And with a brief ‘Whoopee!’ she shot off in the direction of the house at forty or so m.p.h. I followed more slowly, for she had given me much food for thought, and I was musing.
Strange, I was feeling, this strong pro-Kipper sentiment in the Wickham bosom. I mean, consider the facts. What with that espièglerie of hers, which was tops, she had been pretty extensively wooed in one quarter and another for years, and no business had resulted, so that it was generally assumed that only something extra special in the way of suitors would meet her specifications and that whoever eventually got his nose under the wire would be a king among men and pretty warm stuff. And she had gone and signed up with Kipper Herring.
Mind you, I’m not saying a word against old Kipper. The salt of the earth. But nobody could have called him a knock-out in the way of looks. Having gone in a lot for boxing from his earliest years, he had the cauliflower ear of which I had spoken to Aunt Dahlia and in addition to this a nose which some hidden hand had knocked slightly out of the straight. He would, in short, have been an unsafe entrant to have backed in a beauty contest, even if the only other competitors had been Boris Karloff, King Kong and Oofy Prosser of the Drones.
But then, of course, one had to remind oneself that looks aren’t everything. A cauliflower ear can hide a heart of gold, as in Kipper’s case it did, his being about as gold as they come. His brain, too, might have helped to do the trick. You can’t hold down an editorial post on an important London weekly paper without being fairly well fixed with the little grey cells, and girls admire that sort of thing. And one had to remember that most of the bimbos to whom Roberta Wickham had been giving the bird through the years had been of the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ type, fellows who had more or less shot their bolt after saying ‘Eh, what?’ and slapping their leg with a hunting crop. Kipper must have come as a nice change.
Still, the whole thing provided, as I say, food for thought, and I was in what is called a reverie as I made my way to the house, a reverie so profound that no turf accountant would have given any but the shortest odds against my sooner or later bumping into something. And this, to cut a long story s., I did. It might have been a tree, a bush or a rustic seat. In actual fact it turned out to be Aubrey Upjohn. I came on him round a corner and rammed him squarely before I could put the brakes on. I clutched him round the neck and he clutched me about the middle, and for some moments we tottered to and fro, linked in a close embrace. Then, the mists clearing from my eyes, I saw who it was that I had been treading the measure with.
Seeing him steadily and seeing him whole, as I have heard Jeeves put it, I was immediately struck by the change that had taken place in his appearance since those get-togethers in his study at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, when with a sinking heart I had watched him reach for the whangee and start limbering up the shoulder muscles with a few trial swings. At that period of our acquaintance he had been an upstanding old gentleman about eight feet six in height with burning eyes, foam-flecked lips and flame coming out of both nostrils. He had now shrunk to a modest five foot seven or there-abouts, and I could have felled him with a single blow.
Not that I did, of course. But I regarded him without a trace of the old trepidation. It seemed incredible that I could ever have considered this human shrimp a danger to pedestrians and traffic.
I think this was partly due to the fact that at some point in the fifteen years since our last meeting he had grown a moustache. In the Malvern House epoch what had always struck a chill into the plastic mind had been his wide, bare upper lip, a most unpleasant spectacle to behold, especially when twitching. I wouldn’t say the moustache softened his face, but being of the walrus or soup-strainer type it hid some of it, which was all to the good. The up-shot was that instead of quailing, as I had expected to do when we met, I was suave and debonair, possibly a little too much so.
‘Oh, hullo, Upjohn!’ I said. ‘Yoo-hoo!’
‘Who you?’ he responded, making it sound like a reverse echo.
‘Wooster is the name.’
‘Oh, Wooster?’ he said, as if he had been hoping it would be something else, and one could understand his feelings, of course. No doubt he, like me, had been buoying himself up for years with the thought that we should never meet again and that, whatever brickbats life might have in store for him, he had at least got Bertram out of his system. A nasty jar it must have been for the poor bloke having me suddenly pop up from a trap like this.
‘Long time since we met,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he agreed in a hollow voice, and it was so plain that he was wishing it had been longer that conversation flagged, and there wasn’t much in the way of feasts of reason and flows of the soul as we covered the hundred yards to the lawn where the tea table awaited us. I think I may have said ‘Nice day, what?’ and he may have grunted, but nothing more.
Only Bobbie was present when we arrived at the trough. Wilbert and Phyllis were presumably still in the leafy glade, and Mrs Cream, Bobbie said, worked in her room every afternoon on her new spine-freezer and seldom knocked off for a cuppa. We seated ourselves and had just started sipping, when the butler came out of the house bearing a bowl of fruit and hove to beside the table with it.
Well, when I say ‘butler’, I use the term loosely. He was dressed like a butler and he behaved like a butler, but in the deepest and truest sense of the word he was not a butler.
Reading from left to right, he was Sir Roderick Glossop.
4
* * *
AT THE DRONES Club and other places I am accustomed to frequent you will often hear comment on Bertram Wooster’s self-control or sang froid, as it’s sometimes called, and it is generally agreed that this is considerable. In the eyes of many people, I suppose, I seem one of those men of chilled steel you read about, and I’m not saying I’m not. But it is possible to find a chink in my armour, and this can be done by suddenly springing eminent loony-doctors on me in the guise of butlers.
It was out of the q. that I could have been mistaken in supposing that it was Sir Roderick Glossop who, having delivered the fruit, was now ambling back to the house. There could not be two men with that vast bald head and those bushy eyebrows, and it would be deceiving the customers to say that I remained unshaken. The effect the apparition had on me was to make me start violently, and we all know what happens when you start violently while holding a full cup of tea. The contents of mine flew through the air and came to rest on the trousers of Aubrey Upjohn, M.A., moistening them to no little extent. Indeed, it would scarcely be distorting the facts to say that he was now not so much wearing trousers as wearing tea.
I could see the unfortunate man felt his position deeply, and I was surprised that he contented himself with a mere ‘Ouch!’ But I suppose these solid citizens have to learn to curb the tongue. Creates a bad impression, I mean, if they start blinding and stiffing as those more happily placed would be.
But words are not always needed. In the look he now shot at me I seemed to read a hundred unspoken expletives. It was the sort of look the bucko mate of a tramp steamer would have given an able-bodied seaman who for one reason or another had incurred his displeasure.
‘I see you have not changed since you were with me at Malvern House,’ he said in an extremely nasty voice, dabbing at the trousers with a handkerchief. ‘Bungling Wooster we used to call him,’ he went on, addressing his remarks to Bobbie and evidently trying to enlist her sympathy. ‘He could not perform the simplest action such as holding a cup without spreading ruin and disaster on all sides. It was an axiom at Malvern House that if there was a chair in any room in which he happened to be, Wooster would trip over it. The child,’ said Aubrey Upjohn, ‘is the father of the man.’
‘Frightfully sorry,’ I said.
‘Too late to be sorry now. A new pair of trousers ruined. It is doubtful if anything can remove the stain of tea from white flannel. Still, one must hope for the best.’
Whether I was right or wrong at this point in patting him
on the shoulder and saying ‘That’s the spirit!’ I find it difficult to decide. Wrong, probably, for it did not seem to soothe. He gave me another of those looks and strode off, smelling strongly of tea.
‘Shall I tell you something, Bertie?’ said Bobbie, following him with a thoughtful eye. ‘That walking tour Upjohn was going to invite you to take with him is off. You will get no Christmas present from him this year, and don’t expect him to come and tuck you up in bed tonight.’
I upset the milk jug with an imperious wave of the hand.
‘Never mind about Upjohn and Christmas presents and walking tours. What is Pop Glossop doing here as the butler?’
‘Ah! I thought you might be going to ask that. I was meaning to tell you some time.’
‘Tell me now.’
‘Well, it was his idea.’
I eyed her sternly. Bertram Wooster has no objection to listening to drivel, but it must not be pure babble from the padded cell, as this appeared to be.
‘His idea?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you asking me to believe that Sir Roderick Glossop got up one morning, gazed at himself in the mirror, thought he was looking a little pale and said to himself, “I need a change. I think I’ll try being a butler for awhile”?’
‘No, not that, but … I don’t know where to begin.’
‘Begin at the beginning. Come on now, young B. Wickham, smack into it,’ I said, and took a piece of cake in a marked manner.
The austerity of my tone seemed to touch a nerve and kindle the fire that always slept in this vermilion-headed menace to the common weal, for she frowned a displeased frown and told me for heaven’s sake to stop goggling like a dead halibut.
‘I have every right to goggle like a dead halibut,’ I said coldly, ‘and I shall continue to do so as long as I see fit. I am under a considerable nervous s. As always seems to happen when you are mixed up in the doings, life has become one damn thing after another, and I think I am justified in demanding an explanation. I await your statement.’
‘Well, let me marshal my thoughts.’
She did so, and after a brief intermission, during which I finished my piece of cake, proceeded.
‘I’d better begin by telling you about Upjohn, because it all started through him. You see, he’s egging Phyllis on to marry Wilbert Cream.’
‘When you say egging –’
‘I mean egging. And when a man like that eggs, something has to give, especially when the girl’s a pill like Phyllis, who always does what Daddy tells her.’
‘No will of her own?’
‘Not a smidgeon. To give you an instance, a couple of days ago he took her to Birmingham to see the repertory company’s performance of Chekhov’s Seagull, because he thought it would be educational. I’d like to catch anyone trying to make me see Chekhov’s Seagull, but Phyllis just bowed her head and said, “Yes, Daddy.” Didn’t even attempt to put up a fight. That’ll show you how much of a will of her own she’s got.’
It did indeed. Her story impressed me profoundly. I knew Chekhov’s Seagull. My Aunt Agatha had once made me take her son Thos to a performance of it at the Old Vic, and what with the strain of trying to follow the cock-eyed goings-on of characters called Zarietchnaya and Medvienko and having to be constantly on the alert to prevent Thos making a sneak for the great open spaces, my suffering had been intense. I needed no further evidence to tell me that Phyllis Mills was a girl whose motto would always be ‘Daddy knows best.’ Wilbert had only got to propose and she would sign on the dotted line because Upjohn wished it.
‘Your aunt’s worried sick about it.’
‘She doesn’t approve?’
‘Of course she doesn’t approve. You must have heard of Willie Cream, going over to New York so much.’
‘Why yes, news of his escapades has reached me. He’s a playboy.’
‘Your aunt thinks he’s a screwball.’
‘Many playboys are, I believe. Well, that being so, one can understand why she doesn’t want those wedding bells to ring out. But,’ I said, putting my finger on the res in my unerring way, ‘that doesn’t explain where Pop Glossop comes in.’
‘Yes, it does. She got him here to observe Wilbert.’
I found myself fogged.
‘Cock an eye at him, you mean? Drink him in, as it were? What good’s that going to do?’
She snorted impatiently.
‘Observe in the technical sense. You know how these brain specialists work. They watch the subject closely. They engage him in conversation. They apply subtle tests. And sooner or later –’
‘I begin to see. Sooner or later he lets fall an incautious word to the effect that he thinks he’s a poached egg, and then they’ve got him where they want him.’
‘Well, he does something which tips them off. Your aunt was moaning to me about the situation, and I suddenly had this inspiration of bringing Glossop here. You know how I get sudden inspirations.’
‘I do. That hot-water-bottle episode.’
‘Yes, that was one of them.’
‘Ha!’
‘What did you say?’
‘Just “Ha!”’
‘Why “Ha!”?’
‘Because when I think of that night of terror, I feel like saying “Ha!”’
She seemed to see the justice of this. Pausing merely to eat a cucumber sandwich, she proceeded.
‘So I said to your aunt, “I’ll tell you what to do,” I said. “Get Glossop here,” I said, “and have him observe Wilbert Cream. Then you’ll be in a position to go to Upjohn and pull the rug from under him.”’
Again I was not abreast. There had been, as far as I could recollect, no mention of any rug.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, isn’t it obvious? “Rope in old Glossop,” I said, “and let him observe. Then you’ll be in a position,” I said, “to go to Upjohn and tell him that Sir Roderick Glossop, the greatest alienist in England, is convinced that Wilbert Cream is round the bend and to ask him if he proposes to marry his stepdaughter to a man who at any moment may be marched off and added to the membership list of Colney Hatch.” Even Upjohn would shrink from doing a thing like that. Or don’t you think so?’
I weighed this.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I should imagine you were right. Quite possibly Upjohn has human feelings, though I never noticed them when I was in statu pupillari, as I believe the expression is. One sees now why Glossop is at Brinkley Court. What one doesn’t see is why one finds him buttling.’
‘I told you that was his idea. He thought he was such a celebrated figure that it would arouse Mrs Cream’s suspicions if he came here under his own name.’
‘I see what you mean. She would catch him observing Wilbert and wonder why –’
‘– and eventually put two and two together –’
‘– and start Hey-what’s-the-big-idea-ing.’
‘Exactly. No mother likes to find that her hostess has got a brain specialist down to observe the son who is the apple of her eye. It hurts her feelings.’
‘Whereas, if she catches the butler observing him, she merely says to herself, “Ah, an observant butler.” Very sensible. With this deal Uncle Tom’s got on with Homer Cream, it would be fatal to risk giving her the pip in any way. She would kick to Homer, and Homer would draw himself up and say “After what has occurred, Travers, I would prefer to break off the negotiations,” and Uncle Tom would lose a packet. What is this deal they’ve got on, by the way? Did Aunt Dahlia tell you?’
‘Yes, but it didn’t penetrate. It’s something to do with some land your uncle owns somewhere, and Mr Cream is thinking of buying it and putting up hotels and things. It doesn’t matter, anyway. The fundamental thing, the thing to glue the eye on, is that the Cream contingent have to be kept sweetened at any cost. So not a word to a soul.’
‘Quite. Bertram Wooster is not a babbler. No spiller of the beans he. But why are you so certain that Wilbert Cream is loopy? He doesn’t look loopy to me.’
‘Have you met him?’
‘Just for a moment. He was in a leafy glade, reading poetry to the Mills girl.’
She took this big.
‘Reading poetry? To Phyllis?’
‘That’s right. I thought it odd that a chap like him should be doing such a thing. Limericks, yes. If he had been reciting limericks to her, I could have understood it. But this was stuff from one of those books they bind in limp purple leather and sell at Christmas. I wouldn’t care to swear to it, but it sounded to me extremely like Omar Khayyam.’
She continued to take it big.
‘Break it up, Bertie, break it up! There’s not a moment to be lost. You must go and break it up immediately.’
‘Who, me? Why me?’
‘That’s what you’re here for. Didn’t your aunt tell you? She wants you to follow Wilbert Cream and Phyllis about everywhere and see that he doesn’t get a chance of proposing.’
‘You mean that I’m to be a sort of private eye or shamus, tailing them up? I don’t like it,’ I said dubiously.
‘You don’t have to like it,’ said Bobbie. ‘You just do it.’
5
* * *
WAX IN THE hands of the other sex, as the expression is, I went and broke it up as directed, but not blithely. It is never pleasant for a man of sensibility to find himself regarded as a buttinski and a trailing arbutus, and it was thus, I could see at a g., that Wilbert Cream was pencilling me in. At the moment of my arrival he had suspended the poetry reading and had taken Phyllis’s hand in his, evidently saying or about to say something of an intimate and tender nature. Hearing my ‘What ho’, he turned, hurriedly released the fin and directed at me a look very similar to the one I had recently received from Aubrey Upjohn. He muttered something under his breath about someone, whose name I did not catch, apparently having been paid to haunt the place.
‘Oh, it’s you again,’ he said.
Well, it was, of course. No argument about that.