He repeated his advice with ref. to the hat and moved off, and for quite a while I stood where I was, rigid to the last limb, my numbed bean trying to grapple with this hideous problem which had arisen. It was plain that some diabolically clever counter-move would have to be made and made slippily, but what diabolically clever counter-move? There was what is called the rub.
You see, it wasn't as if I could just leg it from the danger zone, which was what I would have liked to do. It was imperative that I be among those present at Brinkley Court when Spode arrived this evening. Airily though Aunt Dahlia had spoken of making the man play ball, it was quite conceivable that the programme might blow a fuse, in which event the presence on the spot of a quick-thinking nephew would be of the essence. The Woosters do not desert aunts in their time of need.
Eliminating, therefore, the wings of the dove, for which I would gladly have been in the market, what other course presented itself ? I freely own that for five minutes or so the thing had me snookered.
But it has often been said of Bertram Wooster that in moments of intense peril he has an uncanny knack of getting inspiration, and this happened now. Suddenly a thought came like a full-blown rose, flushing the brow, and I picked up the feet and lit out for the stables, where my two-seater was housed. It might be that Jeeves had not yet started on the long trail that led to the Junior Ganymede Club, and, if he hadn't, I saw the way out.
CHAPTER 16
If you are one of the better element who are never happier than when curled up with the works of B. Wooster, you possibly came across a previous slab of these reminiscences of mine in which I dealt with a visit Jeeves and I paid to Deverill Hall, the rural seat of Esmond Haddock, J.P., and will recall that while under the Haddock roof Jeeves found my Aunt Agatha's son Thos in possession of what is known as a cosh and very prudently impounded it, feeling – as who wouldn't? – that it was the last thing that ought to be at the disposal of that homicidal young thug. The thought which had flushed my brow in the manner described was: Had Jeeves still got it? Everything turned on that.
I found him, richly apparelled and wearing the bowler hat, at the wheel of the car, on the point of putting foot to self-starter. Another moment, and I should have been too late. Racing up, I inaugurated the quiz without delay.
'Jeeves,' I said, 'throw your mind back to that time we stayed at Deverill Hall. Are you throwing?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Then continue to follow me closely. My Aunt Agatha's son, young Thos, was there.'
'Precisely, sir.'
'With the idea of employing it on a schoolmate of his called Stinker, who had incurred his displeasure for some reason, he had purchased before leaving London a cosh.'
'Or blackjack, to use the American term.'
'Never mind American terms, Jeeves. You took the weapon from him.'
'I deemed it wisest, sir.'
'It was wisest. No argument about that. Let a plug ugly like young Thos loose in the community with a cosh, and you are inviting disasters and...what's the word? Something about cats.'
'Cataclysms, sir?'
'That's it. Cataclysms. Unquestionably you did the right thing. But all that is beside the point. What I am leading up to is this. That cosh, where is it?'
Among my effects at the apartment, sir.'
'I'll drive with you to London and pick it up.'
'I could bring it with me on my return, sir.'
I did a brief dance step. On his return, forsooth! When would that be? Late at night, probably, because the gang at a hot spot like the Junior Ganymede don't break up a party at the end of lunch. I know what happens when these wild butlers let themselves go. They sit around till all hours, drinking deep and singing close harmony and generally whooping it up like a bunch of the boys in the Malemute saloon. It would mean that for the whole of the long summer day I should be defenceless, an easy prey for a Stilton who, as I had just been informed, was prowling about, seeking whom he might devour.
'That's no good, Jeeves. I require it immediately. Not tonight, not a week from Wednesday, but at the earliest possible moment. I am being hotly pursued by Cheesewright, Jeeves.'
'Indeed, sir?'
And if I am to stave off the Cheesewright challenge, I shall have need of a weapon. His strength is as the strength of ten, and unarmed I should be corn before his sickle.'
'Extremely well put, sir, if I may say so, and your diagnosis of the situation is perfectly accurate. Mr Cheesewright's robustness would enable him to crush you like a fly.'
'Exactly.'
'He would obliterate you with a single blow. He would break you in two with his bare hands. He would tear you limb from limb.'
I frowned slightly. I was glad to see that he appreciated the gravity of the situation, but these crude physical details seemed to me uncalled for.
'No need to make a production number of it, Jeeves,' I said with a touch of coldness. 'What I am driving at is that, armed with the cosh, I can face the blighter without a tremor. You agree?'
'Most decidedly, sir.'
'Then shift-ho,' I said, and hurled myself into the vacant seat.
This cosh of which I have been speaking was a small rubber bludgeon which at first sight you might have supposed unequal to the task of coping with an adversary of Stilton Cheesewright's tonnage. In repose, I mean to say, it didn't look like anything so frightfully hot. But I had seen it in action and was hep to what Florence would have called its latent potentialities. At Deverill Hall one night, for the soundest of reasons but too long to go into here, Jeeves had had occasion to bean a policeman with it – Constable Dobbs, a zealous officer – and the smitten slop had dropped as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.
There is a song, frequently sung by curates at village concerts, which runs:
I fear no foe in shining armour,
Though his lance be bright and keen.
Or is it 'swift and keen'? I can't remember. Not that it matters. The point is that those words summed up my attitude to a nicety. They put what I was feeling in a nutshell. With that cosh on my person, I should feel debonair and confident, no matter how many Cheesewrights came bounding at me with slavering jaws.
Everything went according to plan. After an agreeable drive we dropped anchor at the door of Berkeley Mansions and made our way to the flat. There, as foreshadowed, was the cosh. Jeeves handed it over, I thanked him in a few well-chosen words, he went off to his orgy, and I, after a bite of lunch at the Drones, settled myself in the two-seater and turned its nose Worcestershirewards.
The first person I met as I passed through the portals of Brinkley Court some hours later was Aunt Dahlia. She was in the hall, pacing up and down like a distraught tigress. Her exuberance of the morning had vanished completely, leaving her once more the haggard aunt of yesterday, and I was conscious of a quick pang of concern.
'Golly!' I said. 'What's up, old relative? Don't tell me that scheme of yours didn't work?'
She kicked morosely at a handy chair, sending it flying into the unknown.
'It hasn't had a chance to work.'
'Why not? Didn't Spode turn up?'
She gazed about her with sombre eyes, apparently in the hope of finding another chair to kick. There not being one in her immediate sphere of influence, she kicked the sofa.
'He turned up all right, and what happened? Before I could draw him aside and get so much as a word in, Tom swooped on him and took him off to the collection room to look at his foul silver. They've been in there for more than an hour, and how much longer they're going to be, Heaven knows.'
I pursed the lips. One ought, I felt, to have anticipated something of this sort.
'Can't you detach him?'
'No human power can detach a man to whom Tom is talking about his silver collection. He holds him with a glittering eye. All I can hope is that he will be so wrapped up in the silver end of the thing that he'll forget all about the necklace.'
The last thing a nephew of the right sort w
ants to do is to shove a wallowing aunt still more deeply beneath the surface of the slough of despond than she is already, but I had to shake my head at this.
'I doubt it.'
She gave the sofa another juicy one.
'So do I doubt it. That's why I'm going steadily cuckoo and may at any moment start howling like a banshee. Sooner or later he'll remember to take Spode to the safe, and what I am saying to myself is When? When? I feel like ... who was the man who sat with a sword dangling over him, suspended by a hair, wondering how long it was going to be before it dropped and gave him a nasty flesh wound?'
She had me there. Nobody I had met. Certainly not one of the fellows at the Drones.
'I couldn't tell you, I'm afraid. Jeeves might know.'
At the mention of that honoured name her eyes lit up.
'Jeeves! Of course! He's the man I want. Where is he?'
'In London. He asked me if he could take the day off. It was the Junior Ganymede monthly luncheon today.'
She uttered a cry which might have been the howl of the banshee to which she had alluded, and gave me the sort of look which in the old tally-ho days she would have given a mentally deficient hound which she had observed suspending its professional activities in order to chase a rabbit.
'You let Jeeves go away at a time like this, when one has never needed him more?'
'I hadn't the heart to refuse. He was taking the chair. He'll be back soon.'
'By which time...'
She would have spoken further... a good deal further, if I read aright the message in her eyes... but before she could get going something whiskered came down the stairs and Percy was with us.
Seeing me, he halted abruptly.
'Wooster!' His agitation was very marked. 'Where have you been all day, Wooster?'
I told him I had driven to London, and he drew his breath in with a hiss.
'In this hot weather? It can't be good for you. You must not overtax yourself, Wooster. You must husband your strength.'
He had chosen the wrong moment for homing in. The old relative turned on him as if he had been someone she had observed heading off the fox, if not shooting it.
'Gorringe, you ghastly sheepfaced fugitive from hell,' she thundered, forgetting, or so I imagine, that she was a hostess, 'get out of here, blast you! We're in conference.'
I suppose mixing with editors of poetry magazines toughens a fellow, rendering him impervious to verbal assault, for Percy, who might well have been expected to wilt, didn't wilt by a damn sight but drew himself up to his full height, which was about six feet two, and came back at her strongly.
'I am sorry to have intruded at an unseasonable moment, Mrs Travers,' he said, with a simple dignity that became him well, 'but I have a message for you from Moth-aw. Moth-aw would like to speak to you. She desired me to ask if it would be convenient if she came to your room.'
Aunt Dahlia flung her hands up emotionally. I could understand how she felt. The last thing a woman wants, when distraught, is a chat with someone like Ma Trotter.
'Not now!'
'Later, perhaps?'
'Is it important?'
'I received the impression that it was most important.'
Aunt Dahlia heaved a deep sigh, the sigh of a woman who feels that they are coming over the plate too fast for her.
'Oh, all right. Tell her I'll see her in half an hour. I'm going back to the collection room, Bertie. It's just possible that Tom may have run down by now. But one last word,' she added, as she moved away. 'The next subhuman gargoyle that comes butting in and distracting my thoughts when I am trying to wrestle with vital problems takes his life in his hands. Let him make his will and put in his order for lilies!'
She disappeared at some forty m.p.h., and Percy followed her retreating form with an indulgent eye.
A quaint character,' he said.
I agreed that the old relative was quaint in spots.
'She reminds me a little of the editress of Parnassus. The same tendency to wave her hands and shout, when stirred. But about this drive of yours to London, Wooster. What made you go there?'
'Oh, just one or two things I had to attend to.'
'Well, I am thankful that you got back safely The toll of the roads is so high these days. I trust you always drive carefully, Wooster? No speeding? No passing on blind corners? Capital, capital. But we were all quite anxious about you. We couldn't think where you could have got to. Cheesewright was particularly concerned. He appeared to think that you had vanished permanently and he said there were all sorts of things he had been hoping to discuss with you. I must let him know you are back. It will relieve his mind.'
He trotted off, and I lit a nonchalant cigarette, calm and collected to the eyebrows. I was perhaps half-way through it and had just blown quite a goodish smoke-ring, when clumping footsteps made themselves heard and Stilton loomed up on the skyline.
I reached a hand into my pocket and got a firm grasp on the old Equalizer.
CHAPTER 17
I don't know if you have ever seen a tiger of the jungle drawing a deep breath preparatory to doing a swan dive and landing with both feet on the backbone of one of the minor fauna. Probably not, nor, as a matter of fact, have I. But I should imagine that a t. of the j. at such a moment would look... allowing, of course, for the fact that it would not have a pink face and a head like a pumpkin... exactly as G. D'Arcy Cheesewright looked as his eyes rested on the Wooster frame. For perhaps a couple of ticks he stood there inflating and deflating his chest. Then he said, as I had rather supposed he would:
'Ho!'
His signature tune, you might say.
My nonchalance continued undiminished. It would have been idle to pretend that the blister's attitude was not menacing. It was about as menacing as it could jolly well stick. But with my hand on the cosh I faced him without a tremor. Like Caesar's wife, I was ready for anything. I gave him a careless nod.
Ah, Stilton,' I said. 'How are tricks?'
The question appeared to set the seal on his hotted-up-ness. He gnashed a tooth or two.
'I'll show you how tricks are! I've been looking for you all day.'
'You wished to see me about something?'
'I wished to pull your head off at the roots and make you swallow it.'
I nodded again, carelessly as before.
Ah, yes. You rather hinted at some such desire last night, did you not? It all comes back to me. Well, I'm sorry, Stilton, but I'm afraid it's off. I have made other plans. Percy Gorringe will no doubt have told you that I ran up to London this morning. I went to get this,' I said, and producing the man of slender physique's best friend, gave it a suggestive waggle.
There is one drawback to not wearing a moustache, and that is that if you don't have one, you've got nothing to twirl when baffled. All you can do is stand with your lower jaw drooping like a tired lily, looking a priceless ass, and that is what Stilton was doing now. His whole demeanour was that of an Assyrian who, having come down like a wolf on the fold, finds in residence not lambs but wild cats, than which, of course, nothing makes an Assyrian feel sillier.
Amazingly effective little contrivances, these,' I proceeded, rubbing it in. 'You read about them a good deal in mystery thrillers. Coshes they are called, though blackjack is, I believe, the American term.'
He breathed stertorously, his eyes bulging. I suppose he had never come up against anything like this. One gets new experiences.
'You put that thing down!' he said hoarsely.
'I propose to put it down,' I replied, quick as a flash. 'I propose to put it down jolly dashed hard, the moment you make a move, and though I am the merest novice in the use of the cosh, I don't see how I can help hitting a head the size of yours somewhere. And then where will you be, Cheesewright? On the floor, dear old soul, that's where you will be, with me carelessly dusting my hands and putting the instrument back in my pocket. With one of these things in his possession the veriest weakling can lay out the toughest egg colder than a halibut
on ice. To put it in a word, Cheesewright, I am armed, and the set-up, as I see it, is this. I take a comfortable stance with the weight balanced on both feet, you make a spring, and I, cool as some cucumbers...'
It was a silly thing to say, that about making springs, because it put ideas into his head. He made one on the word 'cucumbers' with such abruptness that I was caught completely unawares. That's the trouble with beefy fellows like Stilton. They are so massive that you don't credit them with the ability to get off the mark like jack rabbits and fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Before I knew what had happened, the cosh, wrenched from my grasp, was sailing across the hall, to come to rest on the floor near Uncle Tom's safe.
I stood there defenceless.
Well, 'stood' is putting it loosely. In crises like this we Woosters do not stand. It was soon made abundantly clear that Stilton was not the only one of our little circle who could get off marks like jack rabbits. I doubt if in the whole of Australia, where this species of animal abounds, you could have found a jack rabbit capable of a tithe of the swift smoothness with which I removed myself from the pulsating centre of things. To do a backward jump of some eleven feet and install myself behind the sofa was with me the work of an instant, and there for awhile the matter rested, because every time he came charging round to my side like a greyhound I went whizzing round to his side like an electric hare, rendering his every effort null and void. Those great Generals, of whom I was speaking earlier, go in for this manoeuvre quite a bit. Strategic retreat is the technical term.
How long this round-and-round-the-mulberry-bush sequence would have continued, it is not easy to say, but probably not for any great length of time, for already my partner in the rhythmic doings was beginning to show signs of feeling the pace. Stilton, like so many of these beefy birds, is apt, when not in training for some aquatic contest, to yield to the lure of the flesh pots. This takes its toll. By the end of the first dozen laps, while I remained as fresh as a daisy, prepared to fight it out on this line if it took all summer, he was puffing quite considerably and his brow had become wet with honest sweat.