Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (8 page)

‘Yes,
sir. I fancied that Mr. Cheesewright might possibly be glad of refreshment.’

‘He’s
just in the vein for it. I won’t join you, Stilton, because, as you know, with
this Darts tournament coming on, I am in more or less strict training these
days, but I must insist on your trying one of these superb mixtures of
Jeeves’s. You have been anxious… worried … disturbed… and it will pull
you together. Oh, by the way, Jeeves.’

‘Sir?’

‘I
wonder if you remember, when I came home last night after chatting with Mr.
Cheesewright at the Drones, my saying to you that I was going straight to bed
with an improving book?’

‘Certainly,
sir.’

‘
The
Mystery of the Pink Crayfish,
was it not?’

‘Precisely,
sir.’

‘I
think I said something to the effect that I could hardly wait till I could get
at it?’

‘As I
recollect, those were your exact words, sir. You were, you said, counting the
minutes until you could curl up with the volume in question.

‘Thank
you, Jeeves.’

‘Not at
all, sir.’

He
oozed off, and I turned to Stilton, throwing the arms out in a sort of wide
gesture. I don’t suppose I have ever come closer in my life to saying
‘Voilà’!

‘You
heard?’ I said. ‘If that doesn’t leave me without a stain on my character, it
is difficult to see what it does leave me without. But let me help you to your
special. You will find it rare and refreshing.’

It’s a
curious thing about those specials of Jeeves’s, and one on which many revellers
have commented, that while, as I mentioned earlier, they wake the sleeping
tiger in you, they also work the other way round. I mean, if the tiger in you
isn’t sleeping but on the contrary up and doing with a heart for any fate, they
lull it. You come in like a lion, you take your snootful, and you go out like a
lamb. Impossible to explain it, of course. One can merely state the facts.

It was
so now with Stilton. In his pre-special phase he had been all steamed up and
fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils, as the fellow said, and he became a
better, kindlier man beneath my very gaze. Half—way through the initial snifter
he was admitting in the friendliest way that he had wronged me. I might be the
most consummate ass that ever eluded the vigilance of the talent scouts of
Colney Hatch, he said, but it was obvious that I had not taken Florence to The
Mottled Oyster. And dashed lucky for me I hadn’t, he added, for had such been
the case, he would have broken my spine in three places. In short, all very
chummy and cordial.

‘Harking
back to the earlier portion of our conversation, Stilton,’ I said, changing the
subject after we had agreed that his Uncle Joseph was a cockeyed fathead who
would do well to consult some good oculist, ‘I noticed that when you spoke of
Florence, you used the expression “My fiancée”. Am I to infer from this that
the dove of peace has pulled a quick one since I saw you last? That broken
engagement, has it been soldered?’

He
nodded.

‘Yes,’
he said. ‘I made certain concessions and yielded certain points.’ Here his hand
strayed to his upper lip and a look of pain passed over his face. ‘A
reconciliation took place this morning.’

‘Splendid!’

‘You’re
pleased?’

‘Of
course.’

‘Ho!’

‘Eh?’

He eyed
me fixedly.

‘Wooster,
come off it. You know you’re in love with her yourself.’

‘Absurd.’

‘Absurd,
my foot! You needn’t think you can fool me. You worship that girl, and I am
still inclined to believe that the whole of this moustache sequence was a vile
plot on your part to steal her from me. Well, all I have to say is that if I
ever catch you oiling round her and trying to alienate her affections, I shall
break your spine in four places.’

‘Three,
I thought you said.’

‘No,
four. However, she will be out of your reach for some little time, I am glad to
say. She goes today to visit your aunt, Mrs. Travers, in Worcestershire.’

Amazing
how with a careless word you can land yourself in the soup. I was within the
merest toucher of saying Yes, so she had told me, which would, of course, have
been fatal. In the nick of time I contrived to substitute an ‘Oh, really?’

‘She’s
going to Brinkley, is she? You also?’

‘I
shall be following in a few days.’

‘You
aren’t going with her?’

‘Talk
sense. You don’t suppose I intend to appear in public during the early stages
of growing that damned moustache she insists on. I shall remain confined to my
room till the foul thing has started to sprout a bit. Good-bye, Wooster. You
will remember what I was saying about your spine?’

I
assured him that I would bear it in mind, and he finished his special and
withdrew.

8

The days that followed saw
me at the peak of my form, fizzy to an almost unbelievable extent and
enchanting one and all with my bright smile and merry sallies. During this
halcyon period, if halcyon is the word I want, it would not be too much to say
that I revived like a watered flower.

It was
as if a great weight had been rolled off the soul. Only those who have had to
endure the ordeal of having G. D’Arcy Cheesewright constantly materialize from
thin air and steal up behind them, breathing down the back of their necks as
they took their ease in their smoking-room, can fully understand the relief of
being able to sink into a chair and order a restorative, knowing that the place
would be wholly free from this pre-eminent scourge. My feelings, I suppose,
were roughly what those of Mary would have been, had she looked over her
shoulder one morning and found the lamb no longer among those present.

And
then —
bing
— just as I was saying to myself that this was the life,
along came all those telegrams.

The
first to arrive reached me at my residence just as I was lighting the
after—breakfast cigarette, and I eyed it with something of the nervous
discomfort of one confronted with a ticking bomb. Telegrams have so often been
the heralds or harbingers or whatever they’re called of sharp crises in my
affairs that I have come to look on them askance, wondering if something is
going to pop out of the envelope and bite me in the leg. It was with a
telegram, it may be recalled, that Fate teed off in the sinister episode of Sir
Watkyn Bassett, Roderick Spode and the silver cow-creamer which I was
instructed by Aunt Dahlia to pinch from the first-named’s collection at
Totleigh Towers.

Little
wonder, then, that as I brooded over this one — eyeing it, as I say, askance —
I was asking myself if Hell’s foundations were about to quiver again.

Still,
there the thing was, and it seemed to me, weighing the pros and cons, that only
one course lay before me — viz, to open it.

I did
so. Handed in at Brinkley-cum-Snodsfield-in-the-Marsh, it was signed ‘Travers’,
this revealing it as the handiwork either of Aunt Dahlia or Thomas P. Travers,
her husband, a pleasant old bird whom she had married at her second pop some
years earlier. From the fact that it started with the words ‘Bertie, you worm’
I deduced that it was the former who had taken post-office pen in hand. Uncle
Tom is more guarded in his speech than the female of the species. He generally
calls me ‘Me boy’.

This
was the substance of the communication:

Bertie, you worm, your early presence

desired. Drop everything and come

down here pronto, prepared for lengthy

visit. Urgently need you to buck up

a blighter with whiskers. Love. Travers.

I
brooded over this for the rest of the morning, and on my way to lunch at the
Drones shot off my answer, a brief request for more light:

Did you say whiskers or whisky? Love. Wooster.

I found
another from her on returning:

Whiskers, ass. The son of a what-not

has short but distinct side-whiskers.

Love. Travers.

It’s an
odd thing about memory, it so often just fails to spear the desired object. At
the back of my mind there was dodging about a hazy impression that somewhere at
some time I heard someone mention short side-whiskers in some connection, but I
couldn’t pin it down. It eluded me. So, pursuing the sound old policy of going
to the fountain-head for information, I stepped out and dispatched the
following:

What short side-whiskered son of a what-not

would this be, and why does he need bucking up?

Wire full details, as at present fogged,

bewildered and mystified. Love. Wooster.

She
replied with the generous warmth which causes so many of her circle to hold on
to their hats when she lets herself go:

Listen, you foul blot. What’s the idea of making

me spend a fortune on telegrams like this?

Do you think I am made of money? Never you

mind what short side-whiskered son of a

what-not it is or why he needs bucking up.

You just come as I tell you and look slippy

about it. Oh, and by the way, go to Aspinall’s in

Bond Street and get pearl necklace of mine they

have there and bring it down with you. Have

you got that? Aspinall’s. Bond Street. Pearl

necklace. Shall expect you tomorrow. Love. Travers.

A
little shaken but still keeping the flag flying, I responded with the ensuing:

Fully grasp all that Aspinall’s-Bond-Street-

pearl-necklace stuff, but what you are overlooking

is that coming to Brinkley at present juncture not

so jolly simple as you seem to think. There are

complications and what not. Wheels within

wheels, if you get what I mean. Whole thing calls

for deep thought. Will weigh matter carefully

and let you know decision. Love. Wooster.

You
see, though Brinkley Court is a home from home and gets five stars in Baedeker
as the headquarters of Monsieur Anatole, Aunt Dahlia’s French cook — a place,
in short, to which in ordinary circs I race, when invited, with a whoop and a
holler — it had taken me but an instant to spot that under existing conditions
there were grave objections to going there. I need scarcely say that I allude
to the fact that Florence was on the premises and Stilton expected shortly.

It was
this that was giving me pause. Who could say that the latter, finding me in
residence on his arrival, would not leap to the conclusion that I had rolled up
in pursuit of the former like young Lochinvar coming out of the west? And
should this thought flit into his mind, what, I asked myself, would the harvest
be? His parting words about my spine were still green in my memory. I knew him
to be a man rather careful in his speech, on whose promises one could generally
rely, and if he said he was going to break spines in four places, you could be
quite sure that four places was precisely what he would break them in.

I
passed a restless and uneasy evening. In no mood for revelry at the Drones, I
returned home early and was brushing up on my
Mystery of the Pink Crayfish
when
the telephone rang, and so disordered was the nervous system that I shot
ceilingwards at the sound. It was as much as I could do to totter across the
room and unhook the receiver.

The
voice that floated over the wire was that of Aunt Dahlia.

Well,
when I say floated, possibly ‘thundered’ would be more the
mot juste.
A
girlhood and early womanhood spent in chivvying the British fox in all weathers
under the auspices of the Quorn and Pytchley have left this aunt brick-red in
colour and lent amazing power to her vocal cords. I’ve never pursued foxes
myself, but apparently, when you do, you put in a good bit of your time
shouting across ploughed fields in a high wind, and this becomes a habit. If
Aunt Dahlia has a fault, it is that she is inclined to talk to you when face to
face in a small drawing-room as if she were addressing some crony a quarter of
a mile away whom she had observed riding over hounds. For the rest, she is a
large, jovial soul, built rather on the lines of Mae West, and is beloved by
all including the undersigned. Our relations had always been chummy to the last
drop.

‘Hullo,
hullo, hullo!’ she boomed. The old hunting stuff coming to the surface, you
notice. ‘Is that you, Bertie, darling?’

I said
it was none other.

‘Then
what’s the idea, you half-witted Gadarene swine, of all this playing
hard-to-get? You and your matter-weighing! I never heard such nonsense in my
life. You’ve got to come here, and immediately, if you don’t want an aunt’s
curse delivered on your doorstep by return of post. If I have to cope unaided
with that ruddy Percy any longer, I shall crack beneath the strain.’