I nodded understandingly.
‘We all go through it,’ I said. ‘I had the same experience.’
‘You?’
‘Rather. He nearly got me with a carving knife.’
‘As far as I could discern, the weapon he carried was more of the order of a chopper.’
‘He varies,’ I explained. ‘Now the carving knife, anon the chopper. Versatile chap. It’s the artistic temperament, I suppose.’
‘You speak as if you knew this man.’
‘I do more than know him. I employ him. He’s my valet.’
‘Your valet?’
‘Fellow named Brinkley. He won’t be my valet long, mind you. If he ever simmers down enough for me to get near him and give him the sack. Ironical, that, when you come to think of it,’ I said, for I was in philosophic mood. ‘I mean, do you realize that I’m giving this chap a salary all this time? In other words, he’s actually being paid to chivvy me about with carving knives. If that’s not Life,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘what is?’
It seemed to take the old boy a moment or two to drink this in.
‘Your valet? Then what is he doing in the Dower House?’
‘Oh, he’s a mobile sort of fellow, you know. Now here, now there. He flits. He was at the Hall not long ago.’
‘I never heard of such a thing.’
‘New to me, too, I must confess. Well, you’re certainly having a lively night. This’ll last you, what? I mean, you won’t need any more excitement for months and months and months.’
‘Mr Wooster, my earnest hope is that the entire remainder of my existence will be one round of unruffled monotony. Tonight I have seemed to sense the underlying horror of life. You do not suppose that there could possibly be mice on my person still?’
‘You must have shaken them off, I should say. You were pretty active, you know. I could only hear you, of course, but you seemed to be leaping from crag to crag, as it were.’
‘Certainly I spared no effort to elude this man Brinkley. It was merely that I fancied I felt something nibbling at my left shoulder-blade.’
‘You’ve had quite a night, haven’t you?’
‘A truly terrible night. I shall not readily recover a normal tranquillity of mind. My pulse is still high, and I do not like the way my heart is beating. However, by a merciful good fortune, all has ended well. You will be able to give me the shelter I so sorely need in your cottage. And there with the assistance of a little soap and water I shall be able to wash off this distasteful blacking.’
I saw that this was where I had to start breaking things gently to him.
‘You can’t get that stuff off with soap and water. I’ve tried. You have to have butter.’
‘The point strikes me as immaterial. You can provide butter, no doubt?’
‘Sorry. No butter.’
‘There must be butter in your cottage.’
‘There isn’t. And why? Because there isn’t a cottage.’
‘I cannot understand you.’
‘It’s burned down.’
‘What?’
‘Yes. Brinkley did it.’
‘Good God!’
‘A nuisance in many ways, I must confess.’
He was silent for a space. Turning the thing over in his mind. Looking at it from this angle and that.
‘Your cottage is really burned down?’
‘Heap of ashes.’
‘Then what is to be done?’
It seemed time to point out the silver lining.
‘Be of good cheer,’ I said. ‘We may not be so well off for cottages, but the butter situation, I am happy to say, is reasonably bright. We can’t get any tonight, but it cometh in the morning, so to speak. Jeeves is going to bring me some as soon as the dairyman delivers.’
‘But I cannot remain in this condition till morning.’
‘Only course to pursue, I’m afraid.’
He brooded. Hard to see in the darkness, but discontentedly, I thought, as if his haughty spirit fretted somewhat. He must have been doing some good, solid thinking, too, because suddenly he came to life with an idea.
‘This cottage of yours – had it a garage?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Was that burned down also?’
‘No, I fancy it escaped the holocaust. It was well away from the scene of conflagration.’
‘Is there petrol in it?’
‘Oh, yes. Lots of petrol.’
‘Why, then all is well, Mr Wooster. I am convinced that petrol will prove a cleansing agent equally as efficacious as butter.’
‘But, dash it, you can’t go to my garage.’
‘Why not, pray?’
‘Well, yes, you could, if you liked, I suppose. Not me, though. For reasons which I am not prepared to divulge, I propose to spend the rest of the night in the summer-house on the main lawn of the Hall.”
‘You will not accompany me?’
‘Sorry. No.’
‘Then good night, Mr Wooster. I will not keep you any longer from your rest. I am greatly obliged to you for the assistance you have accorded me in a trying situation. We must see more of one another. Let us lunch together one of these days. How do I obtain access to this garage of yours?’
‘You’ll have to bust a window.’
‘I will do so.’
He pushed off, full of buck and determination, and I, with a dubious shake of the old onion, trickled along towards the summer-house.
17
* * *
Breakfast-time at the Hall
I DON’T KNOW if you have ever spent the night in a summer-house. If not, avoid making the experiment. It’s not a thing I would advise any friend of mine to do. On the subject of sleeping in summer-houses I will speak out fearlessly. As far as I have been able to ascertain, such a binge doesn’t present a single attractive feature. Apart from the inevitable discomfort in the fleshy parts, there’s the cold, and apart from the cold there’s the mental anguish. All the ghost stories you’ve ever read go flitting through the mind, particularly any you know where fellows are found next morning absolutely dead, without a mark on them but with such a look of horror and fear in their eyes that the search party draw in their breath a bit and gaze at each other as much as to say ‘What ho!’ Things creak. You fancy you hear stealthy footsteps. You receive the impression that a goodish quota of skinny hands are reaching out for you in the darkness. And, as I say, the cold extremely severe and much discomfort in the fleshy parts. The whole constituting a pretty sticky experience and one to be avoided by the knowledgeable.
And what made the thing so dashed poignant in my case was the thought that if I had only had the nerve to accompany intrepid old Glossop to the garage there would have been no need for me to stay marooned in this smelly structure, listening to the wind howling through the chinks in the woodwork. Once at the garage, I mean to say, I could not only have scoured the face but could have hopped into the old two-seater, which was champing at its bit there, and tooled off to London by road, singing a gipsy song, as it were.
And I simply couldn’t muster up the nerve to take a pop at it. The garage, I reflected, was right in the danger zone, well inside the Voules and Dobson belt, and I absolutely could not face the possibility of running into Police Sergeant Voules and being detained and questioned. These meetings with him the night before had shattered my morale, causing me to look upon this hellhound of the Law as a sleepless prowler who rambled incessantly and was bound to appear out of a trap just at the moment when you could best have done without him.
So I stayed where I was. I hitched myself into position forty-six in the hope that it would be easier on the f.p.s than the last forty-five, and had another shot at the dreamless.
The thing that always beats me is how on these occasions one ever gets to sleep at all. Personally, I abandoned all idea of it at an early stage, and no one, accordingly, could have been more surprised than myself when, just as I was endeavouring to give the miss to a leopard which was biting me rather
shrewdly in the seat of the trousers, I suddenly awoke to discover that it had been but a dream, that in reality no leopards were to be noticed among those present, that the sun was up and another day had begun, and that on the greensward without the early bird was already breakfasting and making the dickens of a noise about it, too.
I went to the door and looked out. I could hardly believe that it was really morning. But it was, and a dashed good morning, at that. The air was cool and fresh, there were long shadows across the lawn, and everything combined to give the soul such a kick that many fellows in my position would have taken off their socks and done rhythmic dances in the dew. I did not actually do that, but I certainly felt uplifted to no little extent, and you might say that I was simply so much pure spirit, without any material side to me whatsoever, when suddenly it was as if the old tum had come out of a trance with a jerk, and the next moment I was feeling that nothing mattered in this world or the next except about a quart of coffee and all the eggs and b. you could cram on to a dish.
It’s a rummy thing about breakfast. When you’ve only to press a bell to have the domestic staff racing in with everything on the menu from oatmeal to jams, marmalades, and potted meats, you find that all you can look at is a glass of soda water and a rusk. When you can’t get it, you feel like a python when the Zoo officials have just started to bang the luncheon gong. Speaking for myself, I have, as a rule, to be more or less lured to the feast. I mean to say, I don’t as a general thing become what you might call breakfast-conscious till I’ve had my morning tea and rather thought things over a bit. And I can give no better indication of the extraordinary change which had come over my viewpoint now than by mentioning that there was a young fowl of sorts not far away engaged in getting outside a large, pink worm, and I could willingly have joined it at the board. In fact, I would have taken pot luck at this juncture with a buzzard.
My watch had stopped, so I couldn’t tell what time it was: and another thing I didn’t know was when Jeeves was planning to go to the Dower House to keep our tryst. The thought that he might even now be on his way there and that, if he didn’t find me, he would give the thing up as a bad job and retire to some impregnable fastness in the back parts of the Hall gave me a very nasty turn. I left the summer-house and, taking to the bushes, began to work my way through them, treading like a Red Indian on the trail and keeping well under cover throughout.
And I was just navigating round the side of the Hall and making ready for the dash into the open, when through the french window of the morning-room I saw a spectacle which affected me profoundly. In fact, you’d be about right if you said that it seemed to speak to my very depths.
Inside the room, a parlourmaid was placing a large tray on a table.
The sunlight, streaming in, lit up this parlourmaid’s hair: and, noting its auburn hue, I deduced that she must be Mary, the betrothed of Constable Dobson: and at any other time the fact would have been of interest. But I was in no mood now to subject the girl to a critical scrutiny with a view to ascertaining whether the constable had picked a winner or not. My whole attention was earmarked for that tray.
It was a well-laden tray. There was a coffee-pot on it, also toast in considerable quantity, and furthermore a covered dish. It was this last that touched the spot. Under that cover there might be eggs, there might be bacon, there might be sausages, there might be kidneys, or there might be kippers. I could not tell. But whatever there was it was all right with Bertram.
For I had laid my plans and formed my schemes. The girl was on her way out by this time, and I estimated that I had possibly fifty seconds for the stern task before me. Allow twenty for nipping in, three for snaffling the works, and another twenty-five for getting back into the bushes again, and one had all the makings of a successful enterprise.
The moment the door closed I was speeding on my way. I recked little whether anybody saw me, and I should imagine that, had there been eyewitnesses, all they would have seen would have been a sort of blur. I did the first leg of the journey well inside the estimated time, and I had just laid hand on the tray and was about to lift and remove, when there came from outside the door the sound of footsteps.
It was a moment for swift thought, and such moments find Bertram Wooster at his best.
This morning-room, I should mention, was not the small morning-room where Dwight and little Seabury had had their epoch-making turn-up. In fact, I am rather misleading my public in alluding to it as a morning-room at all. It was really a study or office, being the place where Chuffy did his estate business, totted up his bills, brooded over the growing cost of agricultural apparatus, and gave the tenants the bird when they called to ask him to knock a bit off their rent. And as you can’t get very far with that sort of thing unless you have a pretty good-sized desk, Chuffy had most fortunately had one put in. It stood across one whole corner of the room, and it seemed to beckon to me.
Two and a half seconds later, I was behind it, crouching on the carpet and trying to breathe solely through the pores.
The next moment, the door opened, and somebody came in. Feet crossed the floor, right up to the desk, and I heard the click as the hidden hand removed the telephone receiver.
‘Chuffnell Regis, two-niyun-four,’ said a voice, and conceive the sudden rush of relief when I recognized it as one that I had many a time shaken hands with in the past – the voice, in short, of a friend in need.
‘Oh, Jeeves,’ I said, popping up like a jack-in-the-box.
You can’t rattle Jeeves. Where scullerymaids had had hysterics and members of the Peerage had leaped and quivered, he simply regarded me with respectful serenity and, after a civil good morning, went on with the job in hand. He is a fellow who likes to do things in their proper order.
‘Chuffnell Regis two-niyun-four? The Seaview Hotel? Could you inform me if Sir Roderick Glossop is in his room? … Not yet returned? … Thank you.’
He hung up the receiver, and was now at liberty to give the late young master a spot of attention.
‘Good morning, sir,’ he said again. ‘I was not expecting to see you here.’
‘I know, but …’
‘I had supposed that the arrangement was that we should meet at the Dower House.’
I shuddered a bit.
‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘one brief word about the Dower House, and then I should like the subject shelved indefinitely. I know you meant well. I know that when you sent me there your motives were pure to the last drop. But the fact remains that you were dispatching me to a nasty salient. Do you know who was lurking in that House of Fear? Brinkley. Complete with chopper.’
‘I am very sorry to hear that, sir. Then I assume that you did not sleep there last night?’
‘No, Jeeves, I did not. I slept – if you can call it sleeping – in the summer-house. And I was just creeping round through the bushes to try to find you, when I saw that parlourmaid setting out food on the table in here.’
‘His lordship’s breakfast, sir.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He should be down shortly, sir. It is a most fortunate chance that her ladyship should have instructed me to ring up the Seaview Hotel. Otherwise we might have experienced some difficulty in establishing a connection.’
‘Yes. What was all that, by the way? That Seaview Hotel stuff.’
‘Her ladyship is somewhat exercised in her mind about Sir Roderick, sir. I fancy that on reflection she has reached the conclusion that she did not treat him well last night.’
‘Mother Love not so hot this morning?’
‘No, sir.’
‘And it’s a case of “Return and all will be forgiven”?’
‘Precisely, sir. But unfortunately, Sir Roderick appears to be missing, and we can secure no information as to what has become of him.’
I was in a position, of course, to explain and clarify, and I did so without delay.
‘He’s all right. After an invigorating session with Brinkley, he went to my garage to get petrol. Was
he correct in supposing that that would clean him as well as butter?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then I should think he was on his way to London by now, if not actually in the Metropolis.’
‘I will notify her ladyship at once, sir. I imagine that the information will serve sensibly to lessen her anxiety.’
‘You really thinks she loves him still and wishes to extend the amende honorable?’
‘Or olive branch? Yes, sir. So, at least, I divined from her demeanour. I was left with the impression that all the old love and esteem were in operation once more.’
‘And I’m very glad to hear it,’ I said cordially. ‘For I must tell you, Jeeves, that since we last got together I have completely changed my mind about the above Glossop. I see now that there is much good in him. In the silent watches of the night we formed what you wouldn’t be far out in describing as a beautiful friendship. We discovered each other’s hidden merits, and he left showering invitations to lunch.’
‘Indeed, sir?’
‘Absolutely. From now on, there will always be a knife and fork for Bertram at the Glossop lair, and the same for Roddy chez Bertram.’
‘Very gratifying, sir.’
‘Most. So if you’re chatting with Lady Chuffnell in the near future, you can tell her that the match now has my full approval and sanction. But all this, Jeeves,’ I proceeded, striking the practical note, ‘is beside the point. The main issue is that I am sorely in need of nourishment, and I want that tray. So hand it across and look slippy.’
‘You are proposing to eat his lordship’s breakfast, sir?’