‘It would be a graceful act.’
‘After all, what’s money? You can’t take it with you.’
‘The right spirit.’
‘But isn’t Corky going to be a bit at a loss when he suddenly shows up?’
‘That’s all fixed. I met her in the village and told her.’
‘And she approved?’
‘Wholeheartedly. Corky always approves of anything that seems likely to tend to start something.’
‘She’s a wonderful girl.’
‘A very admirable character. By the way, she tells me you put in that word in season.’
‘Yes. I thought she seemed braced.’
‘That’s how she struck me, too. Odd that she should be so crazy about Esmond Haddock. I’ve only seen him from a distance, of course, but I should have imagined he would have been a bit on the stiff side for Corky.’
‘He’s not really stiff. You should see him relaxing over the port.’
‘Perhaps you’re right. And, anyway, love’s a thing you can’t argue about. I suppose it would perplex thousands that Gertrude, bless her, loves me. Yet she does. And look at poor little Queenie. Heartbroken over the loss of a rozzer I wouldn’t be seen in a ditch with. And talking of Queenie, I was thinking of taking her to the pictures in Basingstoke this afternoon, if you’ll lend me your car.’
‘Of course. You feel it would cheer her up?’
‘It might. And I should like to slap balm on that wounded spirit, if it can be managed. It’s curious how, when you’re in love, you yearn to go about doing acts of kindness to everybody. I am bursting with a sort of yeasty benevolence these days, like one of those chaps in Dickens. I very nearly bought you a tie in London. Gosh! Who’s that?’
Someone had knocked on the door.
‘Come in,’ I said, and Catsmeat dashed at the wardrobe and dashed out festooned in trousers and things. Striking the professional note.
Silversmith came navigating over the threshold. This majestic man always had in his deportment a suggestion of the ambassador about to deliver important State papers to a reigning monarch, and now the resemblance was heightened by the fact that in front of his ample stomach he was bearing a salver with a couple of telegrams on it. I gathered them in, and he went navigating out again.
Catsmeat replaced the trousers. He was quivering a little.
‘What effect does that bloke have on you, Bertie?’ he asked in a hushed voice, as if he were speaking in a cathedral. ‘He paralyses me. I don’t know if you are familiar with the works of Joseph Conrad, but there’s a chap in his Lord Jim of whom he says “Had you been the Emperor of the East and West, you could not have ignored your inferiority in his presence”. That’s Silversmith. He fills me with an awful humility. He shrivels my immortal soul to the size of a parched pea. He’s the living image of some of those old time pros who used to give me such a hell of a time when I first went on the stage. Well, go on. Open them.’
‘You mean these telegrams?’
‘What did you think I meant?’
‘They’re addressed to Gussie.’
‘Of course they’re addressed to Gussie. But they’re for you.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘They must be. One’s probably from Jeeves, telling you that the balloon has gone up.’
‘But the other? It may be a tender bob’s-worth from Madeline.’
‘Ah, go on.’
I was firm.
‘No, Catsmeat. The code of the Woosters restrains me. The code of the Woosters is more rigid than the code of the Catsmeats. A Wooster cannot open a telegram addressed to another, even if for the moment he is that other, if you see what I mean. I’ll have to submit them to Gussie.’
‘All right, if you see it that way. I’ll be off, then, to try to bring a little sunshine into Queenie’s life.’
He legged it, and I took a seat and went on being firm. The hour was then three-forty-five.
I continued firm till about five minutes to four.
The catch about the code of the Woosters is that if you start examining it with a couple of telegrams staring you in the face, one of them almost certainly containing news of vital import, you find yourself after a while beginning to wonder if it’s really so hot, after all. I mean to say, the thought creeps in that maybe, if one did but know, the Woosters are priceless asses to let themselves be ruled by a code like that. By four o’clock I wasn’t quite so firm as I had been. By ten past my fingers were definitely twitching.
It was at four-fifteen sharp that I opened the first telegram. As Catsmeat had predicted, it was a cautiously worded communication from Jeeves, handed in at Bramley-on-Sea and signed Bodger’s Stores, guardedly intimating that everything had gone according to plan. The goods, it said, were in transit and would be delivered in a plain van in the course of the evening. Highly satisfactory.
I put a match to it and reduced it to ashes, for you can’t be too careful, and having done so was concerned to find, as I looked at the other envelope, that my fingers were still twitching. I took the thing and twiddled it thoughtfully.
I can guess what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that, having perused the first one and mastered its contents, there was no need whatever for me to open the other, and you are perfectly right. But you know how it is. Ask the first lion cub you meet, and it will tell you that, once you’ve tasted blood, there is no pulling up, and it’s the same with opening telegrams. Conscience whispered that this one, addressed to Gussie and intended for Gussie, was for Gussie’s eyes alone, and I agreed absolutely. But I could no more stop myself opening it than you can stop yourself eating another salted almond.
I ripped the envelope, and the quick blush of shame mantled the cheek as my eye caught the signature ‘Madeline’.
Then my eye caught the rest of the bally thing.
It read as follows:
Fink-Nottle
Deverill Hall
King’s Deverill
Hants
Letter received. Cannot understand why not had reassuring telegram. Sure you concealing accident terribly serious. Fever anxiety. Fear worst. Arriving Deverill Hall tomorrow afternoon. Love. Kisses. Madeline.
14
* * *
YES, THAT WAS the torpedo that exploded under my bows, and I had the feeling you get sometimes that some practical joker has suddenly removed all the bones from your legs, substituting for them an unsatisfactory jelly. I re-read the thing, to make sure I had seen what I thought I had seen, and, finding I had, buried the face in the hands.
It was the being without advisers that made the situation so bleak. On these occasions when Fate, having biffed you in the eye, proceeds to kick you in the pants, you want to gather the boys about you and thresh things out, and there weren’t any boys to gather. Jeeves was in London, Catsmeat in Basingstoke. It made me feel like a Prime Minister who starts to call an important Cabinet meeting and finds that the Home Secretary and the Lord President of the Council have nipped over to Paris and the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries and the rest of the gang are at the dog races.
There seemed to be nothing to do but wait till Catsmeat, having sat through the news and the main feature and the two-reel Silly Symphony, wended homeward. And though Reason told me that he couldn’t get back for another two hours or more and that even when he did get back it was about a hundred to eight against him having any constructive policy to put forward, I went down to the main gate and paced up and down, scanning the horizon like Sister what-was-her-name in that story one used to read.
The evening was well advanced, and the local birds had long since called it a day, when I spotted the two-seater coming down the road. I flagged it, and Catsmeat applied the brakes.
‘Oh, hallo, Bertie,’ he said in a subdued sort of voice, and when he had alighted and I had drawn him apart he explained the reason for his sober deportment.
‘Most unfortunate,’ he said, throwing a commiserating glance at the occupant of the other seat, wh
o was staring before her with anguished eyes and from time to time taking a dab at them with her handkerchief. ‘With these tough films so popular, I suppose I might have foreseen that something like this would happen. The picture was full of cops, scores of cops racing to and fro saying “Oh, so you won’t talk?” and it was too much for poor little Queenie. Just twisted the knife in the wound, as you might say. She’s better now, though still sniffing.’
I suppose if you went through the W1 postal district of London with a fine-tooth comb and a brace of bloodhounds, you wouldn’t find more than about three men readier than Bertram Wooster to sympathize with a woman’s distress, and in ordinary circumstances I would unquestionably have given a low, pitying whistle and said ‘Too bad, too bad’. But I hadn’t time now to mourn over stricken parlourmaids. All the mourning at my disposal was earmarked for Wooster, B.
‘Read this,’ I said.
He cocked an eye at me.
‘Hallo!’ he said, in what is known as a sardonic manner. ‘So the code of the Woosters sprang a leak? I had an idea it would.’
I think he was about to develop the theme and be pretty dashed humorous at my expense, but at this moment he started to scan the document and the gist hit him in the eyeball.
‘H’m!’ he said. ‘This will want a little management.’
‘Yes,’ I concurred.
‘It calls for sophisticated handling. We shall have to think this over.’
‘I’ve been thinking it over for hours.’
‘Yes, but you’ve got one of those cheap substitute brains which are never any good. It will be different when a man like me starts giving it the cream of his intellect.’
‘If only Jeeves were here!’
‘Yes, we could use Jeeves. It’s a pity he is not with us.’
‘And it’s a pity,’ I couldn’t help pointing out, though the man of sensibility dislikes rubbing these things in, ‘that you started the whole trouble by making Gussie wade in the Trafalgar Square fountain.’
‘True. One regrets that. Yet at the time it seemed so right, so inevitable. There he was, I mean, and there was the fountain. I felt very strongly that here was an opportunity which might not occur again. And while I would be the last to deny that the aftermath hasn’t been too good, it was certainly value for money. A man who has seen Gussie Fink-Nottle chasing newts in the Trafalgar Square fountain in correct evening costume at five o’clock in the morning is a man who has lived. He has got something he can tell his grandchildren. But if we are apportioning the blame, we can go further back than that. Where the trouble started was when you insisted on me giving him dinner. Madness. You might have known something would crack.’
‘Well, it’s no good talking about it.’
‘No. Action is what we want. Sharp, decisive action as dished out by Napoleon. I suppose you will shortly be going in and dressing for dinner?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘How soon after dinner will you be in your room?’
‘As soon as I can jolly well manage it.’
‘Expect me there, then, probably with a whole plan of campaign cut and dried. And now I really must be getting back to Queenie. She will be on duty before long and will want to powder her nose and remove the tear stains. Poor little soul! If you knew how my heart bleeds for that girl, Bertie, you would shudder.’
And, of course, it being so vital that we should get together with the minimum of delay, that night turned out to be the one night when it was impossible to take an early powder. Instead of the ordinary dinner, a regular binge had been arranged, with guests from all over the countryside. No fewer than ten of Hampshire’s more prominent stiffs had been summoned to the trough, and they stuck on like limpets long after any competent chucker-out would have bounced them. No doubt, if you have gone to the sweat of driving twenty miles to a house to dine, you don’t feel like just snatching a chop and dashing off. You hang on for the musical evening and the drinks at ten-thirty.
Be that as it may, it wasn’t till close on midnight that the final car rolled away. And when I bounded to my room, off duty at last, there was no sign of Catsmeat.
There was, however, a note from him lying on the pillow, and I tore it open with a feverish flick of the finger.
It was dated eleven pm, and its tone was reproachful. He rebuked me for what he described as sitting gorging and swilling with my fine friends when I ought to have been at the conference table doing a bit of honest work. He asked me if I thought he was going to remain seated on his fanny in my damned room all night, and hoped that I would have a hangover next day, as well as indigestion from too much rich food. He couldn’t wait any longer, he said, it being his intention to take my car and drive to London so as to be at Wimbledon Common bright and early tomorrow morning for an interview with Madeline Bassett. And at that interview, he went on, concluding on a cheerier note, he would fix everything up just the same as Mother makes it, for he had got the idea of a lifetime, an idea so superb that I could set my mind, if I called it a mind, completely at rest. He doubted, he said, whether Jeeves himself, even if full to the brim of fish, could have dug up a better modus operandi.
Well, this was comforting, of course, always provided that one could accept the theory that he was as good as he thought he was. You never know with Catsmeat. In one of his school reports, which I happened to see while prowling about the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn’s study one night in search of biscuits, the Rev. Aubrey had described him as ‘brilliant but unsound’, and if ever a headmaster with a face like a cassowary rang the bell and entitled himself to receive a cigar or a coco-nut, this headmaster was that headmaster.
However, I will own that his communication distinctly eased the spirit. It is a pretty well established fact that the heart bowed down with weight of woe to weakest hope will cling, and that’s what mine did. It was in quite an uplifted frame of mind that I shed the soup and fish and climbed into the slumberwear. I rather think, though I wouldn’t swear to it, that I sang a bar or two of a recent song hit.
I had just donned the dressing-gown and was preparing for a final cigarette, when the door opened and Gussie came in.
Gussie was in peevish mood. He hadn’t liked the stiffs, and he complained with a good deal of bitterness at having had to waste in their society an evening which might have been spent chez Corky.
‘You couldn’t oil out of a big dinner party,’ I urged.
‘No, that’s what Corky said. She said it wouldn’t do. Noblesse oblige was one of the expressions she used. Amazing what high principles she has. You don’t often find a girl as pretty as that with such high principles. And how pretty she is, isn’t she, Bertie? Or, rather, when I say pretty, I mean angelically lovely.’
I agreed that Corky’s face wouldn’t stop a clock, and he retorted warmly what did I mean it wouldn’t stop a clock.
‘She’s divine. She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. It seems so extraordinary that she should be Pirbright’s sister. You would think any sister of Pirbright’s would be as repulsive as he is.’
‘I’d call Catsmeat rather good-looking.’
‘I disagree with you. He’s a hellhound, and it comes out in his appearance. “There are newts in that fountain, Gussie,” he said to me. “Get after them without a second’s delay.” And wouldn’t take No for an answer. Urged me on with sharp hunting cries. “Yoicks!” he said, and ‘Tallyho!” But what I came about, Bertie,’ said Gussie, breaking off abruptly as if this dip into the past pained him, ‘was to ask if you could lend me that tie of yours with the pink lozenges on the dove-grey background. I shall be dropping in at the Vicarage tomorrow morning, and I want to look my best.’
Apart from the fleeting thought that he was a bit of an optimist if he expected a tie with pink lozenges on a dove-grey background to undo Nature’s handiwork to the extent of making him look anything but a fish-faced gargoyle, my reaction to these words was a feeling of profound relief that I had had that talk with Corky and obtained her promise that she woul
d lose no time in choking Gussie off and putting him on the ice.
For it was plain that there was no time to be lost. Every word this super-heated newt-fancier uttered showed more clearly the extent to which he had got it up his nose. Chatting with Augustus Fink-Nottle about Corky was like getting the inside from Mark Antony on the topic of Cleopatra, and every second he spent out of the frigidaire was fraught with peril. It was only too plain that The Larches, Wimbledon Common, had ceased to mean a thing in his life and instead of being a holy shrine housing the girl of his dreams, had become just an address in the suburban telephone book.
I gave him the tie, and he thanked me and started out.
‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, pausing at the door, ‘you remember pestering me to write to Madeline. Well, I’ve done it. I wrote to her this afternoon. Why are you looking like a dying duck?’
I was looking like a dying duck because I had, of course, instantly spotted the snag. What, I was asking myself, was Madeline Bassett going to think when on top of the letter about the sprained wrist she got one in Gussie’s handwriting with no reference in it whatever to runaway horses and completely silent on the theme of golden-haired children with lisps?
I revealed to Gussie the recent activities of the Catsmeat-Wooster duo, and he frowned disapprovingly. Most officious, he said, writing people’s love letters for them, and not in the best of taste.
‘However,’ he proceeded, ‘it doesn’t really matter, because what I said in my letter was that everything was off.’
I tottered and would have fallen, had I not clutched at a passing chest of drawers.
‘Off?’
‘I’ve broken the engagement. I’ve been feeling for some days now that Madeline, though a nice girl, won’t do. My heart belongs to Corky. Good night again, Bertie. Thanks for the tie.’