Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (26 page)

‘Very
good, madam.’

Seppings
withdrew, and I would have given a good deal to have been able to withdraw
myself, for in about another two ticks, I saw, it would be necessary for
Bertram Wooster to come clean and reveal all, blazoning forth to the world Aunt
Dahlia’s recent activities, if blazoning forth to the world is the expression I
want, and bathing the unfortunate old egg in shame and confusion. Feudal
fidelity would no doubt make Jeeves seal his lips, but you can’t let fellows go
sealing their lips if it means rendering themselves liable to an exemplary
sentence, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench. Come what might, the
dirt would have to be dished. The code of the Woosters is rigid on points like
this.

Looking
at Aunt Dahlia, I could see that her mind was working along the same lines, and
she wasn’t liking it by any means. With a face as red as hers she couldn’t turn
pale, but her lips were tightly set and her hand, as it lathered a slice of
toast with marmalade, plainly shook. The look on her dial was the look of a
woman who didn’t need a fortune—teller and a crystal ball to apprise her of the
fact that it would not be long before the balloon went up.

I was
gazing at her so intently that it was only when a soft cough broke the silence
that I realized that Jeeves had joined the gang. He was standing on the outskirts
looking quietly respectful.

‘Madam?’
he said.

‘Hey,
you!’ said Ma Trotter.

He
continued to look quietly respectful. If he resented having the words ‘Hey,
you!’ addressed to him, there was nothing in his manner to show it.

‘This
necklace,’ said Ma Trotter, giving him a double whammy through the lorgnette.
‘The butler says he found it in your room.’

‘Yes,
madam. I was planning after breakfast to make inquiries as to its ownership.’

‘You
were, were you?’

‘I
presumed that it was some trinket belonging to one of the housemaids.’

‘It was
…
what?’

He
coughed again, that deferential cough of his which sounds like a well—bred
sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountain-top.

‘I
perceived at once that it was merely an inexpensive imitation made from cultured
pearls, madam,’ he said.

I don’t
know if you happen to know the expression ‘a stunned silence’. I’ve come across
it in books when one of the characters has unloaded a hot one on the assembled
company, and I have always thought it a neat way of describing that sort of
stilly hush that pops up on these occasions. The silence that fell on the
Brinkley Court breakfast table as Jeeves uttered these words was as stunned as
the dickens.

L.G.
Trotter was the first to break it.

‘What’s
that? Inexpensive imitation? I paid five thousand pounds for that necklace.’

‘Of
course you did,’ said Ma Trotter with a petulant waggle of the bean. ‘The man’s
intoxicated.’

I felt
compelled to intervene in the debate and dispel the miasma of suspicion which
had arisen, or whatever it is that miasmas do.

‘Intoxicated?’
I said. ‘At ten in the morning? A laughable theory. But the matter can readily
be put to the test. Jeeves, say “Theodore Oswaldtwistle, the thistle sifter,
sifting a sack of thistles thrust three thorns through the thick of his
thumb”.’

He did
so with an intonation as clear as a bell, if not clearer.

‘You
see,’ I said, and rested my case.

Aunt
Dahlia, who had blossomed like a flower revived with a couple of fluid ounces
of the right stuff from a watering-can, chipped in with a helpful word.

‘You
can bank on Jeeves,’ she said. ‘If he thinks it’s a dud, it is a dud. He knows
all about jewellery.’

‘Precisely,’
I added. ‘He has the full facts. He studied under an aunt of his in the
profession.’

‘Cousin,
sir.’

‘Of
course, yes, cousin. Sorry, Jeeves.’

‘Not at
all, sir.’

Spode
came butting in again.

‘Let me
see that necklace,’ he said authoritatively.

Jeeves
drew the salver to his attention.

‘You
will, I think, support my view, my lord.’

Spode
took the contents, glanced at them, sniffed and delivered judgment.

‘Perfectly
correct. An imitation, and not a very good one’.’

‘You
can’t be sure,’ said Percy, and got withered by a look.

‘Can’t
be sure?’ Spode bristled like a hornet whose feelings have been wounded by a
tactless remark. ‘Can’t be
sure?’

‘Of
course he’s sure,’ I said, not actually slapping him on the back but giving him
a back-slapping look designed to show him he had got Bertram Wooster in his
corner. ‘He knows, as everybody knows, that cultured pearls have a core. You spotted
the core in a second, didn’t you, Spode, old man, or rather Lord Sidcup, old
man?’

I was
going on to speak of the practice of introducing a foreign substance into the
oyster in order to kid it along and induce it to cover this f.s. with layers of
nacre — which I still think is a dirty trick to play on a shellfish which
simply wants to be left alone with its thoughts — but Spode had risen. There
was dudgeon in his manner.

‘All
this sort of thing at breakfast!’ he said, and I saw what he meant. At home, no
doubt, he wrapped himself around the morning egg in cosy seclusion, his daily
paper propped up against the coffee-pot and none of this business of naked
passions buzzing all over the place. He wiped his mouth, and left via the french
window, wincing with a hand to his head as L.G. Trotter spoke in a voice that
nearly cracked his tea-cup.

‘Emily!
Explain this!’

Ma
Trotter got the lorgnette working on him, but for all the good it did she might
as well have used a monocle. He stared right back at her, and I imagine — couldn’t
be certain, of course, because his back was to me — that there was in his gaze
a steely hardness that turned her bones to water. At any rate, when she spoke,
it was like what I have heard Jeeves describe as the earliest pipe of half—awakened
birds.

‘I
can’t explain it,’ she … yes, quavered. I was going to say ‘murmured’, but
quavered hits it off better.

L.G.
Trotter barked like a seal.

‘I
can,’ he said. ‘You’ve been giving money on the sly again to that brother of
yours.’

This
was the first I had heard of any brother of Ma Trotter’s, but I wasn’t
surprised. My experience is that all wives of prosperous business men have
shady brothers in the background to whom they slip a bit from time to time.

‘I
haven’t!’

‘Don’t
lie to me!’

‘Oh!’ cried
the shrinking woman, shrinking a bit more, and the spectacle was too much for
Percy. All this while he had been sitting tensely where he sat, giving the
impression of something stuffed by a good taxidermist, but now, moved by a
mother’s distress, he rose rather in the manner of one about to reply to the
toast of The Ladies. He was looking a little like a cat in a strange alley
which is momentarily expecting a half-brick in the short ribs, but his voice,
though low, was firm.

‘I can
explain everything. Moth-aw is innocent. She wanted her necklace cleaned. She
entrusted it to me to take to the jeweller’s, and I pawned it and had an
imitation made. I needed money urgently.’

Aunt
Dahlia well-I’ll-be-blowed!

‘What
an extraordinary thing to do!’ she said. ‘Did you ever hear of anybody doing
anything like that, Bertie?’

‘New to
me, I must confess.’

‘Amazing,
eh?’

‘Bizarre,
you might call it.’

‘Still,
that’s how it goes.’

‘Yes,
that’s how it goes.’

‘I
needed a thousand pounds to put into the play,’ said Percy.

L.G.
Trotter, who was in good voice this morning, uttered a howl that set the
silverware rattling. It was fortunate for Spode that he had removed himself
from earshot, for it would certainly have done that head of his no good. Even
I, though a strong man, leaped about six inches.

‘You
put a thousand pounds into a
play?’

‘Into
the
play,’ said Percy. ‘Florence’s and mine. My dramatization of her novel,
Spindrift.
One of our backers had failed us, and rather than disappoint the woman I
loved —‘

Florence
was staring at him, wide-eyed. If you remember, I described her aspect on
first glimpsing my moustache as having had in it a touch of the Soul’s Awakening.
The S.A. was now even more pronounced. It stuck out a mile.

‘Percy!
You did that for me?’

‘And
I’d do it again,’ said Percy.

L.G.
Trotter began to speak. As to whether he opened his remarks with the words ‘Ba goom!’
I cannot be positive, but there was a ‘Ba goom!’ implicit in every syllable.
The man was what is called beside himself, and one felt a gentle pity for Ma
Trotter, little as one liked her. Her reign was over. She had had it. From now
on it was plain who was going to be the Fuhrer of the Trotter home. The worm of
yesterday — or you might say the worm of ten minutes ago — had become a worm in
tiger’s clothing.

‘This
settles it!’ he vociferated, I’m pretty sure it’s vociferated. ‘There won’t be
any more loafing about London for you, young man. We leave this house this
morning —‘

‘What!’
yipped Aunt Dahlia.

‘—and
the moment we get back to Liverpool you start in at the bottom of the business,
as you ought to have done two years ago if I hadn’t let myself be persuaded
against my better judgment. Five thousand pounds I paid for that necklace, and
you …‘

Emotion
overcame him, and he paused.

‘But,
Mr. Trotter!’ There was anguish in Aunt Dahlia’s voice. ‘You aren’t leaving
this morning!’

‘Yes, I
am. Think I’m going to go through another of that French cook’s lunches?’

‘But I
was hoping you would not be going away before we had settled this matter of
buying the
Boudoir.
If you could give me a few moments in the library?’

‘No
time for that. I’m going to drive into Market Snodsbury and see a doctor. Just
a chance he may be able to do something to relieve the pain. It’s about here
that it seems to catch me,’ said L.G. Trotter, indicating the fourth button of
his waistcoat.

‘Tut-tut,’
said Aunt Dahlia, and I tut-tutted, too, but nobody else expressed the sympathy
the writhing man had a right to expect. Florence was still drinking in Percy
with every eye at her disposal, and Percy was bending solicitously over Ma
Trotter, who was sitting looking like a survivor of a bomb explosion.

‘Come,
Moth-aw,’ said Percy, hoiking her up from where she roosted. ‘I will bathe your
temples with eau-de-Cologne.’

With a
reproachful look at L.G. Trotter he led her gently from the room. A mother’s
best friend is her boy.

Aunt
Dahlia was still looking aghast, and I knew what was in her mind. Once let this
Trotter get away to Liverpool and she would be dished. Delicate negotiations
like selling a weekly paper for the gentler sex to a customer full of sales
resistance can’t be conducted successfully by mail. You have to have men like
L.G. Trotter on the spot, kneading their arms and generally giving them the old
personality.

‘Jeeves!’
I cried. I don’t know why, because I couldn’t see what he could do to help.

He
sprang respectfully to life. During the late give-and-take he had been standing
in the background with that detached, stuffed-frog look on his face which it
always wears when he is present at a free—for—all in which his sense of what is
fitting does not allow him to take part. And the spirits rose as I saw from his
eye that he was going to rally round.

‘If I
might make a suggestion, sir.’

‘Yes,
Jeeves?’

‘It
occurs to me that one of those morning mixtures of mine would bring relief to
Mr. Trotter.’

I
gargled. I got his meaning.

‘You
mean those pick-me-ups you occasionally prepare for me when the state of the
old head seems to call for it?’

‘Precisely,
sir.’

‘Would
they hit the trot with Mr. Spotter, or rather the other way round?’

‘Oh,
yes, sir. They act directly on the internal organs.’

It was
enough. I saw that, as always, he had
tetigisti—ed
the
rem.
I
turned to L.G. Trotter.

‘You
heard?’

‘No, I
didn’t. How do you expect me to hear things —?‘

I
checked him with one of my gestures.

‘Well,
listen now,’ I said. ‘Be of good cheer, L.G. Trotter, for the United States
Marines have arrived. No need for any doctors. Go along with Jeeves, and he
will fix you a mixture which will put the old tum in midseason form before you
can say “Lemuel Gengulphus”.’

He
looked at Jeeves with a wild surmise. I heard Aunt Dahlia gasp a gasp.