Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (3 page)

This,
as I had expected, had a mollifying effect on his acerbity, if acerbity is the
word I want. He did not become genial, because he couldn’t, but he became as
nearly genial as it was in his power to be. He practically smiled.

‘Capital,’
he said. ‘Capital. Most satisfactory.’

‘I’m
glad you’re pleased. Well, good night.’

‘Teetotallers,
eh? Yes, that’s excellent. But avoid all rich foods and sauces and be sure to
get to bed early. What was that you said?’

‘I said
good night. You’ll be wanting to run along, no doubt.’

‘I’m
not running along.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Why the devil are women always late?’
he said peevishly. ‘She ought to have been here long ago. I’ve told her over
and over again that if there’s one thing that makes Uncle Joe furious, it’s
being kept waiting for his soup.’

This
introduction of the sex motif puzzled me. ‘She?’

‘Florence.
She is meeting me here. We’re dining with my uncle.’

‘Oh, I
see. Well, well. So Florence will be with us ere long, will she? Splendid,
splendid, splendid.’

I spoke
with quite a bit of warmth and animation, trying to infuse a cheery note into
the proceedings, and immediately wished I hadn’t, because he quivered like a
palsy patient and gave me a keen glance, and I saw that we had got on to
dangerous ground. A situation of considerable delicacy had been precipitated.

One of
the things which make it difficult to bring about a beautiful friendship
between G. D’Arcy Cheesewright and self is the fact that not long ago I
unfortunately got tangled up in his love life. Incensed by some crack he had
made about modern enlightened thought, modern enlightened thought being
practically a personal buddy of hers, Florence gave him the swift heave-ho and
— much against my will, but she seemed to wish it — became betrothed to me. And
this had led Stilton, a man of volcanic passions, to express a desire to tear
me limb from limb and dance buck-and-wing dances on my remains. He also spoke
of stirring up my face like an omelette and buttering me over the West End of
London.

Fortunately
before matters could proceed to this awful extreme love resumed work at the old
stand, with the result that my nomination was cancelled and the peril passed,
but he has never really got over the distressing episode. Ever since then the
green-eyed monster has always been more or less round and about, ready to snap
into action at the drop of the hat, and he has tended to docket me as a snake
in the grass that can do with a lot of watching.

So,
though disturbed, I was not surprised that he now gave me that keen glance and
spoke in a throaty growl, like a Bengal tiger snarling over its breakfast
coolie.

‘What
do you mean, splendid? Are you so anxious to see her?’

I saw
that tact would be required.

‘Not
anxious, exactly,’ I said smoothly. ‘The word is too strong. It’s just that I
would like to have her opinion of this moustache of mine. She is a girl of taste,
and I would be prepared to accept her verdict. Shortly before you arrived,
Jeeves was subjecting the growth to some destructive criticism, and it shook me
a little. What do you think of it, by the way?’

‘I
think it’s ghastly.’

‘Ghastly?’

‘Revolting.
You look like something in the chorus line of a touring revue. But you say
Jeeves doesn’t like it?’

‘He
didn’t seem to.’

‘Ah, so
you’ll have to shave it. Thank God for that!’

I
stiffened. I resent the view, so widely held in my circle of acquaintances,
that I am a mere Hey-you in the home, bowing to Jeeves’s behests like a
Hollywood yes-man.

‘Over
my dead body I’ll shave it! It stays just where it is, rooted to the spot. A
fig for Jeeves, if I may use the expression.

He
shrugged his shoulders.

‘Well,
it’s up to you, I suppose. If you don’t mind making yourself an eyesore —I
stiffened a bit further.

‘Did
you say eyesore?’

‘Eyesore
was what I said.’

‘Oh, it
was, was it?’ I riposted, and it is possible that, had we not been interrupted,
the exchanges would have become heated, for I was still under the stimulating
influence of those specials and in no mood to brook back-chat. But before I
could tell him that he was a fatheaded ass, incapable of recognizing the rare
and the beautiful if handed to him on a skewer, the door bell rang again and
Jeeves announced Florence.

3

It’s just occurred to me,
thinking back, that in that passage where I gave a brief pen portrait of her —
fairly near the start of this narrative, if you remember — I may have made a
bloomer and left you with a wrong impression of Florence Craye. Informed that
she was an intellectual girl who wrote novels and was like ham and eggs with
the boys with the bulging foreheads out Bloomsbury way, it is possible that you
conjured up in your mind’s eye the picture of something short and dumpy with
ink spots on the chin, as worn by so many of the female intelligentsia.

Such is
far from being the truth. She is tall and willowy and handsome, with a terrific
profile and luxuriant platinum-blond hair, and might, so far as looks are
concerned, be the star unit of the harem of one of the better-class Sultans. I
have known strong men to be bowled over by her at first sight, and it is seldom
that she takes her walks abroad without being whistled at by visiting Americans.

She
came breezing in, dressed up to the nines, and Stilton received her with a cold
eye on his wrist-watch.

‘So
there you are at last,’ he said churlishly. ‘About time, dash it. I suppose you
had forgotten that Uncle Joe has a nervous breakdown if he’s kept waiting for
his soup.’

I was
expecting some haughty response to this crack, for I knew her to be a girl of
spirit, but she ignored the rebuke, and I saw that her eyes, which are bright
and hazel in colour, were resting on me with a strange light in them. I don’t
know if you have ever seen a female of what they call teen-age gazing raptly at
Humphrey Bogart in a cinema, but her deportment was much along those lines.
More than a touch of the Soul’s Awakening, if I make my meaning clear.

‘Bertie!’
she yipped, shaking from stem to stern. ‘The moustache! It’s
lovely!
Why
have you kept this from us all these years? It’s wonderful. It gives you such a
dashing look. It alters your whole appearance.‘

Well,
after the bad Press the old fungus had been getting of late, you might have
thought that a rave notice like this would have been right up my street. I
mean, while one lives for one’s Art, so to speak, and cares little for the
public’s praise or blame and all that sort of thing, one can always do with
something to paste into one’s scrapbook, can one not? But it left me cold,
particularly in the vicinity of the feet. I found my eye swivelling round to
Stilton, to see how he was taking it, and was concerned to note that he was
taking it extremely big.

Pique.
That’s the word I was trying to think of. He was looking definitely piqued,
like a diner in a restaurant who has bitten into a bad oyster, and I wasn’t
sure I altogether blamed him, for his loved one had not only patted my cheek
with an affectionate hand but was drinking me in with such wide-eyed admiration
that any fiancé, witnessing the spectacle, might well have been excused for
growing a bit hot under the collar. And Stilton, of course, as I have already
indicated, is a chap who could give Othello a couple of bisques and be dormy
one at the eighteenth.

It
seemed to me that unless prompt steps were taken through the proper channels,
raw passions might be unchained, so I hastened to change the subject.

‘Tell
me all about your uncle, Stilton,’ I said. ‘Fond of soup, is he? Quite a boy
for the bouillon, yes?’

He
merely gave a grunt like a pig dissatisfied with its ration for the day, so I
changed the subject again.

‘How is
Spindrift
going?’ I asked Florence. ‘Still selling pretty copiously?’

I had
said the right thing. She beamed.

‘Yes,
it’s doing splendidly. It has just gone into another edition.’

‘That’s
good.’

‘You
knew it had been made into a play?’

‘Eh?
Oh, yes. Yes, I heard about that.’

‘Do you
know Percy Gorringe?’

I winced
a trifle. Proposing, as I did, to expunge the joy from Percy’s life by giving
him the uncompromising miss-in-baulk before tomorrow’s sun had set, I would
have preferred to keep him out of the conversation. I said the name seemed
somehow familiar, as if I had heard it somewhere in some connection.

‘He did
the dramatization. He has made a splendid job of it.’

Here
Stilton, who appeared to be allergic to Gorringes, snorted in his uncouth way.
There are two things I particularly dislike about G. D’Arcy Cheesewright — one,
his habit of saying ‘Ho!’, the other his tendency, when moved, to make a sound
like a buffalo pulling its foot out of a swamp.

‘We
have a manager who is going to put it on and he’s got the cast and all that,
but there has been an unfortunate hitch.’

‘You
don’t say?’

‘Yes.
One of the backers has failed us, and we need another thousand pounds. Still,
it’s going to be all right. Percy assures me he can raise the money.’

Again I
winced, and once more Stilton snorted. It is always difficult to weigh snorts
in the balance, but I think this second one had it over the first in
offensiveness by a small margin.

‘That
louse?’ he said. ‘He couldn’t raise tuppence.’

These,
of course, were fighting words. Florence’s eyes flashed.

‘I
won’t have you calling Percy a louse. He is very attractive and very clever.’

‘Who
says so?’

‘I say
so.’

‘Ho!’
said Stilton. ‘Attractive, eh? Who does he attract?’

‘Never
mind whom he attracts.’

‘Name
three people he ever attracted. And clever? He may have just about enough
intelligence to open his mouth when he wants to eat, but no more. He’s a
half-witted gargoyle.’

‘He is
not a gargoyle.’

‘Of
course he’s a gargoyle. Are you going to look me in the face and deny that he
wears short side-whiskers?’

‘Why
shouldn’t he wear short side-whiskers?’

‘I
suppose he has to, being a louse.’

‘Let me
tell you’

‘Oh,
come on,’ said Stilton brusquely, and hustled her out. As they wended their
way, he was reminding her once more of his Uncle Joseph’s reluctance to be kept
waiting for his soup.

It was
a pensive Bertram Wooster, with more than a few furrows in his forehead, who
returned to his chair and put match to cigarette. And I’ll tell you why I was
pensive and furrowed. The recent slab of dialogue between the young couple had
left me extremely uneasy.

Love is
a delicate plant that needs constant tending and nurturing, and this cannot be
done by snorting at the adored object like a gas explosion and calling her
friends lice. I had the disquieting impression that it wouldn’t take too much
to make the Stilton-Florence axis go p’fft again, and who could say that in
this event, the latter, back in circulation, would not decide to hitch on to me
once more? I remembered what had happened that other time and, as the fellow
said, the burned child fears the spilled milk.

You
see, the trouble with Florence was that though, as I have stated, indubitably
comely and well equipped to take office as a pin-up girl, she was, as I have
also stressed, intellectual to the core, and the ordinary sort of bloke like
myself does well to give this type of female as wide a miss as he can manage.

You
know how it is with these earnest, brainy beasels of what is called strong
character. They can’t let the male soul alone. They want to get behind it and
start shoving. Scarcely have they shaken the rice from their hair in the car
driving off for the honeymoon than they pull up their socks and begin moulding
the partner of joys and sorrows, and if there is one thing that gives me the
pip, it is being moulded. Despite adverse criticism from many quarters — the name
of my Aunt Agatha is one that springs to the lips — I like B. Wooster the way
he is. Lay off him, I say. Don’t try to change him, or you may lose the
flavour.

Even
when we were merely affianced, I recalled, this woman had dashed the mystery
thriller from my hand, instructing me to read instead a perfectly frightful
thing by a bird called Tolstoy. At the thought of what horrors might ensue
after the clergyman had done his stuff and she had a legal right to bring my
grey hairs in sorrow to the grave, the imagination boggled. It was a subdued
and apprehensive Bertram Wooster who some moments later reached for the hat
and light overcoat and went off to the Savoy .to shove food into the Trotters.

The binge, as I had
anticipated, did little or nothing to raise the spirits. Aunt Dahlia had not
erred in stating that my guests would prove to be creeps of no common order.
L.G. Trotter was a little man with a face like a weasel, who scarcely uttered
during the meal because, whenever he tried to, the moon of his delight shut him
up, and Mrs. Trotter a burly heavyweight with a beaked nose who talked all the
time, principally about some woman she disliked named Blenkinsop. And nothing
to help me through the grim proceedings except the faint, far—off echo of those
specials of Jeeves’s. It was a profound relief when they finally called it a
day and I was at liberty to totter off to the Drones for the restorative I so
sorely needed.