Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (25 page)

‘It
won’t happen again. I know now what love really is, Bertie. I tell you, when
somebody — who shall be nameless — gazes into my eyes and says that the first
time she saw me — in spite of the fact that I was wearing a moustache fully as
foul as that one of yours —something went over her like an electric shock, I
feel as if I had just won the Diamond Sculls at Henley. It’s all washed up
between Florence and me. She’s yours, old man. Take her, old chap, take her.’

Well, I
said something civil like ‘Oh, thanks’, but he wasn’t listening. A silvery
voice had called his name, and pausing but an instant to swallow the last of
his ham he shot from the room, his face aglow and his eyes a-sparkle.

He left
me with the heart like lead within the bosom and the sausage and bacon turning
to ashes in my mouth. This, I could see, was the end. It was plain to the least
observant eye that G. D’Arcy Cheesewright had got it properly up his nose.
Morehead Preferred were booming, and Craye Ordinaries down in the cellar with
no takers.

And I
had been so certain that in due season wiser counsels would prevail, causing
these two sundered hearts to regret the rift in the lute and decide to have
another pop at it, thus saving me from the scaffold once more. But it was not
to be. Bertram was for it. He would have to drain the bitter cup, after all.

I was
starting on a second instalment of coffee — it tasted like the bitter cup —
when L.G. Trotter came in.

The one
thing I didn’t want in my enfeebled state was to have to swap ideas with
Trotters, but when you’re alone in a dining-room with a fellow, something in
the nature of conversation is inevitable, so, as he poured himself out a cup of
tea, I said it was a beautiful morning and recommended the sausages and bacon.

He
reacted strongly, shuddering from head to foot.

‘Sausages?’
he said. ‘Bacon?’ he said. ‘Don’t talk to me about sausages and bacon,’ he
said. ‘My dyspepsia’s worse than ever.’

Well,
if he wanted to thresh out the subject of his aching tum, I was prepared to
lend a ready ear, but he skipped on to another topic.

‘You
married?’ he asked.

I winced
a trifle and said I wasn’t actually married yet.

‘And
you won’t ever be, if you’ve got a morsel of sense,’ he proceeded, and brooded
darkly over his tea for a moment. ‘You know what happens when you get married?
You’re bossed. You can’t call your soul your own. You become just a cipher in
the home.’

I must
say I was a bit surprised to find him so confidential to one who was, after
all, a fairly mere stranger, but I put it down to the dyspepsia. No doubt the
shooting pains had robbed him of his cool judgment.

‘Have
an egg,’ I said, by way of showing him that my heart was in the right place.

He
turned green and tied himself into a lovers’ knot.

‘I
won’t have an egg! Don’t keep telling me to have things. Do you think I could
look at eggs, feeling the way I do? It’s all this infernal French cooking. No
digestion can stand up against it. Marriage!’ he said, getting back to the old
subject. ‘Don’t talk to me about marriages. You get married, and first thing
you know, you have stepsons rung in on you who grow whiskers and don’t do a
stroke of honest work. All they do is write poems about sunsets. Pah!’

I’m
pretty shrewd, and it flashed upon me at this point that it might quite
possibly be his stepson Percy to whom he was guardedly alluding. But before I
could verify this suspicion the room had begun to fill up. Round about
nine-twenty, which it was now, you generally find the personnel of a country
house lining up for the eats. Aunt Dahlia came in and took a fried egg. Mrs.
Trotter came in and took a sausage. Percy and Florence came in and took
respectively a slice of ham and a portion of haddock. As there were no signs of
Uncle Tom, I presumed that he was breakfasting in bed. He generally does when
he has guests, rarely feeling equal to facing them till he has fortified
himself a bit for the stern ordeal.

Those
present had got their heads down and their elbows squared and were busily
employed getting theirs, when Seppings appeared with the morning papers, and
conversation, not that there had ever been much of it, flagged. It was to a
silent gathering that there now entered a newcomer, a man about seven feet in
height with a square, powerful face, slightly moustached towards the centre. It
was some time since I had set eyes on Roderick Spode, but I had no difficulty
in recognizing him. He was one of those distinctive-looking blisters who, once
seen, are never forgotten.

He was
looking a little pale, I thought, as if he had recently had an attack of
vertigo and hit his head on the floor. He said ‘Good morning’ in what for him
was rather a weak voice, and Aunt Dahlia glanced up from her
Daily Mirror.

‘Why,
Lord Sidcup!’ she said. ‘I never expected that you would be able to come to
breakfast. Are you sure it’s wise? Do you feel better this morning?’

‘Considerably
better, thank you,’ he responded bravely. ‘The swelling has to some extent
subsided.’

‘I’m so
glad. That’s those cold compresses. I was hoping they would bring home the
bacon. Lord Sidcup,’ said Aunt Dahlia, ‘had a nasty fall yesterday evening. We
think it must have been a sudden giddiness. Everything went black, didn’t it,
Lord Sidcup?’

He
nodded, and was plainly sorry next moment that he had done so, for he winced as
I have sometimes winced when rashly oscillating the bean after some outstanding
night of revelry at the Drones.

‘Yes,’
he said. ‘It was all most extraordinary. I was standing there feeling perfectly
well — never better, in fact — when it was as though something hard had hit me
on the head, and I remembered no more till I came to in my room, with you
smoothing my pillow and your butler mixing me a cooling drink.’

‘That’s
life,’ said Aunt Dahlia gravely. ‘Yessir, that’s life all right. Here today and
gone tomorrow, I often say — Bertie, you hellhound, take that beastly cigarette
of yours outside. It smells like guano.’

I rose,
always willing to oblige, and had sauntered about half—way to the french
window, when from the lips of Mrs. L.G. Trotter there suddenly proceeded what I
can only describe as a screech. I don’t know if you have ever inadvertently
trodden on an unseen cat. Much the same sort of thing. Taking a quick look at
her, I saw that her face had become almost as red as Aunt Dahlia’s.

‘Well!’
she ejaculated.

She was
staring at
The Times,
which was what she had drawn in the distribution
of the morning journals, in much the same manner as a resident of India would
have stared at a cobra, had he found it nestling in his bath tub.

‘Of all
the —‘ she said, and then words failed her.

L.G.
Trotter gave her the sort of look the cobra might have given the resident of
India who had barged in on its morning bath. I could understand how he felt. A
man with dyspepsia, already out of harmony with his wife, does not like to hear
that wife screaming her head off in the middle of breakfast.

‘What
on earth’s the matter?’ he said testily.

Her
bosom heaved like a stage sea.

‘I’ll
tell you what’s the matter. They’ve gone and knighted Robert Blenkinsop!’

‘They
have?’ said L.G. Trotter. ‘Gosh!’

The
stricken woman seemed to think ‘Gosh!’ inadequate.

‘Is
that all you can say?’

It
wasn’t. He now said ‘Ba goom!’ She continued to erupt like one of those
volcanoes which spill over from time to time and make the neighbouring
householders think a bit.

‘Robert
Blenkinsop! Robert Berlenkinsop! Of all the iniquitous pieces of idiocy! I
don’t know what things are coming to nowadays. I never heard of such a … May
I ask why you are laughing?’

L.G.
Trotter curled up beneath her eye like a sheet of carbon paper. ‘Not laughing,’
he said meekly. ‘Just smiling. I was thinking of Bobby Blenkinsop walking
backwards with satin knee-breeches on.’

‘Oh?’
said Ma Trotter, and her voice rang through the room like that of a
costermonger indicating to his public that he has brussels sprouts and blood
oranges for sale. ‘Well, let me tell you that that is never going to happen to
you. If ever you are offered a knighthood, Lemuel, you will refuse it. Do you
understand? I won’t have you cheapening yourself.’

There
was a crash. It was Aunt Dahlia dropping her coffee—cup, and I could appreciate
her emotion. She was feeling precisely as I had felt on learning from Percy
that the Wooster Darts Sweep ticket had changed hands, leaving Stilton free to
attack me with tooth and claw. There is nothing that makes a woman sicker than
the sudden realization that somebody she thought she was holding in the hollow
of her hand isn’t in the hollow of her hand by a jugful. So far from being in
the hollow of her hand, L.G. Trotter was stepping high, wide and handsome with
his hat on the side of his head, and I wasn’t surprised that the thing had
shaken her to her foundation garments.

In the
silence which followed L.G. Trotter’s response to this wifely ultimatum — it
was, if I remember correctly, ‘Okay’ — Seppings appeared in the doorway.

He was
carrying a silver salver, and on this salver lay a pearl necklace.

21

It is pretty generally
recognized in the circles in which he moves that Bertram Wooster is not a man
who lightly throws in the towel and admits defeat. Beneath the thingummies of
what-d’you-call-it his head, wind and weather permitting, is as a rule bloody
but unbowed, and if the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune want to crush
his proud spirit, they have to pull their socks up and make a special effort.

Nevertheless,
I must confess that when, already weakened by having come down to breakfast, I
beheld the spectacle which I have described, I definitely quailed. The heart
sank, and, as had happened in the case of Spode, everything went black. Through
a murky mist I seemed to be watching a negro butler presenting an inky salver
to a Ma Trotter who looked like the end man in a minstrel show.

The
floor heaved beneath my feet as if an earthquake had set in with unusual
severity. My eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, met Aunt Dahlia’s, and I saw hers
was rolling, too.

Still,
she did her best, as always.

“At—a—boy,
Seppings!’ she said heartily. ‘We were all wondering where that necklace could
have got to. It is yours, isn’t it, Mrs. Trotter?’

Ma
Trotter was scrutinizing the salver through a lorgnette.

‘It’s
mine, all right,’ she said. ‘But what I’d like to know is how it came into this
man’s possession.’

Aunt
Dahlia continued to do her best.

‘You
found it on the floor of the hall, I suppose, Seppings, where Lord Sidcup
dropped it when he had his seizure?’

A
dashed good suggestion, I thought, and it might quite easily have clicked, had
not Spode, the silly ass, shoved his oar in.

‘I fail
to see how that could be so, Mrs. Travers,’ he said in that supercilious way of
his which has got him so disliked on all sides. ‘The necklace I was holding
when my senses left me was yours. Mrs. Trotter’s was presumably in the safe.’

‘Yes,’
said Ma Trotter, ‘and pearl necklaces don’t jump out of safes. I think I’ll
step to the telephone and have a word with the police.’

Aunt
Dahlia raised her eyebrows. It must have taken a bit of doing, but she did it.

‘I
don’t understand you, Mrs. Trotter,’ she said, very much the
grande dame.
‘Do
you suppose that my butler would break into the safe and steal your necklace?’

Spode
horned in again. He was one of those unpleasant men who never know when to keep
their big mouths shut.

‘Why
break?’ he said. ‘It would not have been necessary to
break
into the
safe. The door was already open.’

‘Ho!’
cried Ma Trotter, reckless of the fact that the copyright of the word was
Stilton’s. ‘So that’s how it was. All he had to do was reach in and help
himself. The telephone is in the hall, I think?’

Seppings
made his first contribution to the feast of reason and flow of soul.

‘If I
might explain, madam.’

He
spoke austerely. The rules of their guild do not permit butlers to give employers’
guests dirty looks, but while stopping short of the dirty look he was not
affectionate. Her loose talk about police and telephones had caused him to take
umbrage, and it was pretty clear that whoever he might select as a companion on
his next long walking tour, it would not be Ma Trotter.

‘It was
not I who found the necklace, madam. Acting upon instructions from Mr.
Travers, I instituted a search through the rooms of the staff and discovered
the object in the bedchamber of Mr. Wooster’s personal attendant, Mr. Jeeves.
Upon my drawing this to Mr. Jeeves’s attention, he informed me that he had
picked it up in the hall.’

‘Is
that so? Well, tell this man Jeeves to come here at once.’