‘What do you make of that, Jeeves?’
‘It seems a little obscure at present, sir, but no doubt it becomes clearer at a later point in the communication.’
‘Proceed, old scout,’ I said, champing my bread and butter.
‘You know how all my life I have longed to visit New York and see for myself the wonderful gay life of which I have read so much. I fear that now it will be impossible for me to fulfil my dream. I am old and worn out. I seem to have no strength left in me.’
‘Sad, Jeeves, what?’
‘Extremely, sir.’
‘Sad nothing!’ said Rocky. ‘It’s sheer laziness. I went to see her last Christmas and she was bursting with health. Her doctor told me himself that there was nothing wrong with her whatever. But she will insist that she’s a hopeless invalid, so he has to agree with her. She’s got a fixed idea that the trip to New York would kill her; so, though it’s been her ambition all her life to come here, she stays where she is.’
‘Rather like the chappie whose heart was “in the Highlands a-chasing of the deer,” Jeeves?’
‘The cases are in some respects parallel, sir.’
‘Carry on, Rocky, dear boy.’
‘So I have decided that, if I cannot enjoy all the marvels of the city myself, I can at least enjoy them through you. I suddenly thought of this yesterday after reading a beautiful poem in the Sunday paper about a young man who had longed all his life for a certain thing and won it in the end only when he was too old to enjoy it. It was very sad, and it touched me.
‘A thing,’ interpolated Rocky bitterly, ‘that I’ve not been able to do in ten years.
‘As you know, you will have my money when I am gone; but until now I have never been able to see my way to giving you an allowance. I have now decided to do so – on one condition. I have written to a firm of lawyers in New York, giving them instructions to pay you quite a substantial sum each month. My one condition is that you live in New York and enjoy yourself as I have always wished to do. I want you to be my representative, to spend this money for me as I should do myself. I want you to plunge into the gay, prismatic life of New York. I want you to be the life and soul of brilliant supper parties.
‘Above all, I want you – indeed, I insist on this – to write me letters at least once a week, giving me a full description of all you are doing and all that is going on in the city, so that I may enjoy at second-hand what my wretched health prevents my enjoying for myself. Remember that I shall expect full details, and that no detail is too trivial to interest
‘Your affectionate Aunt,
‘Isabel Rockmetteller.’
‘What about it?’ said Rocky.
‘What about it?’ I said.
‘Yes. What on earth am I going to do?’
It was only then that I really got on to the extremely rummy attitude of the chappie, in view of the fact that a quite unexpected mess of good cash had suddenly descended on him from a blue sky. To my mind it was an occasion for the beaming smile and the joyous whoop; yet here the man was, looking and talking as if Fate had swung on his solar plexus. It amazed me.
‘Aren’t you bucked?’ I said.
‘Bucked!’
‘If I were in your place I should be frightfully braced. I consider this pretty soft for you.’
He gave a kind of yelp, stared at me for a moment, and then began to talk of New York in a way that reminded me of Jimmy Mundy, the reformer bloke. Jimmy had just come to New York on a hit-the-trail campaign, and I had popped in at Madison Square Garden a couple of days before, for half an hour or so, to hear him. He had certainly told New York some pretty straight things about itself, having apparently taken a dislike to the place, but, by Jove, you know, dear old Rocky made him look like a publicity agent for the old metrop!
‘Pretty soft!’ he cried. ‘To have to come and live in New York! To have to leave my little cottage and take a stuffy, smelly, overheated hole of an apartment in this Heaven-forsaken, festering Gehenna. To have to mix night after night with a mob who think that life is a sort of St. Vitus’s dance, and imagine that they’re having a good time because they’re making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn’t come near the place if I hadn’t got to see editors occasionally. There’s a blight on it. It’s got moral delirium tremens. It’s the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this thing pretty soft for me!’
I felt rather like Lot’s friends must have done when they dropped in for a quiet chat and their genial host began to criticise the Cities of the Plain. I had no idea old Rocky could be so eloquent.
‘It would kill me to have to live in New York,’ he went on. ‘To have to share the air with six million people! To have to wear stiff collars and decent clothes all the time! To—’ He started. ‘Good Lord! I suppose I should have to dress for dinner in the evenings. What a ghastly notion!’
I was shocked, absolutely shocked.
‘My dear chap!’ I said, reproachfully.
‘Do you dress for dinner every night, Bertie?’
‘Jeeves,’ I said coldly. ‘How many suits of evening clothes have we?’
‘We have three suits full of evening dress, sir; two dinner jackets—’
‘Three.’
‘For practical purposes two only, sir. If you remember, we cannot wear the third. We have also seven white waistcoats.’
‘And shirts?’
‘Four dozen, sir.’
‘And white ties?’
‘The first two shallow shelves in the chest of drawers are completely filled with our white ties, sir.’
I turned to Rocky.
‘You see?’
The chappie writhed like an electric fan.
‘I won’t do it! I can’t do it! I’ll be hanged if I’ll do it! How on earth can I dress up like that? Do you realise that most days I don’t get out of my pyjamas till five in the afternoon, and then I just put on an old sweater?’
I saw Jeeves wince, poor chap. This sort of revelation shocked his finest feelings.
‘Then, what are you going to do about it?’ I said.
‘That’s what I want to know.’
‘You might write and explain to your aunt.’
‘I might – if I wanted her to get round to her lawyer’s in two rapid leaps and cut me out of her will.’
I saw his point.
‘What do you suggest, Jeeves?’ I said.
Jeeves cleared his throat respectfully.
‘The crux of the matter would appear to be, sir, that Mr Todd is obliged by the conditions under which the money is delivered into his possession to write Miss Rockmetteller long and detailed letters relating to his movements, and the only method by which this can be accomplished, if Mr Todd adheres to his expressed intention of remaining in the country, is for Mr Todd to induce some second party to gather the actual experiences which Miss Rockmetteller wishes reported to her, and to convey these to him in the shape of a careful report, on which it would be possible for him, with the aid of his imagination, to base the suggested correspondence.’
Having got which off the old diaphragm, Jeeves was silent. Rocky looked at me in a helpless sort of way. He hasn’t been brought up on Jeeves as I have, and he isn’t on to his curves.
‘Could he put it a little clearer, Bertie?’ he said. ‘I thought at the start it was going to make sense, but it kind of flickered. What’s the idea?’
‘My dear old man, perfectly simple. I knew we could stand on Jeeves. All you’ve got to do is to get somebody to go round the town for you and take a few notes, and then you work the notes up into letters. That’s it, isn’t it, Jeeves?’
‘Precisely, sir.’
The light of hope gleamed in Rocky’s eyes. He looked at Jeeves in a startled way, dazed by the man’s vast intellect.
‘But who would do it?’ he said. ‘It would have to be a pretty smart sort of man, a man who would notice things.’
?
??Jeeves!’ I said. ‘Let Jeeves do it.’
‘But would he?’
‘You would do it, wouldn’t you, Jeeves?’
For the first time in our long connection I observed Jeeves almost smile. The corner of his mouth curved quite a quarter of an inch, and for a moment his eye ceased to look like a meditative fish’s.
‘I should be delighted to oblige, sir. As a matter of fact, I have already visited some of New York’s places of interest on my evening out, and it would be most enjoyable to make a practice of the pursuit.’
‘Fine! I know exactly what your aunt wants to hear about, Rocky. She wants an earful of cabaret stuff. The place you ought to go to first, Jeeves, is Reigelheimer’s. It’s on Forty-second Street. Anybody will show you the way.’
Jeeves shook his head.
‘Pardon me, sir. People are no longer going to Reigelheimer’s. The place at the moment is Frolics on the Roof.’
‘You see?’ I said to Rocky. ‘Leave it to Jeeves. He knows.’
It isn’t often that you find an entire group of your fellow-humans happy in this world; but our little circle was certainly an example of the fact that it can be done. We were all full of beans. Everything went absolutely right from the start.
Jeeves was happy, partly because he loves to exercise his giant brain, and partly because he was having a corking time among the bright lights. I saw him one night at the Midnight Revels. He was sitting at a table on the edge of the dancing floor, doing himself remarkably well with a fat cigar. His face wore an expression of austere benevolence, and he was making notes in a small book.
As for the rest of us, I was feeling pretty good, because I was fond of old Rocky and glad to be able to do him a good turn. Rocky was perfectly contented, because he was still able to sit on fences in his pyjamas and watch worms. And, as for the aunt, she seemed tickled to death. She was getting Broadway at pretty long range, but it seemed to be hitting her just right. I read one of her letters to Rocky, and it was full of life.
But then Rocky’s letters, based on Jeeves’s notes, were enough to buck anybody up. It was rummy when you came to think of it. There was I, loving the life, while the mere mention of it gave Rocky a tired feeling; yet here is a letter I wrote home to a pal of mine in London:
Dear Freddie, –
Well, here I am in New York. It’s not a bad place. I’m not having a bad time. Everything’s not bad. The cabarets aren’t bad. Don’t know when I shall be back. How’s everybody? Cheerio! –
Yours,
Bertie.
P.S. – Seen old Ted lately?
Not that I cared about old Ted; but if I hadn’t dragged him in I couldn’t have got the confounded thing on to the second page.
Now here’s old Rocky on exactly the same subject:
Dearest Aunt Isabel, –
How can I ever thank you enough for giving me the opportunity to live in this astounding city! New York seems more wonderful every day.
Fifth Avenue is at its best, of course, just now. The dresses are magnificent!
Wads of stuff about the dresses. I didn’t know Jeeves was such an authority.
I was out with some of the crowd at the Midnight Revels the other night. We took in a show first, after a little dinner at a new place on Forty-third Street. We were quite a gay party. Georgie Cohan looked in about midnight and got off a good story about Willie Collier. Fred Stone could only stay a minute, but Doug Fairbanks did all sorts of stunts and made us roar. Ed Wynn was there, and Laurette Taylor showed up with a party. The show at the Revels is quite good. I am enclosing a programme.
Last night a few of us went round to Frolics on the Roof—
And so on and so forth, yards of it. I suppose it’s the artistic temperament or something. What I mean is, it’s easier for a chappie who’s used to writing poems and that sort of tosh to put a bit of a punch into a letter than it is for a fellow like me. Anyway, there’s no doubt that Rocky’s correspondence was hot stuff. I called Jeeves in and congratulated him.
‘Jeeves, you’re a wonder!’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘How you notice everything at these places beats me. I couldn’t tell you a thing about them, except that I’ve had a good time.’
‘It’s just a knack, sir.’
‘Well, Mr Todd’s letters ought to brace Miss Rockmetteller all right, what?’
‘Undoubtedly, sir,’ agreed Jeeves.
And, by Jove, they did! They certainly did, by George! What I mean to say is, I was sitting in the apartment one afternoon, about a month after the thing had started, smoking a cigarette and resting the old bean, when the door opened and the voice of Jeeves burst the silence like a bomb.
It wasn’t that he spoke loud. He has one of those soft, soothing voices that slide through the atmosphere like the note of a far-off sheep. It was what he said that made me leap like a young gazelle.
‘Miss Rockmetteller!’
And in came a large, solid female.
The situation floored me. I’m not denying it. Hamlet must have felt much as I did when his father’s ghost bobbed up in the fairway. I’d come to look on Rocky’s aunt as such a permanency at her own home that it didn’t seem possible that she could really be here in New York. I stared at her. Then I looked at Jeeves. He was standing there in an attitude of dignified detachment, the chump, when, if ever he should have been rallying round the young master, it was now.
Rocky’s aunt looked less like an invalid than anyone I’ve ever seen, except my Aunt Agatha. She had a good deal of Aunt Agatha about her, as a matter of fact. She looked as if she might be deucedly dangerous if put upon; and something seemed to tell me that she would certainly regard herself as put upon if she ever found out the game which poor old Rocky had been pulling on her.
‘Good afternoon,’ I managed to say.
‘How do you do?’ she said. ‘Mr Cohan?’
‘Er – no.’
‘Mr Fred Stone?’
‘Not absolutely. As a matter of fact, my name’s Wooster – Bertie Wooster.’
She seemed disappointed. The fine old name of Wooster appeared to mean nothing in her life.
‘Isn’t Rockmetteller home?’ she said. ‘Where is he?’
She had me with the first shot. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I couldn’t tell her that Rocky was down in the country, watching worms.
There was the faintest flutter of sound in the background. It was the respectful cough with which Jeeves announces that he is about to speak without having been spoken to.
‘If you remember, sir, Mr Todd went out in the automobile with a party earlier in the afternoon.’
‘So he did, Jeeves; so he did,’ I said, looking at my watch. ‘Did he say when he would be back?’
‘He gave me to understand, sir, that he would be somewhat late in returning.’
He vanished; and the aunt took the chair which I’d forgotten to offer her. She looked at me in rather a rummy way. It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time. My own Aunt Agatha, back in England, has looked at me in exactly the same way many a time, and it never fails to make my spine curl.
‘You seem very much at home here, young man. Are you a great friend of Rockmetteller’s?’
‘Oh, yes, rather!’
She frowned as if she had expected better things of old Rocky.
‘Well, you need to be,’ she said, ‘the way you treat his flat as your own!’
I give you my word, this quite unforeseen slam simply robbed me of the power of speech. I’d been looking on myself in the light of the dashing host, and suddenly to be treated as an intruder jarred me. It wasn’t, mark you, as if she had spoken in a way to suggest that she considered my presence in the place as an ordinary social call. She obviously looked on me as a cross between a burglar and the plumber’s man come to fix the leak in the bathroom. It hurt her – my being there.
At this juncture, with the convers
ation showing every sign of being about to die in awful agonies, an idea came to me. Tea – the good old stand-by.
‘Would you care for a cup of tea?’ I said.
‘Tea?’
She spoke as if she had never heard of the stuff.
‘Nothing like a cup after a journey,’ I said. ‘Bucks you up! Puts a bit of zip into you. What I mean is, restores you, and so on, don’t you know. I’ll go and tell Jeeves.’
I tottered down the passage to Jeeves’s lair. The man was reading the evening paper as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘we want some tea.’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘I say, Jeeves, this is a bit thick, what?’
I wanted sympathy, don’t you know – sympathy and kindness. The old nerve centres had had the deuce of a shock.
‘She’s got the idea this place belongs to Mr Todd. What on earth put that into her head?’
Jeeves filled the kettle with a restrained dignity.
‘No doubt because of Mr Todd’s letters, sir,’ he said. ‘It was my suggestion, sir, if you remember, that they should be addressed from this apartment in order that Mr Todd should appear to possess a good central residence in the city.’
I remembered. We had thought it a brainy scheme at the time.
‘Well, it’s dashed awkward, you know, Jeeves. She looks on me as an intruder. By Jove! I suppose she thinks I’m someone who hangs about here, touching Mr Todd for free meals and borrowing his shirts.’
‘Extremely probable, sir.’
‘It’s pretty rotten, you know.’
‘Most disturbing, sir.’
‘And there’s another thing: What are we to do about Mr Todd? We’ve got to get him up here as soon as ever we can. When you have brought the tea you had better go out and send him a telegram, telling him to come up by the next train.’
‘I have already done so, sir. I took the liberty of writing the message and dispatching it by the lift attendant.’
‘By Jove, you think of everything, Jeeves!’
‘Thank you, sir. A little buttered toast with the tea? Just so, sir. Thank you.’
I went back to the sitting-room. She hadn’t moved an inch. She was still bolt upright on the edge of her chair, gripping her umbrella like a hammer-thrower. She gave me another of those looks as I came in. There was no doubt about it; for some reason she had taken a dislike to me. I suppose because I wasn’t George M. Cohan. It was a bit hard on a chap.