I would have told the old relative this, hoping for sympathy, but at this moment the door opened, and in came Jeeves. Opening the conversation with that gentle cough of his that sounds like a very old sheep clearing its throat on a misty mountain top, he said:
‘You wished to see me, sir?’
He couldn’t have had a warmer welcome if he had been the prodigal son whose life story I had had to bone up when I won that Scripture Knowledge prize. The welkin, what there was of it in the drawing-room, rang with our excited yappings.
‘Come in, Jeeves,’ bellowed the aged relative.
‘Yes, come in, Jeeves, come in,’ I cried. ‘We were waiting for you with … with what?’
‘Bated breath,’ said the ancestor.
‘That’s right. With bated breath and—’
‘Tense, quivering nerves. Not to mention twitching muscles and bitten finger nails. Tell me, Jeeves, was that you I saw coming away from 5 Ormond Crescent about an hour ago?’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘You had been seeing Bingley?’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘About the book?’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘Did you tell him he had jolly well got to return it?’
‘No, madam.’
‘Then why on earth did you go to see him?’
‘To obtain the book, madam.’
‘But you said you didn’t tell him—’
‘There was no necessity to broach the subject, madam. He had not yet recovered consciousness. If I might explain. On my arrival at his residence he offered me a drink, which I accepted. He took one himself. We talked for awhile of this and that. Then I succeeded in diverting his attention for a moment, and while his scrutiny was elsewhere I was able to insert a chemical substance in his beverage which had the effect of rendering him temporarily insensible. I thus had ample time to make a search of the room. I had assumed that he would be keeping the book there, and I had not been in error. It was in a lower drawer of the desk. I secured it, and took my departure.’
Stunned by this latest revelation of his efficiency and do-it-yourself-ness, I was unable to utter, but the old ancestor gave the sort of cry or yowl which must have rung over many a hunting field, causing members of the Quorn and the Pytchley to leap in their saddles like Mexican jumping beans.
‘You mean you slipped him a Mickey Finn?’
‘I believe that is what they are termed in the argot, madam.’
‘Do you always carry them about with you?’
‘I am seldom without a small supply, madam.’
‘Never know when they won’t come in handy, eh?’
‘Precisely, madam. Opportunities for their use are constantly arising.’
‘Well, I can only say thank you. You have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.’
‘It is kind of you to say so, madam.’
‘Much obliged, Jeeves.’
‘Not at all, madam.’
I was expecting the aged relative to turn to me at this point and tick me off for not having had the sense to give Bingley a Mickey Finn myself, and I knew, for you cannot reason with aunts, that it would be no use pleading that I hadn’t got any; but her jocund mood caused her to abstain. Returning to the subject of L. P. Runkle, she said this had made her realize that her luck was in, after all, and she was going to press it.
‘I’ll go and see him now,’ she yipped, ‘and I confidently expect to play on him as on a stringed instrument. Out of my way, young Bertie,’ she cried, heading for the door, ‘or I’ll trample you to the dust. Yoicks!’ she added, reverting to the patois of the old hunting days. ‘Tally ho! Gone away! Hark forrard!’
Or words to that effect.
12
* * *
HER DEPARTURE – AT, I should estimate, some sixty m.p.h. – left behind it the sort of quivering stillness you get during hurricane time in America, when the howling gale, having shaken you to the back teeth, passes on to tickle up residents in spots further west. Kind of a dazed feeling it gives you. I turned to Jeeves, and found him, of course, as serene and unmoved as an oyster on the half shell. He might have been watching yowling aunts shoot out of rooms like bullets from early boyhood.
‘What was that she said, Jeeves?’
‘Yoicks, sir, if I am not mistaken. It seemed to me that Madam also added Tally-ho, Gone away and Hark forrard.’
‘I suppose members of the Quorn and the Pytchley are saying that sort of thing all the time.’
‘So I understand, sir. It encourages the hounds to renewed efforts. It must, of course, be trying for the fox.’
‘I’d hate to be a fox, wouldn’t you, Jeeves?’
‘Certainly I can imagine more agreeable existences, sir.’
‘Not only being chivvied for miles across difficult country but having to listen to men in top hats uttering those uncouth cries.’
‘Precisely, sir. A very wearing life.’
I produced my cambric handkerchief and gave the brow a mop. Recent events had caused me to perspire in the manner popularized by the fountains at Versailles.
‘Warm work, Jeeves.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Opens the pores a bit.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How quiet everything seems now.’
‘Yes, sir. Silence like a poultice comes to heal the blows of sound.’
‘Shakespeare?’
‘No, sir. The American author Oliver Wendell Holmes. His poem, “The Organ Grinders”. An aunt of mine used to read it to me as a child.’
‘I didn’t know you had any aunts.’
‘Three, sir.’
‘Are they as jumpy as the one who has just left us?’
‘No, sir. Their outlook on life is uniformly placid.’
I had begun to feel a bit more placid myself. Calmer, if you know what I mean. And with the calm had come more charitable thoughts.
‘Well, I don’t blame the aged relative for being jumpy,’ I said. ‘She’s all tied up with an enterprise of pith and something.’
‘Of great pith and moment, sir?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Let us hope that its current will not turn awry and lose the name of action.’
‘Yes, let’s. Turn what?’
‘Awry, sir.’
‘Don’t you mean agley?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then it isn’t the poet Burns?’
‘No, sir. The words occur in Shakespeare’s drama Hamlet.’
‘Oh, I know Hamlet. Aunt Agatha once made me take her son Thos to it at the Old Vic. Not a bad show, I thought, though a bit highbrow. You’re sure the poet Burns didn’t write it?’
‘Yes, sir. The fact, I understand, is well established.’
‘Then that settles that. But we have wandered from the point, which is that Aunt Dahlia is up to her neck in this enterprise of great pith and moment. It’s about Tuppy Glossop.’
‘Indeed, sir?’
‘It ought to interest you, because I know you’ve always liked Tuppy.’
‘A very pleasant young gentleman, sir.’
‘When he isn’t looping back the last ring over the Drones swimming-pool, yes. Well, it’s too long a story to tell you at the moment, but the gist of it is this. L. P. Runkle, taking advantage of a legal quibble … is it quibble?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Did down Tuppy’s father over a business deal … no, not exactly a business deal, Tuppy’s father was working for him, and he took advantage of the small print in their contract to rob him of the proceeds of something he had invented.’
‘It is often the way, sir. The financier is apt to prosper at the expense of the inventor.’
‘And Aunt Dahlia is hoping to get him to cough up a bit of cash and slip it to Tuppy.’
‘Actuated by remorse, sir?’
‘Not just by remorse. She’s relying more on the fact that for quite a time he has been under the spell of Anatole’s cooking, and she feels that this
will have made him a softer and kindlier financier, readier to oblige and do the square thing. You look dubious, Jeeves. Don’t you think it will work? She’s sure it will.’
‘I wish I could share Madam’s confidence, but—’
‘But, like me, you look on her chance of playing on L. P. Runkle as on a stringed instrument as … what? A hundred to eight shot?’
‘A somewhat longer price than that, sir. We have to take into consideration the fact that Mr Runkle is …’
‘Yes? You hesitate, Jeeves, Mr Runkle is what?’
‘The expression I am trying to find eludes me, sir. It is one I have sometimes heard you use to indicate a deficiency of sweetness and light in some gentleman of your acquaintance. You have employed it of Mr Spode or, as I should say, Lord Sidcup and, in the days before your association with him took on its present cordiality, of Mr Glossop’s uncle, Sir Roderick. It is on the tip of my tongue.’
‘A stinker?’
No, he said, it wasn’t a stinker.
‘A tough baby?’
‘No.’
‘A twenty-minute egg?’
‘That was it, sir. Mr Runkle is a twenty-minute egg.’
‘But have you seen enough of him to judge? After all, you’ve only just met him.’
‘Yes, sir, that is true, but Bingley, on learning that he was a guest of Madam’s, told me a number of stories illustrative of his hardhearted and implacable character. Bingley was at one time in his employment.’
‘Good lord, he seems to have been employed by everyone.’
‘Yes, sir, he was inclined to flit. He never remained in one post for long.’
‘I don’t wonder.’
‘But his relationship with Mr Runkle was of more extended duration. He accompanied him to the United States of America some years ago and remained with him for several months.’
‘During which period he found him a twenty-minute egg?’
‘Precisely, sir. So I very much fear that Madam’s efforts will produce no satisfactory results. Would it be a large sum of money that she is hoping to persuade Mr Runkle to part with?’
‘Pretty substantial, I gather. You see, what Tuppy’s father invented were those Magic Midget things, and Runkle must have made a packet out of them. I suppose she aims at a fifty-fifty split.’
‘Then I am forced to the opinion that a hundred to one against is more the figure a level-headed turf accountant would place upon the likelihood of her achieving her objective.’
Not encouraging, you’ll agree. In fact, you might describe it as definitely damping. I would have called him a pessimist, only I couldn’t think of the word, and while I was trying to hit on something other than ‘Gloomy Gus’, which would scarcely have been a fitting way to address one of his dignity, Florence came in through the French window and he of course shimmered off. When our conversations are interrupted by the arrival of what you might call the quality, he always disappears like a family spectre vanishing at dawn.
Except at meals I hadn’t seen anything of Florence till now, she, so to speak, having taken the high road while I took the low road. What I mean to say is that she was always in Market Snodsbury, bustling about on behalf of the Conservative candidate to whom she was betrothed, while I, after that nerve-racking encounter with the widow of the late McCorkadale, had given up canvassing in favour of curling up with a good book. I had apologized to Ginger for this … is pusillanimity the word? … and he had taken it extraordinarily well, telling me it was perfectly all right and he wished he could do the same.
She was looking as beautiful as ever, if not more so, and at least ninety-six per cent of the members of the Drones Club would have asked nothing better than to be closeted with her like this. I, however, would willingly have avoided the tête-à-tête, for my trained senses told me that she was in one of her tempers, and when this happens the instinct of all but the hardiest is to climb a tree and pull it up after them. The overbearing dishpotness to which I alluded earlier and which is so marked a feature of her make-up was plainly to the fore. She said, speaking abruptly:
‘What are you doing in here on a lovely day like this, Bertie?’
I explained that I had been in conference with Aunt Dahlia, and she riposted that the conference was presumably over by now, Aunt D being conspicuous by her absence, so why wasn’t I out getting fresh air and sunshine.
‘You’re much too fond of frowsting indoors. That’s why you have that sallow look.’
‘I didn’t know I had a sallow look.’
‘Of course you have a sallow look. What else did you expect? You look like the underside of a dead fish.’
My worst fears seemed to be confirmed. I had anticipated that she would work off her choler on the first innocent bystander she met, and it was just my luck that this happened to be me. With bowed head I prepared to face the storm, and then to my surprise she changed the subject.
‘I’m looking for Harold,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Have you seen him.’
‘I don’t think I know him.’
‘Don’t be a fool. Harold Winship.’
‘Oh, Ginger,’ I said, enlightened. ‘No, he hasn’t swum into my ken. What do you want to see him about? Something important?’
‘It is important to me, and it ought to be to him. Unless he takes himself in hand, he is going to lose this election.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘His behaviour at lunch today.’
‘Oh, did he take you to lunch? Where did you go? I had mine at a pub, and the garbage there had to be chewed to be believed. But perhaps you went to a decent hotel?’
‘It was the Chamber of Commerce luncheon at the Town Hall. A vitally important occasion, and he made the feeblest speech I have ever heard. A child with water on the brain could have done better. Even you could have done better.’
Well, I suppose placing me on a level of efficiency with a water-on-the-brained child was quite a stately compliment coming from Florence, so I didn’t go further into the matter, and she carried on, puffs of flame emerging from both nostrils.
‘Er, er, er!’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘He kept saying Er. Er, er, er. I could have thrown a coffee spoon at him.’
Here, of course, was my chance to work in the old gag about to err being human, but it didn’t seem to me the moment. Instead, I said:
‘He was probably nervous.’
‘That was his excuse. I told him he had no right to be nervous.’
‘Then you’ve seen him?’
‘I saw him.’
‘After the lunch?’
‘Immediately after the lunch.’
‘But you want to see him again?’
‘I do.’
‘I’ll go and look for him, shall I?’
‘Yes, and tell him to meet me in Mr Travers’s study. We shall not be interrupted there.’
‘He’s probably sitting in the summerhouse by the lake.’
‘Well, tell him to stop sitting and come to the study,’ she said, for all the world as if she had been Arnold Abney M.A. announcing that he would like to see Wooster after morning prayers. Quite took me back to the old days.
To get to the summerhouse you have to go across the lawn, the one Spode was toying with the idea of buttering me over, and the first thing I saw as I did so, apart from the birds, bees, butterflies, and what-not which put in their leisure hours there, was L. P. Runkle lying in the hammock wrapped in slumber, with Aunt Dahlia in a chair at his side. When she sighted me, she rose, headed in my direction and drew me away a yard or two, at the same time putting a finger to her lips.
‘He’s asleep,’ she said.
A snore from the hammock bore out the truth of this, and I said I could see he was and what a revolting spectacle he presented, and she told me for heaven’s sake not to bellow like that. Somewhat piqued at being accused of bellowing by a woman whose lightest whisper was like someone calling the cattle home ac
ross the sands of Dee, I said I wasn’t bellowing, and she said ‘Well, don’t.’
‘He may be in a nasty mood if he’s woken suddenly.’
It was an astute piece of reasoning, speaking well for her grasp of strategy and tactics, but with my quick intelligence I spotted a flaw in it to which I proceeded to call her attention.
‘On the other hand, if you don’t wake him, how can you plead Tuppy’s cause?’
‘I said suddenly, ass. It’ll be all right if I let Nature take its course.’
‘Yes, you may have a point there. Will Nature be long about it, do you think?’
‘How do I know?’
‘I was only wondering. You can’t sit there the rest of the afternoon.’
‘I can if necessary.’
‘Then I’ll leave you to it. I’ve got to go and look for Ginger. Have you seen him?’
‘He came by just now with his secretary on his way to the summerhouse. He told me he had some dictation to do. Why do you want him?’
‘I don’t particularly, though always glad of his company. Florence told me to find him. She has been giving him hell and is anxious to give him some more. Apparently—’
Here she interrupted me with a sharp ‘Hist!’, for L. P. Runkle had stirred in his sleep and it looked as if life was returning to the inert frame. But it proved to be a false alarm, and I resumed my remarks.
‘Apparently he failed to wow the customers at the Chamber of Commerce lunch, where she had been counting on him being a regular … who was the Greek chap?’
‘Bertie, if I wasn’t afraid of waking Runkle, I’d strike you with a blunt instrument, if I had a blunt instrument. What Greek chap?’
‘That’s what I’m asking you. He chewed pebbles.’
‘Do you mean Demosthenes?’
‘You may be right. I’ll take it up later with Jeeves. Florence was expecting Ginger to be a regular Demosthenes, if that was the name, which seems unlikely, though I was at school with a fellow called Gianbattista, and he let her down, and this has annoyed her. You know how she speaks her mind, when annoyed.’