ll be back soon.’

‘By
which time …’

She
would have spoken further … a good deal further, if I read aright the message
in her eyes … but before she could get going something whiskered came down
the stairs and Percy was with us.

Seeing
me, he halted abruptly.

‘Wooster!’
His agitation was very marked. ‘Where have you been all day, Wooster?’

I told
him I had driven to London, and he drew his breath in with a hiss.

‘In
this hot weather? It can’t be good for you. You must not overtax yourself,
Wooster. You must husband your strength.’

He had
chosen the wrong moment for horning in. The old relative turned on him as if he
had been someone she had observed heading off the fox, if not shooting it.

‘Gorringe,
you ghastly sheep-faced fugitive from Hell,’ she thundered, forgetting, or so
I imagine, that she was a hostess, ‘get out of here, blast you! We’re in
conference.’

I
suppose mixing with editors of poetry magazines toughens a fellow, rendering him
impervious to verbal assault, for Percy, who might well have been expected to
wilt, didn’t wilt by a damn sight but drew himself up to his full height, which
was about six feet two, and came back at her strongly.

‘I am
sorry to have intruded at an unseasonable moment, Mrs. Travers,’ he said, with
a simple dignity that became him well, ‘but I have a message for you from
Moth-aw, Moth-aw would like to speak to you. She desired me to ask if it would
be convenient if she came to your room.’

Aunt
Dahlia flung her hands up emotionally. I could understand how she felt. The
last thing a woman wants, when distraught, is a chat with someone like Ma
Trotter.

‘Not
now!’

‘Later,
perhaps?’

‘Is it
important?’

‘I
received the impression that it was most important.’

Aunt Dahlia
heaved a deep sigh, the sigh of a woman who feels that they are coming over the
plate too fast for her.

‘Oh,
all right. Tell her I’ll see her in half an hour. I’m going back to the
collection room, Bertie. It’s just possible that Tom may have run down by now.
But one last word,’ she added, as she moved away. ‘The next subhuman gargoyle
that comes butting in and distracting my thoughts when I am trying to wrestle
with vital problems takes his life in his hands. Let him make his will and put
in his order for lilies!‘

She
disappeared at some forty m.p.h., and Percy followed her retreating form with
an indulgent eye.

‘A
quaint character,’ he said.

I
agreed that the old relative was quaint in spots.

‘She
reminds me a little of the editress of
Parnassus.
The same tendency to
wave her hands and shout, when stirred. But about this drive of yours to
London, Wooster. What made you go there?’

‘Oh,
just one or two things I had to attend to.’

‘Well,
I am thankful that you got back safely. The toll of the roads is so high these
days. I trust you always drive carefully, Wooster? No speeding? No passing on
blind corners? Capital, capital. But we were all quite anxious about you. We
couldn’t think where you could have got to. Cheesewright was particularly
concerned. He appeared to think that you had vanished permanently and he said
there were all sorts of things he had been hoping to discuss with you. I must
let him know you are back. It will relieve his mind.’

He
trotted off, and I lit a nonchalant cigarette, calm and collected to the
eyebrows. I was perhaps half-way through it and had just blown quite a goodish
smoke-ring, when clumping footsteps made themselves heard and Stilton loomed up
on the skyline.

I
reached a hand into my pocket and got a firm grasp on the old Equalizer.

17

I don’t know if you have
ever seen a tiger of the jungle drawing a deep breath preparatory to doing a
swan dive and landing with both feet on the backbone of one of the minor fauna.
Probably not, nor, as a matter of fact, have I. But I should imagine that a t. of
the j. at such a moment would look … allowing, of course, for the fact that
it would not have a pink face and a head like a pumpkin … exactly as G. D’Arcy
Cheesewright looked as his eyes rested on the Wooster frame. For perhaps a
couple of ticks he stood there inflating and deflating his chest. Then he said,
as I had rather supposed he would:

‘Ho!’

His
signature tune, as you might say.

My
nonchalance continued undiminished. It would have been idle to pretend that the
blister’s attitude was not menacing. It was about as menacing as it could jolly
well stick. But with my hand on the cosh I faced him without a tremor. Like
Caesar’s wife, I was ready for anything. I gave him a careless nod.

‘Ah,
Stilton,’ I said. ‘How are tricks?’

The
question appeared to set the seal on his hotted-up-ness. He gnashed a tooth or
two.

‘I’ll
show you how tricks are! I’ve been looking for you all day.’

‘You
wished to see me about something?’

‘I
wished to pull your head off at the roots and make you swallow it.’

I
nodded again, carelessly as before.

‘Ah,
yes. You rather hinted at some such desire last night, did you not? It all
comes back to me. Well, I’m sorry, Stilton, but I’m afraid it’s off. I have
made other plans. Percy Gorringe will no doubt have told you that I ran up to
London this morning. I went to get this,’ I said, and producing the man of
slender physique’s best friend, gave it a suggestive waggle.

There
is one drawback to not wearing a moustache, and that is that if you don’t have
one, you’ve got nothing to twirl when baffled. All you can do is stand with
your lower jaw drooping like a tired lily, looking a priceless ass, and that is
what Stilton was doing now. His whole demeanour was that of an Assyrian who,
having come down like a wolf on the fold, finds in residence not lambs but wild
cats, than which, of course, nothing makes an Assyrian feel sillier.

‘Amazingly
effective little contrivances, these,’ I proceeded, rubbing it in. ‘You read
about them a good deal in mystery thrillers. Coshes they are called, though
black-jack is, I believe, the American term.’

He
breathed stertorously, his eyes bulging. I suppose he had never come up against
anything like this. One gets new experiences.

‘You
put that thing down!’ he said hoarsely.

‘I
propose to put it down,’ I replied, quick as a flash. ‘I propose to put it down
jolly dashed hard, the moment you make a move, and though I am the merest
novice in the use of the cosh, I don’t see how I can help hitting a head the
size of yours somewhere. And then where will you be, Cheesewright? On the
floor, dear old soul, that’s where you will be, with me carelessly dusting my
hands and putting the instrument back in my pocket. With one of these things in
his possession the veriest weakling can lay out the toughest egg colder than a
halibut on ice. To put it in a word, Cheesewright, I am armed, and the set-up,
as I see it, is this. I take a comfortable stance with the weight balanced on
both feet, you make a spring, and I, cool as some cucumbers …

It was
a silly thing to say, that about making springs, because it put ideas into his
head. He made one on the word ‘cucumbers’ with such abruptness that I was
caught completely unawares. That’s the trouble with beefy fellows like Stilton.
They are so massive that you don’t credit them with the ability to get off the
mark like jack rabbits and fly through the air with the greatest of ease.
Before I knew what had happened, the cosh, wrenched from my grasp, was sailing
across the hall, to come to rest on the floor near Uncle Tom’s safe.