‘Then tally ho!’
‘Very good, sir.’
He flickered off upon his mission, while I, having summoned up the blood a bit and stiffened the sinews as far as was possible at such short notice, squared the shoulders and headed for where Edwin was squatting. The weather continued uniformly fine. The sun shone, and a blackbird, I remember, was singing in an adjoining thicket. No reason why it shouldn’t have been, of course. I mention the fact merely to stress the general peace and tranquillity of everything. And I must say it did strike me as a passing thought that the sort of setting a job like this really needed was a blasted heath at midnight, with a cold wind whistling in the bushes and three witches doing their stuff at the cauldron.
However, one can’t have everything, and I doubt if an observer would have noted any diffidence in Bertram’s bearing as he advanced upon his prey. Bertram, I rather fancy he would have thought, was in pretty good form.
I hove to at the stripling’s side.
‘Hullo, young Edwin,’ I said.
His gaze had been riveted on the ground, but at the sound of the familiar voice a couple of pink-rimmed eyes came swivelling round in my direction. He looked up at me like a ferret about to pass the time of day with another ferret.
‘Hullo, Bertie. I say, Bertie, I did another act of kindness this morning.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘I finished pasting the notices of Florence’s novel in her album. That puts me all right up to last Wednesday.’
‘Good work. You’re catching up. And what do you think you’re doing now?’
‘I’m studying ants. Do you know anything about ants, Bertie?’
‘Only from meeting them at picnics.’
‘I’ve been reading up about them. Very interesting.’
‘Vastly, I shouldn’t wonder.’
I was glad the topic had been introduced, for it promised to be one that would carry us along nicely until Florence’s arrival on the scene. It was obvious that the young squirt was bulging with information about these industrious little creatures and asked nothing better than to be allowed to impart it.
‘Did you know that ants can talk?’
‘Talk?’
‘In a sort of way. To other ants, of course. They do it by tapping their heads on a leaf. How’s your head this morning, Bertie? I nearly forgot to ask.’
‘Still on the tender side.’
‘I thought it would be. Coo! That was funny last night, wasn’t it? I laughed for hours, when I got to bed.’
He emitted a ringing guffaw, and at the raucous sound any spark of compunction that might have been lingering in my bosom was quenched. A boy to whom the raising of a lump the size of a golf ball on the Wooster bean was a subject for heartless mirth deserved all that boot toe could do to him. For the first time, I found myself contemplating the task before me with real fire and enthusiasm – almost, as you might say, in a missionary spirit. I mean, I felt what a world of good a swift kick in the pants would do to this child. It might prove to be the turning-point in his life.
‘You laughed, did you?’
‘Rather!’
‘Ha!’ I said, and ground a few teeth.
The maddening thing was, of course, that though I was now keyed up to give of my best, and though the position he had assumed for this ant-studying session of his was the exact position demanded by the run of the scenario, I was debarred from getting action. You might have compared me to a greyhound on the leash. Until Florence came along, I could not fulfil myself. As Jeeves had said, her presence was of the essence. I scanned the horizon for a sight of her, like a shipwrecked mariner hoping for a sail, but she did not appear, and in the meantime we went on talking about ants, Edwin saying that they were members of the Hymenoptera family and self replying, ‘Well, well. Quite the nibs, eh?’
‘They are characterized by unusual distinctness of the three regions of the body – head, thorax and abdomen – and by the stack or petiole of the abdomen having one or two scales or nodes, so that the abdomen moves very freely on the truck or thorax.’
‘You wouldn’t fool me?’
‘The female, after laying her eggs, feeds the larvae with food regurgitated from her stomach.’
‘Try to keep it clean, my lad.’
‘Both males and females are winged.’
‘And why not?’
‘But the female pulls off its wings and runs about without them.’
‘I question that. I doubt if even an ant would be such an ass.’
‘It’s quite true. It says so in the book. Have you ever seen ants fight?’
‘Not that I remember.’
‘They rise on their hind legs and curve the abdomen.’
And, to my consternation and chagrin, whether because it was his intention to illustrate or because he found his squatting position cramping to the limbs, this was just what he did himself. He rose on his hind legs, and stood facing me, curving the abdomen – at the exact moment when I perceived Florence emerging from the house and walking briskly in our direction.
It was a crisis at which a less resourceful man might have supposed that all was lost. But the Woosters are quick thinkers.
‘Hullo!’ I said.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Have you dropped sixpence?’
‘No.’
‘Somebody has. Look.’
‘Where?’
‘Under that bush,’ I said, and pointed to a shrub of sorts on the edge of the drive.
As you probably conjecture, in saying this I was descending to subterfuge, and anybody knowing Bertram Wooster and his rigid principles might have supposed that such wilful tampering with the truth would have caused the blush of shame to mantle his cheek. Not so, however. If there was a flush to be noted, it was the flush of excitement and triumph.
For my subtle appeal to the young blister’s cupidity had not failed to achieve its end. Already, he was down on all fours, and if I had posed him with my own hands I could not have obtained better results. His bulging shorts seemed to smile up at me in a sort of inviting, welcoming way.
As Jeeves had rightly said, there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. I drew back the leg, and let him have it just where the pants were tightest.
It was a superb effort. Considering that I hadn’t kicked anyone since the distant days of school, you might have thought that the machinery would have got rusty. But no. All the old skill still lingered. My timing was perfect, and so was my follow through. He disappeared into the bush, travelling as if out of a gun, and as he did so Florence’s voice spoke.
‘Ah!’ she said.
There was no mistaking the emotion that animated the ejaculation. It was stiff with it. But with a dazed sensation of something having gone wrong I realized that it was not the emotion I had anticipated. Horror was completely absent, nor had there come through anything in the nature of indignation and sisterly resentment. Astounding as it may seem, joy was the predominating note. One might go further and say ecstasy. Her ‘Ah!’ in short, had been practically equivalent to ‘Whoopee!’ and I could make nothing of it.
‘Thank you, Bertie!’ she said. ‘It was just what I was going to do myself. Edwin, come here!’
Down in the forest something stirred. It was the prudent child wriggling his way through the bush in a diametrically opposite direction. There came the sound of a faint and distant ‘Coo!’ and he was gone, leaving not a wrack behind.
Florence was gazing at me, a cordial and congratulatory light in her eyes, a happy smile playing about her lips.
‘Thank you, Bertie!’ she said again, once more with that wealth of emotion in her voice. ‘I would like to skin him! I have just been looking at my album of press clippings, and he has gone and pasted in half the reviews of Spindrift wrong side up. I believe he did it on purpose. It’s a pity I couldn’t catch him, but there it is. I can’t tell you how grateful I am, Bertie, for what you did. What gave you the idea?’
‘Oh, it just came to me.’
‘I understand. A sort of sudden inspiration. The central theme of Spindrift came like that. Jeeves says you want to speak to me. Is it something very important?’
‘Oh, no. Not important.’
‘Then we will keep it till later. I must go back now and see if there isn’t some way of floating those clippings off with hot water.’
She hurried away, turning as she entered the house to wave a loving hand, and I was left alone to submit the situation to the analysis it demanded.
I don’t know anything that seems to jar the back teeth like having a sure thing come unstuck, and it was with a dull sensation of having been hit in the stomach by a medicine ball, as once happened to me during a voyage to America, that I stood contemplating the future. Not even the fact that in the recent scene this girl had shown a warm, human side to her nature, which I had not suspected that she possessed, could reconcile me to what I was now so unavoidably in for. A Florence capable of wanting to skin Edwin was better, of course, than a Florence susceptible of no such emotion, but no, I couldn’t bring myself to like the shape of things to come.
How long I stood brooding there before I became aware of the squeaking that was going on at my side, I cannot say. Quite a time it must have been. For when at length I came out of my reverie, to find that Nobby was endeavouring to attract my attention, I saw that her manner was impatient, like that of one who has been trying to hobnob with a deaf mute and is finding the one-sided conversation weighing upon the spirits.
‘Bertie!’
‘Oh, sorry. I was musing.’
‘Well, stop musing. You’ll be late.’
‘Late?’
‘For Uncle Percy. In the study.’
I have mentioned earlier in this narrative that I am a pretty good silver-lining spotter, and that if there is a bright side to any cataclysm or disaster I seldom fail to put my finger on it sooner or later. Her words reminded me that there was one attached to the present catastrophe. Murky the future might be, what with all those wedding bells and what not which now seemed so inescapable, but at least I was in a position to save something out of the wreck. I could at any rate give Uncle Percy the go-by.
‘Oh, that?’ I said. ‘That’s off.’
‘Off?’
‘My reward for sitting in on the scheme,’ I explained, ‘was to have been the learning of the Fittleworth secret process for getting out of being engaged to Florence. I have learned it, and it is a wash-out. I, therefore, hand in my portfolio.’
‘You mean you won’t help us?’
‘In some other way, to be decided on later, certainly. But not by inflaming Uncle Percy.’
‘Oh, Bertie!’
‘And it’s no good saying, “Oh, Bertie!”
’ She looked at me with bulging eyes, and it seemed for an instant as if those pearly drops, of which Boko had spoken so eloquently, were about to start functioning once more. But there was good stuff in the Hopwoods. The dam did not burst.
‘But I don’t understand.’
I explained in some detail what had occurred.
‘Boko,’ I concluded, ‘claimed that this secret remedy of his was infallible. It is not. So unless he has something else to suggest –’
‘But he has. I mean, I have.’
‘You?’
‘You want Florence to break off the engagement?’
‘I do.’
‘Well, go and talk to Uncle Percy, and I’ll show her that letter you wrote me, saying what you thought of her. That’ll work it.’
I started. In fact, I leaped about a foot.
‘Golly!’
‘Don’t you agree?’
‘Well, I’m dashed!’
I don’t know when I’ve been so affected. I had forgotten all about that letter, but now, as its burning phrases came back to me, hope, which I had thought dead, threw off the winding sheet and resumed business at the old stand. The Fittleworth method might have failed, but there was no question that the Hopwood remedy would bring home the bacon.
‘Nobby!’
‘Think on your feet!’
‘You promise you’ll show Florence that letter?’
‘Faithfully. If you will give Uncle Percy the treatment.’
‘Is Boko at his post?’
‘Sure to be by now.’
‘Then out of my way! Here we go!’
And, moving as if on wings, I flitted to the house, plunged across the threshold, shot down the passage that led to the relative’s sanctum and dived in.
22
* * *
UNCLE PERCY’S STUDY, to which this was of course my first visit, proved to be what they call on the stage a ‘rich interior’, liberally equipped with desks, chairs, tables, carpets and all the usual fixings. Books covered one side of it, and on the opposite wall there hung a large picture showing nymphs, or something similar, sporting with what, from the look of them and the way they were behaving, I took to be fauns. One also noted a terrestrial globe, some bowls of flowers, a stuffed trout, a cigar humidor, and a bust which might have been that of the late Mr Gladstone.
In short, practically the only thing you could think of that could have been in the room, but wasn’t, was Uncle Percy. He was not seated in the chair behind the desk, nor was he pacing the carpet, twiddling the globe, sniffing the flowers, reading the books, admiring the stuffed trout or taking a gander at the nymphs and fauns. Not a glimpse of him met the eye, and this total absence of uncles, so different from what I had been led to expect, brought me up with a bit of a turn.
It’s a rummy feeling, when you’ve got yourself all braced for the fray and suddenly discover that the fray hasn’t turned up. Rather like treading on the last stair when it isn’t there. I stood chewing the lip in some perplexity, wondering what to do for the best.
The scent of a robust cigar, still lingering in the air, showed that he must have been on the spot quite recently, and the open french windows suggested that he had popped out into the garden, there possibly to wrestle with the problems which were weighing on his mind – notably, no doubt, that of how the dickens life at Steeple Bumpleigh being what it was, he was to obtain an uninterrupted five minutes with Chichester Clam. And what I was debating within myself was whether to follow him or to remain in status quo till he came back.
Much depended, of course, on how long he was going to be. I mean, it wasn’t as if the mood of fiery resolution in which I had hurled myself across the threshold was a thing which would last indefinitely. Already, the temperature of the feet had become sensibly lowered, and I was conscious of an emptiness behind the diaphragm and a disposition to gulp. Postpone the fixture for even another minute or two, and the evil would spread to such an extent that the relative, when he eventually showed up, would find a Bertram out of whom all the sawdust had trickled – a Wooster capable of nothing better than a mild ‘Yes, Uncle Percy’, and ‘No, Uncle Percy’.
Looking at it from every angle, therefore, it seemed that it would be best to go and tackle him in the great open spaces, where Boko by this time was presumably lurking. And I had reached the french windows, and was about to pass through, though with little or no relish for what lay before me, when my attention was arrested by the sound of raised voices. They came from a certain distance, and the actual wording of the dialogue escaped the eardrum, but from the fact that they were addressing each other as ‘My dear Worplesdon’ and ‘You blot’, I divined that they belonged – respectively – to Boko and the seigneur of Bumpleigh Hall.
A moment later, my conjecture was proved correct. A little procession came into view, crossing the strip of lawn outside the study. Heading it was Boko, looking less debonair than I have sometimes seen him. Following him came a man of gardeneresque appearance, armed with a pitchfork and accompanied by a dog of uncertain breed. The rear was brought up by Uncle Percy, waving a cigar menacingly like the angel expelling Adam from the Garden of Eden.
It was he who seemed to be doing most of t
he talking. From time to time, Boko would look around, as if about to say something, but whatever eloquence he may have been intending was checked by the expression on the face of the dog, which was that of one fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils, and the fact that the pitchfork to which I have alluded was almost touching the seat of his trousers.
Half-way across the lawn, Uncle Percy detached himself from the convoy and came stumping rapidly towards me, puffing emotionally at his cigar. Boko and his new friends continued in the direction of the drive.
After the painful shock, inevitable on seeing an old friend given the push from enclosed premises, my first thought, as you may have surmised, had been that there was nothing to keep me. The whole essence of the scheme to which I had consented to lend my services had been that Boko should be within earshot while I was making my observations to Uncle Percy, and nothing was clearer than that by the time the latter reached his sanctum he would have drifted away like thistledown.
I shot off, accordingly, not standing upon the order of my going but going at once, as the fellow said, and was making good progress when, as I approached the door, I suddenly observed that there hung over it a striking portrait of Aunt Agatha, from the waist upwards. In making my entrance, I had, of course, missed this, but there it had been all the time, and now it caught my eye and halted me in my tracks as if I had run into a lamp-post.
It was the work of one of those artists who reveal the soul of the sitter, and it had revealed so much of Aunt Agatha’s soul that for all practical purposes it might have been that danger to traffic in person. Indeed, I came within an ace of saying ‘Oh, hullo!’ at the same moment when I could have sworn it said ‘Bertie!’ in that compelling voice which had so often rung in my ears and caused me to curl up in a ball in the hope that a meek subservience would enable me to get off lightly.
The weakness was, of course, merely a temporary one. A moment later, Bertram was himself again. But the pause had been long enough to allow Uncle Percy to come clumping into the room, and escape was now impossible. I remained, therefore, and stood shooting my cuffs, trusting that the action would induce fortitude. It does sometimes.
The Jeeves Omnibus Vol. 2: Right Ho, Jeeves / Joy in the Morning / Carry On, Jeeves Page 40
