‘To what a what?’
‘Nothing, nothing. I was just thinking of something,’ I said, and turned the conv. to other topics.
She gave me the impression, when we parted, of being a bit pensive, which I could well understand, and I wasn’t feeling too unpensive myself. There’s a touch of the superstitious in my make-up, and the way the Bassett ménage seemed to be raising its ugly head, if you know what I mean, struck me as sinister. I had a … what’s the word? … begins with a p … pre-something … presentiment, that’s the baby … I had a presentiment that I was being tipped off by my guardian angel that Totleigh Towers was trying to come back into my life and that I would be well advised to watch my step and keep an eye skinned.
It was consequently a thoughtful Bertram Wooster who half an hour later sat toying with a stoup of malvoisie in the smoking room of the Drones Club. To the overtures of fellow-members who wanted to hurry me from sport to sport I turned a deaf ear, for I wished to brood. And I was trying to tell myself that all this Totleigh Towers business was purely coincidental and meant nothing, when the smoking-room waiter slid up and informed me that a gentleman stood without, asking to have speech with me. A clerical gentleman named Pinker, he said, and I gave another of my visible starts, the presentiment stronger on the wing than ever.
It wasn’t that I had any objection to the sainted Pinker. I loved him like a b. We were up at Oxford together, and our relations have always been on strictly David and Jonathan lines. But while technically not a resident of Totleigh Towers, he helped the Vicar vet the souls of the local yokels in the adjoining village of Totleigh-in-the-Wold, and that was near enough to it to make this sudden popping up of his deepen the apprehension I was feeling. It seemed to me that it only needed Sir Watkyn Bassett, Madeline Bassett, Roderick Spode and the dog Bartholomew to saunter in arm in arm, and I would have a full hand. My respect for my guardian angel’s astuteness hit a new high. A gloomy bird, with a marked disposition to take the dark view and make one’s flesh creep, but there was no gainsaying that he knew his stuff.
‘Bung him in,’ I said dully, and in due season the Rev. H.P. Pinker lumbered across the threshold and advancing with outstretched hand tripped over his feet and upset a small table, his almost invariable practice when moving from spot to spot in any room where there’s furniture.
3
* * *
WHICH WAS ODD, when you came to think of it, because after representing his University for four years and his country for six on the football field, he still turns out for the Harlequins when he can get a Saturday off from saving souls, and when footballing is as steady on his pins as a hart or roe or whatever the animals are that don’t trip over their feet and upset things. I’ve seen him a couple of times in the arena, and was profoundly impressed by his virtuosity. Rugby football is more or less a sealed book to me, I never having gone in for it, but even I could see that he was good. The lissomness with which he moved hither and thither was most impressive, as was his homicidal ardour when doing what I believe is called tackling. Like the Canadian Mounted Police he always got his man, and when he did so the air was vibrant with the excited cries of morticians in the audience making bids for the body.
He’s engaged to be married to Stiffy Byng, and his long years of football should prove an excellent preparation for setting up house with her. The way I look at it is that when a fellow has had pluguglies in cleated boots doing a Shuffle-Off-To-Buffalo on his face Saturday after Saturday since he was a slip of a boy, he must get to fear nothing, not even marriage with a girl like Stiffy, who from early childhood has seldom let the sun go down without starting some loony enterprise calculated to bleach the hair of one and all.
There was plenty and to spare of the Rev. H.P. Pinker. Even as a boy, I imagine, he must have burst seams and broken try-your-weight machines, and grown to man’s estate he might have been Roderick Spode’s twin brother. Purely in the matter of thews, sinews and tonnage, I mean of course, for whereas Roderick Spode went about seeking whom he might devour and was a consistent menace to pedestrians and traffic, Stinker, though no doubt a fiend in human shape when assisting the Harlequins Rugby football club to dismember some rival troupe of athletes, was in private life a gentle soul with whom a child could have played. In fact, I once saw a child doing so.
Usually when you meet this man of God, you find him beaming. I believe his merry smile is one of the sights of Totleigh-in-the-Wold, as it was of Magdalen College, Oxford, when we were up there together. But now I seemed to note in his aspect a certain gravity, as if he had just discovered a schism in his flock or found a couple of choir boys smoking reefers in the churchyard. He gave me the impression of a two-hundred-pound curate with something on his mind beside his hair. Upsetting another table, he took a seat and said he was glad he had caught me.
‘I thought I’d find you at the Drones.’
‘You have,’ I assured him. ‘What brings you to the metrop?’
‘I came up for a Harlequins committee meeting.’
‘And how were they all?’
‘Oh, fine.’
‘That’s good. I’ve been worrying myself sick about the Harlequins committee. Well, how have you been keeping, Stinker?’
‘I’ve been all right.’
‘Are you free for dinner?’
‘Sorry, I’ve got to get back to Totleigh.’
‘Too bad. Jeeves tells me Sir Watkyn and Madeline and Stiffy have been staying with my aunt at Brinkley.’
‘Yes.’
‘Have they returned?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how’s Stiffy?’
‘Oh, fine.’
‘And Bartholomew?’
‘Oh, fine.’
‘And your parishioners? Going strong, I trust?’
‘Oh yes, they’re fine.’
I wonder if anything strikes you about the slice of give-and-take I’ve just recorded. No? Oh, surely. I mean, here were we, Stinker Pinker and Bertram Wooster, buddies who had known each other virtually from the egg, and we were talking like a couple of strangers making conversation on a train. At least, he was, and more and more I became convinced that his bosom was full of the perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart, as I remember Jeeves putting it once.
I persevered in my efforts to uncork him.
‘Well, Stinker,’ I said, ‘what’s new? Has Pop Bassett given you that vicarage yet?’
This caused him to open up a bit. His manner became more animated.
‘No, not yet. He doesn’t seem able to make up his mind. One day he says he will, the next day he says he’s not so sure, he’ll have to think it over.’
I frowned. I disapproved of this shilly-shallying. I could see how it must be throwing a spanner into Stinker’s whole foreign policy, putting him in a spot and causing him alarm and despondency. He can’t marry Stiffy on a curate’s stipend, so they’ve got to wait till Pop Bassett gives him a vicarage which he has in his gift. And while I personally, though fond of the young gumboil, would run a mile in tight shoes to avoid marrying Stiffy, I knew him to be strongly in favour of signing her up.
‘Something always happens to put him off. I think he was about ready to close the deal before he went to stay at Brinkley, but most unfortunately I bumped into a valuable vase of his and broke it. It seemed to rankle rather.’
I heaved a sigh. It’s always what Jeeves would call most disturbing to hear that a chap with whom you have plucked the gowans fine, as the expression is, isn’t making out as well as could be wished. I was all set to follow this Pinker’s career with considerable interest, but the way things were shaping it began to look as if there wasn’t going to be a career to follow.
‘You move in a mysterious way your wonders to perform, Stinker. I believe you would bump into something if you were crossing the Gobi desert.’
‘I’ve never been in the Gobi desert.’
‘Well, don’t go. It isn’t safe. I suppose Stiffy’s sore about this … what’s the word? … N
ot vaseline … Vacillation, that’s it. She chafes, I imagine, at this vacillation on Bassett’s part and resents him letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would”, like the poor cat in the adage. Not my own, that, by the way. Jeeves’s. Pretty steamed up, is she?’
‘She is rather.’
‘I don’t blame her. Enough to upset any girl. Pop Bassett has no right to keep gumming up the course of true love like this.’
‘No.’
‘He needs a kick in the pants.’
‘Yes.’
‘If I were Stiffy, I’d put a toad in his bed or strychnine in his soup.’
‘Yes. And talking of Stiffy, Bertie –’
He broke off, and I eyed him narrowly. There could be no question to my mind that I had been right about that perilous stuff. His bosom was obviously chock full of it.
‘There’s something the matter, Stinker.’
‘No, there isn’t. Why do you say that?’
‘Your manner is strange. You remind me of a faithful dog looking up into its proprietor’s face as if it were trying to tell him something. Are you trying to tell me something?’
He swallowed once or twice, and his colour deepened, which took a bit of doing, for even when his soul is in repose he always looks like a clerical beetroot. It was as though the collar he buttons at the back was choking him. In a hoarse voice he said:
‘Bertie.’
‘Hullo?’
‘Bertie.’
‘Still here, old man, and hanging on your lips.’
‘Bertie, are you busy just now?’
‘Not more than usual.’
‘You could get away for a day or two?’
‘I suppose one might manage it.’
‘Then can you come to Totleigh?’
‘To stay with you, do you mean?’
‘No, to stay at Totleigh Towers.’
I stared at the man, wide-eyed as the expression is. Had it not been that I knew him to be abstemiousness itself, rarely indulging in anything stronger than a light lager, and not even that during Lent, I should have leaped to the conclusion that there beside me sat a curate who had been having a couple. My eyebrows rose till they nearly disarranged my front hair.
‘Stay where? Stinker, you’re not yourself, or you wouldn’t be gibbering like this. You can’t have forgotten the ordeal I passed through last time I went to Totleigh Towers.’
‘I know. But there’s something Stiffy wants you to do for her. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, but she said it was most important and that you would have to be on the spot to do it.’
I drew myself up. I was cold and resolute.
‘You’re crazy, Stinker!’
‘I don’t see why you say that.’
‘Then let me explain where your whole scheme falls to the ground. To begin with, is it likely that after what has passed between us Sir Watkyn B. would issue an invitation to one who has always been to him a pain in the neck to end all pains in the neck? If ever there was a man who was all in favour of me taking the high road while he took the low road, it is this same Bassett. His idea of a happy day is one spent with at least a hundred miles between him and Bertram.’
‘Madeline would invite you, if you sent her a wire asking if you could come for a day or two. She never consults Sir Watkyn about guests. It’s an understood thing that she has anyone she wants to at the house.’
This I knew to be true, but I ignored the suggestion and proceeded remorselessly.
‘In the second place, I know Stiffy. A charming girl whom, as I was telling Emerald Stoker, I am always prepared to clasp to my bosom, at least I would be if she wasn’t engaged to you, but one who is a cross between a ticking bomb and a poltergeist. She lacks that balanced judgment which we like to see in girls. She gets ideas, and if you care to call them bizarre ideas, it will be all right with me. I need scarcely remind you that when I last visited Totleigh Towers she egged you on to pinch Constable Eustace Oates’s helmet, the one thing a curate should shrink from doing if he wishes to rise to heights in the Church. She is, in short, about as loony a young shrimp as ever wore a wind-swept hair-do. What this commission is that she has in mind for me we cannot say, but going by the form book I see it as something totally unfit for human consumption. Didn’t she even hint at its nature?’
‘No. I asked, of course, but she said she would rather keep it under her hat till she saw you.’
‘She won’t see me.’
‘You won’t come to Totleigh?’
‘Not within fifty miles of the sewage dump.’
‘She’ll be terribly disappointed.’
‘You will administer spiritual solace. That’s your job. Tell her these things are sent to try us.’
‘She’ll probably cry.’
‘Nothing better for the nervous system. It does something, I forget what, to the glands. Ask any well-known Harley Street physician.’
I suppose he saw that my iron front was not to be shaken, for he made no further attempt to sell the idea to me. With a sigh that seemed to come up from the soles of the feet, he rose, said goodbye, knocked over the glass from which I had been refreshing myself and withdrew.
Knowing how loath Bertram Wooster always is to let a pal down and fail him in his hour of need, you are probably thinking that this distressing scene had left me shaken, but as a matter of fact it had bucked me up like a day at the seaside.
Let’s just review the situation. Ever since breakfast my guardian angel had been scaring the pants off me by practically saying in so many words that Totleigh Towers was all set to re-enter my life, and it was now clear that what he had had in mind had been the imminence of this plea to me to go there, he feeling that in a weak moment I might allow myself to be persuaded against my better judgment. The peril was now past. Totleigh Towers had made its spring and missed by a mile, and I no longer had a thing to worry about. It was with a light heart that I joined a group of pleasure-seekers who were playing Darts and cleaned them up with effortless skill. Three o’clock was approaching when I left the club en route for home, and it must have been getting on for half past when I hove alongside the apartment house where I have my abode.
There was a cab standing outside, laden with luggage. From its window Gussie Fink-Nottle’s head was poking out, and I remember thinking once again how mistaken Emerald Stoker had been about his appearance. Seeing him steadily, if not whole, I could detect in his aspect no trace of the lamb, but he was looking so like a halibut that if he hadn’t been wearing horn-rimmed spectacles, a thing halibuts seldom do, I might have supposed myself to be gazing on something a.w.o.l. from a fishmonger’s slab.
I gave him a friendly yodel, and he turned the spectacles in my direction.
‘Oh, hullo, Bertie,’ he said, ‘I’ve just been calling on you. I left a message with Jeeves. Your aunt told me to tell you she’s coming to London the day after tomorrow and she wants you to give her lunch.’
‘Yes, she was on the phone to that effect this morning. I suppose she thought you’d forget to notify me. Come in and have some orange juice,’ I said, for it is to that muck that he confines himself whilst making whoopee.
He looked at his watch, and his eyes lost the gleam that always comes into them when orange juice is mentioned.
‘I wish I could, but I can’t,’ he sighed. ‘I should miss my train. I’m off to Totleigh on the four o’clock at Paddington.’
‘Oh, really? Well, look out for a friend of yours, who’ll be on it. Emerald Stoker.’
‘Stoker? Stoker? Emerald Stoker?’
‘Girl with freckles. American. Looks like a Pekinese of the better sort. She tells me she met you at a studio party the other day, and you talked about newts.’
His face cleared.
‘Of course, yes. Now I’ve placed her. I didn’t get her name that day. Yes, we had a long talk about newts. She used to keep them herself as a child, only she called them guppies. A most delightful girl. I shall enjoy seeing her again. I don’t know when I’ve met a girl
who attracted me more.’
‘Except, of course, Madeline.’
His face darkened. He looked like a halibut that’s taken offence at a rude remark from another halibut.
‘Madeline! Don’t talk to me about Madeline! Madeline makes me sick!’ he hissed. ‘Paddington!’ he shouted to the charioteer and was gone with the wind, leaving me gaping after him, all of a twitter.
4
* * *
AND I’LL TELL you why I was all of a t. My critique of her when chatting with Emerald Stoker will have shown how allergic I was to this Bassett beazel. She was scarcely less of a pain in the neck to me than I was to her father or Roderick Spode. Nevertheless, there was a grave danger that I might have to take her for better or for worse, as the book of rules puts it.
The facts may be readily related. Gussie, enamoured of the Bassett, would have liked to let her in on the way he felt, but every time he tried to do so his nerve deserted him and he found himself babbling about newts. At a loss to know how to swing the deal, he got the idea of asking me to plead his cause, and when I pleaded it, the Bassett, as pronounced a fathead as ever broke biscuit, thought I was pleading mine. She said she was so sorry to cause me pain, but her heart belonged to Gussie. Which would have been fine, had she not gone on to say that if anything should ever happen to make her revise her conviction that he was a king among men and she was compelled to give him the heave-ho, I was the next in line, and while she could never love me with the same fervour she felt for Gussie, she would do her best to make me happy. I was, in a word, in the position of a Vice-President of the United States of America who, while feeling that he is all right so far, knows that he will be for it at a moment’s notice if anything goes wrong with the man up top.
Little wonder, then, that Gussie’s statement that Madeline made him sick smote me like a ton of bricks and had me indoors and bellowing for Jeeves before you could say What ho. As had so often happened before, I felt that my only course was to place myself in the hands of a higher power.
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 4: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.4 Page 38
