‘Oh, won’t he?’ he said, going back into the old cinnamon bear routine. ‘He won’t, won’t he? We’ll see about that. Pop off, Bertie. I want to think.’
I popped off, glad to do so. These displays of naked emotion take it out of one.
14
* * *
THE SHORTEST WAY to the house was across the lawn, but I didn’t take it. Instead, I made for the back door. It was imperative, I felt, that I should see Jeeves without delay and tell him of the passions he had unchained and warn him, until the hot blood had had time to cool, to keep out of Ginger’s way. I hadn’t at all liked the sound of the latter’s ‘We’ll see about that’, nor the clashing of those gnashed teeth. I didn’t of course suppose that, however much on the boil, he would inflict personal violence on Jeeves – sock him, if you prefer the expression – but he would certainly say things to him which would wound his feelings and cause their relations, so pleasant up to now, to deteriorate. And naturally I didn’t want that to happen.
Jeeves was in a deck-chair outside the back door, reading Spinoza with the cat Augustus on his lap. I had given him the Spinoza at Christmas and he was constantly immersed in it. I hadn’t dipped into it myself, but he tells me it is good ripe stuff, well worth perusal.
He would have risen at my approach, but I begged him to remain seated, for I knew that Augustus, like L. P. Runkle, resented being woken suddenly, and one always wants to consider a cat’s feelings.
‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘a somewhat peculiar situation has popped up out of a trap, and I would be happy to have your comments on it. I am sorry to butt in when you are absorbed in your Spinoza and have probably just got to the part where the second corpse is discovered, but what I have to say is of great pith and moment, so listen attentively.’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘The facts are these,’ I said, and without further preamble or whatever they call it I embarked on my narrative. ‘Such,’ I concluded some minutes later, ‘is the position of affairs, and I think you will agree that the problem confronting us presents certain points of interest.’
‘Undeniably, sir.’
‘Somehow Ginger has got to lose the election.’
‘Precisely, sir.’
‘But how?’
‘It is difficult to say on the spur of the moment, sir. The tide of popular opinion appears to be swaying in Mr Winship’s direction. Lord Sidcup’s eloquence is having a marked effect on the electorate and may well prove the deciding factor. Mr Seppings, who obliged as an extra waiter at the luncheon, reports that his lordship’s address to the members of the Market Snodsbury Chamber of Commerce was sensational in its brilliance. He tells me that, owing entirely to his lordship, the odds to be obtained in the various public houses, which at one time favoured Mrs McCorkadale at ten to six, have now sunk to evens.’
‘I don’t like that, Jeeves.’
‘No, sir, it is ominous.’
‘Of course, if you were to release the club book …’
‘I fear I cannot do that, sir.’
‘No, I told Ginger you regarded it as a sacred trust. Then nothing can be done except to urge you to get the old brain working.’
‘I will certainly do my utmost, sir.’
‘No doubt something will eventually emerge. Keep eating lots of fish. And meanwhile stay away from Ginger as much as possible, for he is in ugly mood.’
‘I quite understand, sir. Stockish, hard and full of rage.’
‘Shakespeare?’
‘Yes, sir. His Merchant of Venice.’
I left him then, pleased at having got one right for a change, and headed for the drawing-room, hoping for another quiet go at the Rex Stout which the swirling rush of events had forced me to abandon. I was, however, too late. The old ancestor was on the chaise longue with it in her grasp, and I knew that I had small chance of wresting it from her. No one who has got his or her hooks on a Rex Stout lightly lets it go.
Her presence there surprised me. I had supposed that she was still brooding over the hammock and its contents.
‘Hullo,’ I said, ‘have you finished with Runkle?’
She looked up, and I noted a trace of annoyance in her demeanour. I assumed that Nero Wolfe had come down from the orchid room and told Archie Goodwin to phone Saul Panzar and Orrie what’s his name and things were starting to warm up. In which event she would naturally resent the intrusion of even a loved nephew whom she had often dandled on her knee – not recently, I don’t mean, but when I was a bit younger.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, which it was of course. ‘No, I haven’t finished with Runkle. I haven’t even begun. He’s still asleep.’
She gave me the impression of being not much in the mood for chit-chat, but one has to say something on these occasions. I brought up a subject which I felt presented certain points of interest.
‘Have you ever noticed the remarkable resemblance between L. P. Runkle’s daily habits and those of the cat Augustus? They seem to spend all their time sleeping. Do you think they’ve got traumatic symplegia?’
‘What on earth’s that?’
‘I happened to come on it in a medical book I was reading. It’s a disease that makes you sleep all the time. Has Runkle shown no signs of waking?’
‘Yes, he did, and just as he was beginning to stir Madeline Bassett came along. She said could she speak to me, so I had to let her. It wasn’t easy to follow what she was saying, because she was sobbing all the time, but I got it at last. It was all about the rift with Spode. I told you they had had a tiff. It turns out to be more serious than that. You remember me telling you he couldn’t be a Member of Parliament because he was a peer. Well, he wants to give up his title so that he will be eligible.’
‘Can a fellow with a title give it up? I thought he was stuck with it.’
‘He couldn’t at one time, at least only by being guilty of treason, but they’ve changed the rules and apparently it’s quite the posh thing to do nowadays.’
‘Sounds silly.’
‘That’s the view Madeline takes.’
‘Did she say what put the idea into Spode’s fat head?’
‘No, but I can see what did. He has made such a smash hit with his speeches down here that he’s saying to himself “Why am I sweating like this on behalf of somebody else? Why not go into business for myself?” Who was it said someone was intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Jeeves would. It was Bernard Shaw or Mark Twain or Jack Dempsey or somebody. Anyway, that’s Spode. He’s all puffed up and feels he needs a wider scope. He sees himself holding the House of Commons spellbound.’
‘Why can’t he hold the House of Lords spellbound?’
‘It wouldn’t be the same thing. It would be like playing in the Market Snodsbury tennis tournament instead of electrifying one and all on the centre court at Wimbledon. I can see his point.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Nor can Madeline. She’s all worked up about it, and I can understand how she feels. No joke for a girl who thinks she’s going to be the Countess of Sidcup to have the fellow say “April fool, my little chickadee. What you’re going to be is Mrs Spode.” If I had been told at Madeline’s age that Tom had been made a peer and I then learned that he was going to back out of it and I wouldn’t be able to call myself Lady Market Snodsbury after all, I’d have kicked like a mule. Titles to a girl are like catnip to a cat.’
‘Can nothing be done?’
‘The best plan would be for you to go to him and tell him how much we all admire him for being Lord Sidcup and what a pity it would be for him to go back to a ghastly name like Spode.’
‘What’s the next best plan?’
‘Ah, that wants thinking out.’
We fell into a thoughtful silence, on my part an uneasy one. I didn’t at this juncture fully appreciate the peril that lurked, but anything in the nature of a rift within the lute between Spode and Madeline was always calculated to
make me purse the lips to some extent. I was still trying to hit on some plan which would be more to my taste than telling Spode what a pity it would be for him to stop being the Earl of Sidcup and go back to a ghastly name like his, when my reverie was broken by the entry through the French window of the cat Augustus, for once awake and in full possession of his faculties, such as they were. No doubt in a misty dreamlike sort of way he had seen me when I was talking to Jeeves and had followed me on my departure, feeling, after those breakfasts of ours together, that association with me was pretty well bound to culminate in kippers. A vain hope, of course. The well-dressed man does not go around with kippered herrings in his pocket. But one of the lessons life teaches us is that cats will be cats.
As is my unvarying policy when closeted with one of these fauna, I made chirruping noises and bent down to tickle the back of the dumb chum’s left ear, but my heart was not in the tickling. The more I mused on the recent conversation, the less I liked what the aged relative had revealed. Telling Augustus that I would be back with him in a moment, I straightened myself and was about to ask her for further details, when I discovered that she was no longer in my midst. She must suddenly have decided to have another pop at L. P. Runkle and was presumably even now putting Tuppy’s case before him. Well, best of luck to her, of course, and nice to think she had a fine day for it, but I regretted her absence. When your mind is weighed down with matters of great pith and moment, it gives you a sort of sinking feeling to be alone. No doubt the boy who stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled had this experience.
However, I wasn’t alone for long. Scarcely had Augustus sprung on to my lap and started catching up with his sleep when the door opened and Spode came in.
I leaped to my feet, causing Augustus to fall to earth I knew not where, as the fellow said. I was a prey to the liveliest apprehensions. My relations with Spode had been for long so consistently strained that I never saw him nowadays without a lurking fear that he was going to sock me in the eye. Obviously I wasn’t to be blamed if he and Madeline had been having trouble, but that wouldn’t stop him blaming me. It was like the story of the chap who was in prison and a friend calls and asks him why and the chap tells him and the friend says But they can’t put you in prison for that and the chap says I know they can’t, but they have. Spode didn’t have to have logical reasons for setting about people he wasn’t fond of, and it might be that he was like Florence and would work off his grouch on the first available innocent bystander. Putting it in a nutshell, my frame of mind was approximately that of the fellows in the hymn who got such a start when they looked over their shoulders and saw the troops of Midian prowling and prowling around.
It was with profound relief, therefore, that I suddenly got on to it that his demeanour was free from hostility. He was looking like somebody who has just seen the horse on which he had put all his savings, plus whatever he had been able to lift from his employer’s till, beaten by a short head. His face, nothing to write home about at the best of times, was drawn and contorted, but with pain rather than the urge to commit mayhem. And while one would always prefer him not to be present, a drawn-and-contorted-with-pain Spode was certainly the next best thing. My greeting, in consequence, had the real ring of cordiality in it.
‘Oh, hullo, Spode, hullo. There you are, what? Splendid.’
‘Can I have a word with you, Wooster?’
‘Of course, of course. Have several.’
He did not speak for a minute or so, filling in the time by subjecting me to a close scrutiny. Then he gave a sigh and shook his head.
‘I can’t understand it,’ he said.
‘What can’t you understand, Spode old man or rather Lord Sidcup old man?’ I asked in a kind voice, for I was only too willing to help this new and improved Spode solve any little problem that was puzzling him.
‘How Madeline can contemplate marrying a man like you. She has broken our engagement and says that’s what she’s going to do. She was quite definite about it. “All is over,” she said. “Here is your ring,” she said. “I shall marry Bertie Wooster and make him happy,” she said. You can’t want it plainer than that.’
I stiffened from head to f. Even with conditions what they were in this disturbed post-war world I hadn’t been expecting to be turned into a pillar of salt again for some considerable time, but this had done it. I don’t know how many of my public have ever been slapped between the eyes with a wet fish, but those who have will appreciate my emotions as the seventh Earl of Sidcup delivered this devastating bulletin. Everything started to go all wobbly, and through what is known as a murky mist I seemed to be watching a quivering-at-the-edges seventh Earl performing the sort of gyrations travelled friends have told me the Ouled Nail dancers do in Cairo.
I was stunned. It seemed to me incredible that Madeline Bassett should have blown the whistle on their engagement. Then I remembered that at the time when she had plighted her troth Spode was dangling a countess’s coronet before her eyes, and the thing became more understandable. I mean, take away the coronet and what had you got? Just Spode. Not good enough, a girl would naturally feel.
He, meanwhile, was going on to explain why he found it so bizarre that Madeline should be contemplating marrying me, and almost immediately I saw that I had been mistaken in supposing that he was not hostile. He spoke from between clenched teeth, and that always tells the story.
‘As far as I can see, Wooster, you are without attraction of any kind. Intelligence? No. Looks? No. Efficiency? No. You can’t even steal an umbrella without getting caught. All that can be said for you is that you don’t wear a moustache. They tell me you did grow one once, but mercifully shaved it off. That is to your credit, but it is a small thing to weigh in the balance against all your other defects. When one considers how numerous these are, one can only suppose that it is your shady record of stealing anything you can lay your hands on that appeals to Madeline’s romantic soul. She is marrying you in the hope of reforming you, and let me tell you, Wooster, that if you disappoint that hope, you will be sorry. She may have rejected me, but I shall always love her as I have done since she was so high, and I shall do my utmost to see that her gentle heart is not broken by any sneaking son of a what-not who looks like a chorus boy in a touring revue playing the small towns and cannot see anything of value without pocketing it. You will probably think you are safe from me when you are doing your stretch in Wormwood Scrubs for larceny, but I shall be waiting for you when you come out and I shall tear you limb from limb. And,’ he added, for his was a one-track mind, ‘dance on the fragments in hob-nailed boots.’
He paused, produced his cigarette case, asked me if I had a match, thanked me when I gave him one, and withdrew.
He left behind him a Bertram Wooster whom the dullest eye could have spotted as not being at the peak of his form. The prospect of being linked for life to a girl who would come down to breakfast and put her hands over my eyes and say ‘Guess who’ had given my morale a sickening wallop, reducing me to the level of one of those wee sleekit timorous cowering beasties Jeeves tells me the poet Burns used to write about. It is always my policy in times of crisis to try to look on the bright side, but I make one proviso – viz. that there has to be a bright side to look on, and in the present case there wasn’t even the sniff of one.
As I sat there draining the bitter cup, there were noises off stage and my meditations were interrupted by the return of the old ancestor. Well, when I say return, she came whizzing in but didn’t stop, just whizzed through, and I saw, for I am pretty quick at noticing things, that she was upset about something. Reasoning closely, I deduced that her interview with L. P. Runkle must have gone awry or, as I much prefer to put it, agley.
And so it proved when she bobbed up again some little time later. Her first observation was that L. P. Runkle was an illegitimate offspring to end all illegitimate offsprings, and I hastened to commiserate with her. I could have done with a bit of commiseration myself, but Women and Children Fir
st is always the Wooster slogan.
‘No luck?’ I said.
‘None.’
‘Wouldn’t part?’
‘Not a penny.’
‘You mentioned that without his cooperation Tuppy and Angela’s wedding bells would not ring out?’
‘Of course I did. And he said it was a great mistake for young people to marry before they knew their own minds.’
‘You could have pointed out that Tuppy and Angela have been engaged for two years.’
‘I did.’
‘What did he say to that?’
‘He said “Not nearly long enough”.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I’ve done it,’ said the old ancestor. ‘I pinched his porringer.’
15
* * *
I GOGGLED AT her, one hundred per cent nonplussed. She had spoken with the exuberance of an aunt busily engaged in patting herself between the shoulder-blades for having done something particularly clever, but I could make nothing of her statement. This habit of speaking in riddles seemed to be growing on her.
‘You what?’ I said. ‘You pinched his what?’
‘His porringer. I told you about it the day you got here. Don’t you remember? That silver thing he came to try to sell to Tom.’
She had refreshed my memory. I recalled the conversation to which she referred. I had asked her why she was entertaining in her home a waste product like L. P. Runkle, and she had said that he had come hoping to sell Uncle Tom a silver something for his collection and she had got him to stay on in order to soften him up with Anatole’s cooking and put to him, when softened up, her request for cash for Tuppy.
‘When he turned me down just now, it suddenly occurred to me that if I got hold of the thing and told him he wouldn’t get it back unless he made a satisfactory settlement, I would have a valuable bargaining point and we could discuss the matter further at any time that suited him.’