‘Then you’ve really definitely and finally decided to attend the binge?’
‘With bells on, my dear boy, with bells on. You might not think it, to look at me now, but there was a time when no Covent Garden ball was complete without me. I used to have the girls flocking round me like flies about a honeypot. Between ourselves, it was owing to the fact that I got thrown out of a Covent Garden ball and taken to Vine Street Police Station in the company of a girl who, if memory serves me aright, was named Tottie that I escaped – that I had the misfortune not to marry your aunt thirty years earlier than I did.’
‘Really?’
‘I assure you. We had just got engaged at the time, and she broke it off within three minutes of reading my press notices in the evening papers. I was too late, of course, for the morning sheets, but the midday specials of the evening ones did me proud, and she was a little upset about it all. That is why I am so particularly anxious that no hint of to-night’s doings shall reach her ears. Your aunt is a wonderful woman, Bertie . . . can’t think what I should do without her . . . but – well, you know how it is.’
I said I knew how it was.
‘So I trust that all will be well and that she will never learn of the dark deeds which have been done in her absence. I think I have the mechanics of the thing fairly well planned out. I shall sneak down the back stairs, muffled to the eyes in an overcoat, and tool over to East Wibley on my old push bicycle. It’s only half a dozen miles. No flaws in that?’
‘None that I can spot.’
‘Of course, if Florence saw me—’
‘She won’t.’
‘Or Edwin.’
‘Not a chance.’
‘Or Maple.’
I was distressed to note this resurgence of the old fawn complex just when everything had seemed hotsy-totsy, and addressed myself without delay to the task of putting a stopper on it. And eventually I succeeded. By the time I had finished pointing out that nothing was more unlikely than that Florence should be roaming the back stairs at such an hour, that Edwin was bound to take a day or two off from his spooring after the treatment I had administered that morning, and that Maple, if encountered, could readily be squared with a couple of quid, he bucked up enormously, and I left him trying out dance steps on the study floor.
Well, of course, you can’t ginger up an uncle by marriage from shortly after breakfast to about five in the afternoon without paying the toll a bit. All this exhortation and encouragement had, as you may well imagine, taken it out of me not a little, inducing a limpness of the limbs and a sort of general feeling of stickiness. I don’t say I was perspiring at every pore, but I felt in need of a thorough rinse: and, the river being at my very door, this was easy to obtain. A quarter of an hour later, I might have been observed breasting the waves, clad in a bathing suit from Boko’s store.
In fact, I was observed, and by none other than G. D’Arcy Cheesewright. Doing the Australian crawl back to the bank after a refreshing plunge and holding on to a bush while I brushed the moisture from my eyes, I glanced up and saw him standing above me.
It was an embarrassing moment. I don’t know when you feel less at ease than when encountering a bloke to whose fiancée you have just got engaged.
‘Oh, hullo, Stilton,’ I said. ‘Coming in?’
‘Not while you are polluting the water.’
‘I’m just coming out.’
‘Then I’ll let it run a bit and perhaps it will be all right.’
His words alone would have been enough to inform a man of my quick intelligence that he was not unmixedly pro-Bertram, and as I climbed out and slid into the bath robe he gave me a look which drove the thing home. I have already, in another place, described at some length these looks of his, and I may say that this one was fully up to the sample he had given me outside Wee Nooke on the previous day.
However, if there is a chance that suavity will ease a situation, the Woosters always give it a buzz.
‘Nice day,’ I said. ‘Pretty country, this.’
‘Ruined by the people you meet.’
‘Trippers, you mean?’
‘No, I don’t mean trippers. I refer to snakes in the grass.’
It would be absurd to say that his attitude was encouraging, but I persevered.
‘Talking of grass,’ I said, ‘Boko was in that of Bumpleigh Hall this morning, and Uncle Percy trod on him.’
‘I wish he had broken your neck.’
‘I wasn’t there.’
‘I thought you said your uncle trod on you.’
‘You don’t listen, Stilton. I said he trod on Boko.’
‘Oh Boko? Good Lord!’ he cried, with honest heat. ‘With a fellow like you around, he treads on Boko! What on earth was the use of treading on Boko?’
There was a pause, during which he tried to catch my eye and I tried to avoid his. Stilton’s eye, even in repose, is nothing to write home about, being a sort of hard blue and rather bulging. In moments of emotion, it tends to protrude even farther, like that of an irascible snail, the general effect being rather displeasing.
Presently, he spoke again.
‘I’ve just seen Florence.’
My embarrassment increased. I had been hoping that the topic might have been avoided. But Stilton is one of those rugged, forthright chaps who don’t avoid topics.
‘Oh, yes?’ I said. ‘Florence, eh?’
‘She says she’s going to marry you.’
I was liking this less and less.
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I believe there is some idea of a union.’
‘What do you mean, some idea? It’s all fixed for September.’
‘September?’ I quavered, trembling from head to foot a bit. I hadn’t had a notion that the curse was slated to come upon me so dashed quick.
‘So she says,’ he responded moodily. ‘I’d like to break your neck. But I can’t, because I’m in uniform.’
‘Yes, there’s that. One doesn’t want one of these unpleasant police scandals, does one?’
There was another pause. He was looking at me in a sort of yearning way.
‘Gosh!’ he murmured, almost dreamily. ‘I wish there was something I could pinch you for!’
‘Come, come, Stilton. Is this the tone?’
‘I’d love to see you cowering in the dock, with me giving evidence against you.’
He was silent for a space, and I could see that he was still gloating over the vision he had conjured up. Then he asked me rather abruptly if I had finished with the river, and I said I had.
‘Then in about five minutes or so I might take a chance and go in,’ he said.
It was, as you may well imagine, in pretty fairly melancholy mood that I donned the bath robe and made my way back to the house. There’s always something about the going phut of an old friendship that tends to lower the spirits. It was many years since this Cheesewright and I had started what I believe is known as plucking the gowans fine, and there had been a time when we had plucked them rather assiduously. But his attitude at the recent get-together had made it plain that the close season for gowans had now set in, and, as I say, it rather saddened me.
Shoving on the shirt and bags with an unshed tear in the eye, I trickled along to the sitting-room to see if Boko had returned from his mission to London. I found him sitting in an armchair with Nobby on his lap, seeming in admirable spirits.
‘Come in, Bertie, come in,’ he cried jovially. ‘Jeeves is in the kitchen, brewing a dish of tea. You will join us in a cup?’
Inclining my head in assent to this suggestion, I addressed Nobby on a point of pre-eminent interest.
‘Nobby,’ I said, ‘I have just seen Stilton, and he informs me that Florence has fixed the nuptials for a shockingly early date – viz. September. It is vital, therefore, that you lose no time in showing her that letter of mine.’
‘If everything goes all right to-night, she will be skimming through it to-morrow morning over her early cup of tea.’
Reliev
ed, I turned to Boko.
‘Did you get the costumes?’
‘Of course I got the costumes. What the dickens do you think I sweated up to London for? Two in all, one for self and one for you, the finest the Bros. Cohen could supply. Mine is a Cavalier. A rather sex-appealy wig goes with it. Yours—’
Yes, what about mine?’
He hesitated a moment.
You’ll like yours. It’s a Pierrot.’
I uttered a cry of chagrin. Boko, like all my circle, is well acquainted with my views on going to fancy dress dances as a Pierrot. I consider it roughly equivalent to shooting a sitting bird.
‘Oh, is it?’ I said, speaking with quiet firmness. ‘Well, I’m jolly well going to have the Cavalier.’
You can’t, Bertie, old man. It wouldn’t fit you. It was built for a shortish, squarish reveller like me. You are tall and slim and elegant. “Elegant” is the word?’ he said, putting it up to Nobby.
‘Just the word,’ she assented.
‘Another good adjective would be “willowy”. Or “sylphlike”. Gosh, I wish I had a figure like yours, Bertie. You don’t know what you’ve got.’
‘Yes, I do,’ I riposted, coldly ignoring the salve. ‘I’ve got a ruddy Pierrot costume. A Wooster going to a fancy dress ball as a Pierrot!’ I said, and laughed shortly.
Boko shot Nobby off his knee and rose and began patting my shoulder. I suppose he could see that I was in dangerous mood.
‘You need have no qualms about appearing in this Pierrot, Bertie,’ he said soothingly. ‘Where you have gone astray is in supposing that it is an ordinary Pierrot. Far from it. I doubt if, strictly speaking, you could call it a Pierrot at all. For one thing, it is mauve in colour. For another . . . But I’ll show it to you, and I’ll bet you go dancing about the house, clapping your hands.’
He reached for the suitcase which lay in the foreground, opened it, pulled out its contents and stared at them, aghast. So did I. So did Nobby. We all stared at them, aghast.
They consisted of what appeared to be a football suit. There was a pair of blue shorts, a pair of purple stockings and a crimson jersey.
Across the chest of the jersey, in large white letters, ran the legend ‘BORSTAL ROVERS’.
CHAPTER 25
It was some moments before any of us broke what I believe is called the pregnant silence. Then Nobby spoke.
‘Do either of you see what I see?’ she asked, in a sort of hushed, awed voice.
My own was dull and toneless.
‘If what you see is a gent’s footballing outfit,’ I replied, ‘that is what is impressing itself on the Wooster retina.’
‘With “Borstal Rovers” written across the jersey?’
‘Right across the jersey.’
‘In large white letters?’
‘In very large white letters. I am waiting,’ I said, coldly, ‘for an explanation, Fittleworth.’
Nobby uttered a passionate cry.
‘I can give you the explanation. Boko has gone and made an ass of himself again!’
Cringing beneath her flaming eye, the wretched man broke into a storm of protest.
‘I haven’t! I swear I haven’t, darling!’
‘Come, come, Boko,’ I said, sternly. I had no wish to grind the man into the dust, but he had the wages of sin coming to him. ‘A Cavalier costume and a mauve – if your story is to be credited – Pierrot have changed, while in your custody, into a football kit belonging apparently to an athlete who turns out for the Borstal Rovers, though I wouldn’t have said offhand that there was such a team. Someone has blundered, and all the evidence points to you.’
Boko had tottered to a chair, and was sitting in it with his head in his hands. He emitted a sudden yip.
‘Catsmeat!’ he cried. ‘I see it all. It was that chump, Catsmeat. Before starting to return here,’ he proceeded, looking up and looking quickly down again as his eye collided with Nobby’s, ‘I stopped in at the Drones to get one for the road. Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright was there. We fell into conversation, and it turned out that he, too, was going to a fancy dress binge tonight. We chatted for a while of this and that, and then he looked at his watch and found that he had only just time to catch his train, and buzzed off. What happened is obvious. Rendered cock-eyed by haste, he took my suitcase in mistake for his own. And if you’re going to make out that that was my fault,’ said Boko, speaking now with some spirit, ‘then all I can say is that there’s no justice in the world and that it’s a fat lot of use being as innocent as the driven snow.’
This appeal to our better feelings was not without its effect. Nobby flung herself into his arms, cooing over him to a considerable extent, and even I was compelled to admit that he had been more sinned against than sinning.
‘Still, it’s all right,’ said Boko, now definitely chirpy once more. ‘Catsmeat and I are about the same build, so I can wear this number. I would prefer, of course, not to have to flaunt myself before East Wibley as a member of the Borstal Rovers, but one realizes that this is not a time when one can pick and choose. Yes, I can take it.’
I mentioned a point which he appeared to have overlooked.
‘And how about me? I’ve got to be there, too, to pave the way for you with Uncle Percy. A lot of solid talking will be required before it will be any use you approaching him. If I’m not at this East Wibley orgy, you might just as well stay at home.’
My words, as I had anticipated, produced a marked sensation. Nobby gave a sort of distraught hiccough, like a bull-pup choking on a rubber bone, and Boko confessed with a moody oath that he hadn’t thought of that.
‘Think of it now,’ I said. ‘Or, better,’ I went on, as the door opened, ‘ask Jeeves what his views on the matter are. You will probably have something to suggest, eh, Jeeves?’
‘Sir?’
A snag has arisen in our path, an Act of God having left us a costume short,’ I explained, ‘and we are frankly baffled.’
He placed the tea-tray on the table, and listened with respectful interest while we laid the facts before him.
‘Might I take a short walk, sir,’ he said, when we had finished, ‘and think the problem over?’
‘Certainly, Jeeves,’ I replied, concealing a slight pang of disappointment, for I had hoped that he might have come across with an immediate solution. ‘By all means take a short walk. You will find us here on your return.’
He oiled off, and we settled down to an informal debate, in which the note of hope was conspicuous by its a. It could scarcely escape the attention of three keen minds like ours that what looked like dishing us was the matter of time. It was now well past five o’clock, which rendered out of the question the idea of another quick dash to the metropolis and a second visit to the establishment of the Bros. Cohen. Zealous though they are in their self-chosen task of supplying the populace with clothing, there comes a moment when these merchants call it a day and put up the shutters. Not even by exceeding the speed limit all the way could a driver, starting from Steeple Bumpleigh now, reach the emporium in time to do business. Long ere he could arrive, the Bros, and their corps of assistants would have retired to their various residences and be relaxing over good books.
And as for the chance of securing anything in the nature of a costume in Steeple Bumpleigh, that, it seemed to us, could be ruled out altogether. At the beginning of this chronicle, I gave a brief description of this hamlet, showing it to be rich in honeysuckle-covered cottages and apple-cheeked villagers, but that let it out. It had only one shop, that so ably conducted by Mrs Greenless opposite the Jubilee watering-trough: and this, after it had supplied you with string, pink sweets, sides of bacon, tinned goods and Old Moore’s Almanac, was a spent force.
Taking it for all in all, accordingly, the situation seemed pretty bleak. When I tell you that the best suggestion was the one advanced by Boko, that I should strip to a loin-cloth and smear myself with boot polish and go to the dance as a Zulu chief, you will see how little constructive progress had been made
by the time the door opened and Jeeves was once more in our midst.
There is something about the mere sight of this number-nine-size-hatted man that seldom fails to jerk the beholder from despondency’s depths in times of travail. Although Reason told us that he couldn’t possibly have formulated a scheme for dragging home the gravy, we hailed him eagerly.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘Well?’ said Boko.
‘Well?’ said Nobby.
Any luck, Jeeves?’ I asked.
He inclined the coconut.
‘Yes, sir. I am happy to say that I have been successful in finding a solution to the problem confronting you.’
‘Gosh!’ cried Nobby, stunned to the core.
‘Egad!’ cried Boko, the same.
‘Well, I’m blowed!’ I ejaculated, ibid. ‘You have? I wouldn’t have thought it possible. Would you, Boko?’
‘I certainly wouldn’t.’
‘Or you, Nobby?’
‘Not in a million years.’
‘Well, there it is. That’s Jeeves. Where others merely smite the brow and clutch the hair, he acts. Napoleon was the same.’
Boko shook his head.
‘You can’t class Napoleon with Jeeves.’
‘Like putting up a fairish selling-plater against a classic yearling,’ agreed Nobby.
‘Napoleon had his moments,’ I urged.
‘On a very limited scale compared with Jeeves,’ said Boko. ‘I have nothing against Napoleon, but I cannot see him sauntering out into Steeple Bumpleigh at half-past five in the afternoon and coming back ten minutes later with a costume for a fancy dress ball. And this, you say, is what you have accomplished, Jeeves?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, I don’t know how you feel about it, Bertie,’ said Boko, ‘but to me the thing looks like a ruddy miracle. Where is this costume, Jeeves?’
‘I have placed it on the bed in Mr Wooster’s room, sir.’
‘But where on earth did you get it?’
‘I found it, sir.’
‘Found it? Just lying around, do you mean?’
Yes, sir. On the bank of the river.’
I don’t know why it was, unless possibly because we Woosters are a bit quicker than other men, but at these words a sudden, horrible suspicion shot through me like a dose of salts, numbing the nerve centres and turning the blood to ice.