Jeeves was at the telephone when I reached the sitting-room.
‘I am sorry,’ he was saying, and I noticed that he was just as suave and firm as I had been at our recent get-together. ‘No, please, further discussion is useless. I am afraid you must accept my decision as final. Good night.’
From the fact that he had not chucked in a lot of ‘sirs’ I presumed that he had been talking to some pal of his, though from the curtness of his tone probably not the one whose strength was as the strength of ten.
‘What was that, Jeeves?’ I asked. ‘A little tiff with one of the boys at the club?’
‘No, sir. I was speaking to Mr. Percy Gorringe, who rang up shortly before you entered. Affecting to be yourself, I informed him that his request for a thousand pounds could not be entertained. I thought that this might spare you discomfort and embarrassment.’
I must say I was touched. After being worsted in that clash of wills of ours, one might have expected him to show dudgeon and be loath to do the feudal thing by the young master. But Jeeves and I, though we may have our differences – as it might be on the subject of lip-joy – do not allow them to rankle.
‘Thank you, Jeeves.’
‘Not at all, sir.’
‘Lucky you came back in time to do the needful. Did you enjoy yourself at the club?’
‘Very much, sir.’
‘More than I did at mine.’
‘Sir?’
‘I ran into Stilton Cheesewright there and found him in difficult mood. Tell me, Jeeves, what do you do at this Junior Ganymede of yours?’
‘Well, sir, many of the members play a sound game of bridge. The conversation, too, rarely fails to touch a high level of interest. And should one desire more frivolous entertainment, there are the club books.’
‘The … Oh, yes, I remember.’
Perhaps you do, too, if you happened to be around when I was relating the doings at Totleigh Towers, the country seat of Sir Watkyn Bassett, when this club book had enabled me to put it so crushingly across the powers of darkness in the shape of Roderick Spode. Under Rule Eleven at the Junior Ganymede, you may recall, members are required to supply intimate details concerning their employers for inclusion in the volume, and its pages revealed that Spode, who was an amateur Dictator of sorts, running a gang called the Black Shorts, who went about in black footer bags shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’, also secretly designed ladies’ underclothing under the trade name of Eulalie Sœurs. Armed with this knowledge, I had had, of course, little difficulty in reducing him to the level of a third-class power. These Dictators don’t want a thing like that to get spread about.
But though the club book had served me well on that occasion, I was far from approving of it. Mine has been in many ways a chequered career, and it was not pleasant to think that full details of episodes I would prefer to be buried in oblivion were giving a big laugh daily to a bunch of valets and butlers.
‘You couldn’t tear the Wooster material out of that club book, could you, Jeeves?’
‘I fear not, sir.’
‘It contains matter that can fairly be described as dynamite.’
‘Very true, sir.’
‘Suppose the contents were bruited about and reached the ears of my Aunt Agatha?’
‘You need have no concern on that point, sir. Each member fully understands that perfect discretion is a sine qua non.’
‘All the same I’d feel happier if that page –’
‘Those eleven pages, sir.’
‘– if those eleven pages were consigned to the flames.’ A sudden thought struck me. ‘Is there anything about Stilton Cheesewright in the book?’
‘A certain amount, sir.’
‘Damaging?’
‘Not in the real sense of the word, sir. His personal attendant merely reports that he has a habit, when moved, of saying “Ho!” and does Swedish exercises in the nude each morning before breakfast.’
I sighed. I hadn’t really hoped, and yet it had been a disappointment. I have always held – rightly, I think – that nothing eases the tension of a difficult situation like a well-spotted bit of blackmail, and it would have been agreeable to have been in a position to go to Stilton and say ‘Cheesewright, I know your secret!’ and watch him wilt. But you can’t fulfil yourself to any real extent in that direction if all the party of the second part does is say ‘Ho!’ and tie himself into knots before sailing into the eggs and b. It was plain that with Stilton there could be no such moral triumph as I had achieved in the case of Roderick Spode.
‘Ah, well,’ I said resignedly, ‘if that’s that, that’s that, what?’
‘So it would appear, sir.’
‘Nothing to do but keep the chin up and the upper lip as stiff as can be managed. I think I’ll go to bed with an improving book. Have you read The Mystery of the Pink Crayfish by Rex West?’
‘No, sir, I have not enjoyed that experience. Oh, pardon me, sir, I was forgetting. Lady Florence Craye spoke to me on the telephone shortly before you came in. Her ladyship would be glad if you would ring her up. I will get the number, sir.’
I was puzzled. I could make nothing of this. No reason, of course, why she shouldn’t want me to give her a buzz, but on the other hand no reason that I could see why she should.
‘She didn’t say what she wanted?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Odd, Jeeves.’
‘Yes, sir … One moment, m’lady. Here is Mr. Wooster.’
I took the instrument from him and hullo-ed.
‘Bertie?’
‘On the spot.’
‘I hope you weren’t in bed?’
‘No, no.’
‘I thought you wouldn’t be. Bertie, will you do something for me? I want you to take me to a night club tonight.’
‘Eh?’
‘A night club. Rather a low one. I mean garish and all that sort of thing. It’s for the book I’m writing. Atmosphere.’
‘Oh, ah,’ I said, enlightened. I knew all about this atmosphere thing. Bingo Little’s wife, the well-known novelist Rosie M. Banks, is as hot as a pistol on it, Bingo has often told me. She frequently sends him off to take notes of this and that so that she shall have plenty of ammunition for her next chapter. If you’re a novelist, apparently, you have to get your atmosphere correct, or your public starts writing you stinkers beginning ‘Dear Madam, are you aware …?’ ‘You’re doing something about a night club?’
‘Yes, I’m just coming to the part where my hero goes to one, and I’ve never been to any except the respectable ones where everybody goes, which aren’t the sort of thing I want. What I need is something more –’
‘Garish?’
‘Yes, garish.’
‘You want to go tonight?’
‘It must be tonight, because I’m off tomorrow afternoon to Brinkley.’
‘Oh, you’re going to stay with Aunt Dahlia?’
‘Yes. Well, can you manage it?’
‘Oh, rather. Delighted.’
‘Good. D’Arcy Cheesewright,’ said Florence, and I noted the steely what-d’you-call-it in her voice, ‘was to have taken me, but he finds himself unable to. So I’ve had to fall back on you.’
This might, I thought, have been more tactfully put, but I let it go.
‘Right ho,’ I said. ‘I’ll call for you at about half-past eleven.’
You are surprised? You are saying to yourself ‘Come, come, Wooster, what’s all this?’ – wondering why I was letting myself in for a beano from which I might well have shrunk? The matter is susceptible of a ready explanation.
My quick mind, you see, had spotted instantly that this was where I might quite conceivably do myself a bit of good. Having mellowed this girl with food and drink, who knew but that I might succeed in effecting a reconciliation between her and the piece of cheese with whom until tonight she had been headed for the altar rails, thus averting the peril which must always loom on the Wooster horizon while she remained unattached and at a loose end? It needed, I wa
s convinced, only a few kindly words from a sympathetic man of the world, and these I was prepared to supply in full measure.
‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘I shall be going out again. This will mean having to postpone finishing The Mystery of the Pink Crayfish to a later date, but that can’t be helped. As a matter of fact, I rather fancy I have already wrested its secret from it. Unless I am very much mistaken, the man who bumped off Sir Eustace Willoughby, Bart, was the butler.’
‘Indeed, sir?’
‘That is what I think, having sifted the clues. All that stuff throwing suspicion on the vicar doesn’t fool me for an instant. Will you ring up The Mottled Oyster and book a table in my name.’
‘Not too near the band, sir?’
‘How right you are, Jeeves. Not too near the band.’
5
* * *
I DON’T KNOW why it is, but I’m not much of a lad for night clubs these days. Age creeping on me, I suppose. But I still retain my membership in about half a dozen, including this Mottled Oyster at which I had directed Jeeves to book me a table.
The old spot has passed a somewhat restless existence since I first joined, and from time to time I get a civil note from its proprietors saying that it has changed its name and address once more. When it was raided as The Feverish Cheese, it became The Frozen Limit, and when it was raided as The Frozen Limit, it bore for awhile mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device The Startled Shrimp. From that to The Mottled Oyster was, of course, but a step. In my hot youth I had passed not a few quite pleasant evenings beneath its roof in its various incarnations, and I thought that, if it preserved anything approaching the old form, it ought to be garish enough to suit Florence. As I remembered, it rather prided itself on its garishness. That was why the rozzers were always raiding it.
I picked her up at her flat at eleven-thirty, and found her in sombre mood, the lips compressed, the eyes inclined to gaze into space with a sort of hard glow in them. No doubt something along these lines is always the aftermath of a brisk dust-up with the heart-throb. During the taxi drive she remained about as silent as the tomb, and from the way her foot kept tapping on the floor of the vehicle I knew that she was thinking of Stilton, whether or not in agony of spirit I was, of course, unable to say, but I thought it probable. Following her into the joint, I was on the whole optimistic. It seemed to me that with any luck I ought to be successful in the task that lay before me – viz. softening her with well-chosen words and jerking her better self back to the surface.
When we took our seats and I looked about me, I must confess that, having this object in mind, I could have done with dimmer lights and a more romantic tout ensemble, if tout ensemble is the expression I want. I could also have dispensed with the rather strong smell of kippered herrings which hung over the establishment like a fog. But against these drawbacks could be set the fact that up on the platform, where the band was, a man with adenoids was singing through a megaphone and, like all men who sing through megaphones nowadays, ladling out stuff well calculated to melt the hardest heart.
It’s an odd thing. I know one or two song writers and have found them among the most cheery of my acquaintances, ready of smile and full of merry quips and so forth. But directly they put pen to paper they never fail to take the dark view. All that ‘We’re-drifting-apart-you’re-breaking-my-heart’ stuff, I mean to say. The thing this bird was putting across per megaphone at the moment was about a chap crying into his pillow because the girl he loved was getting married next day, but – and this was the point or nub – not to him. He didn’t like it. He viewed the situation with concern. And the megaphonist was extracting every ounce of juice from the set-up.
Some fellows, no doubt, would have taken advantage of this outstanding goo to plunge without delay into what Jeeves calls medias res, but I, being shrewd, knew that you have to give these things time to work. So, having ordered kippers and a bottle of what would probably turn out to be rat poison, I opened the conversation on a more restrained note, asking her how the new novel was coming along. Authors, especially when female, like to keep you posted about this.
She said it was coming very well but not quickly, because she was a slow, careful worker who mused a good bit in between paragraphs and spared no pains to find the exact word with which to express what she wished to say. Like Flaubert, she said, and I said I thought she was on the right lines.
‘Those,’ I said, ‘were more or less my methods when I wrote that thing of mine for the Boudoir.’
I was alluding to the weekly paper for the delicately nurtured, Milady’s Boudoir, of which Aunt Dahlia is the courteous and popular proprietor or proprietress. She has been running it now for about three years, a good deal to the annoyance of Uncle Tom, her husband, who has to foot the bills. At her request I had once contributed an article – or ‘piece’, as we journalists call it – on What The Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing.
‘So you’re off to Brinkley tomorrow,’ I went on. ‘You’ll like that. Fresh air, gravel soil, company’s own water, Anatole’s cooking and so forth.’
‘Yes. And of course it will be wonderful meeting Daphne Dolores Morehead.’
The name was new to me.
‘Daphne Dolores Morehead?’
‘The novelist. She is going to be there. I admire her work so much. I see, by the way, she is doing a serial for the Boudoir.’
‘Oh, yes?’ I said, intrigued. One always likes to hear about the activities of one’s fellow-writers.
‘It must have cost your aunt a fortune. Daphne Dolores Morehead is frightfully expensive. I can’t remember what it is she gets a thousand words, but it’s something enormous.’
‘The old sheet must be doing well.’
‘I suppose so.’
She spoke listlessly, seeming to have lost interest in Milady’s Boudoir. Her thoughts, no doubt, had returned to Stilton. She cast a dull eye hither and thither about the room. It had begun to fill up now, and the dance floor was congested with frightful bounders of both sexes.
‘What horrible people!’ she said. ‘I must say I am surprised that you should be familiar with such places, Bertie. Are they all like this?’
I weighed the question.
‘Well, some are better and some worse. I would call this one about average. Garish, of course, but then you said you wanted something garish.’
‘Oh, I’m not complaining. I shall make some useful notes. It is just the sort of place to which I pictured Rollo going that night.’
‘Rollo?’
‘The hero of my novel. Rollo Beaminster.’
‘Oh, I see. Yes, of course. Out on the tiles, was he?’
‘He was in wild mood. Reckless. Desperate. He had lost the girl he loved.’
‘What ho!’ I said. ‘Tell me more.’
I spoke with animation and vim, for whatever you may say of Bertram Wooster, you cannot say that he does not know a cue when he hears one. Throw him the line, and he will do the rest. I hitched up the larynx. The kippers and the bot had arrived by now, and I took a mouthful of the former and a sip of the latter. It tasted like hair-oil.
‘You interest me strangely,’ I said. ‘Lost the girl he loved, had he?’
‘She had told him she never wished to see or speak to him again.’
‘Well, well. Always a nasty knock for a chap, that.’
‘So he comes to this low night club. He is trying to forget.’
‘But I’ll bet he doesn’t.’
‘No, it is useless. He looks about him at the glitter and garishness and feels how hollow it all is. I think I can use that waiter over there in the night club scene, the one with the watery eyes and the pimple on his nose,’ she said, jotting down a note on the back of the bill of fare.
I fortified myself with a swig of whatever the stuff was in the bottle and prepared to give her the works.
‘Always a mistake,’ I said, starting to do the sympathetic man of the world, ‘fellows losing girls and – conversely, if that’s the word I wan
t – girls losing fellows. I don’t know how you feel about it, but the way it seems to me is that it’s a silly idea giving the dream man the raspberry just because of some trifling tiff. Kiss and make up, I always say. I saw Stilton at the Drones tonight,’ I said, getting down to it.
She stiffened and took a reserved mouthful of kipper. Her voice, when the consignment had passed down the hatch and she was able to speak, was cold and metallic.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘He was in wild mood.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Reckless. Desperate. He looked about him at the Drones smoking-room, and I could see he was feeling what a hollow smoking-room it was.’
‘Oh, yes?’
Well, I suppose if someone had come along at this moment and said to me ‘Hullo there, Wooster, how’s it going? Are you making headway?’ I should have had to reply in the negative. ‘Not perceptibly, Wilkinson’ – or Banks or Smith or Knatchbull-Huguessen or whatever the name might have been, I would have said. I had the uncomfortable feeling of having been laid a stymie. However, I persevered.
‘Yes, he was in quite a state of mind. He gave me the impression that it wouldn’t take much to make him go off to the Rocky Mountains and shoot grizzly bears. Not a pleasant thought.’
‘You mean if one is fond of grizzly bears?’
‘I was thinking more if one was fond of Stiltons.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Oh? Well, suppose he joined the Foreign Legion?’
‘It would have my sympathy.’
‘You wouldn’t like to think of him tramping through the hot sand without a pub in sight, with Riffs or whatever they’re called potting at him from all directions.’
‘Yes, I would. If I saw a Riff trying to shoot D’Arcy Cheesewright, I would hold his hat for him and egg him on.’