Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (6 page)

‘But
I’ll bet he doesn’t.’

‘No, it
is useless. He looks about him at the glitter and garishness and feels how
hollow it all is. I think I can use that waiter over there in the night club
scene, the one with the watery eyes and the pimple on his nose,’ she said,
jotting .down a note on the back of the bill of fare.

I
fortified myself with a swig of whatever the stuff was in the bottle and
prepared to give her the works.

‘Always
a mistake,’ I said, starting to do the sympathetic man of the world, ‘fellows
losing girls and — conversely, if that’s the word I want — girls losing
fellows. I don’t know how you feel about it, but the way it seems to me is that
it’s a silly idea giving the dream man the raspberry just because of some
trifling tiff. Kiss and make up, I always say. I saw Stilton at the Drones
tonight,’ I said, getting down to it.

She
stiffened and took a reserved mouthful of kipper. Her voice, when the
consignment had passed down the hatch and she was able to speak, was cold and
metallic.

‘Oh,
yes?’

‘He was
in wild mood.’

‘Oh,
yes?’

‘Reckless.
Desperate. He looked about him at the Drones smoking-room, and I could see he
was feeling what a hollow smoking-room it was.’

‘Oh,
yes?’

Well, I
suppose if someone had come along at this moment and said to me ‘Hullo there,
Wooster, how’s it going? Are you making headway?’ I should have had to reply
in the negative. ‘Not perceptibly, Wilkinson’ — or Banks or Smith or
Knatchbull-Huguessen or whatever the name might have been, I would have said. I
had the uncomfortable feeling of having been laid a stymie. However, I
persevered.

‘Yes,
he was in quite a state of mind. He gave me the impression that it wouldn’t
take much to make him go off to the Rocky Mountains and shoot grizzly bears.
Not a pleasant thought.’

‘You
mean if one is fond of grizzly bears?’

‘I was
thinking more if one was fond of Stiltons.’

‘I’m
not.’

‘Oh?
Well, suppose he joined the Foreign Legion?’

‘It
would have my sympathy.’

‘You
wouldn’t like to think of him tramping through the hot sand without a pub in sight,
with Riffs or whatever they’re called potting at him from all directions.’

‘Yes, I
would. If I saw a Riff trying to shoot D’Arcy Cheesewright, I would hold his
hat for him and egg him on.’

Once
more I had that sense of not making progress. Her face, I observed, was cold
and hard, like my kipper, which of course during these exchanges I had been
neglecting, and I began to understand how these birds in Holy Writ must have
felt after their session with the deaf adder. I can’t recall all the details,
though at my private school I once won a prize for Scripture Knowledge, but I
remember that they had the dickens of an uphill job trying to charm it, and
after they had sweated themselves to a frazzle no business resulted. It is
often this way, I believe, with deaf adders.

‘Do you
know Horace Pendlebury-Davenport?’ I said, after a longish pause during which
we worked away at our respective kippers.

‘The
man who married Valerie Twistleton?’

‘That’s
the chap. Formerly the Drones Club Darts champion.’

‘I’ve
met him. But why bring him up?’

‘Because
he points the moral and adorns the tale. During the period of their betrothal
he and Valerie had a row similar in calibre to that which has occurred between
you and Stilton and pretty nearly parted for ever.’

She
gave me the frosty eye.

‘Must
we talk about Mr. Cheesewright?’

‘I see
him as tonight’s big topic.’

‘I
don’t, and I think I’ll go home.’

‘Oh,
not yet. I want to tell you about Horace and Valerie. They had this row of
which I speak and might, as I say, have parted for ever, had they not been
reconciled by a woman who, so Horace says, looked as if she bred cocker
spaniels. She told them a touching story, which melted their hearts. She said
she had once loved a bloke and quarrelled with him about some trifle, and he
turned on his heel and went off to the Federated Malay States and married the
widow of a rubber planter. And each year from then on there arrived at her
address a simple posy of white violets, together with a slip of paper bearing
the words “It might have been”. You wouldn’t like that to happen with you and
Stilton, would you?’

‘I’d
love it.’

‘It
doesn’t give you a pang to think that at this very moment he may be going the
rounds of the shipping offices, inquiring about sailings to the Malay States?’

‘They’d
be shut at this time of night.’

‘Well,
first thing tomorrow morning, then.’

She
laid down her knife and fork and gave me an odd look.

‘Bertie,
you’re extraordinary,’ she said.

‘Eh? How
do you mean, extraordinary?’

‘All
this nonsense you have been talking, trying to reconcile me and D’Arcy. Not
that I don’t admire you for it. I think it’s rather wonderful of you. But then
everybody says that, though you have a brain like a peahen, you’re the soul of
kindness and generosity.’

Well, I
was handicapped here by the fact that, never having met a peahen, I was unable
to estimate the quality of these fowls’ intelligence, but she had spoken as if
they were a bit short of the grey matter, and I was about to ask her who the
hell she meant by ‘everybody’, when she resumed.

‘You
want to marry me yourself, don’t you?’

I had
to take another mouthful of the substance in the bottle before I could speak. One
of those difficult questions to answer.

‘Oh, rather,’
I said, for I was anxious to make the evening a success. ‘Of course. Who
wouldn’t?’

‘And
yet you —‘

She did
not proceed further than the word ‘you’, for at this juncture, with the
abruptness with which these things always happen, the joint was pinched. The
band stopped in the middle of a bar. A sudden hush fell upon the room.
Square-jawed men shot up through the flooring, and one, who seemed to be
skippering the team, stood out in the middle and in a voice like a foghorn told
everybody to keep their seats. I remember thinking how nicely timed the whole
thing was — breaking loose, I mean, at a moment when the conversation had taken
a distasteful turn and threatened to become fraught with embarrassment. I have
heard hard things said about the London police force — notably by Catsmeat
Potter-Pirbright and others on the morning after the annual Oxford and
Cambridge boat race — but a fair-minded man had to admit that there were
occasions when they showed tact of no slight order.

I
wasn’t alarmed, of course. I had been through this sort of thing many a time
and oft, as the expression is, and I knew what happened. So, noting that my
guest was giving a rather close imitation of a cat on hot bricks, I hastened to
dispel her alarm.

‘No
need to get the breeze up,’ I said. ‘Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
or knock the breast,’ I added, using one of Jeeves’s gags which I chanced to
remember. ‘Everything is quite in order.’

‘But
won’t they arrest us?’

I
laughed lightly. These novices!

‘Absurd.
No danger of that whatsoever.’

‘How do
you know?’

‘All
this is old stuff to me. Here in a nutshell is the procedure. They round us up,
and we push off in an orderly manner to the police station in plain vans. There
we assemble in the waiting-room and give our names and addresses, exercising a
certain latitude as regards the details. I, for example, generally call myself
Ephraim Gadsby of The Nasturtiums, Jubilee Road, Streatham Common. I don’t know
why. Just a whim. You, if you will be guided by me, will be Matilda Bott of 365
Churchill Avenue, East Dulwich. These formalities concluded, we shall be free
to depart, leaving the proprietor to face the awful majesty of Justice.’

She
refused to be consoled. The resemblance to a cat on hot bricks became more
marked. Though instructed by the foghorn chap to keep her seat, she shot up as
if a spike had come through it.

‘I’m
sure that’s not what happens.’

‘It is,
unless they’ve changed the rules.’

‘You
have to appear in court.’

‘No,
no.’

‘Well,
I’m not going to risk it. Good night.’

And
getting smoothly off the mark she made a dash for the service door, which was
not far from where we sat. And an adjacent constable, baying like a bloodhound,
started off in hot pursuit.

Whether
I acted judiciously at this point is a question which I have never been able to
decide. Sometimes I think yes, reflecting that the Chevalier Bayard in my place
would have done the same, sometimes no. Briefly what occurred was that as the
gendarme came galloping by, I shoved out a foot, causing him to take the toss
of a lifetime. Florence withdrew, and the guardian of the peace, having removed
his left boot from his right ear, with which it had become temporarily
entangled, rose and informed me that I was in custody.

As at
the moment he was grasping the scruff of my neck with one hand and the seat of
my trousers with the other, I saw no reason to doubt the honest fellow.

6

I spent the night in what
is called durance vile, and bright and early next day was haled before the beak
at Vinton Street police court, charged with assaulting an officer of the Law
and impeding him in the execution of his duties, which I suppose was a fairly
neat way of putting it. I was extremely hungry and needed a shave.

It was
the first time I had met the Vinton Street chap, always hitherto having
patronized his trade rival at Bosher Street, but Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, who
was introduced to him on the morning of January the first one year, had told me
he was a man to avoid, and the truth of this was now borne in upon me in no uncertain
manner. It seemed to me, as I stood listening to the cop running through the
story sequence, that Barmy, in describing this Solon as a twenty-minute egg
with many of the less lovable qualities of some high-up official of the Spanish
Inquisition, had understated rather than exaggerated the facts.

I
didn’t like the look of the old blister at all. His manner was austere, and as
the tale proceeded his face, such as it was, grew hard and dark with menace. He
kept shooting quick glances at me through his pince-nez, and the dullest eye
could see that the constable was getting all the sympathy of the audience and
that the citizen cast for the role of Heavy in this treatment was the prisoner
Gadsby. More and more the feeling stole over me that the prisoner Gadsby was
about to get it in the gizzard and would be lucky if he didn’t fetch up on
Devil’s Island.

However,
when the
J’accuse
stuff was over and I was asked if I had anything to
say, I did my best. I admitted that on the occasion about which we had been chatting
I had extended a foot causing the officer to go base over apex, but protested
that it had been a pure accident without any
arrière-pensée
on my part.
I said I had been feeling cramped after a longish sojourn at the table and had
merely desired to unlimber the leg muscles.

‘You
know how sometimes you want a stretch,’ I said.

‘I am
strongly inclined,’ responded the beak, ‘to give you one. A good long stretch.’

Rightly
recognizing this as comedy, I uttered a cordial guffaw to show that my heart
was in the right place, and an officious blighter in the well of the court
shouted ‘Silence!’ I tried to explain that I was convulsed by His Worship’s
ready wit, but he shushed me again, and His Worship came to the surface once
more.

‘However,’
he went on, adjusting his pince-nez, ‘in consideration of your youth I will
exercise clemency.’

‘Oh,
fine!’ I said.

‘Fine,’
replied the other half of the cross—talk act, who seemed to know all the
answers, ‘is right. Ten pounds. Next case.’

I paid
my debt to Society, and pushed off.

Jeeves
was earning the weekly envelope by busying himself at some domestic task when I
reached the old home. He cocked an inquiring eye at me, and I felt that an
explanation was due to him. It would have surprised him, of course, to discover
that my room was empty and my bed had not been slept in.

‘A
little trouble last night with the minions of the Law, Jeeves,’ I said. ‘Quite
a bit of that Eugene-Aram-walked-between-with-gyves-upon-his-wrists stuff.’

‘Indeed,
sir? Most vexing.’

‘Yes, I
didn’t like it very much, but the magistrate — with whom I have just been
threshing the thing out — had a wonderful time. I brought a ray of sunshine
into his drab life all right. Did you know that these magistrates were expert
comedians?’

‘No,
sir. The fact had not been drawn to my attention.