The slightly awakened interest in the young lady’s eyes did not abate. Perhaps it was caused by either the originality or the audacity of the snow-bird hunter, in thus circumventing her express commands against the ordinary modes of communication. She fixed her eye on a statue standing disconsolate in the dishevelled park, and spoke into the transmitter:
“Tell the gentleman that I need not repeat to him a description of my ideals. He knows what they have been and what they still are. So far as they touch on this case, absolute loyalty and truth are the ones paramount. Tell him that I have studied my own heart as well as one can, and I know its weakness as well as I do its needs. That is why I decline to hear his pleas, whatever they may be. I did not condemn him through hearsay or doubtful evidence, and that is why I made no charge. But, since he persists in hearing what he already well knows, you may convey the matter.
“Tell him that I entered the conservatory that evening from the rear, to cut a rose for my mother. Tell him I saw him and Miss Ashburton beneath the pink oleander. The tableau was pretty, but the pose and juxtaposition were too eloquent and evident to require explanation. I left the conservatory, and, at the same time, the rose and my ideal. You may carry that song and dance to your impresario.”
“I’m shy on one word, lady. Jux—jar—put me wise on dat, will yer? “
“Juxtaposition—or you may call it propinquity—or, if you like, being rather too near for one maintaining the position of an ideal.”
The gravel spun from beneath the boy’s feet. He stood by the other bench. The man’s eyes interrogated him, hungrily. The boy’s were shining with the impersonal zeal of the translator.
“De lady says dat she’s on to de fact dat gals is dead easy when a feller comes spielin’ ghost stories and tryin’ to make up, and dat’s why she won’t listen to no soft-soap. She says she caught yer dead to fights, huggin’ a bunch o’ calico in de hot-house. She sidestepped in to pull some posies and yer was squeezin’ de oder gal to beat de band. She says it looked cute, all right all right, but it made her sick. She says yer better git busy, and make a sneak for de train.”
The young man gave a low whistle and his eyes flashed with a sudden thought. His hand flew to the inside pocket of his coat, and drew out a handful of letters. Selecting one, he handed it to the boy, following it with a silver dollar from his vest-pocket.
“Give that letter to the lady,” he said, “and ask her to read it. Tell her that it should explain the situation. Tell her that, if she had mingled a little trust with her conception of the ideal, much heartache might have been avoided. Tell her that the loyalty she prizes so much has never wavered. Tell her I am waiting for an answer.”
The messenger stood before the lady.
“De gent says he’s had de ski-bunk put on him widout no cause. He says he’s no bum guy; and, lady, yer read dat letter, and I’ll bet yer he’s a white sport, all right.”
The young lady unfolded the letter, somewhat doubtfully, and read it.
DEAR DR. ARNOLD: I want to thank you for your most kind and opportune aid to my daughter last Friday evening, when she was overcome by an attack of her old heart-trouble in the conservatory at Mrs. Waldron’s reception. Had you not been near to catch her as she fell and to render proper attention, we might have lost her. I would be glad if you would call and undertake the treatment of her case.
Gratefully yours,
ROBERT ASHBURTON.
The young lady refolded the letter, and handed it to the boy.
“De gent wants an answer,” said the messenger. “Wot’s de word?”
The lady’s eyes suddenly flashed on him, bright, smiling and wet.
“Tell that guy on the other bench,” she said, with a happy, tremulous laugh, “that his girl wants him.”
THE AUNT AND THE SLUGGARD (1916)
P. G. Wodehouse
For several decades, P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975), an Englishman, was a master of comic fiction. A frequent visitor to New York City, in 1915 he began writing for Broadway, and simultaneously created for his stories characters who would become his most famous heroes: the bumbling British aristocrat Bertie Wooster and Bertie’s brilliant servant Jeeves. In “The Aunt and the Sluggard,” Bertie’s reclusive friend, Rockmetteller (“Rocky”), must learn to live it up and report on his high life to his rich aunt. “To have to come and live in New York! To have to leave my little cottage and take a stuffy, smelly, over-heated hole of an apartment in this Heaven-forsaken, festering Gehenna,” declares the sluggard. “To have to mix night after night with a mob who think that life is a sort of St. Vitus’s dance,” continues Rocky, “and imagine that they’re having a good time because they’re making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. . . .” Jeeves, ever on hand to unknot Bertie’s social and legal tangles, lends his precise knowledge of New York’s hot spots to the decidedly withdrawn Rocky.
NOW THAT IT’S all over, I may as well admit that there was a time during the rather rummy affair of Rockmetteller Todd when I thought that Jeeves was going to let me down. The man had the appearance of being baffled.
Jeeves is my man, you know. Officially he pulls in his weekly wage for pressing my clothes, and all that sort of thing; but actually he’s more like what the poet Johnnie called some bird of his acquaintance who was apt to rally round him in times of need—a guide, don’t you know; philosopher, if I remember rightly, and—I rather fancy—friend. I rely on him at every turn.
So naturally, when Rocky Todd told me about his aunt, I didn’t hesitate. Jeeves was in on the thing from the start.
The affair of Rocky Todd broke loose early one morning in spring. I was in bed, restoring the good old tissues with about nine hours of the dreamless, when the door flew open and somebody prodded me in the lower ribs and began to shake the bedclothes. After blinking a bit and generally pulling myself together, I located Rocky, and my first impression was that it was some horrid dream.
Rocky, you see, lived down on Long Island somewhere, miles away from New York; and not only that, but he had told me himself more than once that he never got up before twelve, and seldom earlier than one. Constitutionally the laziest young devil in America, he had hit on a walk in life which enabled him to go the limit in that direction. He was a poet. At least, he wrote poems when he did anything; but most of his time, as far as I could make out, he spent in a sort of trance. He told me once that he could sit on a fence, watching a worm and wondering what on earth it was up to, for hours at a stretch.
He had his scheme of life worked out to a fine point. About once a month he would take three days writing a few poems; the other three hundred and twenty-nine days of the year he rested. I didn’t know there was enough money in poetry to support a chappie, even in the way in which Rocky lived; but it seems that, if you stick to exhortations to young men to lead the strenuous life and don’t shove in any rhymes, American editors fight for the stuff. Rocky showed me one of his things once. It began:—
Be!
Be!
The past is dead.
To-morrow is not born. Be to-day!
To-day!
Be with every nerve, With every muscle,
With every drop of your red blood!
Be!
It was printed opposite the frontispiece of a magazine with a sort of scroll round it, and a picture in the middle of a fairly nude chappie, with bulging muscles, giving the rising sun the glad eye. Rocky said they gave him a hundred dollars for it, and he stayed in bed till four in the afternoon for over a month.
As regarded the future he was pretty solid, owing to the fact that he had a moneyed aunt tucked away somewhere in Illinois; and, as he had been named Rockmetteller after her, and was her only nephew, his position was pretty sound. He told me that when he did come into the money he meant to do no work at all, except perhaps an occasional poem recommending the young man with life opening out before him, with all its splendid possibilities, to light a pipe and shove his feet upon the
mantelpiece.
And this was the man who was prodding me in the ribs in the grey dawn!
“Read this, Bertie!” I could just see that he was waving a letter or something equally foul in my face. “Wake up and read this!”
I can’t read before I’ve had my morning tea and a cigarette. I groped for the bell.
Jeeves came in, looking as fresh as a dewy violet. It’s a mystery to me how he does it.
“Tea, Jeeves.”
“Very good, sir.”
He flowed silently out of the room—he always gives you the impression of being some liquid substance when he moves; and I found that Rocky was surging round with his beastly letter again.
“What is it?” I said. “What on earth’s the matter?”
“Read it!”
“I can’t. I haven’t had my tea.”
“Well, listen then.”
“Who’s it from?”
“My aunt.”
At this point I fell asleep again. I woke to hear him saying: —
“So what on earth am I to do?”
Jeeves trickled in with the tray, like some silent stream meandering over its mossy bed; and I saw daylight.
“Read it again, Rocky, old top,” I said. “I want Jeeves to hear it. Mr. Todd’s aunt has written him a rather rummy letter, Jeeves, and we want your advice.”
“Very good, sir.”
He stood in the middle of the room, registering devotion to the cause, and Rocky started again: —
MY DEAR ROCKMETTELLER, —
I have been thinking things over for a long while, and I have come to the conclusion that I have been very thoughtless to wait so long before doing what I have made up my mind to do now.
“What do you make of that, Jeeves?”
“It seems a little obscure at present, sir, but no doubt it becomes clearer at a later point in the communication.”
“It becomes as clear as mud!” said Rocky.
“Proceed, old scout,” I said, champing my bread and butter.
You know how all my life I have longed to visit New York and see for myself the wonderful gay life of which I have read so much. I fear that now it will be impossible for me to fulfil my dream. I am old and worn out. I seem to have no strength left in me.
“Sad, Jeeves, what?”
“Extremely, sir.”
“Sad nothing!” said Rocky. “It’s sheer laziness. I went to see her last Christmas and she was bursting with health. Her doctor told me himself that there was nothing wrong with her whatever. But she will insist that she’s a hopeless invalid, so he has to agree with her. She’s got a fixed idea that the trip to New York would kill her; so, though it’s been her ambition all her life to come here, she stays where she is.”
“Rather like the chappie whose heart was ‘in the Highlands a-chasing of the deer,’ Jeeves?”
“The cases are in some respects parallel, sir.”
“Carry on, Rocky, dear boy.”
So I have decided that, if I cannot enjoy all the marvels of the city myself, I can at least enjoy them through you. I suddenly thought of this yesterday after reading a beautiful poem in the Sunday paper about a young man who had longed all his life for a certain thing and won it in the end only when he was too old to enjoy it. It was very sad, and it touched me.
“A thing,” interpolated Rocky, bitterly, “that I’ve not been able to do in ten years.”
As you know, you will have my money when I am gone; but until now I have never been able to see my way to giving you an allowance. I have now decided to do so—on one condition. I have written to a firm of lawyers in New York, giving them instructions to pay you quite a substantial sum each month. My one condition is that you live in New York and enjoy yourself as I have always wished to do. I want you to be my representative, to spend this money for me as I should do myself. I want you to plunge into the gay, prismatic life of New York. I want you to be the life and soul of brilliant supper parties.
Above all, I want you—indeed, I insist on this—to write me letters at least once a week, giving me a full description of all you are doing and all that is going on in the city, so that I may enjoy at secondhand what my wretched health prevents my enjoying for myself. Remember that I shall expect full details, and that no detail is too trivial to interest
Your affectionate Aunt,
ISABEL ROCKMETTELLER.
“What about it?” said Rocky.
“What about it?” I said.
“Yes. What on earth am I going to do?”
It was only then that I really got on to the extremely rummy attitude of the chappie, in view of the fact that a quite unexpected mess of the right stuff had suddenly descended on him from a blue sky. To my mind it was an occasion for the beaming smile and the joyous whoop; yet here the man was, looking and talking as if Fate had swung on his solar plexus. It amazed me.
“Aren’t you bucked?” I said.
“Bucked!”
“If I were in your place I should be frightfully braced. I consider this pretty soft for you.”
He gave a kind of yelp, stared at me for a moment, and then began to talk of New York in a way that reminded me of Jimmy Mundy, the reformer chappie. Jimmy had just come to New York on a hit-the-trail campaign, and I had popped in at the Garden a couple of days before, for half an hour or so, to hear him. He had certainly told New York some pretty straight things about itself, having apparently taken a dislike to the place, but, by Jove, you know, dear old Rocky made him look like a publicity agent for the old metrop!
“Pretty soft!” he cried. “To have to come and live in New York! To have to leave my little cottage and take a stuffy, smelly, overheated hole of an apartment in this Heaven-forsaken, festering Gehenna. To have to mix night after night with a mob who think that life is a sort of St. Vitus’s dance, and imagine that they’re having a good time because they’re making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn’t come near the place if I hadn’t got to see editors occasionally. There’s a blight on it. It’s got moral delirium tremens. It’s the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this thing pretty soft for me!”
I felt rather like Lot’s friends must have done when they dropped in for a quiet chat and their genial host began to criticize the Cities of the Plain. I had no idea old Rocky could be so eloquent.
“It would kill me to have to live in New York,” he went on.
“To have to share the air with six million people! To have to wear stiff collars and decent clothes all the time! To——” He started.
“Good Lord! I suppose I should have to dress for dinner in the evenings. What a ghastly notion!”
I was shocked, absolutely shocked.
“My dear chap!” I said, reproachfully.
“Do you dress for dinner every night, Bertie?”
“Jeeves,” I said, coldly. The man was still standing like a statue by the door. “How many suits of evening clothes have I?”
“We have three suits full of evening dress, sir; two dinner jackets——”
“Three.”
“For practical purposes two only, sir. If you remember, we cannot wear the third. We have also seven white waistcoats.”
“And shirts?”
“Four dozen, sir.”
“And white ties?”
“The first two shallow shelves in the chest of drawers are completely filled with our white ties, sir.”
I turned to Rocky.
“You see?”
The chappie writhed like an electric fan.
“I won’t do it! I can’t do it! I’ll be hanged if I’ll do it! How on earth can I dress up like that? Do you realize that most days I don’t get out of my pyjamas till five in the afternoon, and then I just put on an old sweater?”
I saw Jeeves wince, poor chap! This sort of revelation shocked his finest feelings.
“Then, what are you going to do about it?” I said.
�
�That’s what I want to know.”
“You might write and explain to your aunt.”
“I might—if I wanted her to get round to her lawyer’s in two rapid leaps and cut me out of her will.”
I saw his point.
“What do you suggest, Jeeves?” I said.
Jeeves cleared his throat respectfully.
“The crux of the matter would appear to be, sir, that Mr. Todd is obliged by the conditions under which the money is delivered into his possession to write Miss Rockmetteller long and detailed letters relating to his movements, and the only method by which this can be accomplished, if Mr. Todd adheres to his expressed intention of remaining in the country, is for Mr. Todd to induce some second party to gather the actual experiences which Miss Rockmetteller wishes reported to her, and to convey these to him in the shape of a careful report, on which it would be possible for him, with the aid of his imagination, to base the suggested correspondence.”
Having got which off the old diaphragm, Jeeves was silent. Rocky looked at me in a helpless sort of way. He hasn’t been brought up on Jeeves as I have, and he isn’t on to his curves.
“Could he put it a little clearer, Bertie?” he said. “I thought at the start it was going to make sense, but it kind of flickered. What’s the idea?”
“My dear old man, perfectly simple. I knew we could stand on Jeeves. All you’ve got to do is to get somebody to go round the town for you and take a few notes, and then you work the notes up into letters. That’s it, isn’t it, Jeeves?”
“Precisely, sir.”
The light of hope gleamed in Rocky’s eyes. He looked at Jeeves in a startled way, dazed by the man’s vast intellect.
“But who would do it?” he said. “It would have to be a pretty smart sort of man, a man who would notice things.”
“Jeeves!” I said. “Let Jeeves do it.”
“But would he?”
“You would do it, wouldn’t you, Jeeves?”
For the first time in our long connection I observed Jeeves almost smile. The corner of his mouth curved quite a quarter of an inch, and for a moment his eye ceased to look like a meditative fish’s.
New York Stories Page 9
