‘She stole my pearls! I am convinced of it.’
This started the whisker specialist off again, and in about a couple of minutes Aunt Agatha had reached the frozen grande-dame stage and was putting the last of the bandits through it in the voice she usually reserves for snubbing waiters in restaurants.
‘I tell you, my good man, for the hundredth time –’
‘I say,’ I said, ‘don’t want to interrupt you and all that sort of thing, but these aren’t the little chaps by any chance, are they?’
I pulled the pearls out of my pocket and held them up.
‘These look like pearls, what?’
I don’t know when I’ve had a more juicy moment. It was one of those occasions about which I shall prattle to my grandchildren – if I ever have any, which at the moment of going to press seems more or less of a hundred-to-one shot. Aunt Agatha simply deflated before my eyes. It reminded me of when I once saw some chappies letting the gas out of a balloon.
‘Where – where – where –’ she gurgled.
‘I got them from your friend, Miss Hemmingway.’
Even now she didn’t get it.
‘From Miss Hemmingway. Miss Hemmingway! But – but how did they come into her possession?’
‘How?’ I said. ‘Because she jolly well stole them. Pinched them! Swiped them! Because that’s how she makes her living, dash it – palling up to unsuspicious people in hotels and sneaking their jewellery. I don’t know what her alias is, but her bally brother, the chap whose collar buttons at the back, is known in criminal circles as Soapy Sid.’
She blinked.
‘Miss Hemmingway a thief! I – I –’ She stopped and looked feebly at me. ‘But how did you manage to recover the pearls, Bertie dear?’
‘Never mind,’ I said crisply. ‘I have my methods.’ I dug out my entire stock of manly courage, breathed a short prayer and let her have it right in the thorax.
‘I must say, Aunt Agatha, dash it all,’ I said severely, ‘I think you have been infernally careless. There’s a printed notice in every bedroom in this place saying that there’s a safe in the manager’s office, where jewellery and valuables ought to be placed, and you absolutely disregarded it. And what’s the result? The first thief who came along simply walked into your room and pinched your pearls. And instead of admitting that it was all your fault, you started biting this poor man here in the gizzard. You have been very, very unjust to this poor man.’
‘Yes, yes,’ moaned the poor man.
‘And this unfortunate girl, what about her? Where does she get off? You’ve accused her of stealing the things on absolutely no evidence. I think she would be jolly well advised to bring an action for – for whatever it is and soak you for substantial damages.’
‘Mais oui, mais ouis, c’est trop fort!’ shouted the Bandit Chief, backing me up like a good ’un. And the chambermaid looked up inquiringly, as if the sun was breaking through the clouds.
‘I shall recompense her,’ said Aunt Agatha feebly.
‘If you take my tip you jolly well will, and that eftsoons or right speedily. She’s got a cast-iron case, and if I were her I wouldn’t take a penny under twenty quid. But what gives me the pip most is the way you’ve unjustly abused this poor man here and tried to give his hotel a bad name –’
‘Yes, by damn! It’s too bad! cried the whiskered marvel. ‘You careless old woman! You give my hotel bad names, would you or wasn’t it? Tomorrow you leave my hotel, by great Scotland!’
And more to the same effect, all good, ripe stuff. And presently having said his say he withdrew, taking the chambermaid with him, the latter with a crisp tenner clutched in a vice-like grip. I suppose she and the bandit split it outside. A French hotel manager wouldn’t be likely to let real money wander away from him without counting himself in on the division.
I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.
‘I don’t want to rub it in, Aunt Agatha,’ I said coldly, ‘but I should just like to point out before I go that the girl who stole your pearls is the girl you’ve been hounding me on to marry ever since I got here. Good heavens! Do you realize that if you had brought the thing off I should probably have had children who would have sneaked my watch while I was dandling them on my knee? I’m not a complaining sort of chap as a rule, but I must say that another time I do think you might be more careful how you go about egging me on to marry females.’
I gave her one look, turned on my heel and left the room.
‘Ten o’clock, a clear night, and all’s well, Jeeves,’ I said, breezing back into the good old suite.
‘I am gratified to hear it, sir.’
‘If twenty quid would be any use to you, Jeeves –’
‘I am much obliged, sir.’
There was a pause. And then – well, it was a wrench, but I did it. I unstripped the cummerbund and handed it over.
‘Do you wish me to press this, sir?’
I gave the thing one last, longing look. It had been very dear to me.
‘No,’ I said, ‘take it away; give it to the deserving poor – I shall never wear it again.’
‘Thank you very much, sir,’ said Jeeves.
5
* * *
The Pride of the Woosters is Wounded
IF THERE’S ONE thing I like, it’s a quiet life. I’m not one of those fellows who get all restless and depressed if things aren’t happening to them all the time. You can’t make it too placid for me. Give me regular meals, a good show with decent music every now and then, and one or two pals to totter round with, and I ask no more.
That is why the jar, when it came, was such a particularly nasty jar. I mean, I’d returned from Roville with a sort of feeling that from now on nothing could occur to upset me. Aunt Agatha, I imagined, would require at least a year to recover from the Hemmingway affair: and apart from Aunt Agatha there isn’t anybody who really does much in the way of harrying me. It seemed to me that the skies were blue, so to speak, and no clouds in sight.
I little thought … Well, look here, what happened was this, and I ask you if it wasn’t enough to rattle anybody.
Once a year Jeeves takes a couple of weeks’ vacation and biffs off to the sea or somewhere to restore his tissues. Pretty rotten for me, of course, while he’s away. But it has to be stuck, so I stick it; and I must admit that he usually manages to get hold of a fairly decent fellow to look after me in his absence.
Well, the time had come round again, and Jeeves was in the kitchen giving the understudy a few tips about his duties. I happened to want a stamp or something, and I toddled down the passage to ask him for it. The silly ass had left the kitchen door open, and I hadn’t gone two steps when his voice caught me squarely in the eardrum.
‘You will find Mr Wooster,’ he was saying to the substitute chappie, ‘an exceedingly pleasant and amiable young gentleman, but not intelligent. By no means intelligent. Mentally he is negligible – quite negligible.’
Well, I mean to say, what!
I suppose, strictly speaking, I ought to have charged in and ticked the blighter off properly in no uncertain voice. But I doubt whether it’s humanly possible to tick Jeeves off. Personally, I didn’t even have a dash at it. I merely called for my hat and stick in a marked manner and legged it. But the memory rankled, if you know what I mean. We Woosters do not lightly forget. At least, we do – some things – appointments, and people’s birthdays, and letters to post, and all that – but not an absolute bally insult like the above. I brooded like the dickens.
I was still brooding when I dropped in at the oyster-bar at Buck’s for a quick bracer. I needed a bracer rather particularly at the moment, because I was on my way to lunch with Aunt Agatha. A pretty frightful ordeal, believe me or believe me not, even though I took it that after what had happened at Roville she would be in a fairly subdued and amiable mood. I had just had one quick and another
rather slower, and was feeling about as cheerio as was possible under the circs, when a muffled voice hailed me from the north-east, and, turning round, I saw young Bingo Little propped up in a corner, wrapping himself round a sizeable chunk of bread and cheese.
‘Hallo-allo-allo!’ I said. ‘Haven’t seen you for ages. You’ve not been in here lately, have you?’
‘No. I’ve been living out in the country.’
‘Eh?’ I said, for Bingo’s loathing for the country was well known. ‘Whereabouts?’
‘Down in Hampshire, at a place called Ditteredge.’
‘No, really? I know some people who’ve got a house there. The Glossops. Have you met them?’
‘Why, that’s where I’m staying!’ said young Bingo. ‘I’m tutoring the Glossop kid.’
‘What for?’ I said. I couldn’t seem to see young Bingo as a tutor. Though, of course, he did get a degree of sorts at Oxford, and I suppose you can always fool some of the people some of the time.
‘What for? For money, of course! An absolute sitter came unstitched in the second race at Haydock Park,’ said young Bingo, with some bitterness, ‘and I dropped my entire month’s allowance. I hadn’t the nerve to touch my uncle for any more, so it was a case of buzzing round to the agents and getting a job. I’ve been down there three weeks.’
‘I haven’t met the Glossop kid.’
‘Don’t!’ advised Bingo, briefly.
‘The only one of the family I really know is the girl.’ I had hardly spoken these words when the most extraordinary change came over young Bingo’s face. His eyes bulged, his cheeks flushed, and his Adam’s apple hopped about like one of those india-rubber balls on the top of the fountain in a shooting-gallery.
‘Oh, Bertie!’ he said, in a strangled sort of voice.
I looked at the poor fish anxiously. I knew that he was always falling in love with someone, but it didn’t seem possible that even he could have fallen in love with Honoria Glossop. To me the girl was simply nothing more nor less than a pot of poison. One of those dashed large, brainy, strenuous, dynamic girls you see so many of these days. She had been at Girton, where, in addition to enlarging her brain to the most frightful extent, she had gone in for every kind of sport and developed the physique of a middle-weight catch-as-catch-can wrestler. I’m not sure she didn’t box for the Varsity while she was up. The effect she had on me whenever she appeared was to make me want to slide into a cellar and lie low till they blew the All Clear.
Yet here was young Bingo obviously all for her. There was no mistaking it. The love light was in the blighter’s eyes.
‘I worship her, Bertie! I worship the very ground she treads on!’ continued the patient, in a loud, penetrating voice. Fred Thompson and one or two fellows had come in, and McGarry, the chappie behind the bar, was listening with his ears flapping. But there’s no reticence about Bingo. He always reminds me of the hero of a musical comedy who takes the centre of the stage, gathers the boys round him in a circle, and tells them all about his love at the top of his voice.
‘Have you told her?’
‘No, I haven’t the nerve. But we walk together in the garden most evenings, and it sometimes seems to me that there is a look in her eyes.’
‘I know that look. Like a sergeant-major.’
‘Nothing of the kind! Like a tender goddess.’
‘Half a second, old thing,’ I said. ‘Are you sure we’re talking about the same girl? The one I mean is Honoria. Perhaps there’s a younger sister or something I’ve not heard of?’
‘Her name is Honoria,’ bawled Bingo reverently.
‘And she strikes you as a tender goddess?’
‘She does.’
‘God bless you!’ I said.
‘She walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies; and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes. Another bit of bread and cheese,’ he said to the lad behind the bar.
‘You’re keeping your strength up,’ I said.
‘This is my lunch. I’ve got to meet Oswald at Waterloo at one-fifteen, to catch the train back. I brought him up to town to see the dentist.’
‘Oswald? Is that the kid?’
‘Yes. Pestilential to a degree.’
‘Pestilential! That reminds me, I’m lunching with my Aunt Agatha. I’ll have to pop off now, or I’ll be late.’
I hadn’t seen Aunt Agatha since that little affair of the pearls; and, while I didn’t anticipate any great pleasure from gnawing a bone in her society, I must say that there was one topic of conversation I felt pretty confident she wouldn’t touch on, and that was the subject of my matrimonial future. I mean, when a woman’s made a bloomer like the one Aunt Agatha made at Roville, you’d naturally think that a decent shame would keep her off it for, at any rate, a month or two.
But women beat me. I mean to say, as regards nerve. You’ll hardly credit it, but she actually started in on me with the fish. Absolutely with the fish, I give you my solemn word. We’d hardly exchanged a word about the weather, when she let me have it without a blush.
‘Bertie,’ she said, ‘I’ve been thinking again about you and how necessary it is that you should get married. I quite admit that I was dreadfully mistaken in my opinion of that terrible, hypocritical girl at Roville, but this time there is no danger of an error. By great good luck I have found the very wife for you, a girl whom I have only recently met, but whose family is above suspicion. She has plenty of money, too, though that does not matter in your case. The great point is that she is strong, self-reliant and sensible, and will counterbalance the deficiencies and weaknesses of your character. She has met you; and, while there is naturally much in you of which she disapproves, she does not dislike you. I know this, for I have sounded her – guardedly, of course – and I am sure you have only to make the first advance –’
‘Who is it?’ I would have said it long before, but the shock had made me swallow a bit of roll the wrong way, and I had only just finished turning purple and trying to get a bit of air back into the old windpipe. ‘Who is it?’
‘Sir Roderick Glossop’s daughter, Honoria.’
‘No, no!’ I cried, paling beneath the tan.
‘Don’t be silly, Bertie. She is just the wife for you.’
‘Yes, but look here –’
‘She will mould you.’
‘But I don’t want to be moulded.’
Aunt Agatha gave me the kind of look she used to give me when I was a kid and had been found in the jam cupboard.
‘Bertie! I hope you are not going to be troublesome.’
‘Well, but I mean –’
‘Lady Glossop has very kindly invited you to Ditteredge Hall for a few days. I told her you would be delighted to come down tomorrow.’
‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got a dashed important engagement tomorrow.’
‘What engagement?’
‘Well – er –’
‘You have no engagement. And, even if you had, you must put it off. I shall be very seriously annoyed, Bertie, if you do not go to Ditteredge Hall tomorrow.’
‘Oh, right-o!’ I said.
It wasn’t two minutes after I had parted from Aunt Agatha before the old fighting spirit of the Woosters reasserted itself. Ghastly as the peril was which loomed before me, I was conscious of a rummy sort of exhilaration. It was a tight corner, but the tighter the corner, I felt, the more juicily should I score off Jeeves when I got myself out of it without a bit of help from him. Ordinarily, of course, I should have consulted him and trusted to him to solve the difficulty; but after what I had heard him saying in the kitchen, I was dashed if I was going to demean myself. When I got home I addressed the man with light abandon.
‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘I’m in a bit of a difficulty.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir.’
‘Yes, quite a bad hole. In fact, you might say on the brink of a precipice, and faced by an awful doom.’
‘If I could be of any assistance, sir –??
?
‘Oh, no. No, no. Thanks very much, but no, no. I won’t trouble you. I’ve no doubt I shall be able to get out of it by myself.’
‘Very good, sir.’
So that was that. I’m bound to say I’d have welcomed a bit more curiosity from the fellow, but that is Jeeves all over. Cloaks his emotions, if you know what I mean.
Honoria was away when I got to Ditteredge on the following afternoon. Her mother told me that she was staying with some people named Braythwayt in the neighbourhood, and would be back next day, bringing the daughter of the house with her for a visit. She said I would find Oswald out in the grounds, and such is a mother’s love that she spoke as if that were a bit of a boost for the grounds and an inducement to go there.
Rather decent, the grounds at Ditteredge. A couple of terraces, a bit of lawn with a cedar on it, a bit of shrubbery, and finally a small but goodish lake with a stone bridge running across it. Directly I’d worked my way round the shrubbery I spotted young Bingo leaning against the bridge smoking a cigarette. Sitting on the stone-work, fishing, was a species of kid whom I took to be Oswald the Plague-Spot.
Bingo was both surprised and delighted to see me, and introduced me to the kid. If the latter was surprised and delighted too, he concealed it like a diplomat. He just looked at me, raised his eyebrows slightly, and went on fishing. He was one of those supercilious striplings who give you the impression that you went to the wrong school and that your clothes don’t fit.
‘This is Oswald,’ said Bingo.
‘What,’ I replied cordially, ‘could be sweeter? How are you?’
‘Oh, all right,’ said the kid.
‘Nice place, this.’
‘Oh, all right,’ said the kid.
‘Having a good time fishing?’
‘Oh, all right,’ said the kid.
Young Bingo led me off to commune apart.
‘Doesn’t jolly old Oswald’s incessant flow of prattle make your head ache sometimes?’ I asked.
Bingo sighed.
‘It’s a hard job.’
‘What’s a hard job?’