‘I oughtn’t to call him a worm. It’s not his fault, really. They brought him up from the time he was six, oppressing him daily, and it’s difficult for him to cast off the shackles, I suppose. I’m very sorry for him. But there’s a limit. When it came to being scared to tell them we were engaged, I put my foot down. I said he’d got to tell them, and he turned green and said Oh, he couldn’t, and I said All right, then, let’s call the whole thing off. And I haven’t spoken to him since, except to ask him to sing this song at the concert. And the unfortunate part of it all is, Bertie, that I’m crazier about him than ever. Just to think of him makes me want to howl and chew the carpet.’
At this point she buried her face in Sam Goldwyn’s coat, ostensibly by way of showing a proprietress’s affection, but really, I could see, being shrewd, in order to dry the starting tears. Personally, for the animal niffed to heaven, I would have preferred to use my cambric handkerchief, but girls will be girls.
‘Oh, well,’ she said, coming to the surface again.
It was a bit difficult to know how to carry on. A ‘There, there, little woman’ might have gone well, or it might not. After thinking it over for a moment, I too-badded.
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ she said, stiffening the upper lip. ‘Just one of those things. When do you go down to Deverill?’
‘This evening.’
‘How do you feel about it?’
‘Not too good. A certain coolness in the feet. I’m never at my best in the society of aunts and, according to Jeeves, they assemble in gangs at Deverill Hall. There are five of them, he says.’
‘That’s right.’
‘It’s a lot.’
‘Five too many. I don’t think you’ll like them, Bertie. One’s deaf, one’s dotty, and they’re all bitches.’
‘You use strong words, child.’
‘Only because I can’t think of any stronger. They’re awful. They’ve lived all their lives at that mouldering old hall, and they’re like something out of a three-volume novel. They judge everybody by the county standard. If you aren’t county, you don’t exist. I believe they swooned for weeks when their sister married Esmond’s father.’
‘Yes, Jeeves rather suggested that in their opinion he soiled the escutcheon.’
‘Nothing to the way I would have soiled it. Being in pix, I’m the scarlet woman.’
‘I’ve often wondered about that scarlet woman. Was she scarlet all over, or was it just that her face was red? However, that is not germane to the issue. So that’s how it is, is it?’
‘That’s how it is.’
I was rather glad that at this juncture the hound Sam Goldwyn made another of his sudden dives at my abdomen with the slogan ‘Back to Bertram’ on his lips, for it enabled me to bridge over an emotional moment. I was considerably concerned. What was to be done about it, I didn’t know, but there was no gainsaying that when it came to making matrimonial plans, the Pirbrights were not a lucky family.
Corky seemed to be feeling this, too.
‘It would happen, wouldn’t it,’ she said, ‘that the only one of all the millions of men I’ve met that I’ve ever wanted to marry can’t marry me because his aunts won’t let him.’
‘It’s tough on you,’ I agreed.
‘And just as tough on poor old Catsmeat. You wouldn’t think, just seeing him around, that Catsmeat was the sort of man to break his heart over a girl, but he is. He’s full of hidden depths, if you really know him. Gertrude means simply everything to him. And I doubt if she will be able to hold out against a combination of Esmond and her mother and the aunts.’
‘Yes, he told me pressure was being applied.’
‘How did you think he seemed?’
‘Low-spirited.’
‘Yes, he’s taking it hard,’ said Corky.
Her face clouded. Catsmeat has always been her ewe lamb, if you understand what I mean by ewe lamb. It was plain that she mourned for him in spirit, and no doubt at this point we should have settled down to a long talk about his spot of bother, examining it from every angle and trying to decide what was to be done for the best, had not the door opened and he blown in in person.
‘Hallo, Catsmeat,’ I said.
‘Hallo, Catsmeat, darling,’ said Corky.
‘Hallo,’ said Catsmeat.
I looked at Corky. She looked at me. I rather think we pursed our lips and, speaking for myself, I know I raised my eyebrows. For the demeanour of this Pirbright was that of a man who has abandoned hope, and the voice in which he had said ‘Hallo’ had been to all intents and purposes a voice from the tomb. The whole set-up, in short, such as to occasion pity and terror in the bosoms of those who wished him well.
He sank into a chair and closed his eyes, and for some moments remained motionless. Then, as if a bomb had suddenly exploded inside the bean, he shot up with a stifled cry, clasping his temples, and I began to see daylight. His deportment, so plainly that of a man aware that only prompt action in the nick of time has prevented his head splitting in half, told me that we had been mistaken in supposing that this living corpse had got that way purely through disappointed love. I touched the bell, and Jeeves appeared.
‘One of your special morning-afters, if you please, Jeeves.’
‘Very good, sir.’
He shimmered out, and I subjected Catsmeat to a keen glance. I am told by those who know that there are six varieties of hangover – the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie, and his manner suggested that he had got them all.
‘So you were lathered last night?’ I said.
‘I was perhaps a mite polluted,’ he admitted.
‘Jeeves has gone for one of his revivers.’
‘Thank you, Bertie, thank you,’ said Catsmeat in a low, soft voice, and closed his eyes again.
His intention obviously was to restore his tissues with a short nap, and personally I would have left him alone and let him go to it. But Corky was of sterner stuff. She took his head in both hands and shook it, causing him to shoot ceilingwards, this time with a cry so little stifled that it rang through the room like the death rattle of a hundred expiring hyenas. The natural consequence was that Sam Goldwyn began splitting the welkin, and with the view of taking him off the air I steered him to the door and bunged him out. I returned to find Corky ticking Catsmeat off in no uncertain manner.
‘You promised me faithfully you wouldn’t get pie-eyed, you poor fish,’ she was saying with sisterly vehemence. ‘What price the word of the Pirbrights?’
‘That’s all right “What price the word of the Pirbrights?”’ retorted Catsmeat with some spirit. ‘When I gave the word of the Pirbrights that I wouldn’t get pie-eyed, I didn’t know I should be dining with Gussie Fink-Nottle. Bertie will bear me out that it is not humanly possible to get through an evening alone with Gussie without large quantities of stimulants.’
I nodded.
‘He’s quite right,’ I said. ‘Even at the peak of his form Gussie isn’t everybody’s dream-comrade, and last night I should imagine he was low-spirited.’
‘Very low-spirited,’ said Catsmeat. ‘In my early touring days I have sometimes arrived at Southport on a rainy Sunday morning. Gussie gave me that same sense of hopeless desolation. He sat there with his lower jaw drooping, goggling at me like a codfish –’
‘Gussie,’ I explained to Corky, ‘has had a lovers’ tiff with his betrothed.’
‘– until after a bit I saw that there was only one thing to be done, if I was to survive the ordeal. I told the waiter to bring a magnum and leave it at my elbow. After that, things seemed to get better.’
‘Gussie, of course, drank orange juice?’
‘Throughout,’ said Catsmeat with a slight shudder.
I could see that even though he had made this manly, straightforward statement, Corky was still threatening to do the heavy sister and heap reproaches on a man who was in no condition to receive them, for even the best of women cannot refrain f
rom saying their say the morning after, so I hastened to continue the conversation on a neutral note.
‘Where did you dine?’
‘At the Dorchester.’
‘Go anywhere after dinner?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Where?’
‘Oh, hither and thither. East Dulwich, Ponder’s End, Limehouse –’
‘Why Limehouse?’
‘Well, I had always wanted to see it, and I may have had some idea of comparing its blues with mine. As to East Dulwich and Ponder’s End, I am not sure. Perhaps I heard someone recommend them, or possibly I just felt that the thing to do was to get about and see fresh faces. I had chartered a taxi for the evening and we roamed around, taking in the sights. Eventually we fetched up in Trafalgar Square.’
‘What time was this?’
‘About five in the morning. Have you ever been in Trafalgar Square at five in the morning? Very picturesque, that fountain in the first early light of the dawn. It was as we stood on its brink with the sun just beginning to gild the house-tops that I got an idea which I can now see, though it seemed a good one at the time, was a mistake.’
‘What was that?’
‘It struck me as a possibility that there might be newts in the fountain, and knowing how keen Gussie is on newts I advised him to wade in and hunt around.’
‘With all his clothes on?’
‘Yes, he had his clothes on. I remember noticing.’
‘But you can’t go wading in the Trafalgar Square fountain with all your clothes on.’
‘Yes, you can. Gussie did. My recollection of the thing is a trifle blurred, but I seem to recall that he took a bit of persuading. Yes, I’ve got it now,’ said Catsmeat, brightening. ‘I told him to wade, and he wouldn’t wade, and I said if he didn’t wade I would bean him with my magnum. So he waded.’
‘You still had the magnum?’
‘This was another one, which we had picked up in Limehouse.’
‘And Gussie waded?’
‘Yes, Gussie waded.’
‘I wonder he wasn’t pinched.’
‘He was,’ said Catsmeat. ‘A cop came along and gaffed him, and this morning he was given fourteen days without the option at Bosher Street police court.’
The door opened. Sam Goldwyn came bounding in and flung himself on my chest as if we had been a couple of lovers meeting at journey’s end.
He was followed by Jeeves, bearing a salver with a glass on it containing one of his dynamite specials.
4
* * *
WHEN I WAS a piefaced lad of some twelve summers, doing my stretch at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, the private school conducted by the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn, I remember hearing the Rev. Aubrey give the late Sir Philip Sidney a big build-up because, when wounded at the battle of somewhere and offered a quick one by a companion in arms, he told the chap who was setting them up to leave him out of that round and slip his spot to a nearby stretcher-case, whose need was greater than his. This spirit of selfless sacrifice, said the Rev. Aubrey, was what he would like to see in you boys – particularly you, Wooster, and how many times have I told you not to gape at me in that half-witted way? Close your mouth, boy, and sit up.
Well, if he had been one of our little circle, he would have seen it now. My primary impulse was to charge across and grab that glass from that salver and lower it at a gulp, for if ever I needed a bracer, it was then. But I stayed my hand. Even in that dreadful moment I was able to tell myself that Catsmeat’s need was greater than mine. I stood back, shimmying in every limb, and he got the juice and drained it, and after going through the motions of a man struck by lighting, always the immediate reaction to these pick-me-ups of Jeeves’s, said ‘Ha!’ and looked a lot better.
I passed a fevered hand across the brow.
‘Jeeves!’
‘Sir?’
‘Do you know what?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Gussie Fink-Nottle is in stir.’
‘Indeed, sir?’
I passed another hand across the brow, and the blood pressure rose several notches. I ought, I suppose, to have got it into my nut by this time that no news item, however front page, is going to make Jeeves roll his eyes and leap about, but that ‘Indeed, sir?’ stuff of his never fails to get the Wooster goat.
‘Don’t say “Indeed, sir?” I repeat. Wading in the Trafalgar Square fountain at five ack emma this morning, Augustus Fink-Nottle was apprehended by the police and is in the coop for fourteen days. And he’s due at Deverill Hall this evening.’
Catsmeat, who had closed his eyes, opened them for a moment.
‘Shall I tell you something?’ he said. ‘He won’t be there.’
He reclosed the eyes, and I passed a third hand across the brow.
‘You see the ghastly position, Jeeves? What is Miss Bassett going to say? What will her attitude be when she learns the facts? She opens tomorrow’s paper. She sees that loved name in headlines in the police court section …’
‘No, she doesn’t,’ said Catsmeat. ‘Because Gussie, showing unexpected intelligence, gave his name as Alfred Duff Cooper.’
‘Well, what’s going to happen when he doesn’t turn up at the Hall?’
‘Yes, there’s that,’ said Catsmeat, and fell into a refreshing sleep.
‘I’ll tell you what Miss Bassett is going to say. She is going to say … Jeeves!’
‘Sir?’
‘You are letting your attention wander.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir. I was observing the dog. If you notice, sir, he has commenced to eat the sofa cushion.’
‘Never mind about the dog.’
‘I think it would be advisable to remove the little fellow to the kitchen, sir,’ he said with respectful firmness. Jeeves is a great stickler for having things just right. ‘I will return as soon as he is safely immured.’
He withdrew, complete with dog, and Corky caught the speaker’s eye. For some moments she had been hovering on the outskirts with the air of one not completely abreast of the continuity.
‘But, Bertie,’ she said, ‘why all the excitement and agony? I could understand this Mr Fink-Nottle being a little upset, but why are you skipping like the high hills?’
I was glad that Jeeves had temporarily absented himself from the conference-table, as it would have been impossible for me to unbosom myself freely about Madeline Bassett in his presence. Naturally he knows all the circumstances in re the Bassett, and I know he knows them, but we do not discuss her. To do so would be bandying a woman’s name. The Woosters do not bandy a woman’s name. Nor, for the matter of that, do the Jeeveses.
‘Hasn’t Catsmeat told you about me and Madeline Bassett?’
‘Not a word.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you why I’m skipping like the high hills,’ I said, and proceeded to do so.
The Bassett-Wooster imbroglio or mix-up will, of course, be old stuff to those of my public who were hanging on my lips when I told of it before, but there are always new members coming along, and for the benefit of these new members I will give a brief what’s-it-called of the facts.
The thing started at Brinkley Court, my Aunt Dahlia’s place in Worcestershire, when Gussie and I and this blighted Bassett were putting in a spell there during the previous summer. It was one of those cases you so often read about where Bloke A loves a girl but fears to speak and a friend of his, Bloke B, out of the kindness of his heart, offers to pave the way for him with a few well-chosen words – completely overlooking, poor fathead, the fact that by doing so he will be sticking his neck out and simply asking for it. What I’m driving at is that Gussie, though very much under the influence, could not bring himself to start the necessary pourparlers, and like an ass I told him to leave this to me.
And so, steering the girl out into the twilight one evening, I pulled some most injudicious stuff about there being hearts at Brinkley Court that ached for love of her. And the first thing I knew, she was saying that of course she had guessed how I f
elt, for a girl always knows, doesn’t she, but she was so, so sorry it could not be, for she was sold on Gussie. But, she went on, and it was this that had made peril lurk ever since, if there should come a time when she found that Gussie was not the rare, stainless soul she thought him, she would hand him his hat and make me happy.
And, as I have related elsewhere, there had been moments when it had been touch and go, notably on the occasion when Gussie got lit up like a candelabra and in that condition presented the prizes to the young scholars of Market Snodsbury Grammar School. She had scratched his nomination then, though subsequently relenting, and it could not but be that she would scratch it again, should she discover that the man on whom she looked as a purer, loftier spirit than other men had received an exemplary sentence for wading in the Trafalgar Square fountain. Nothing puts an idealistic girl off a fellow more than the news that he is doing fourteen days in the jug.
All this I explained to Corky, and she said Yes, she saw what I meant.
‘I should think you do see what I mean. I shan’t have a hope. Let Madeline Bassett become hep to what has occurred, and there can be but one result. Gussie will get the bum’s rush, and the bowed figure you will see shambling down the aisle at her side, while the customers reach for their hats and the organ plays ‘The Voice That Breathed O’er Eden’, will be that of Bertram Wilberforce Wooster.’
‘I didn’t know your name was Wilberforce.’
I explained that except in moments of great emotion one hushed it up.
‘But Bertie, I can’t understand why you don’t want to shamble down aisles at her side. I’ve seen a photograph of her at the Hall, and she’s a pippin.’
This is a very common error into which people fall who have never met Madeline Bassett but have only seen her photograph. As far as the outer crust is concerned, there is little, I fully realize, to cavil at in this pre-eminent bit of bad news. The eyes are large and lustrous, the features delicately moulded, the hair, nose, teeth and ears well up to, if not above, the average standard. Judge her by the photograph alone, and you have something that would be widely accepted as a pin-up girl.