‘My dear good bird, would I lend my car to a chap in a check suit and a crimson tie, not to mention a black patch and a ginger moustache? The thing’s not … what, Jeeves?’
‘Feasible, m’lord.’ Jeeves coughed. ‘Possibly the gentleman’s eyesight needs medical attention.’
Captain Biggar swelled portentously.
‘My eyesight? My eyesight? Do you know who you’re talking to? I am Bwana Biggar.’
‘I regret that the name is strange to me, sir. But I still maintain that you have made the pardonable mistake of failing to read the licence number correctly.’
Before speaking again, Captain Biggar was obliged to swallow once or twice, to restore his composure. He also took another nut.
‘Look,’ he said, almost mildly. ‘Perhaps you’re not up on these things. You haven’t been told who’s who and what’s what. I am Biggar the White Hunter, the most famous White Hunter in all Africa and Indonesia. I can stand without a tremor in the path of an onrushing rhino … and why? Because my eyesight is so superb that I know … I know I can get him in that one vulnerable spot before he has come within sixty paces. That’s the sort of eyesight mine is.’
Jeeves maintained his iron front.
‘I fear I cannot recede from my position, sir. I grant that you may have trained your vision for such a contingency as you have described, but, poorly informed as I am on the subject of the larger fauna of the East, I do not believe that rhinoceri are equipped with licence numbers.’
It seemed to Bill that the time had come to pour oil on the troubled waters and dish out a word of comfort.
‘This bookie of yours, Captain. I think I can strike a note of hope. We concede that he legged it with what appears to have been the swift abandon of a bat out of hell, but I believe that when the fields are white with daisies he’ll pay you. I get the impression that he’s simply trying to gain time.’
‘I’ll give him time,’ said the captain morosely. ‘I’ll see that he gets plenty. And when he has paid his debt to Society, I shall attend to him personally. A thousand pities we’re not out East. They understand these things there. If they know you for a straight shooter and the other chap’s a wrong ’un … well, there aren’t many questions asked.’
Bill started like a frightened fawn.
‘Questions about what?’
‘“Good riddance” sums up their attitude. The fewer there are of such vermin, the better for Anglo-Saxon prestige.’
‘I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.’
‘I don’t mind telling you that there are a couple of notches on my gun that aren’t for buffaloes … or lions … or elands … or rhinos.’
‘Really? What are they for?’
‘Cheaters.’
‘Ah, yes. Those are those leopard things that go as fast as race-horses.’
Jeeves had a correction to make.
‘Somewhat faster, m’lord. A half-mile in forty-five seconds.’
‘Great Scott! Pretty nippy, what? That’s travelling, Jeeves.’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘That’s a cheetah, that was, as one might say.’
Captain Biggar snorted impatiently.
‘Chea-ters was what I said. I’m not talking about cheetah, the animal … though I have shot some of those, too.’
‘Too?’
‘Too.’
‘I see,’ said Bill, gulping a little. ‘Too.’
Jeeves coughed.
‘Might I offer a suggestion, m’lord?’
‘Certainly, Jeeves. Offer several.’
‘An idea has just crossed my mind, m’lord. It has occurred to me that it is quite possible that this race-course character against whom Captain Biggar nurses a justifiable grievance may have substituted for his own licence plate a false one –’
‘By Jove, Jeeves, you’ve hit it!’
‘– and that by some strange coincidence he selected for this false plate the number of your lordship’s car.’
‘Exactly. That’s the solution. Odd we didn’t think of that before. It explains the whole thing, doesn’t it, Captain?’
Captain Biggar was silent. His thoughtful frown told that he was weighing the idea.
‘Of course it does,’ said Bill buoyantly. ‘Jeeves, your bulging brain, with its solid foundation of fish, has solved what but for you would have remained one of those historic mysteries you read about. If I had a hat on, I would raise it to you.’
‘I am happy to have given satisfaction, m’lord.’
‘You always do, Jeeves, you always do. It’s what makes you so generally esteemed.’
Captain Biggar nodded.
‘Yes, I suppose that might have happened. There seems to be no other explanation.’
‘Jolly, getting these things cleared up,’ said Bill. ‘More port, Captain?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Then suppose we join the ladies? They’re probably wondering what the dickens has happened to us and saying “He cometh not”, like … who, Jeeves?’
‘Mariana of the Moated Grange, m’lord. Her tears fell with the dews at even; her tears fell ere the dews were dried. She could not look on the sweet heaven either at morn or eventide.’
‘Oh, well, I don’t suppose our absence has hit them quite as hard as that. Still, it might be as well … Coming, Captain?’
‘I should first like to make a telephone call.’
‘You can do it from the living room.’
‘A private telephone call.’
‘Oh, right-ho. Jeeves, conduct Captain Biggar to your pantry and unleash him on the instrument.’
‘Very good, m’lord.’
Left alone, Bill lingered for some moments, the urge to join the ladies in the living room yielding to a desire to lower just one more glass of port by way of celebration. Honest Patch Perkins had, he felt, rounded a nasty corner.
The only thought that came to mar his contentment had to do with Jill. He was not quite sure of his standing with that lodestar of his life. At dinner, Mrs Spottsworth, seated on his right, had been chummy beyond his gloomiest apprehensions, and he fancied he had detected in Jill’s eye one of those cold, pensive looks which are the last sort of look a young man in love likes to see in the eye of his betrothed.
Fortunately, Mrs Spottsworth’s chumminess had waned as the meal proceeded and Captain Biggar started monopolizing the conversation. She had stopped talking about the old Cannes days and had sat lingering in rapt silence as the White Hunter told of antres vast and deserts idle and of the cannibals that each other eat, the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.
This to hear had Mrs Spottsworth seriously inclined, completely switching off the Cannes motif, so it might be that all was well.
Jeeves returned, and he greeted him effusively as one who had fought the good fight.
‘That was a brain wave of yours, Jeeves.’
‘Thank you, m’lord.’
‘It eased the situation considerably. His suspicions are lulled, don’t you think?’
‘One would be disposed to fancy so, m’lord.’
‘You know, Jeeves, even in these disturbed postwar days, with the social revolution turning handsprings on every side and Civilization, as you might say, in the melting pot, it’s still quite an advantage to be in big print in Debrett’s Peerage.’
‘Unquestionably so, m’lord. It gives a gentleman a certain standing.’
‘Exactly. People take it for granted that you’re respectable. Take an earl, for instance. He buzzes about, and people say “Ah, an Earl” and let it go at that. The last thing that occurs to them is that he may in his spare moments be putting on patches and false moustaches and standing on a wooden box in a check coat and a tie with blue horseshoes, shouting “Five to one the field, bar one!”’
‘Precisely, m’lord.’
‘A satisfactory state of things.’
‘Highly satisfactory, m’lord.’
‘There have been moments today
, Jeeves, I don’t mind confessing, when it seemed to me that the only thing to do was to turn up the toes and say “This is the end”, but now it would take very little to start me singing like the Cherubim and Seraphim. It was the Cherubim and Seraphim who sang, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, m’lord. Hosanna, principally.’
‘I feel a new man. The odd sensation of having swallowed a quart of butterflies, which I got when there was a burst of red fire and a roll of drums from the orchestra and that White Hunter shot up through a trap at my elbow, has passed away completely.’
‘I am delighted to hear it, m’lord.’
‘I knew you would be, Jeeves, I knew you would be. Sympathy and understanding are your middle names. And now,’ said Bill, ‘to join the ladies in the living room and put the poor souls out of their suspense.’
9
* * *
ARRIVING IN THE living room, he found that the number of ladies available for being joined there had been reduced to one – reading from left to right, Jill. She was sitting on the settee twiddling an empty coffee cup and staring before her with what are sometimes described as unseeing eyes. Her air was that of a girl who is brooding on something, a girl to whom recent happenings have given much food for thought.
‘Hullo there, darling,’ cried Bill with the animation of a shipwrecked mariner sighting a sail. After that testing session in the dining room, almost anything that was not Captain Biggar would have looked good to him, and she looked particularly good.
Jill glanced up.
‘Oh, hullo,’ she said.
It seemed to Bill that her manner was reserved, but he proceeded with undiminished exuberance.
‘Where’s everybody?’
‘Rory and Moke are in the library, looking in at the Derby Dinner.’
‘And Mrs Spottsworth?’
‘Rosie,’ said Jill in a toneless voice, ‘has gone to the ruined chapel. I believe she is hoping to get a word with the ghost of Lady Agatha.’
Bill started. He also gulped a little.
‘Rosie?’
‘I think that is what you call her, is it not?’
‘Why – er – yes.’
‘And she calls you Billiken. Is she a very old friend?’
‘No, no. I knew her slightly at Cannes one summer.’
‘From what I heard her saying at dinner about moonlight drives and bathing from the Eden Roc, I got the impression that you had been rather intimate.’
‘Good heavens, no. She was just an acquaintance, and a pretty mere one, at that.’
‘I see.’
There was a silence.
‘I wonder if you remember,’ said Jill, at length breaking it, ‘what I was saying this evening before dinner about people not hiding things from each other, if they are going to get married?’
‘Er – yes … Yes … I remember that.’
‘We agreed that it was the only way.’
‘Yes … Yes, that’s right. So we did.’
‘I told you about Percy, didn’t I? And Charles and Squiffy and Tom and Blotto,’ said Jill, mentioning other figures of Romance from the dead past. ‘I never dreamed of concealing the fact that I had been engaged before I met you. So why did you hide this Spottsworth from me?’
It seemed to Bill that, for a pretty good sort of chap who meant no harm to anybody and strove always to do the square thing by one and all, he was being handled rather roughly by Fate this summer day. The fellow – Shakespeare, he rather thought, though he would have to check with Jeeves – who had spoken of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune had known what he was talking about. Slings and arrows described it to a nicety.
‘I didn’t hide this Spottsworth from you!’ he cried passionately. ‘She just didn’t happen to come up. Lord love a duck, when you’re sitting with the girl you love, holding her little hand and whispering words of endearment in her ear, you can’t suddenly switch the conversation to an entirely different topic and say “Oh, by the way, there was a woman I met in Cannes some years ago, on the subject of whom I would now like to say a few words. Let me tell you all about the time we drove to St Tropez.”’
‘In the moonlight.’
‘Was it my fault that there was a moon? I wasn’t consulted. And as for bathing from the Eden Roc, you talk as if we had had the ruddy Eden Roc to ourselves with not another human being in sight. It was not so, but far otherwise. Every time we took a dip, the water was alive with exiled Grand Dukes and stiff with dowagers of the most rigid respectability.’
‘I still think it odd you never mentioned her.’
‘I don’t.’
‘I do. And I think it still odder that when Jeeves told you this afternoon that a Mrs Spottsworth was coming here, you just said “Oh, ah?” or something and let it go as if you had never heard the name before. Wouldn’t the natural thing have been to say “Mrs Spottsworth? Well, well, bless my soul, I wonder if that can possibly be the woman with whom I was on terms of mere acquaintanceship at Cannes a year or two ago. Did I ever tell you about her, Jill? I used to drive with her a good deal in the moonlight, though of course in quite a distant way.”’
It was Bill’s moment.
‘No,’ he thundered, ‘it would not have been the natural thing to say “Mrs Spottsworth? Well, well,” and so on and so forth, and I’ll tell you why. When I knew her … slightly, as I say, as one does know people in places like Cannes … her name was Bessemer.’
‘Oh?’
‘Precisely. B with an E with an S with an S with an E with an M with an E with an R. Bessemer. I have still to learn how all this Spottsworth stuff arose.’
Jeeves came in. Duty called him at about this hour to collect the coffee cups, and duty never called to this great man in vain.
His arrival broke what might be called the spell. Jill, who had more to say on the subject under discussion, withheld it. She got up and made for the french window.
‘Well, I must be getting along,’ she said, still speaking rather tonelessly.
Bill stared.
‘You aren’t leaving already?’
‘Only to go home and get some things. Moke has asked me to stay the night.’
‘Then Heaven bless Moke! Full marks for the intelligent female.’
‘You like the idea of my staying the night?’
‘It’s terrific.’
‘You’re sure I shan’t be in the way?’
‘What on earth are you talking about? Shall I come with you?’
‘Of course not. You’re supposed to be a host.’
She went out, and Bill, gazing after her fondly, suddenly stiffened. Like a delayed-action bomb, those words ‘You’re sure I shan’t be in the way?’ had just hit him. Had they been mere idle words? Or had they contained a sinister significance?
‘Women are odd, Jeeves,’ he said.
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘Not to say peculiar. You can’t tell what they mean when they say things, can you?’
‘Very seldom, m’lord.’
Bill brooded for a moment.
‘Were you observing Miss Wyvern as she buzzed off?’
‘Not closely, m’lord.’
‘Was her manner strange, do you think?’
‘I could not say, m’lord. I was concentrating on coffee cups.’
Bill brooded again. This uncertainty was preying on his nerves. ‘You’re sure I shan’t be in the way?’ Had there been a nasty tinkle in her voice as she uttered the words? Everything turned on that. If no tinkle, fine. But if tinkle, things did not look so good. The question, plus tinkle, could only mean that his reasoned explanation of the Spottsworth-Cannes sequence had failed to get across and that she still harboured suspicions, unworthy of her though such suspicions might be.
The irritability which good men feel on these occasions swept over him. What was the use of being as pure as the driven snow, or possibly purer, if girls were going to come tinkling at you?
‘The whole trouble with women, Jeeves,’ he said, and the p
hilosopher Schopenhauer would have slapped him on the back and told him he knew just how he felt, ‘is that practically all of them are dotty. Look at Mrs Spottsworth. Wacky to the eyebrows. Roosting in a ruined chapel in the hope of seeing Lady Agatha.’
‘Indeed, m’lord? Mrs Spottsworth is interested in spectres?’
‘She eats them alive. Is that balanced behaviour?’
‘Psychical research frequently has an appeal for the other sex, m’lord. My Aunt Emily –’
Bill eyed him dangerously.
‘Remember what I said about Pliny the Younger, Jeeves?’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘That goes for your Aunt Emily as well.’
‘Very good, m’lord.’
‘I’m not interested in your Aunt Emily.’
‘Precisely, m’lord. During her long lifetime very few people were.’
‘She is no longer with us?’
‘No, m’lord.’
‘Oh, well, that’s something,’ said Bill.
Jeeves floated out, and Bill flung himself into a chair. He was thinking once more of that cryptic speech, and now his mood had become wholly pessimistic. It was no longer any question of a tinkle or a non-tinkle. He was virtually certain that the words ‘You’re sure I shan’t be in the way?’ had been spoken through clenched teeth and accompanied by a look of infinite meaning. They had been the words of a girl who had intended to make a nasty crack.
He was passing his hands through his hair with a febrile gesture when Monica entered from the library. She had found the celebrants at the Derby Dinner a little on the long-winded side. Rory was still drinking in every word, but she needed an intermission.
She regarded her hair-twisting brother with astonishment.
‘Good heavens, Bill! Why the agony? What’s up?’
Bill glared unfraternally.
‘Nothing’s up, confound it! Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing!’
Monica raised her eyebrows.
‘Well, there’s no need to be stuffy about it. I was only being the sympathetic sister.’
With a strong effort Bill recovered the chivalry of the Rowcesters. ‘I’m sorry, Moke old thing. I’ve got a headache.’
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3 Page 9
