Well, he didn’t need to tell me that. An old hand like myself knows how vital rigid training is for success on the turf. I have not forgotten the time at Aunt Dahlia’s place in Worcestershire when I had a heavy bet on Marlene Cooper, the gardener’s niece, in the Girls’ Under Fifteen Egg and Spoon race on Village Sports Day, and on the eve of the meeting she broke training, ate pounds of unripe gooseberries, and got abdominal pains which prevented her showing up at the starting-post.
‘But, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘while all this is of absorbing interest, what I want to know is why Cook got into such a frenzy about this cat. You ought to have seen his blood pressure. It shot up like a rocket. He couldn’t have been more emotional if he had been a big shot in the Foreign Office and I a heavily veiled woman diffusing a strange exotic scent whom he had caught getting away with the Naval Treaty.’
‘Fortunately I am in a position to elucidate the mystery, sir. One of the habitués with whom I fraternized at the Goose and Grasshopper chances to be an employee of Mr Cook, and he furnished me with the facts in the case. The cat was a stray which appeared one morning in the stable yard, and Potato Chip took an instant fancy to it. This, I understand, is not unusual with highly bred horses, though more often it is a goat or a sheep which engages their affection.’
This was quite new stuff to me. First I’d ever heard of it.
‘Goat?’ I said.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Or a sheep?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You mean love at first sight?’
‘One might so describe it, sir.’
‘What asses horses are, Jeeves.’
‘Certainly their mentality is open to criticism, sir.’
‘Though I suppose if for weeks you’ve seen nothing but Cook and stable boys, a cat comes as a nice change. I take it that the friendship ripened?’
‘Yes, sir. The cat now sleeps nightly in the horse’s stall and is there to meet him when he returns from his daily exercise.’
‘The welcome guest?’
‘Extremely welcome, sir.’
‘They’ve put down the red carpet for it, you might say. Strange. I’d have thought a human vampire bat like Cook would have had a stray cat off the premises with a single kick.’
‘Something of that nature did occur, my informant tells me, and the result was disastrous. Potato Chip became listless and refused his food. Then one day the cat returned, and the horse immediately recovered both vivacity and appetite.’
‘Golly!’
‘Yes, sir, the story surprised me when I heard it.’
I rose. Time was getting on, and I had a vision of the Briscoes with their noses pressed to the drawing-room window, looking out and telling each other that surely their Wooster ought to have shown up by now.
‘Well, many thanks, Jeeves,’ I said. ‘With your customary what-d’you-call-it you have cast light on what might have remained a permanent brain-teaser. But for you I should have passed sleepless nights wondering what on earth Cook thought he was playing at. I now feel kindlier towards him. I still wouldn’t care to have to go on a long walking tour with the son of a what-not, and if he ever gets himself put up for the Drones, I shall certainly blackball him, but I can see his point of view. He finds me clutching his cat, learns that I am on pally terms with his deadly rival the Colonel, and naturally assumes that there is dirty work afoot. No wonder he yelled like a soul in torment and brandished his hunting crop. He deserves considerable credit for not having given me six of the best with it.’
‘Your broadminded view is to be applauded, sir.’
‘One must always strive to put oneself in the other fellow’s place and remember … remember what?’
‘Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.’
‘Thank you, Jeeves.’
‘Not at all, sir.’
‘And now Ho for Eggesford Hall.’
If you ask about me in circles which I frequent, you will be told that I am a good mixer who is always glad to shake hands with new faces, and it ought to have been in merry mood that I braked the car at the front door of Eggesford Hall. But it wasn’t. Not that there was anything about the new faces on the other side to give me the pip. Colonel Briscoe proved to be a genial host, Mrs B a genial hostess. There were also present, besides Aunt Dahlia, the Rev Ambrose Briscoe, the Colonel’s brother, and the latter’s daughter Angelica, a very personable wench with whom, had I not been so preoccupied, I should probably have fallen in love. In short, as pleasant a bunch as you could wish to meet.
But that was the trouble. I was preoccupied. It wasn’t so much finding myself practically next door to Vanessa Cook that worried me. It would be pretty difficult for me to go anywhere in England where there wasn’t somebody who had turned me down at one time or another. I have run across them in spots as widely separated as Bude, Cornwall, and Sedbergh, Yorks. No, what was occupying the Wooster mind was the thought of Pop Cook and his hunting crop. It was not agreeable to feel that one was on bad terms with a man who might run amok at any moment and who, if he did, would probably make a beeline for Bertram.
The result was that I did not shine at the festive b. The lunch was excellent and the port with which it concluded definitely super, and I tucked in with a zest which would have made E. Jimpson Murgatroyd draw in a sharp breath, but as far as sprightly conversation went I was a total loss, and the suspicion must have crossed the minds of my host and hostess fairly soon in the proceedings that they were entertaining a Trappist monk with a good appetite.
That this had not failed to cross the mind of Aunt Dahlia was made abundantly clear to me when the meal was over and she took me for a tour of what Jeeves had called the extensive grounds. She ticked me off with her habitual non-mincing of words. All through my life she has been my best friend and severest critic, and when she rebukes a nephew she rebukes him good.
She spoke as follows, her manner and diction similar to those of a sergeant-major addressing recruits.
‘What’s the matter with you, you poor reptile? I told Jimmy and Elsa that my nephew might look like a half-witted halibut, but wait till he starts talking, I said, he’ll have you in stitches. And what occurs? Quips? Sallies? Diverting anecdotes? No, sir. You sit there stupefying yourself with food, and scarcely a sound out of you except the steady champing of your jaws. I felt like an impresario of performing fleas who has given his star artist a big build-up, only to have him forget his lines on the opening night.’
I bowed my head in shame, knowing how justified was the rebuke. My contribution to what I have heard called the feast of reason and flow of soul had been, as I have indicated, about what you might have expected from a strong silent Englishman with tonsilitis.
‘And the way you waded into that port. Like a camel arriving at an oasis after a long journey through desert sands. It was as if you had received private word from Jimmy that he wanted his cellar emptied quick so that he could turn it into a games room. If that’s the way you carry on in London, no wonder you come out all over in spots. I’m surprised you can walk.’
She was right. I had to admit it.
‘Did you ever see a play called Ten Nights in a Bar Room?’
I could bear no more. Weakly I tried to plead my case.
‘I am sorry, aged relative. What you say is true. But I am not myself today.’
‘Well, that’s a bit of luck for everybody.’
‘I’m what you could call distraught.’
‘You’re what I could call a mess.’
‘I passed through a strange experience this morning.’
And with no further ado – or is it to-do? I never can remember – I told her my cat-Cook story.
I told it well, and there was no mistaking her interest when I came to the part where Jeeves elucidated the mystery of the cat’s importance in the scheme of things.
‘Do you mean to say,’ she yipped, ‘that if you had got away with that cat—’
I had to pull her up here with a touch of austerity. I
n spite of the clearness with which I had been at pains to tell the story just right she seemed to have got the wrong angle on the thing.
‘There was no question, old ancestor, of my getting away with the cat. I was merely doing the civil thing by tickling its stomach.’
‘But do you really mean that if someone were to get away with it, it would be all up with Potato Chip’s training?’
‘So Jeeves informs me, and he had it from a reliable source at the Goose and Grasshopper.’
‘H’m.’
‘Why do you say H’m?’
‘Ha.’
‘Why do you say Ha?’
‘Never mind.’
But I did mind. When an aunt says ‘H’m’ and ‘Ha’, it means something, and I was filled with a nameless fear.
However, I had no time to go into it, for at this moment we were joined by the Rev Briscoe and his daughter. And shortly afterwards I left.
6
* * *
THE AFTERNOON HAD now hotted up to quite a marked extent, and what with a substantial lunch and several beakers of port I was more or less in the condition a python gets into after its mid-day meal. A certain drowsiness had stolen over me, so much so that twice in the course of my narrative the aged r. had felt compelled to notify me that if I didn’t stop yawning in her face, she would let me have one on the side of my fat head with the parasol with which she was shielding herself from the rays of the sun.
There had been no diminution of this drowsiness since last heard of, and as I bowled along the high road I was practically in dreamland, and it occurred to me that if I didn’t pause somewhere and sleep it off, I should shortly become a menace to pedestrians and traffic. The last thing I wanted was to come before my late host in his magisterial capacity, charged with having struck some citizen amidships while under the influence of his port. Colonel Briscoe’s port, I mean, not the citizen’s. Embarrassing for both of us, though in a way a compliment to the excellence of his cellar.
The high road, like most high roads, was flanked on either side by fields, some with cows, some without, so, the day being as warm as it was, just dropping anchor over here or over there meant getting as cooked to a crisp as Major Plank would have been, had the widows and surviving relatives of the late chief of the ‘Mgombis established connection with him. What I wanted was shade, and by great good fortune I came on a little turning leading to wooded country, just what I needed. I drove into this wooded country, stopped the machinery, and it wasn’t long before sleep poured over me in a healing wave, as the expression is.
It started off by being one of those dreamless sleeps, but after a while a nightmare took over. It seemed to me that I was out fishing with E. Jimpson Murgatroyd in what appeared to be tropical waters, and he caught a shark and I was having a look at it, when it suddenly got hold of my arm. This of course gave me a start, and I woke. And as I opened my eyes I saw that there was something attached to my port-side biceps, but it wasn’t a shark, it was Orlo Porter.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he was saying, ‘for interrupting your doze, but I am a bird-watcher. I was watching a Clarkson’s warbler in that thicket over there, and I was afraid your snoring might frighten it away, so might I beg you to go easy on the sound effects. Clarkson’s warblers are very sensitive to loud noises, and you were making yourself audible a mile off.’
Or words to that general import.
I would have replied ‘Oh, hullo’, or something like that, but I was too astonished to speak, partly because I had never suspected that Orlo Porter could be so polite, but principally because he was there at all. I had looked on Maiden Eggesford as somewhere where I would be free from all human society, a haven where I would have peace perfect peace with loved ones far away, as the hymnbook says, and it was turning out to be a sort of meeting place of the nations. First Plank, then Vanessa Cook, and now Orlo Porter. If this sort of thing was going to go on, I told myself, I wouldn’t be surprised to see my Aunt Agatha come round the corner arm in arm with E. J. Murgatroyd.
Orlo Porter seemed now to recognize me, for he started like a native of India who sees a scorpion in his path, and went on to say:
‘Wooster, you blasted slimy creeping crawling serpent, I might have expected this!’
It was plain that he was not glad to see me, for there was nothing affectionate in what he said or the way he said it, but apart from that I was unable to follow him. He had me at a loss.
‘Expected what?’ I asked, hoping for footnotes.
‘That you would have followed Vanessa here, your object to steal her from me.’
This struck me as so absurd that I laughed a light laugh, and he asked me to stop cackling like a hen whose union had been blest – or laying a blasted egg, as he preferred to put it.
‘I haven’t followed anyone anywhere,’ I said, trying to pour oil on the troubled w.’s. I debated with myself whether to add ‘old man’, and decided not. I doubt if it would have had much effect, anyway.
‘Then why are you here?’ he demanded in a voice so fortissimo that it was obvious that he didn’t give a damn if Clarkson’s warbler heard him and legged it in a panic.
I continued suave.
‘The matter is susceptible of a ready explanation,’ I said. ‘You remember those spots of mine.’
‘Don’t change the subject.’
‘I wasn’t. Having inspected the spots, the doc advised me to retire to the country.’
‘There are plenty of other places in the country to retire to.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘but my Aunt Dahlia is staying with some people here, and I knew it would make all the difference if I had her to exchange ideas with. Very entertaining woman, my Aunt Dahlia. Never a dull moment when she’s around.’
This, as I had foreseen, had him stymied. Something of his belligerence left him, and I could see that he was saying to himself, ‘Can it be that I have wronged Bertram?’ Then he clouded over again.
‘All this is very plausible,’ he said, ‘but it does not explain why you were slinking round Eggesford Court this morning.’
I was amazed. When I was a child, my nurse told me that there was One who was always beside me, spying out all my ways, and that if I refused to eat my spinach I would hear about it on Judgment Day, but it never occurred to me that she was referring to Orlo Porter.
‘How on earth do you know that?’ I said – or perhaps ‘gasped’ would be a better word, or even ‘gurgled’.
‘I was watching the place through my bird-watching binoculars, hoping to get a glimpse of the woman I love.’
This gave me the opportunity to steer the conversation into less controversial topics.
‘I had forgotten you were a bird-watcher till you reminded me just now. You went in for it at Oxford, I remember. It isn’t a thing I would care to do myself. Not,’ I hastened to add, ‘that I’ve anything against bird-watching. Must be most interesting, besides keeping you’ – I was about to say ‘out of the public houses’ but thought it better to change it to ‘out in the open air’. ‘What’s the procedure?’ I said. ‘I suppose you lurk in a bush till a bird comes along, and then you out with the glasses and watch it.’
I had more to say, notably a question as to who Clarkson was and how he came to have a warbler, but he interrupted me.
‘I will tell you why you were sneaking round Eggesford Court this morning. It was in the hope of seeing Vanessa.’
I no-noed, but he paid no attention.
‘And I would like to say for your guidance, Wooster, that if I catch you trying to inflict your beastly society on her again, I shall have no hesitation in tearing your insides out.’
He started to walk away, paused, added over his shoulder the words ‘With my bare hands’ and was gone, whether or not to resume watching Clarkson’s warbler, I had no means of knowing. My own feeling was that any level-headed bird with sensitive ears would have removed itself almost immediately after he had begun to speak.
7
* * *
r /> THESE PARTING REMARKS of O. Porter gave me, as may readily be imagined, considerable food for thought. There happened at the moment to be no passers-by, but if any passers had been by, they would have noticed that my brow was knitted and the eyes a bit glazed. This always happens when you are turning things over in your mind and not liking the look of them. You see the same thing in Cabinet ministers when they are asked awkward questions in Parliament.
It was not, of course, the first time an acquaintance had expressed a desire to delve into my interior and remove its contents. Roderick Spode, now going about under the alias of Lord Sidcup, had done so frequently when in the grip of the illusion that I was trying to steal Madeline Bassett from him, little knowing that she gave me a pain in the gizzard and that I would willingly have run a mile in tight shoes to avoid her.
But I had never before had such a sense of imminent peril as now. Spode might talk airily – or is it glibly? – of buttering me over the lawn and jumping on the remains with hobnailed boots, but it was always possible to buoy oneself up with the thought that his bark was worse than his b. I mean to say, a fellow like Spode has a position to keep up. He can’t afford to indulge every passing whim. If he goes buttering people over lawns, he’s in for trouble. Debrett’s Peerage tut-tuts, Burke’s Landed Gentry raises its eyebrows, and as likely as not he gets cut by the County and has to emigrate.
But Orlo Porter was under no such restraint. Being a Communist, he was probably on palsy-walsy terms with half the big shots at the Kremlin, and the more of the bourgeoisie he disembowelled, the better they would be pleased. ‘A young man with the right stuff in him, this Comrade Porter. Got nice ideas,’ they would say when reading about the late Wooster. ‘We must keep an eye on him with a view to further advancement.’