Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (5 page)

‘You
couldn’t tear the Wooster material out of that club book, could you, Jeeves?’

‘I fear
not, sir.’

‘It
contains matter that can fairly be described as dynamite.’

‘Very true,
sir.’

‘Suppose
the contents were bruited about and reached the ears of my Aunt Agatha?’

‘You
need have no concern on that point, sir. Each member fully understands that
perfect discretion is a
sine qua non.’

‘All
the same I’d feel happier if that page —‘

‘Those
eleven pages, sir.’

‘— if
those eleven pages were consigned to the flames.’ A sudden thought struck me.
‘Is there anything about Stilton Cheesewright in the book?’

‘A
certain amount, sir.’

‘Damaging?’

‘Not in
the real sense of the word, sir. His personal attendant merely reports that he
has a habit, when moved, of saying “Ho!” and does Swedish exercises in the nude
each morning before breakfast.’

I
sighed. I hadn’t really hoped, and yet it had been a disappointment. I have
always held — rightly, I think — that nothing eases the tension of a difficult
situation like a well—spotted bit of blackmail, and it would have been
agreeable to have been in a position to go to Stilton and say ‘Cheesewright, I
know your secret!’ and watch him wilt. But you can’t fulfil yourself to any
real extent in that direction if all the party of the second part does is say
‘Ho!’. and tie himself into knots before sailing into the eggs and b. It was
plain that with Stilton there could be no such moral triumph as I had achieved
in the case of Roderick Spode.

‘Ah,
well,’ I said resignedly, ‘if that’s that, that’s that, what?’

‘So it
would appear, sir.

‘Nothing
to do but keep the chin up and the upper lip as stiff as can be managed. I
think I’ll go to bed with an improving book. Have you read
The Mystery of
the Pink Crayfish
by Rex West?’

‘No,
sir, I have not enjoyed that experience. Oh, pardon me, sir, I was forgetting.
Lady Florence Craye spoke to me on the telephone shortly before you came in.
Her ladyship would be glad if you would ring her up. I will get the number,
sir.’

I was
puzzled. I could make nothing of this. No reason, of course, why she shouldn’t
want me to give her a buzz, but on the other hand no reason that I could see
why she should.

‘She
didn’t say what she wanted?’

‘No,
sir.’

‘Odd,
Jeeves.’

‘Yes,
sir… One moment, m’lady. Here is Mr. Wooster. ‘I took the instrument from him
and hullo-ed.

‘Bertie?’

‘On the
spot.’

‘I hope
you weren’t in bed?’

‘No,
no.’

‘I
thought you wouldn’t be. Bertie, will you do something for me? I want you to
take me to a night club tonight.’

‘Eh?’

‘A
night club. Rather a low one. I mean garish and all that sort of thing. It’s
for the book I’m writing. Atmosphere.’

‘Oh,
ah,’ I said, enlightened. I knew all about this atmosphere thing. Bingo Little’s
wife, the well-known novelist Rosie M. Banks, is as hot as a pistol on it,
Bingo has often told me. She frequently sends him off to take notes of this and
that so that she shall have plenty of ammunition for her next chapter. If
you’re a novelist, apparently, you have to get your atmosphere correct, or your
public starts writing you stinkers beginning ‘Dear Madam, are you aware…?’
‘You’re doing something about a night club?’

‘Yes,
I’m just coming to the part where my hero goes to one, and I’ve never been to
any except the respectable ones where everybody goes, which aren’t the sort of
thing I want. What I need is something more —‘

‘Garish?’

‘Yes,
garish.’

‘You
want to go tonight?’

‘It
must be tonight, because I’m off tomorrow afternoon to Brinkley.’

‘Oh,
you’re going to stay with Aunt Dahlia?’

‘Yes.
Well, can you manage it?’

‘Oh,
rather. Delighted.’

‘Good.
D’Arcy Cheesewright,’ said Florence, and I noted the steely what-d’you-call-it
in her voice, ‘was to have taken me, but he finds himself unable to. So I’ve
had to fall back on you.’

This
might, I thought, have been more tactfully put, but I let it go.

‘Right
ho,’ I said. ‘I’ll call for you at about half-past eleven.’

You are
surprised? You are saying to yourself ‘Come, come, Wooster, what’s all this?’
— wondering why I was letting myself in for a beano from which I might well
have shrunk? The matter is susceptible of a ready explanation.

My
quick mind, you see, had spotted instantly that this was where I might quite
conceivably do myself a bit of good. Having mellowed this girl with food and
drink, who knew but that I might succeed in effecting a reconciliation between
her and the piece of cheese with whom until tonight she had been headed for the
altar rails, thus averting the peril which must always loom on the Wooster
horizon while she remained unattached and at a loose end? It needed, I was
convinced, only a few kindly words from a sympathetic man of the world, and
these I was prepared to supply in full measure.

‘Jeeves,’
I said, ‘I shall be going out again. This will mean having to postpone
finishing
The Mystery of the Pink Crayfish
to a later date, but that
can’t be helped. As a matter of fact, I rather fancy I have already wrested its
secret from it. Unless I am very much mistaken, the man who bumped off Sir
Eustace Willoughby, Bart, was the butler.’

‘Indeed,
sir?’

‘That
is what I think, having sifted the clues. All that stuff throwing suspicion on
the vicar doesn’t fool me for an instant. Will you ring up The Mottled Oyster
and book a table in my name.’

‘Not
too near the band, sir?’

‘How
right you are, Jeeves. Not too near the band.’

5

I don’t know why it is,
but I’m not much of a lad for night clubs these days. Age creeping on me, I
suppose. But I still retain my membership in about half a dozen, including this
Mottled Oyster at which I had directed Jeeves to book me a table.

The old
spot has passed a somewhat restless existence since I first joined, and from
time to time I get a civil note from its proprietors saying that it has changed
its name and address once more. When it was raided as The Feverish Cheese, it
became The Frozen Limit, and when it was raided as The Frozen Limit, it bore
for awhile mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device The Startled
Shrimp. From that to The Mottled Oyster was, of course, but a step. In my hot
youth I had passed not a few quite pleasant evenings beneath its roof in its
various incarnations, and I thought that, if it preserved anything approaching
the old form, it ought to be garish enough to suit Florence. As I remembered,
it rather prided itself on its garishness. That was why the rozzers were always
raiding it.

I
picked her up at her flat at eleven—thirty, and found her in sombre mood, the
lips compressed, the eyes inclined to gaze into space with a sort of hard glow
in them. No doubt something along these lines is always the aftermath of a
brisk dust—up with the heart-throb. During the taxi drive she remained about as
silent as the tomb, and from the way her foot kept tapping on the floor of the
vehicle I knew that she was thinking of Stilton, whether or not in agony of
spirit I was, of course, unable to say, but I thought it probable. Following
her into the joint, I was on the whole optimistic. It seemed to me that with
any luck I ought to be successful in the task that lay before me — viz.
softening her with well-chosen words and jerking her better self back to the
surface.

When we
took our seats and I looked about me, I must confess that, having this object
in mind, I could have done with dimmer lights and a more romantic
tout
ensemble,
if
tout ensemble
is the expression I want. I could also
have dispensed with the rather strong smell of kippered herrings which hung
over the establishment like a fog. But against these drawbacks could be set the
fact that up on the platform, where the band was, a man with adenoids was
singing through a megaphone and, like all men who sing through megaphones
nowadays, ladling out stuff well calculated to melt the hardest heart.

It’s an
odd thing. I know one or two song writers and have found them among the most
cheery of my acquaintances, ready of smile and full of merry quips and so
forth. But directly they put pen to paper they never fail to take the dark
view. All that ‘We’re-drifting-apart-you’re-breaking-my-heart’ stuff, I mean to
say. The thing this bird was putting across per megaphone at the moment was
about a chap crying into his pillow because the girl he loved was getting
married next day, but — and this was the point or nub — not to him. He didn’t
like it. He viewed the situation with concern. And the megaphonist was
extracting every ounce of juice from the set-up.

Some
fellows, no doubt, would have taken advantage of this outstanding goo to
plunge without delay into what Jeeves calls
medias res,
but I, being
shrewd, knew that you have to give these things time to work. So, having
ordered kippers and a bottle of what would probably turn out to be rat poison,
I opened the conversation on a more restrained note, asking her how the new
novel was coming along. Authors, especially when female, like to keep you
posted about this.

She
said it was coming very well but not quickly, because she was a slow, careful
worker who mused a good bit in between paragraphs and spared no pains to find
the exact word with which to express what she wished to say. Like Flaubert, she
said, and I said I thought she was on the right lines.

‘Those,’
I said, ‘were more or less my methods when I wrote that thing of mine for the
Boudoir.’

I was
alluding to the weekly paper for the delicately nurtured,
Milady’s Boudoir,
of
which Aunt Dahlia is the courteous and popular proprietor or proprietress. She
has been running it now for about three years, a good deal to the annoyance of
Uncle Tom, her husband, who has to foot the bills. At her request I had once
contributed an article — or ‘piece’, as we journalists call it — on What The
Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing.

‘So
you’re off to Brinkley tomorrow,’ I went on. ‘You’ll like that.

Fresh
air, gravel soil, company’s own water, Anatole’s cooking and so forth.’

‘Yes.
And of course it will be wonderful meeting Daphne Dolores Morehead.’

The
name was new to me.

‘Daphne
Dolores Morehead?’

‘The
novelist. She is going to be there. I admire her work so much. I see, by the
way, she is doing a serial for the
Boudoir.’

‘Oh,
yes?’ I said, intrigued. One always likes to hear about the activities of one’s
fellow—writers.

‘It
must have cost your aunt a fortune. Daphne Dolores Morehead is frightfully
expensive. I can’t remember what it is she gets a thousand words, but it’s
something enormous.’

‘The
old sheet must be doing well.’

‘I
suppose so.’

She
spoke listlessly, seeming to have lost interest in
Milady’s Boudoir.
Her
thoughts, no doubt, had returned to Stilton. She cast a dull eye hither and
thither about the room. It had begun to fill up now, and the dance floor was
congested with frightful bounders of both sexes.

‘What
horrible people!’ she said. ‘I must say I am surprised that you should be
familiar with such places, Bertie. Are they all like this?’

I
weighed the question.

‘Well,
some are better and some worse. I would call this one about average. Garish, of
course, but then you said you wanted something garish.’

‘Oh,
I’m not complaining. I shall make some useful notes. It is just the sort of
place to which I pictured Rollo going that night.’

‘Rollo?’

‘The
hero of my novel. Rollo Beaminster.’

‘Oh, I
see. Yes, of course. Out on the tiles, was he?’

‘He was
in wild mood. Reckless. Desperate. He had lost the girl he loved.’

‘What
ho!’ I said. ‘Tell me more.’

I spoke
with animation and vim, for whatever you may say of Bertram Wooster, you cannot
say that he does not know a cue when he hears one. Throw him the line, and he
will do the rest. I hitched up the larynx. The kippers and the bot had arrived
by now, and I took a mouthful of the former and a sip of the latter. It tasted
like hair-oil.

‘You
interest me strangely,’ I said. ‘Lost the girl he loved, had he?’

‘She
had told him she never wished to see or speak to him again.’

‘Well,
well. Always a nasty knock for a chap, that.’

‘So he
comes to this low night club. He is trying to forget.’