I was so relieved that we had got off the subject of my literary output that I shouted approval in a ringing baritone.
‘I am delighted to hear it, Mr Wooster. I may be prejudiced, but to my mind that woman is a genius.’
‘Absolutely!’ I said.
‘She has been with me seven years, and in all that time I have not known her guilty of a single lapse from the highest standard. Except once, in the winter of 1917, when a purist might have condemned a certain mayonnaise of hers as lacking in creaminess. But one must make allowances. There had been several air-raids about that time, and no doubt the poor woman was shaken. But nothing is perfect in this world, Mr Wooster, and I have had my cross to bear. For seven years I have lived in constant apprehension lest some evilly-disposed person might lure her from my employment. To my certain knowledge she has received offers, lucrative offers, to accept service elsewhere. You may judge of my dismay, Mr Wooster, when only this morning the bolt fell. She gave notice!’
‘Good Lord!’
‘Your consternation does credit, if I may say so, to the heart of the author of A Red, Red Summer Rose. But I am thankful to say the worst has not happened. The matter has been adjusted. Jane is not leaving me.’
‘Good egg!’
‘Good egg, indeed – though the expression is not familiar to me. I do not remember having come across it in your books. And, speaking of your books, may I say that what has impressed me about them even more than the moving poignancy of the actual narrative, is your philosophy of life. If there were more men like you, Mr Wooster, London would be a better place.’
This was dead opposite to my Aunt Agatha’s philosophy of life, she having always rather given me to understand that it is the presence in it of chappies like me that makes London more or less of a plague spot; but I let it go.
‘Let me tell you, Mr Wooster, that I appreciate your splendid defiance of the outworn fetishes of a purblind social system. I appreciate it! You are big enough to see that rank is but the guinea stamp and that, in the magnificent words of Lord Bletchmore in Only a Factory Girl, “Be her origin ne’er so humble, a good woman is the equal of the finest lady on earth!”’
‘I say! Do you think that?’
‘I do, Mr Wooster. I am ashamed to say that there was a time when I was like other men, a slave to the idiotic convention which we call Class Distinction. But, since I read your book –’
I might have known it. Jeeves had done it again.
‘You think it’s all right for a chappie in what you might call a certain social position to marry a girl of what you might describe as the lower classes?’
‘Most assuredly I do, Mr Wooster.’
I took a deep breath, and slipped him the good news.
‘Young Bingo – your nephew, you know – wants to marry a waitress,’ I said.
‘I honour him for it,’ said old Little.
‘You don’t object?’
‘On the contrary.’
I took another deep breath and shifted to the sordid side of the business.
‘I hope you won’t think I’m butting in, don’t you know,’ I said, ‘but – er – well, how about it?’
‘I fear I do not quite follow you.’
‘Well, I mean to say, his allowance and all that. The money you’re good enough to give him. He was rather hoping that you might see your way to jerking up the total a bit.’
Old Little shook his head regretfully.
‘I fear that can hardly be managed. You see, a man in my position is compelled to save every penny. I will gladly continue my nephew’s existing allowance, but beyond that I cannot go. It would not be fair to my wife.’
‘What! But you’re not married?’
‘Not yet. But I propose to enter upon that holy state almost immediately. The lady who for years has cooked so well for me honoured me by accepting my hand this very morning.’ A cold gleam of triumph came into his eye. ‘Now let ’em try to get her away from me!’ he muttered defiantly.
‘Young Mr Little has been trying frequently during the afternoon to reach you on the telephone, sir,’ said Jeeves that night, when I got home.
‘I’ll bet he has,’ I said. I had sent poor old Bingo an outline of the situation by messenger-boy shortly after lunch.
‘He seemed a trifle agitated.’
‘I don’t wonder, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘so brace up and bite the bullet. I’m afraid I’ve bad news for you.
‘That scheme of yours – reading those books to old Mr Little and all that – has blown out a fuse.’
‘They did not soften him?’
‘They did. That’s the whole bally trouble. Jeeves, I’m sorry to say that fiancée of yours – Miss Watson, you know – the cook, you know – well, the long and the short of it is that she’s chosen riches instead of honest worth, if you know what I mean.’
‘Sir?’
‘She’s handed you the mitten and gone and got engaged to old Mr Little!’
‘Indeed, sir?’
‘You don’t seem much upset.’
‘The fact is, sir, I had anticipated some such outcome.’
I stared at him. ‘Then what on earth did you suggest the scheme for?’
‘To tell you the truth, sir, I was not wholly averse from a severance of my relations with Miss Watson. In fact, I greatly desired it. I respect Miss Watson exceedingly, but I have seen for a long time that we were not suited. Now, the other young person with whom I have an understanding –’
‘Great Scott, Jeeves! There isn’t another?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How long has this been going on?’
‘For some weeks, sir. I was greatly attracted by her when I first met her at a subscription dance at Camberwell.’
‘My sainted aunt! Not –’
Jeeves inclined his head gravely.
‘Yes, sir. By an odd coincidence it is the same young person that young Mr Little – I have placed the cigarettes on the small table. Good night, sir.’
3
* * *
Aunt Agatha Speaks her Mind
I SUPPOSE IN the case of a chappie of really fine fibre and all that sort of thing, a certain amount of gloom and anguish would have followed this dishing of young Bingo’s matrimonial plans. I mean, if mine had been a noble nature, I would have been all broken up. But, what with one thing and another, I can’t let it weigh on me very heavily. The fact that less than a week after he had had the bad news I came on young Bingo dancing like an untamed gazelle at Ciro’s helped me to bear up.
A resilient bird, Bingo. He may be down, but he is never out. While these little love-affairs of his are actually on, nobody could be more earnest and blighted; but once the fuse has blown out and the girl has handed him his hat and begged him as a favour never to let her see him again, up he bobs as merry and bright as ever. If I’ve seen it happen once, I’ve seen it happen a dozen times.
So I didn’t worry about Bingo. Or about anything else, as a matter of fact. What with one thing and another, I can’t remember ever having been chirpier than at about this period in my career. Everything seemed to be going right. On three separate occasions horses on which I’d invested a sizeable amount won by lengths instead of sitting down to rest in the middle of the race, as horses usually do when I’ve got money on them.
Added to this, the weather continued topping to a degree; my new socks were admitted on all sides to be just the kind that mother makes; and to round it all off, my Aunt Agatha had gone to France and wouldn’t be on hand to snooter me for at least another six weeks. And, if you knew my Aunt Agatha, you’d agree that that alone was happiness enough for anyone.
It suddenly struck me so forcibly, one morning while I was having my bath, that I hadn’t a worry on earth that I began to sing like a bally nightingale as I sploshed the sponge about. It seemed to me that everything was absolutely for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
But have you ever noticed a rummy thing about life? I mean the way something
always comes along to give it you in the neck at the very moment when you’re feeling most braced about things in general. No sooner had I dried the old limbs and shoved on the suiting and toddled into the sitting-room than the blow fell. There was a letter from Aunt Agatha on the mantelpiece.
‘Oh gosh!’ I said when I’d read it.
‘Sir?’ said Jeeves. He was fooling about in the background on some job or other.
‘It’s from my Aunt Agatha, Jeeves. Mrs Gregson, you know.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Ah, you wouldn’t speak in that light, careless tone if you knew what was in it,’ I said with a hollow, mirthless laugh. ‘The curse has come upon us, Jeeves. She wants me to go and join her at – what’s the name of the dashed place? – at Roville-sur-mer. Oh, hang it all!’
‘I had better be packing, sir?’
‘I suppose so.’
To people who don’t know my Aunt Agatha I find it extraordinarily difficult to explain why it is that she has always put the wind up me to such a frightful extent. I mean, I’m not dependent on her financially or anything like that. It’s simply personality, I’ve come to the conclusion. You see, all through my childhood and when I was a kid at school she was always able to turn me inside out with a single glance, and I haven’t come out from under the ’fluence yet. We run to height a bit in our family, and there’s about five-foot-nine of Aunt Agatha, topped off with a beaky nose, an eagle eye, and a lot of grey hair, and the general effect is pretty formidable. Anyway, it never even occurred to me for a moment to give her the miss-in-baulk on this occasion. If she said I must go to Roville, it was all over except buying the tickets.
‘What’s the idea, Jeeves? I wonder why she wants me.’
‘I could not say, sir.’
Well, it was no good talking about it. The only gleam of consolation, the only bit of blue among the clouds, was the fact that at Roville I should at last be able to wear the rather fruity cummerbund I had bought six months ago and had never had the nerve to put on. One of those silk contrivances, you know, which you tie round your waist instead of a waistcoat, something on the order of a sash only more substantial. I had never been able to muster up the courage to put it on so far, for I knew that there would be trouble with Jeeves when I did, it being a pretty brightish scarlet. Still, at a place like Roville, presumably dripping with the gaiety and joie de vivre of France, it seemed to me that something might be done.
Roville, which I reached early in the morning after a beastly choppy crossing and a jerky night in the train, is a fairly nifty spot where a chappie without encumbrances in the shape of aunts might spend a somewhat genial week or so. It is like all these French places, mainly sands and hotels and casinos. The hotel which had had the bad luck to draw Aunt Agatha’s custom was the Splendide, and by the time I got there there wasn’t a member of the staff who didn’t seem to be feeling it deeply. I sympathized with them. I’ve had experience of Aunt Agatha at hotels before. Of course, the real rough work was all over when I arrived, but I could tell by the way everyone grovelled before her that she had started by having her first room changed because it hadn’t a southern exposure and her next because it had a creaking wardrobe and that she had said her say on the subject of the cooking, the waiting, the chambermaiding and everything else, with perfect freedom and candour. She had got the whole gang nicely under control by now. The manager, a whiskered cove who looked like a bandit, simply tied himself into knots whenever she looked at him.
All this triumph had produced a sort of grim geniality in her, and she was almost motherly when we met.
‘I am so glad you were able to come, Bertie,’ she said. ‘The air will do you so much good. Far better for you than spending your time in stuffy London night clubs.’
‘Oh, ah,’ I said.
‘You will meet some pleasant people, too. I want to introduce you to a Miss Hemmingway and her brother, who have become great friends of mine. I am sure you will like Miss Hemmingway. A nice, quiet girl, so different from so many of the bold girls one meets in London nowadays. Her brother is curate at Chipley-in-the-Glen in Dorsetshire. He tells me they are connected with the Kent Hemmingways. A very good family. She is a charming girl.’
I had a grim foreboding of an awful doom. All this boosting was so unlike Aunt Agatha, who normally is one of the most celebrated right-and-left-hand knockers in London society. I felt a clammy suspicion. And, by Jove, I was right.
‘Aline Hemmingway,’ said Aunt Agatha, ‘is just the girl I should like to see you marry, Bertie. You ought to be thinking of getting married. Marriage might make something of you. And I could not wish you a better wife than dear Aline. She would be such a good influence in your life.’
‘Here, I say!’ I chipped in at this juncture, chilled to the marrow.
‘Bertie!’ said Aunt Agatha, dropping the motherly manner for a bit and giving me the cold eye.
‘Yes, but I say –’
‘It is young men like you, Bertie, who make the person with the future of the race at heart despair. Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in idle selfishness a life which might have been made useful, helpful and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone. Bertie, it is imperative that you marry.’
‘But, dash it all –’
‘Yes! You should be breeding children to –’
‘No, really, I say, please!’ I said, blushing richly. Aunt Agatha belongs to two or three of these women’s clubs, and she keeps forgetting she isn’t in the smoking-room.
‘Bertie,’ she resumed, and would no doubt have hauled up her slacks at some length, had we not been interrupted. ‘Ah, here they are!’ she said. ‘Aline, dear!’
And I perceived a girl and a chappie bearing down on me, smiling in a pleased sort of manner.
‘I want you to meet my nephew, Bertie Wooster,’ said Aunt Agatha. ‘He has just arrived. Such a surprise! I had no notion that he intended coming to Roville.’
I gave the couple the wary up-and-down, feeling like a cat in the middle of a lot of hounds. Sort of trapped feeling, you know what I mean. An inner voice was whispering that Bertram was up against it.
The brother was a small round cove with a face rather like a sheep. He wore pince-nez, his expression was benevolent, and he had on one of those collars which button at the back.
‘Welcome to Roville, Mr Wooster,’ he said.
‘Oh, Sidney!’ said the girl. ‘Doesn’t Mr Wooster remind you of Canon Blenkinsop, who came to Chipley to preach last Easter?’
‘My dear! The resemblance is most striking!’
They peered at me for a while as if I were something in a glass case, and I goggled back and had a good look at the girl. There’s no doubt about it, she was different from what Aunt Agatha had called the bold girls one meets in London nowadays. No bobbed hair and gaspers about her! I don’t know when I’ve met anybody who looked so – respectable is the only word. She had on a kind of plain dress, and her hair was plain, and her face was sort of mild and saint-like. I don’t pretend to be a Sherlock Holmes or anything of that order, but the moment I looked at her I said to myself, ‘The girl plays the organ in a village church!’
Well, we gazed at one another for a bit, and there was a certain amount of chit-chat, and then I tore myself away. But before I went I had been booked up to take brother and girl for a nice drive that afternoon. And the thought of it depressed me to such an extent that I felt there was only one thing to be done. I went straight back to my room, dug out the cummerbund, and draped it round the old tum. I turned round and Jeeves shied like a startled mustang.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said in a sort of hushed voice. ‘You are surely not proposing to appear in public in that thing?’
‘The cummerbund?’ I said in a careless, debonair way, passing it off. ‘Oh, rather!’
‘I should not advise it, sir, really I shouldn’t.’
‘Why not?’
?
??The effect, sir, is loud in the extreme.’
I tackled the blighter squarely. I mean to say, nobody knows better than I do that Jeeves is a master mind and all that, but, dash it, a fellow must call his soul his own. You can’t be a serf to your valet. Besides, I was feeling pretty low and the cummerbund was the only thing which could cheer me up.
‘You know, the trouble with you, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘is that you’re too – what’s the word I want? – too bally insular. You can’t realize that you aren’t in Piccadilly all the time. In a place like this a bit of colour and touch of the poetic is expected of you. Why, I’ve just seen a fellow downstairs in a morning suit of yellow velvet.’
‘Nevertheless, sir –’
‘Jeeves,’ I said firmly, ‘my mind is made up. I am feeling a little low-spirited and need cheering. Besides, what’s wrong with it? This cummerbund seems to me to be called for. I consider that it has rather a Spanish effect. A touch of the hidalgo. Sort of Vicente y Blasco What’s-his-name stuff. The jolly old hidalgo off to the bull fight.’
‘Very good, sir,’ said Jeeves coldly.
Dashed upsetting, this sort of thing. If there’s one thing that gives me the pip, it’s unpleasantness in the home; and I could see that relations were going to be fairly strained for a while. And, coming on top of Aunt Agatha’s bombshell about the Hemmingway girl, I don’t mind confessing it made me feel more or less as though nobody loved me.
The drive that afternoon was about as mouldy as I had expected. The curate chappie prattled on of this and that; the girl admired the view; and I got a headache early in the proceedings which started at the sole of my feet and got worse all the way up. I tottered back to my room to dress for dinner, feeling like a toad under the harrow. If it hadn’t been for that cummerbund business earlier in the day I could have sobbed on Jeeves’s neck and poured out all my troubles to him. Even as it was, I couldn’t keep the thing entirely to myself.
‘I say, Jeeves,’ I said.
‘Sir?’
‘Mix me a stiffish brandy and soda.’