‘Hoy!’ I said, eluding the cheesehound’s attempts to place his front paws on my shoulders and strop his tongue on my face. I jerked a thumb. ‘Gussie,’ I said.
Corky’s face lit up in a tickled-to-death manner. She proceeded immediately to turn on the charm.
‘Oh, is this Mr Fink-Nottle? How do you do, Mr Fink-Nottle? I am so glad to see you, Mr Fink-Nottle. How lucky meeting you. I wanted to talk to you about the act.’
‘We’ve just been having a word or two on that subject,’ I said, ‘and Gussie’s kicking a bit at playing Pat.’
‘Oh, no?’
‘I thought you might like to reason with him. I’ll leave you to it,’ I said and biffed off. Looking around as I turned the corner, I saw that she had attached herself with one slim hand to the lapel of Gussie’s coat and with the other was making wide, appealing gestures, indicating to the most vapid and irreflective observer that she was giving him Treatment A.
Well pleased, I made my way back to the hall, keeping an eye skinned for prowling aunts, and won through without disaster to my room. I was enjoying a thoughtful smoke there about half an hour later when Gussie came in, and I could see right away that this was not the morose, sullen Fink-Nottle who had so uncompromisingly panned the daylights out of Pat and Mike in the course of our recent get-together. His bearing was buoyant. His face glowed. He was wearing in his buttonhole a flower which had not been there before.
‘Hallo, there, Bertie,’ he said. ‘I say, Bertie, why didn’t you tell me that Miss Pirbright was Cora Starr, the film actress? I have long been one of her warmest admirers. What a delightful girl she is, is she not, and how unlike her brother, whom I consider and always shall consider England’s leading louse. She has made me see this cross-talk act in an entirely new light.’
‘I thought she might.’
‘It’s extraordinary that a girl as pretty as that should also have a razor-keen intelligence and that amazing way of putting her arguments with a crystal clarity which convinces you in an instant that she is right in every respect.’
‘Yes, Corky’s a persuasive young gum-boil.’
‘I would prefer that you did not speak of her as a gum-boil. Corky, eh? That’s what you call her, is it? A charming name.’
‘What was the outcome of your conference? Are you going to do the act?’
‘Oh, yes, it’s all settled. She overcame my objections entirely. We ran through the script after you had left us, and she quite brought me round to her view that there is nothing in the least degrading in this simple, wholesome form of humour. Hokum, yes, but, as she pointed out good theatre. She is convinced that I shall go over big.’
‘You’ll knock ’em cold. I’m sorry I can’t play Pat myself –’
‘A good thing, probably. I doubt if you are the type.’
‘Of course I’m the type,’ I retorted hotly. ‘I should have given a sensational performance.’
‘Corky thinks not. She was telling me how thankful she was that you had stepped out and I had taken over. She said the part wants broad, robust treatment and you would have played it too far down. It’s a part that calls for personality and the most precise timing, and she said that the moment she saw me she felt that here was the ideal Pat. Girls with her experience can tell in a second.’
I gave it up. You can’t reason with hams, and twenty minutes of Corky’s society seemed to have turned Augustus Fink-Nottle from a blameless newt-fancier into as pronounced a ham as ever drank small ports in Bodegas and called people ‘laddie’. In another half jiffy, I felt, he would be addressing me as ‘laddie’.
‘Well, it’s no use talking about it,’ I said, ‘because I could never have taken the thing on. Madeline wouldn’t have approved of her affianced appearing in public in a green beard.’
‘No, she’s an odd girl.’
It seemed to me that I might wipe that silly smile off his face by reminding him of something he appeared to have forgotten.
‘And how about Dobbs?’
‘Eh?’
‘When last heard from, you were a bit agitated at the prospect of having to slosh Police Constable Dobbs with your umbrella.’
‘Oh, Dobbs? He’s out. He’s been given his notice. He came along when we were rehearsing and started to read Mike’s lines, but he was hopeless. No technique. No personality. And he wouldn’t take direction. Kept arguing every point with the management, until finally Corky got heated and began raising her voice, and he got heated and began raising his voice, and the upshot was that that dog of hers, excited no doubt by the uproar, bit him in the leg.’
‘Good Lord!’
‘Yes, it created an unpleasant atmosphere. Corky put the animal’s case extremely well, pointing out that it had probably been pushed around by policemen since it was a slip of a puppy and so was merely fulfilling a legitimate aspiration if it took an occasional nip at one, but Dobbs refused to accept her view that the offence was one calling for a mere reprimand. He took the creature into custody and is keeping it at the police station until he has been able to ascertain whether this was its first bite. Apparently a dog that has had only one bite is in a strong position legally.’
‘Sam Goldwyn bit Silversmith last night.’
‘Did he? Well, if that comes out, I’m afraid counsel for the prosecution will have a talking-point. But, to go on with my story, Corky, incensed, and quite rightly, by Dobbs’s intransigent attitude, threw him out of the act and is getting her brother to play the part. There is the risk, of course, that the vicar will recognize him, which would lead to an unfortunate situation, but she thinks the green beard will form a sufficient disguise. I am looking forward to having Pirbright as a partner. I can think of few men whom it would give me more genuine pleasure to hit with an umbrella,’ said Gussie broodingly, adding that the first time his weapon connected with Catsmeat’s head, the latter would think he had been struck by a thunderbolt. It was plain that Time, the great healer, would have to put in a lot of solid work before he forgot and forgave.
‘But I can’t stay here talking,’ he went on. ‘Corky has asked me to lunch at the Vicarage, and I must be getting along. I just looked in to give you those poems.’
‘Those what?’
‘Those Christopher Robin poems. Here they are.’
He handed me a slim volume of verse, and I gave it the perplexed eye.
‘What’s this for?’
‘You recite them at the concert. The ones marked with a cross. I was to have recited them, Madeline making a great point of it – you know how fond she is of the Christopher Robin poems – but now, of course, we have switched acts. And I don’t mind telling you that I feel extremely relieved. There’s one about the little blighter going hoppity-hoppity-hop which … Well, as I say, I feel extremely relieved.’
The slim volume fell from my nerveless fingers, and I goggled at him.
‘But, dash it!’
‘It’s no good saying “But, dash it!” Do you think I didn’t say “But, dash it!” when she forced nauseous productions on me? You’ve got to do them. She insists. The first thing she will want to know is how they went.’
‘But the tough eggs at the back of the row will rush the stage and lynch me.’
‘I shouldn’t wonder. Still, you’ve got one consolation.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The thought that all that befalls you is part of the great web, ha, ha, ha,’ said Gussie, and exited smiling.
And so the first day of my sojourn at Deverill Hall wore to a close, full to the brim of V-shaped depressions and unsettled outlooks.
10
* * *
AND AS THE days went by, these unsettled outlooks became more unsettled, those V-shaped depressions even V-er. It was on Friday that I had clocked in at Deverill Hall. By the morning of Tuesday I could no longer conceal it from myself that I was losing the old pep and that, unless the clouds changed their act and started dishing out at an early date a considerably more substantial slab of silver lining th
an they were coming across with at the moment, I should soon be definitely down among the wines and spirits.
It is bad to be trapped in a den of slavering aunts, lashing their tails and glaring at you out of their red eyes. It is unnerving to know that in a couple of days you will be up on a platform in a village hall telling an audience, probably well provided with vegetables, that Christopher Robin goes hoppity-hoppity-hop. It degrades the spirit to have to answer to the name of Augustus, and there are juicier experiences than being in a position where you are constantly asking yourself if an Aunt Agatha or a Madeline Bassett won’t suddenly arrive and subject you to shame and exposure. No argument about that. We can take that, I think, as read.
But it was not these chunks of the great web that were removing the stiffening from the Wooster upper lip. No, the root of the trouble, the thing that was giving me dizzy spells and night sweats and making me look like the poor bit of human wreckage in the ‘before taking’ pictures in the advertisements of Haddock’s Headache Hokies, was the sinister behaviour of Gussie Fink-Nottle. Contemplating Gussie, I found my soul darkened by a nameless fear.
I don’t know if you have ever had your soul darkened by a nameless fear. It’s a most unpleasant feeling. I used to get it when I was one of the resident toads beneath the harrow at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, on hearing the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn conclude a series of announcements with the curt crack that he would like to see Wooster in his study after evening prayers. On the present occasion I had felt it coming on during the conversation with Gussie which I have just related, and in the days that followed it had grown and grown until now I found myself what is known as a prey to the liveliest apprehension.
I wonder if you spotted anything in the conversation to which I refer? Did it, I mean, strike you as significant and start you saying ‘What ho!’ to yourself? It didn’t? Then you missed the gist.
The first day I had had merely a vague suspicion. The second day this suspicion deepened. By nightfall on the third day suspicion had become a certainty. The evidence was all in, and there was no getting round it. Reckless of the fact that there existed at The Larches, Wimbledon Common, a girl to whom he had plighted his troth and who would be madder than a bull-pup entangled in a fly-paper were she to discover that he was moving in on another, Augustus Fink-Nottle had fallen for Corky Pirbright like a ton of bricks.
You may say ‘Come, come, Bertram, you are imagining things’ or ‘Tush, Wooster, this is but an idle fancy’, but let me tell you that I wasn’t the only one who had noticed it. Five solid aunts had noticed it.
‘Well, really,’ Dame Daphne Winkworth had observed bitterly just before lunch, when Silversmith had blown in with the news that Gussie had once again telephoned to say he would be taking pot-luck at the Vicarage, ‘Mr Wooster seems to live in Miss Pirbright’s pocket. He appears to regard Deverill Hall as a hotel which he can drop into or stay away from as he feels inclined.’
And Aunt Charlotte, when the facts had been relayed to her through her ear-trumpet, for she was wired for sound, had said with a short, quick sniff that she supposed they ought to consider themselves highly honoured that the piefaced young bastard condescended to sleep in the bally place, or words to that effect.
Nor could one fairly blame them for blinding and stiffing. Nothing sticks the gaff into your chatelaine more than a guest being constantly AWOL, and it was only on the rarest occasions nowadays that Gussie saw fit to put on the nosebag at Deverill Hall. He lunched, tea-ed and dined with Corky. Since that first meeting outside the post office he had seldom left her side. The human poultice, nothing less.
You can readily understand, then, why there were dark circles beneath my eyes and why I had almost permanently now a fluttering sensation at the pit of the stomach, as if I had recently swallowed far more mice than I could have wished. It only needed a word from Dame Daphne Winkworth to Aunt Agatha to the effect that her nephew Bertram had fallen into the toils of a most undesirable girl – a Hollywood film actress, my dear – I could see her writing it as clearly as if I had been peeping over her shoulder – to bring the old relative racing down to Deverill Hall with her foot in her hand. And then what? Ruin, desolation and despair.
The obvious procedure, of course, when the morale is being given the sleeve across the windpipe like this, is to get in touch with Jeeves and see what he has to suggest. So, encountering the parlourmaid, Queenie, in the passage outside my room after lunch, I enquired as to his whereabouts.
‘I say,’ I said, ‘I wonder if you happen to know where Jeeves is? Wooster’s man, you know.’
She stood staring at me goofily. Her eyes, normally like twin stars, were dull and a bit reddish about the edges, and I should have described her face as drawn. The whole set-up, in short, seeming to indicate that here one had a parlourmaid who had either gone off her onion or was wrestling with a secret sorrow.
‘Sir?’ she said, in a tortured sort of voice.
I repeated my remarks, and this time they penetrated.
‘Mr Jeeves isn’t here, sir. Mr Wooster let him go to London. There was a lecture he wanted to be at.’
‘Oh thanks,’ I said, speaking dully, for this was a blow. ‘You don’t know when he’ll be back?’
‘No, sir.’
‘I see. Thanks.’
I went on into my room and took a good, square look at the situation.
If you ask any of the nibs who move in diplomatic circles and are accustomed to handling tricky affairs of state, he will tell you that when matters have reached a deadlock, it is not a bit of good just sitting on the seat of the pants and rolling the eyes up to heaven – you have got to turn stones and explore avenues and take prompt steps through the proper channels. Only thus can you hope to find a formula. And it seemed to me, musing tensely, that in the present crisis something constructive might be accomplished by rounding up Corky and giving her a straight-from-the-shoulder talk, pointing out the frightful jeopardy in which she was placing an old friend and dancing-class buddy by allowing Gussie to spend his time frisking and bleating round her.
I left the room, accordingly, and a few minutes later might have been observed stealing through the sunlit grounds en route for the village. In fact, I was observed, and by Dame Daphne Winkworth. I was nearing the bottom of the drive and in another moment should have won through to safety, when somebody called my name – or, rather, Gussie’s name – and I saw the formidable old egg standing in the rose garden. From the fact that she had a syringe in her hand I deduced that she was in the process of doing the local green-fly a bit of no good.
‘Come here, Augustus,’ she said.
It was the last thing I would have done, if given the choice, for even at the best of times this dangerous specimen put the wind up me pretty vertically, and she was now looking about ten degrees more forbidding than usual. Her voice was cold and her eye was cold, and I didn’t like the way she was toying with that syringe. It was plain that for some reason I had fallen in her estimation to approximately the level of a green-fly, and her air was that of a woman who for two pins would press the trigger and let me have a fluid ounce of whatever the hell-brew was squarely in the mazzard.
‘Oh, hallo,’ I said, trying to be debonair but missing by a mile. ‘Squirting the rose trees?’
‘Don’t talk to me about rose trees!’
‘Oh, no, rather not,’ I said. Well, I hadn’t wanted to particularly. Just filling in with ad lib stuff.
‘Augustus, what is this I hear?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You would do better to beg Madeline’s.’
Mystic stuff. I didn’t get it. The impression I received was of a Dame of the British Empire talking through the back of her neck.
‘When I was in the house just now,’ she proceeded, ‘a telegram arrived for you from Madeline. It was telephoned from the post office. Sometimes they telephone, and sometimes they deliver personally.’
‘I see. According to the whim of the moment.’
> ‘Please do not interrupt. This time it happened that the message was telephoned, and as I was passing through the hall when the bell rang, I took it down.’
‘Frightfully white of you,’ I said, feeling that I couldn’t go wrong in giving her the old oil.
I had gone wrong, however. She didn’t like it. She frowned, raised the syringe, then, as if remembering in time that she was a Deverill, lowered it again.
‘I have already asked you not to interrupt. I took down the message, as I say, and I have it here. No,’ she said, having searched through her costume, ‘I must have left it on the hall table. But I can tell you its contents. Madeline says she has not received a single letter from you since you arrived at the hall, and she wishes to know why. She is greatly distressed at your abominable neglect, and I am not surprised. You know how sensitive she is. You ought to have been writing to her every day. I have no words to express what I think of your heartless behaviour. That is all, Augustus,’ she said, and dismissed me with a gesture of loathing, as if I had been a green-fly that had fallen short of even the very moderate level of decency of the average run-of-the-mill green-fly. And I tottered off and groped my way to a rustic bench and sank onto it.
The information which she had sprung on me had, I need scarcely say, affected me like the impact behind the ear of a stocking full of wet sand. Only once in my career had I experienced an emotion equally intense, on the occasion when Freddie Widgeon at the Drones, having possessed himself of a motor horn, stole up behind me as I crossed Dover Street in what is known as a reverie and suddenly tooted the apparatus in my immediate ear.
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3: The Mating Season / Ring for Jeeves / Very Good, Jeeves Page 29
