The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3: The Mating Season / Ring for Jeeves / Very Good, Jeeves

by P. G. Wodehouse

  We were silent for a moment, musing on what the harvest would be, were anything to cause Madeline Bassett to become de-Gussied. Then I changed a distasteful subject.

  ‘Talking of romances, I suppose Catsmeat confided in you about his?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I thought he would. Amazing, the way all these birds come to you and sob out their troubles on your chest.’

  ‘I find it most gratifying, sir, and am always eager to lend such assistance as may lie within my power. One desires to give satisfaction. Shortly after your departure yesterday, Mr Pirbright devoted some little time to an exposition of the problem confronting him. It was after learning the facts that I ventured to suggest that he should take my place here as your attendant.’

  ‘I wish one of you had thought to tip me off with a telegram. I should have been spared a nasty shock. The last thing one wants on top of what might be termed a drinking bout is to have a changeling ring himself in on you without warning. You’d look pretty silly yourself if you came into my room one morning with the cup of tea after a thick night and found Ernie Bevin or someone propped up in the bed. When you saw Catsmeat just now, did he tell you the Stop Press news?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘About Esmond Haddock and Corky.’

  ‘Ah, yes, sir. He informed me of what you had said to him with reference to Mr Haddock’s unswerving devotion to Miss Pirbright. He appeared greatly relieved. He feels that the principal obstacle to his happiness has now been removed.’

  ‘Yes, Catsmeat’s sitting pretty. One wishes one could say the same of poor old Esmond.’

  ‘You think that Miss Pirbright does not reciprocate Mr Haddock’s sentiments, sir?’

  ‘Oh, she reciprocates them, all right. She freely admits that he is the lodestar of her life, and you’re probably saying to yourself that in these circs everything should be hunkadory. I mean, if she’s the lodestar of his life and he’s the lodestar of hers, the thing ought to be in the bag. But you’re wrong, and so is Esmond Haddock. His view, poor deluded clam, is that he will make such a whale of a hit with this song he’s singing at the concert that when she hears the audience cheering him to the echo she will say “Oh, Esmond!” and fling herself into his arms. Not a hope.’

  ‘No, sir?’

  ‘Not a hope, Jeeves. There’s a snag. The trouble is that she refuses to consider the idea of hitching up with him unless he defies his aunts, and he very naturally gets the vapours at the mere idea. It is what I have sometimes heard described as an impasse.’

  ‘Why does the young lady wish Mr Haddock to defy his aunts, sir?’

  ‘She says he has allowed them to oppress him from childhood, and it’s time he threw off the yoke. She wants him to show her that he is a man of intrepid courage. It’s the old dragon gag. In the days when knights were bold, as you probably know, girls used to hound fellows into going out and fighting dragons. I expect your old pal Childe Roland had it happen to him a dozen times. But dragons are one thing, and aunts are another. I have no doubt that Esmond Haddock would spring to the task of taking on a fire-breathing dragon, but there isn’t the remotest chance of him ever standing up to Dame Daphne Winkworth, and the Misses Charlotte, Emmeline, Harriet and Myrtle Deverill and making them play ball.’

  ‘I wonder, sir?’

  ‘What do you mean, you wonder, Jeeves?’

  ‘It crossed my mind as a possibility, sir, that were Mr Haddock’s performance at the concert to be the success he anticipates, his attitude might become more resolute. I have not myself had the opportunity of studying the young gentleman’s psychology, but from what my Uncle Charlie tells me I am convinced that he is one of these gentlemen on whom popular acclamation might have sensational effects. Mr Haddock’s has been, as you say, a repressed life, and he has, no doubt, a very marked inferiority complex. The cheers of the multitude frequently act like a powerful drug upon young gentlemen with inferiority complexes.’

  I began to grasp the gist.

  ‘You mean that if he makes a hit he will get it up his nose to such an extent that he will be able to look his aunts in the eye and make them wilt?’

  ‘Precisely, sir. You will recall the case of Mr Little.’

  ‘Golly, yes, that’s right. Bingo became a changed man, didn’t he? Jeeves, I believe you’ve got something.’

  ‘At least the theory which I have advanced is a tenable one, sir.’

  ‘It’s more than tenable. It’s a pip. Then what we’ve got to do is to strain every nerve to see that he makes a hit. What are those things people have?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Opera singers and people like that.’

  ‘You mean a claque, sir?’

  ‘That’s right. The word was on the tip of my tongue. He must be provided with a claque. It will be your task, Jeeves, to move about the village, dropping a word here, standing a beer there, till the whole community is impressed with the necessity of cheering Esmond Haddock’s song till their eyes bubble. I can leave this to you?’

  ‘Certainly, sir. I will attend to the matter.’

  ‘Fine. And now I suppose I ought to be getting up and seeing Gussie. There are probably one or two points he will want to discuss. Is there a ruined mill around here?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge, sir.’

  ‘Well any landmark where you could tell him to meet me? I don’t want to roam the house and grounds, looking for him. My aim is rather to sneak down the back stairs and skirt around the garden via the shrubberies. You follow me, Jeeves?’

  ‘Perfectly, sir. I would suggest that I arrange with Mr Fink-Nottle to meet you in, say, an hour’s time outside the local post office.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Outside the post office in an hour or sixty minutes. And now, Jeeves, if you will be so good as to turn it on, the refreshing bath.’

  9

  * * *

  WHAT WITH ONE thing and another, singing a bit too much in the bath and so on, I was about five minutes behind scheduled time in reaching the post office, and when I got there I found Gussie already at the tryst.

  Jeeves, in speaking of this Fink-Nottle, had, if you remember, described him as disgruntled, and it was plain at a glance that the passage of time had done nothing to gruntle him. The eyes behind their horn-rimmed spectacles were burning with fury and resentment and all that sort of thing. He looked like a peevish halibut. In moment of emotion Gussie’s resemblance to some marine monster always becomes accentuated.

  ‘Well,’ he said, starting in without so much as a What-ho. ‘This is a pretty state of things!’

  It seemed to me that a cheery, pep-giving word would be in order. I proceeded, accordingly, to shoot it across. Assenting to his opinion that the state of things was pretty, I urged him to keep the tail up, pointing out that though the storm clouds might lower, he was better off at Deverill Hall than he would have been in a dark dungeon with dripping walls and a platoon of resident rats, if that’s where they put fellows who have been given fourteen days without the option at Bosher Street police court.

  He replied curtly that he entirely disagreed with me.

  ‘I would greatly have preferred prison,’ he said. ‘When you’re in prison, you don’t have people calling you Mr Wooster. How do you suppose I feel, knowing that everybody thinks I’m you?’

  This startled me, I confess. Of all the things I had to worry about, the one that was gashing me like a knife most was the thought that the populace, beholding Gussie, were under the impression that there stood Bertram Wooster. When I reflected that the little world of King’s Deverill would go to its grave believing that Bertram Wooster was an undersized gargoyle who looked like Lester de Pester in that comic strip in one of the New York papers, the iron entered my soul. It was a bit of a jar to learn that Gussie was suffering the same spiritual agonies.

  ‘I don’t know if you are aware,’ he proceeded, ‘what your reputation is in these parts? In case you are under any illusions, let me inform you that your name is mud. Those women
at breakfast were drawing their skirts away as I passed. They shivered when I spoke to them. From time to time I would catch them looking at me in a way that would have wounded a smash-and-grab man. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, you seem in a single evening to have made my name mud, too. What’s all this I hear about you getting tight last night and singing hunting songs?’

  ‘I didn’t get tight, Gussie. Just pleasantly mellowed, as you might say. And I sang hunting songs because my host seemed to wish it. One has to humour one’s host. So they mentioned that, did they?’

  ‘They mentioned it, all right. It was the chief topic of conversation at the breakfast table. And what’s going to happen if they mention it to Madeline?’

  ‘I advise stout denial.’

  ‘It wouldn’t work.’

  ‘It might,’ I said, for I had been giving a good deal of thought to the matter and was feeling more optimistic than I had been. ‘After all, what can they prove?’

  ‘Madeline’s godmother said she came into the dining-room and found you on a chair, waving a decanter and singing A-hunting we will go.’

  ‘True. We concede that. But who is to say that that decanter was not emptied exclusively by Esmond Haddock, who, you must remember, was on the table, also singing A-hunting we will go and urging his horse on with a banana? I feel convinced that, should the affair come to Madeline’s ears, you can get away with it with stout denial.’

  He pondered.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. But all the same I wish you’d be more careful. The whole thing has been most annoying and upsetting.’

  ‘Still,’ I said, feeling that it was worth trying, ‘it’s part of the great web, what?’

  ‘Great web?’

  ‘One of Marcus Aurelius’s cracks. He said: “Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.”’

  From the brusque manner in which he damned and blasted Marcus Aurelius, I gathered that, just as had happened when Jeeves sprang it on me, the gag had failed to bring balm. I hadn’t had much hope that it would. I doubt, as a matter of fact, if Marcus Aurelius’s material is ever the stuff to give the troops at a moment when they have just stubbed their toe on the brick of Fate. You want to wait till the agony has abated.

  To ease the strain, I changed the subject, asking him if he had been surprised to find Catsmeat in residence at the hall, and immediately became aware that I had but poured kerosene on the flames. Heated though his observations on Marcus Aurelius had been, they were mildness itself compared with what he had to say about Catsmeat.

  It was understandable, of course. If a fellow has forced you against your better judgment to go wading in the Trafalgar Square fountain at five in the morning, ruining your trousers and causing you to be pinched and jugged and generally put through it by the machinery of the Law, no doubt you do find yourself coming round to the view that what he needs is disembowelling with a blunt bread-knife. This, among other things, was what Gussie hoped some day to be able to do to Catsmeat, if all went well, and, as I say, one could follow the train of thought.

  Presently, having said all he could think of on the topic of Catsmeat, he turned, as I had rather been expecting he would, to that of the cross-talk act of which the other was the originator and producer.

  ‘What’s all this Pirbright was saying about something he called a cross-talk act?’ he asked, and I saw that we had reached a point in the exchanges where suavity and the honeyed word would be needed.

  ‘Ah, yes, he mentioned that to you did he not? It’s an item on the programme of the concert which his sister is impresarioing at the village hall shortly. I was to have played Pat in it, but owing to the changed circumstances you will now sustain the role.’

  ‘Will I! We’ll see about that. What the devil is the damned thing?’

  ‘Haven’t you seen it? Pongo Twistleton and Barmy Phipps do it every year at the Drones smoker.’

  ‘I never go to the Drones smoker.’

  ‘Oh? Well, it’s a … How shall I put it? … It’s what is known as a cross-talk act. The principals are a couple of Irishmen named Pat and Mike, and they come on and … But I have the script here,’ I said, producing it. ‘If you glance through it, you’ll get the idea.’

  He took the script and studied it with a sullen frown. Watching him, I realized what a ghastly job it must be writing plays. I mean, having to hand over your little effort to a hardfaced manager and stand shuffling your feet while he glares at it as if it hurt him in a tender spot, preparatory to pushing it back at you with a curt ‘It stinks’.

  ‘Who wrote this?’ asked Gussie, as he turned the final page, and when I told him that Catsmeat was the author he said he might have guessed it. Throughout his perusal, he had been snorting at intervals, and he snorted again, a good bit louder, as if he were amalgamating about six snorts into one snort.

  ‘The thing is absolute drivel. It has no dramatic coherence. It lacks motivation and significant form. Who are these two men supposed to be?’

  ‘I told you. A couple of Irishmen named Pat and Mike.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you can explain what their social position is, for it is frankly beyond me. Pat, for instance, appears to move in the very highest circles, for he describes himself as dining at Buckingham Palace, and yet his wife takes in lodgers.’

  ‘I see what you mean. Odd.’

  ‘Inexplicable. Is it credible that a man of his class would be invited to dinner at Buckingham Palace, especially as he is apparently completely without social savoir-faire? At this dinner party to which he alludes he relates how the Queen asked him if he would like some mulligatawny and he, thinking that there was nothing else coming, had six helpings, with the result that, to quote his words, he spent the rest of the evening sitting in a corner full of soup. And in describing the incident he prefaces his remarks at several points with the expressions “Begorrah” and “faith and begob”. Irishmen don’t talk like that. Have you ever read Synge’s Riders to the Sea? Well, get hold of it and study it, and if you can show me a single character in it who says “Faith and begob”, I’ll give you a shilling. Irishmen are poets. They talk about their souls and mist and so on. They say things like “An evening like this, it makes me wish I was back in County Clare, watchin’ the cows in the tall grass”.’

  He turned the pages frowningly, his nose wrinkled as if it had detected some unpleasant smell. It brought back to me the old days at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, when I used to take my English essay to be blue-pencilled by the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn.

  ‘Here’s another bit of incoherent raving. “My sister’s in the ballet.” “You say your sister’s in the ballet?” “Yes, begorrah, my sister’s in the ballet.” “What does your sister do in the ballet?” “She comes rushing in, and then she goes rushing out.” “What does she have to rush like that for?” “Faith and begob, because it’s a Rushin’ ballet.” It simply doesn’t make sense. And now we come to something else that is quite beyond me, the word “bus”. After the line “Because it’s a Rushin’ ballet” and in other places throughout the script the word “bus” in brackets occurs. It conveys nothing to me. Can you explain it?’

  ‘It’s short for “business”. That’s where you hit Mike with your umbrella. To show the audience that there has been a joke.’

  Gussie started.

  ‘Are these things jokes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see. I see. Well, of course, that throws a different light on …’ He paused, and eyed me narrowly. ‘Did you say that I am supposed to strike my colleague with an umbrella?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And if I understood Pirbright correctly, the other performer in this extraordinary production is the local policeman?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘The whole thing is impossible and utterly out of the question,’ said Gussie vehemently. ‘Have you any idea what happens when you hit a policeman wit
h an umbrella? I did so on emerging from the fountain in Trafalgar Square, and I certainly do not intend to do it again.’ A sort of grey horror came into his face, as if he had been taking a quick look into a past which he had hoped to forget. ‘Well, let me put you quite straight, Wooster, as to what my stand is in this matter. I shall not say “Begorrah”. I shall not say “Faith and begob”. I shall not assault policemen with an umbrella. In short, I absolutely and positively refuse to have the slightest association with this degraded buffoonery. Wait till I meet Miss Pirbright. I’ll tell her a thing or two. I’ll show her she can’t play fast and loose with human dignity like this.’

  He was about to speak further, but at this point his voice died away in a sort of gurgle and I saw his eyes bulge. Glancing around, I perceived Corky approaching. She was accompanied by Sam Goldwyn and was looking, as is her wont, like a million dollars, gowned in some clinging material which accentuated rather than hid her graceful outlines, if you know what I mean.

  I was delighted to see her. With Gussie in this non-cooperative mood, digging his feet in and refusing to play ball, like Balaam’s ass, it seemed to me that precisely what was needed was the woman’s touch. To decide to introduce them and leave her to take on the job of melting his iron front was with me the work of a moment.

  I had high hopes that she would be able to swing the deal. Though differing from my Aunt Agatha in almost every possible respect, Corky has this in common with that outstanding scourge: she is authoritative. When she wants you to do a thing, you find yourself doing it. This has been so from her earliest years. I remember her on one occasion at our mutual dancing class handing me an antique orange, a blue and yellow mass of pips and mildew, and bidding me bung it at our instructress, who had incurred her displeasure for some reason which has escaped my recollection. And I did it without a murmur, though knowing full well how bitter the reckoning would be.