However, there beyond a question she was.
‘Mr Wooster?’
‘Oh, hullo, Lady Wickham.’
‘Are you there?’
I put her straight on this point, and she took time out to sob again. She then spoke in a hoarse, throaty voice, like Tallulah Bankhead after swallowing a fish bone the wrong way.
‘Is this awful news true?’
‘Eh?’
‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!’
‘I don’t quite follow.’
‘In this morning’s Times.’
I’m pretty shrewd, and it seemed to me, reading between the lines, that there must have been something in the issue of The Times published that morning that for some reason had upset her, though why she should have chosen me to tell her troubles to was a mystery not easy to fathom. I was about to institute inquiries in the hope of spearing a solution, when in addition to sobbing she started laughing in a hyaena-esque manner, making it clear to my trained ear that she was having hysterics. And before I could speak there was a dull thud suggestive of some solid body falling to earth, I knew not where, and when the dialogue was resumed, I found that the butler had put himself on as an understudy.
‘Mr Wooster?’
‘Still here.’
‘I regret to say that her ladyship has fainted.’
‘It was she I heard going bump?’
‘Precisely, sir. Thank you very much, sir. Good-bye.’
He replaced the receiver and went about his domestic duties, these no doubt including the loosening of the stricken woman’s corsets and burning feathers under her nose, leaving me to chew on the situation without further bulletins from the front.
It seemed to me that the thing to do here was to get hold of The Times and see what it had to offer in the way of enlightenment. It’s a paper I don’t often look at, preferring for breakfast reading the Mirror and the Mail, but Jeeves takes it in and I have occasionally borrowed his copy with a view to having a shot at the crossword puzzle. It struck me as a possibility that he might have left today’s issue in the kitchen, and so it proved. I came back with it, lowered myself into a chair, lit another cigarette and proceeded to cast an eye on its contents.
At a cursory glance what might be called swoon material appeared to be totally absent from its columns. The Duchess of something had been opening a bazaar at Wimbledon in aid of a deserving charity, there was an article on salmon fishing on the Wye, and a Cabinet Minister had made a speech about conditions in the cotton industry, but I could see nothing in these items to induce a loss of consciousness. Nor did it seem probable that a woman would have passed out cold on reading that Herbert Robinson (26) of Grove Road, Ponder’s End, had been jugged for stealing a pair of green and yellow checked trousers. I turned to the cricket news. Had some friend of hers failed to score in one of yesterday’s county matches owing to a doubtful l.b.w. decision?
It was just after I had run the eye down the Births and Marriages that I happened to look at the Engagements, and a moment later I was shooting out of my chair as if a spike had come through its cushioned seat and penetrated the fleshy parts.
‘Jeeves!’ I yelled, and then remembered that he had long since gone with the wind. A bitter thought, for if ever there was an occasion when his advice and counsel were of the essence, this occ. was that occ. The best I could do, tackling it solo, was to utter a hollow g. and bury the face in the hands. And though I seem to hear my public tut-tutting in disapproval of such neurotic behaviour, I think the verdict of history will be that the paragraph on which my gaze had rested was more than enough to excuse a spot of face-burying.
It ran as follows:
FORTHCOMING MARRIAGES
The engagement is announced between Bertram Wilberforce Wooster of Berkeley Mansions, W.l, and Roberta, daughter of the late Sir Cuthbert Wickham and Lady Wick-ham of Skeldings Hall, Herts.
3
* * *
WELL, AS I was saying, I had several times when under the influence of her oomph taken up with Roberta Wickham the idea of such a merger, but – and here is the point I would stress – I could have sworn that on each occasion she had declined to co-operate, and that in a manner which left no room for doubt regarding her views. I mean to say, when a girl, offered a good man’s heart, laughs like a bursting paper bag and tells him not to be a silly ass, the good man is entitled, I think, to assume that the whole thing is off. In the light of this announcement in The Times I could only suppose that on one of these occasions, unnoticed by me possibly because my attention had wandered, she must have drooped her eyes and come through with a murmured ‘Right ho.’ Though when this could have happened, I hadn’t the foggiest.
It was, accordingly, as you will readily imagine, a Bertram Wooster with dark circles under his eyes and a brain threatening to come apart at the seams who braked the sports model on the following afternoon at the front door of Brinkley Court – a Bertram, in a word, who was asking himself what the dickens all this was about. Non-plussed more or less sums it up. It seemed to me that my first move must be to get hold of my fiancée and see if she had anything to contribute in the way of clarifying the situation.
As is generally the case at country houses on a fine day, there seemed to be nobody around. In due season the gang would assemble for tea on the lawn, but at the moment I could spot no friendly native to tell me where I might find Bobbie. I proceeded, therefore, to roam hither and thither about the grounds and messuages in the hope of locating her, wishing that I had a couple of bloodhounds to aid me in my task, for the Travers demesne is a spacious one and there was a considerable amount of sunshine above, though none, I need scarcely mention, in my heart.
And I was tooling along a mossy path with the brow a bit wet with honest sweat, when there came to my ears the unmistakable sound of somebody reading poetry to someone, and the next moment I found myself confronting a mixed twosome who had dropped anchor beneath a shady tree in what is known as a leafy glade.
They had scarcely swum into my ken when the welkin started ringing like billy-o. This was due to the barking of a small dachshund, who now advanced on me with the apparent intention of seeing the colour of my insides. Milder counsels, however, prevailed, and on arriving at journey’s end he merely rose like a rocket and licked me on the chin, seeming to convey the impression that in Bertram Wooster he had found just what the doctor ordered. I have noticed before in dogs this tendency to form a beautiful friendship immediately on getting within sniffing distance of me. Something to do, no doubt, with the characteristic Wooster smell, which for some reason seems to speak to their deeps. I tickled him behind the right ear and scratched the base of his spine for a moment or two: then, these civilities concluded, switched my attention to the poetry group.
It was the male half of the sketch who had been doing the reading, a willowy bird of about the tonnage and general aspect of David Niven with ginger hair and a small moustache. As he was unquestionably not Aubrey Upjohn, I assumed that this must be Willie Cream, and it surprised me a bit to find him dishing out verse. One would have expected a New York playboy, widely publicized as one of the lads, to confine himself to prose, and dirty prose, at that. But no doubt these playboys have their softer moments.
His companion was a well-stacked young featherweight, who could be none other than the Phyllis Mills of whom Kipper had spoken. Nice but goofy, Kipper had said, and a glance told me that he was right. One learns, as one goes through life, to spot goofiness in the other sex with an unerring eye, and this exhibit had a sort of mild, Soul’s Awakening kind of expression which made it abundantly clear that, while not a super-goof like some of the female goofs I’d met, she was quite goofy enough to be going on with. Her whole aspect was that of a girl who at the drop of a hat would start talking baby talk.
This she now proceeded to do, asking me if I didn’t think that Poppet, the dachshund, was a sweet little doggie. I assented rather austerely, for I prefer the shorter form more generally used, and she said she suppose
d I was Mrs Travers’s nephew Bertie Wooster, which, as we knew, was substantially the case.
‘I heard you were expected today. I’m Phyllis Mills,’ she said, and I said I had divined as much and that Kipper had told me to slap her on the back and give her his best, and she said, ‘Oh, Reggie Herring? He’s a sweetie-pie, isn’t he?’ and I agreed that Kipper was one of the sweetie-pies and not the worst of them, and she said, ‘Yes, he’s a lambkin.’
This duologue had, of course, left Wilbert Cream a bit out of it, just painted on the backdrop as you might say, and for some moments, knitting his brow, plucking at his moustache, shuffling the feet and allowing the limbs to twitch, he had been giving abundant evidence that in his opinion three was a crowd and that what the leafy glade needed to make it all that a leafy glade should be was a complete absence of Woosters. Taking advantage of a lull in the conversation, he said:
‘Are you looking for someone?’
I replied that I was looking for Bobbie Wickham.
‘I’d go on looking, if I were you. Bound to find her somewhere.’
‘Bobbie?’ said Phyllis Mills. ‘She’s down at the lake, fishing.’
‘Then what you do,’ said Wilbert Cream, brightening, ‘is follow this path, bend right, sharp left, bend right again and there you are. You can’t miss. Start at once, is my advice.’
I must say I felt that, related as I was by ties of blood, in a manner of speaking, to this leafy glade, it was a bit thick being practically bounced from it by a mere visitor, but Aunt Dahlia had made it clear that the Cream family must not be thwarted or put upon in any way, so I did as he suggested, picking up the feet without anything in the nature of back chat. As I receded, I could hear in my rear the poetry breaking out again.
The lake at Brinkley calls itself a lake, but when all the returns are in it’s really more a sort of young pond. Big enough to mess about on in a punt, though, and for the use of those wishing to punt a boathouse has been provided with a small pier or landing stage attached to it. On this, rod in hand, Bobbie was seated, and it was with me the work of an instant to race up and breathe down the back of her neck.
‘Hey!’ I said.
‘Hey to you with knobs on,’ she replied. ‘Oh, hullo, Bertie. You here?’
‘You never spoke a truer word. If you can spare me a moment of your valuable time, young Roberta –’
‘Half a second, I think I’ve got a bite. No, false alarm. What were you saying?’
‘I was saying –’
‘Oh, by the way, I heard from Mother this morning.’
‘I heard from her yesterday morning.’
‘I was kind of expecting you would. You saw that thing in The Times?’
‘With the naked eye.’
‘Puzzled you for a moment, perhaps?’
‘For several moments.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you all about that. The idea came to me in a flash.’
‘You mean it was you who shoved that communiqué in the journal?’
‘Of course.’
‘Why?’ I said, getting right down to it in my direct way.
I thought I had her there, but no.
‘I was paving the way for Reggie.’
I passed a hand over my fevered brow.
‘Something seems to have gone wrong with my usually keen hearing,’ I said. ‘It sounds just as if you were saying “I was paving the way for Reggie.”’
‘I was. I was making his path straight. Softening up Mother on his behalf.’
I passed another hand over my f.b.
‘Now you seem to be saying “Softening up Mother on his behalf.”’
‘That’s what I am saying. It’s perfectly simple. I’ll put it in words of one syllable for you. I love Reggie. Reggie loves me.’
‘Reggie,’ of course, is two syllables, but I let it go.
‘Reggie who?’
‘Reggie Herring.’
I was amazed.
‘You mean old Kipper?’
‘I wish you wouldn’t call him Kipper.’
‘I always have. Dash it,’ I said with some warmth, ‘if a fellow shows up at a private school on the south coast of England with a name like Herring, what else do you expect his playmates to call him? But how do you mean you love him and he loves you? You’ve never met him.’
‘Of course I’ve met him. We were in the same hotel in Switzerland last Christmas. I taught him to ski,’ she said, a dreamy look coming into her twin starlikes. ‘I shall never forget the day I helped him unscramble himself after he had taken a toss on the beginners’ slope. He had both legs wrapped round his neck. I think that is when love dawned. My heart melted as I sorted him out.’
‘You didn’t laugh?’
‘Of course I didn’t laugh. I was all sympathy and understanding.’
For the first time the thing began to seem plausible to me. Bobbie is a fun-loving girl, and the memory of her reaction when in the garden at Skeldings I had once stepped on the teeth of a rake and had the handle jump up and hit me on the tip of the nose was still laid away among my souvenirs. She had been convulsed with mirth. If, then, she had refrained from guffawing when confronted with the spectacle of Reginald Herring with both legs wrapped round his neck, her emotions must have been very deeply involved.
‘Well, all right,’ I said. ‘I accept your statement that you and Kipper are that way. But why, that being so, did you blazon it forth to the world, if blazoning forth is the expression I want, that you were engaged to me?’
‘I told you. It was to soften Mother up.’
‘Which sounded to me like delirium straight from the sick bed.’
‘You don’t get the subtle strategy?’
‘Not by several parasangs.’
‘Well, you know how you stand with Mother.’
‘Our relations are a bit distant.’
‘She shudders at the mention of your name. So I thought if she thought I was going to marry you and then found I wasn’t, she’d be so thankful for the merciful escape I’d had that she’d be ready to accept anyone as a son-in-law, even someone like Reggie, who, though a wonder man, hasn’t got his name in Debrett and isn’t any too hot financially. Mother’s idea of a mate for me has always been a well-to-do millionaire or a Duke with a large private income. Now do you follow?’
‘Oh yes, I follow all right. You’ve been doing what Jeeves does, studying the psychology of the individual. But do you think it’ll work?’
‘Bound to. Let’s take a parallel case. Suppose your Aunt Dahlia read in the paper one morning that you were going to be shot at sunrise.’
‘I couldn’t be. I’m never up so early.’
‘But suppose she did? She’d be pretty worked up about it, wouldn’t she?’
‘Extremely, one imagines, for she loves me dearly. I’m not saying her manner toward me doesn’t verge at times on the brusque. In childhood days she would occasionally clump me on the side of the head, and since I have grown to riper years she has more than once begged me to tie a brick around my neck and go and drown myself in the pond in the kitchen garden. Nevertheless, she loves her Bertram, and if she heard I was to be shot at sunrise, she would, as you say, be as sore as a gumboil. But why? What’s that got to do with it?’
‘Well, suppose she then found out it was all a mistake and it wasn’t you but somebody else who was to face the firing squad. That would make her happy, wouldn’t it?’
‘One can picture her dancing all over the place on the tips of her toes.’
‘Exactly. She’d be so all over you that nothing you did would be wrong in her eyes. Whatever you wanted to do would be all right with her. Go to it, she would say. And that’s how Mother will feel when she learns that I’m not marrying you after all. She’ll be so relieved.’
I agreed that the relief would, of course, be stupendous.
‘But you’ll be giving her the inside facts in a day or two?’ I said, for I was anxious to have assurance on this point. A man with an Engagement notice in The T
imes hanging over him cannot but feel uneasy.
‘Well, call it a week or two. No sense in rushing things.’
‘You want me to sink in?’
‘That’s the idea.’
‘And meanwhile what’s the drill? Do I kiss you a good deal from time to time?’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘Right ho. I just want to know where I stand.’
‘An occasional passionate glance will be ample.’
‘It shall be attended to. Well, I’m delighted about you and Kipper or, as you would prefer to say, Reggie. There’s nobody I’d rather see you centre-aisle-ing with.’
‘It’s very sporting of you to take it like this.’
‘Don’t give it a thought.’
‘I’m awfully fond of you, Bertie.’
‘Me, too, of you.’
‘But I can’t marry everybody, can I?’
‘I wouldn’t even try. Well, now that we’ve got all that straight, I suppose I’d better be going and saying “Come aboard” to Aunt Dahlia.’
‘What’s the time?’
‘Close on five.’
‘I must run like a hare. I’m supposed to be presiding at the tea table.’
‘You? Why you?’
‘Your aunt’s not here. She found a telegram when she got back yesterday saying that her son Bonzo was sick of a fever at his school, and dashed off to be with him. She asked me to deputy-hostess for her till her return, but I shan’t be able to for the next few days. I’ve got to dash back to Mother. Ever since she saw that thing in The Times, she’s been wiring me every hour on the hour to come home for a round table conference. What’s a guffin?’
‘I don’t know. Why?’
‘That’s what she calls you in her latest ’gram. Quote. “Cannot understand how you can be contemplating marrying that guffin.” Close quote. I suppose it’s more or less the same as a gaby, which was how you figured in one of her earlier communications.’
‘That sounds promising.’
‘Yes, I think the thing’s in the bag. After you, Reggie will come to her like rare and refreshing fruit. She’ll lay down the red carpet for him.’