I stiffened a bit further.
'Did you say eyesore?'
'Eyesore was what I said.'
'Oh, it was, was it?' I riposted, and it is possible that, had we not been interrupted, the exchanges would have become heated, for I was still under the stimulating influence of those specials and in no mood to brook back-chat. But before I could tell him that he was a fatheaded ass, incapable of recognizing the rare and the beautiful if handed to him on a skewer, the door bell rang again and Jeeves announced Florence.
CHAPTER 3
It's just occurred to me, thinking back, that in that passage where I gave a brief pen portrait of her – fairly near the start of this narrative, if you remember – I may have made a bloomer and left you with a wrong impression of Florence Craye. Informed that she was an intellectual girl who wrote novels and was like ham and eggs with the boys with the bulging foreheads out Bloomsbury way, it is possible that you conjured up in your mind's eye the picture of something short and dumpy with ink spots on the chin, as worn by so many of the female intelligentsia.
Such is far from being the truth. She is tall and willowy and handsome, with a terrific profile and luxuriant platinum-blond hair, and might, so far as looks are concerned, be the star unit of the harem of one of the better-class Sultans. I have known strong men to be bowled over by her at first sight, and it is seldom that she takes her walks abroad without being whistled at by visiting Americans.
She came breezing in, dressed up to the nines, and Stilton received her with a cold eye on his wrist-watch.
'So there you are at last,' he said churlishly. About time, dash it. I suppose you had forgotten that Uncle Joe has a nervous breakdown if he's kept waiting for his soup.'
I was expecting some haughty response to this crack, for I knew her to be girl of spirit, but she ignored the rebuke, and I saw that her eyes, which are bright and hazel in colour, were resting on me with a strange light in them. I don't know if you have ever seen a female of what they call teen-age gazing raptly at Humphrey Bogart in a cinema, but her deportment was much along those lines. More than a touch of the Soul's Awakening, if I make my meaning clear.
'Bertie!' she yipped, shaking from stem to stern. The moustache! It's lovely! Why have you kept this from us all these years? It's wonderful. It gives you such a dashing look. It alters your whole appearance.'
Well, after the bad Press the old fungus had been getting of late, you might have thought that a rave notice like this would have been right up my street. I mean, while one lives for one's Art, so to speak, and cares little for the public's praise or blame and all that sort of thing, one can always do with something to paste into one's scrapbook, can one not? But it left me cold, particularly in the vicinity of the feet. I found my eye swivelling round to Stilton, to see how he was taking it, and was concerned to note that he was taking it extremely big.
Pique. That's the word I was trying to think of. He was looking definitely piqued, like a diner in a restaurant who has bitten into a bad oyster, and I wasn't sure I altogether blamed him, for his loved one had not only patted my cheek with an affectionate hand but was drinking me in with such wide-eyed admiration that any fiancé, witnessing the spectacle, might well have been excused for growing a bit hot under the collar. And Stilton, of course, as I have already indicated, is a chap who could give Othello a couple of bisques and be dormy one at the eighteenth.
It seemed to me that unless prompt steps were taken through the proper channels, raw passions might be unchained, so I hastened to change the subject.
'Tell me all about your uncle, Stilton,' I said. 'Fond of soup, is he? Quite a boy for the bouillon, yes?'
He merely gave a grunt like a pig dissatisfied with its ration for the day, so I changed the subject again.
'How is Spindrift going?' I asked Florence. 'Still selling pretty copiously?'
I had said the right thing. She beamed.
'Yes, it's doing splendidly. It has just gone into another edition.'
'That's good.'
'You knew it had been made into a play?'
'Eh? Oh, yes. Yes, I heard about that.'
'Do you know Percy Gorringe?'
I winced a trifle. Proposing, as I did, to expunge the joy from Percy's life by giving him the uncompromising miss-in-baulk before tomorrow's sun had set, I would have preferred to keep him out of the conversation. I said the name seemed somehow familiar, as if I had heard it somewhere in some connection.
'He did the dramatization. He has made a splendid job of it.'
Here Stilton, who appeared to be allergic to Gorringes, snorted in his uncouth way. There are two things I particularly dislike about G. D'Arcy Cheesewright - one, his habit of saying 'Ho!', the other his tendency, when moved, to make a sound like a buffalo pulling its foot out of a swamp.
'We have a manager who is going to put it on and he's got the cast and all that, but there has been an unfortunate hitch.'
'You don't say?'
'Yes. One of the backers has failed us, and we need another thousand pounds. Still, it's going to be all right. Percy assures me he can raise the money.'
Again I winced, and once more Stilton snorted. It is always difficult to weigh snorts in the balance, but I think this second one had it over the first in offensiveness by a small margin.
That louse?' he said. 'He couldn't raise tuppence.'
These, of course, were fighting words. Florence's eyes flashed.
'I won't have you calling Percy a louse. He is very attractive and very clever.'
'Who says so?'
'I say so.'
'Ho!' said Stilton. 'Attractive, eh? Who does he attract?'
'Never mind whom he attracts.'
'Name three people he ever attracted. And clever? He may have just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wants to eat, but no more. He's a half-writted gargoyle.'
'He is not a gargoyle.'
'Of course he's a gargoyle. Are you going to look me in the face and deny that he wears short side-whiskers?'
'Why shouldn't he wear short side-whiskers?'
'I suppose he has to, being a louse.'
'Let me tell you–'
'Oh, come on,' said Stilton brusquely, and hustled her out. As they wended their way, he was reminding her once more of his Uncle Joseph's reluctance to be kept waiting for his soup.
It was a pensive Bertram Wooster, with more than a few furrows in his forehead, who returned to his chair and put match to cigarette. And I'll tell you why I was pensive and furrowed. The recent slab of dialogue between the young couple had left me extremely uneasy.
Love is a delicate plant that needs constant tending and nurturing, and this cannot be done by snorting at the adored object like a gas explosion and calling her friends lice. I had the disquieting impression that it wouldn't take too much to make the Stilton–Florence axis go p'fft again, and who could say that in this event, the latter, back in circulation, would not decide to hitch on to me once more? I remembered what had happened that other time and, as the fellow said, the burned child fears the spilled milk.
You see, the trouble with Florence was that though, as I have stated, indubitably comely and well equipped to take office as a pin-up girl, she was, as I have also stressed, intellectual to the core, and the ordinary sort of bloke like myself does well to give this type of female as wide a miss as he can manage.
You know how it is with these earnest, brainy beazels of what is called strong character. They can't let the male soul alone. They want to get behind it and start shoving. Scarcely have they shaken the rice from their hair in the car driving off for the honeymoon than they pull up their socks and begin moulding the partner of joys and sorrows, and if there is one thing that gives me the pip, it is being moulded. Despite adverse criticism from many quarters – the name of my Aunt Agatha is one that springs to the lips – I like B. Wooster the way he is. Lay off him, I say. Don't try to change him, or you may lose the flavour.
Even when we were merely af
fianced, I recalled, this woman had dashed the mystery thriller from my hand, instructing me to read instead a perfectly frightful thing by a bird called Tolstoy. At the thought of what horrors might ensue after the clergyman had done his stuff and she had a legal right to bring my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave, the imagination boggled. It was a subdued and apprehensive Bertram Wooster who some moments later reached for the hat and light overcoat and went off to the Savoy to shove food into the Trotters.
The binge, as I had anticipated, did little or nothing to raise the spirits. Aunt Dahlia had not erred in stating that my guests would prove to be creeps of no common order. L. G. Trotter was a little man with a face like a weasel, who scarcely uttered during the meal because, whenever he tried to, the moon of his delight shut him up, and Mrs Trotter a burly heavyweight with a beaked nose who talked all the time, principally about some woman she disliked named Blenkinsop. And nothing to help me through the grim proceedings except the faint, far-off echo of those specials of Jeeves's. It was a profound relief when they finally called it a day and I was at liberty to totter off to the Drones for the restorative I so sorely needed.
The almost universal practice of the inmates being to attend some form of musical entertainment after dinner, the smoking room was empty when I arrived, and it would not be too much to say that five minutes later, a cigarette between my lips and a brimming flagon at my side, I was enveloped in a deep peace. The strained nerves had relaxed. The snootered soul was at rest.
It couldn't last, of course. These lulls in life's battle never do. Came a moment when I had that eerie feeling that I was not alone and, looking round, found myself gazing at G. D'Arcy Cheesewright.
CHAPTER 4
This Cheesewright, I should perhaps have mentioned earlier, is a bimbo who from the cradle up has devoted himself sedulously to aquatic exercise. He was Captain of Boats at Eton. He rowed four years for Oxford. He sneaks off each summer at the time of Henley Regatta and sweats lustily with his shipmates on behalf of the Leander Club. And if he ever goes to New York, I have no doubt he will squander a fortune sculling about the lake in Central Park at twenty-five cents a throw. It is only rarely that the oar is out of his hand.
Well, you can't do that sort of thing without developing the thews and sinews, and all this galley-slave stuff has left him extraordinarily robust. His chest is broad and barrel-like and the muscles of his brawny arms strong as iron bands. I remember Jeeves once speaking of someone of his acquaintance whose strength was as the strength of ten, and the description would have fitted Stilton nicely. He looks like an all-in wrestler.
Being a pretty broad-minded chap and realizing that it takes all sorts to make a world, I had always till now regarded this beefiness of his with kindly toleration. The way I look at it is, if blighters want to be beefy, let them be beefy. Good luck to them, say I. What I did not like at moment of going to press was the fact that in addition to bulging in all directions with muscle he was glaring at me in a highly sinister manner, his air that of one of those Fiends with Hatchet, who are always going about the place Slaying Six. He was plainly much stirred about something, and it would not be going too far to say that, as I caught his eye, I wilted where I sat.
Thinking that it must be the circumstances of his having found me restoring the tissues with a spot of the right stuff that was causing his chagrin, I was about to say that the elixir in my hand was purely medicinal and had been recommended by a prominent Harley Street physician when he spoke.
'If only I could make up my mind!'
About what, Stilton?'
About whether to break your foul neck or not.'
I did a bit more wilting. It seemed to me that I was alone in a deserted smoking-room with a homicidal loony. It is a type of loony I particularly bar, and the homicidal loony I like least is one with a forty-four chest and biceps in proportion. His fingers, I noticed, were twitching, always a bad sign. 'Oh, for the wings of a dove' about summed up my feelings as I tried not to look at them.
'Break my foul neck?' I said, hoping for further information. 'Why?'
'You don't know?'
'I haven't the foggiest.'
'Ho!'
He paused at this point to dislodge a fly which had sauntered in through the open window and become mixed up with his vocal cords. Having achieved his object, he resumed.
'Wooster!'
'Still here, old man.'
'Wooster,' said Stilton, and if he wasn't grinding his teeth, I don't know a ground tooth when I see one, 'what was the thought behind that moustache of yours? Why did you grow it?'
'Well, rather difficult to say, of course. One gets these whims.' I scratched the chin a moment.
'I suppose I felt it might brighten things up,' I hazarded.
'Or had you an ulterior motive? Was it part of a subtle plot for stealing Florence from me?'
'My dear Stilton!'
'It all looks very fishy to me. Do you know what happened just now, when we left my uncle's?'
'I'm sorry, no. I'm a stranger in these parts myself
He ground a few more teeth.
'I will tell you. I saw Florence home in a cab, and all the way there she was raving about that moustache of yours. It made me sick to listen to her.'
I weighed the idea of saying something to the effect that girls would be girls and must be expected to have their simple enthusiasms, but decided better not.
'When we got off at her door and I turned after paying the driver, I found she was looking at me intently, examining me from every angle, her eyes fixed on my face.'
'You enjoyed that, of course?'
'Shut up. Don't interrupt me.'
'Right ho. I only meant it must have been pretty gratifying.'
He brooded for a space. Whatever had happened at that lovers' get-together, one could see that the memory of it was stirring him like a dose of salts.
'A moment later,' he said, and paused, wrestling with his feelings. 'A moment later,' he went on, finding speech again, 'she announced that she wished me to grow a moustache, too. She said – I quote her words – that when a man has a large pink face and a head like a pumpkin, a little something around the upper lip often does wonders in the way of easing the strain. Would you say my head was like a pumpkin, Wooster?'
'Not a bit, old man.'
'Not like a pumpkin?'
'No, not like a pumpkin. A touch of the dome of St Paul's, perhaps.'
'Well, that is what she compared it to, and she said that if I split it in the middle with a spot of hair, the relief to pedestrians and traffic would be enormous. She's crazy. I wore a moustache my last year at Oxford, and it looked frightful. Nearly as loathsome as yours. Moustache forsooth!' said Stilton, which surprised me, for I hadn't supposed he knew words like 'forsooth.' '"I wouldn't grow a moustache to please a dying grandfather," I told her. "A nice fool I'd look with a moustache," I said. "It's how you look without one," she said. "Is that so?" I said. "Yes, it is," she said. "Oh?" I said. "Yes," she said. "Ho!" I said, and she said "Ho to you!'"
If she had added 'With knobs on', it would, of course, have made it stronger, but I must say I was rather impressed by Florence's work as described in this slice of dialogue. It seemed to me snappy and forceful. I suppose girls learn this sort of cut-and-thrust stuff at their finishing schools. And Florence, one must remember, had been moving a good deal of late in Bohemian circles – Chelsea studios and the rooms of the intelligentsia in Bloomsbury and places like that – where the repartee is always of a high order.
'So that was that,' proceeded Stilton, having brooded for a space. 'One thing led to another, hot words passed to and fro, and it was not long before she was returning the ring and saying she would be glad to have her letters back at my earliest convenience.'
I tut-tutted. He asked me rather abruptly not to tut-tut, so I stopped tut-tutting, explaining that my reason for having done so was that his tragic tale had moved me deeply
'My heart aches for you,' I said.
; 'It does, does it?'
'Profusely.'
'Ho!'
'You doubt my sympathy?'
'You bet I doubt your ruddy sympathy. I told you just now that I was trying to make up my mind, and what I'm trying to make it up about is this. Had you foreseen that that would happen? Did your cunning fiend's brain spot what was bound to occur if you grew a moustache and flashed it on Florence?'
I tried to laugh lightly, but you know how it is with these light laughs, they don't always come out just the way you would wish. Even to me it sounded more like a gargle.
'Am I right? Was that the thought that came into your cunning fiend's brain?'
'Certainly not. As a matter of fact, I haven't got a cunning fiend's brain.'
'Jeeves has. The plot could have been his. Was it Jeeves who wove this snare for my feet?'
'My dear chap! Jeeves doesn't weave snares for feet. He would consider it a liberty. Besides, I told you he is the spearhead of the movement which disapproves of my moustache.'
'I see what you mean. Yes, on second thoughts I am inclined to acquit Jeeves of complicity. The evidence points to your having thought up the scheme yourself
'Evidence? How do you mean, evidence?'
'When we were at your flat and I said I was expecting Florence, I noticed a very significant thing – your face lit up.'
'It didn't.'
'Pardon me. I know when a face lights up and when it doesn't. I could read you like a book. You were saying to yourself, "This is the moment! This is where I spring it on her!'"
'Nothing of the sort. If my face lit up –which I gravely doubt – it was merely because I reasoned that as soon as she arrived you would be leaving.'
'You wanted me to leave?'
'I did. You were taking up space which I required for other purposes.'
It was plausible, of course, and I could see it shook him. He passed a hamlike hand, gnarled with toiling at the oar, across his brow.
'Well, I shall have to think it over. Yes, yes, I shall have to think it over.'