Well, what I was about to say, when I rambled off a bit on the subject of the dear old days, was that though in the course of the years most of the poem of which I speak has slid from the memory, I still recall its punch line. The thing goes, as you probably know,
Tum tiddle umpty-pum
Tum tiddle umpty-pum
Tum tiddle umpty-pum
and this brought you to the snapperoo or pay-off, which was
I always remember that bit, and the reason I bring it up now is that, as I stood blinking at this pink-boudoir-capped girl, I was feeling just as those Light Brigade fellows must have felt. Obviously someone had blundered here, and that someone was Aunt Dahlia. Why she should have told me that her window was the last one on the left, when the last are on the left was what it was anything but, was more than I could imagine. One sought in vain for what Stilton Cheesewright would have called the ulterior motive.
However, it is hopeless to try to fathom the mental processes of aunts, and anyway this was no time for idle speculation. The first thing the man of sensibility has to do on arriving like a sack of coals in a girl's bedroom in the small hours is to get the conversation going, and it was to this that I now addressed myself. Nothing is worse on these occasions than the awkward pause and the embarrassed silence.
'Oh, hullo,' I said, as brightly and cheerily as I could manage. 'I say, I'm most frightfully sorry to pop in like this at a moment when you were doubtless knitting up the ravelled sleeve of care, but I went for a breather in the garden and found I was locked out, so I thought my best plan was not to rouse the house but to nip in through the first open window. You know how it is when you rouse houses. They don't like it.'
I would have spoken further, developing the theme, for it seemed to me that I was on the right lines ... so much better, I mean to say, than affecting to be walking in my sleep. All that 'Where am I?' stuff, I mean. Too damn silly... but she suddenly gave one of those rippling laughs of hers.
'Oh, Bertie!' she said, and not, mark you, with that sort of weary fed-up-ness with which girls generally say 'Oh, Bertie!' to me. 'What a romantic you are!'
'Eh?'
She rippled again. It was a relief, of course, to find that she did not propose to yell for help and all that sort of thing, but I must say I found this mirth a bit difficult to cope with. You've probably had the same experience yourself – listening to people guffawing like hyenas and not having the foggiest what the joke is. It makes you feel at a disadvantage.
She was looking at me in an odd kind of way, as if at some child for whom, while conceding that it had water on the brain, she felt a fondness.
'Isn't this just the sort of thing you would do!' she said. 'I told you I was no longer engaged to D'Arcy Cheesewright, and you had to fly to me. You couldn't wait till the morning, could you? I suppose you had some sort of idea of kissing me softly while I slept?'
I leaped perhaps six inches in the direction of the ceiling. I was appalled, and I think not unjustifiably so. I mean, dash it, a fellow who has always prided himself on the scrupulous delicacy of his relations with the other sex doesn't like to have it supposed that he deliberately shins up ladders at one in the morning in order to kiss girls while they sleep.
'Good Lord, no!' I said, replacing the chair which I had knocked over in my agitation. 'Nothing further from my thoughts. I take it your attention happened to wander for a moment when I was outlining the facts, just now. What I was saying, only you weren't listening, was that I went for a breather in the garden and found I was locked out –'
She rippled once more. That looking-fondly-at-idiot-child expression on her face had become intensified.
'You don't think I'm angry, do you? Of course I'm not. I'm very touched. Kiss me, Bertie.'
Well, one has to be civil. I did as directed, but with an uneasy feeling that this was a bit above the odds. I didn't at all like the general trend of affairs, the whole thing seeming to me to be becoming far too French. When I broke out of the clinch and stepped back, I found the expression on her face had changed. She was now regarding me in a sort of speculative way, if you know what I mean, rather like a governess taking a gander at the new pupil.
'Mother's quite wrong,' she said.
'Mother?'
'Your Aunt Agatha.'
This surprised me.
'You call her Mother? Oh, well, okay, if you like it. Up to you, of course. What was she wrong about?'
'You. She keeps insisting that you are a vapid and irreflective nitwit who ought years ago to have been put in some good mental home.'
I drew myself up haughtily, cut more or less to the quick. So this was how the woman was accustomed to shoot off her bally head about me in my absence, was it! A pretty state of affairs. The woman, I'll trouble you, whose repulsive son Thos I had for years practically nursed in my bosom. That is to say, when he passed through London on his way back to school, I put him up at my residence and not only fed him luxuriously but with no thought of self took him to the Old Vic and Madame Tussaud's. Was there no gratitude in the world?
'She does, does she?'
'She's awfully amusing about you.'
Amusing, eh?'
'It was she who said that you had a brain like a peahen.'
Here, of course, if I had wished to take it, was an admirable opportunity to go into this matter of peahens and ascertain just were they stood in the roster of our feathered friends as regards the I.Q., but I let it go.
She adjusted the boudoir cap, which the recent embrace had tilted a bit to one side. She was still looking at me in the speculative way.
'She says you are a guffin.'
'A what?'
'A guffin.'
'I don't understand you.'
'It's one of those old-fashioned expressions. What she meant, I think, was that she considered you a wet smack and a total loss. But I told her she was quite mistaken and that there is a lot more in you than people suspect. I realized that when I found you in that bookshop that day buying Sprindrift. Do you remember?'
I had not forgotten the incident. The whole thing had been one of those unfortunate misunderstandings. I had promised Jeeves to buy him the works of a cove of the name of Spinoza – some kind of philosopher or something, I gathered – and the chap at the bookshop, expressing the opinion that there was no such person as Spinoza, had handed me Spindrift as being more probably what I was after, and scarcely had I grasped it when Florence came in. To assume that I had purchased the thing and to autograph it for me in green ink with her fountain-pen had been with her the work of an instant.
'I knew then that you were groping dimly for the light and trying to educate yourself by reading good literature, that there was something lying hidden deep down in you that only needed bringing out. It would be a fascinating task, I told myself, fostering the latent potentialities of your budding mind. Like watching over some timid, backward flower.'
I bridled pretty considerably. Timid, backward flower, my left eyeball, I was thinking. I was on the point of saying something stinging like 'Oh, yes?' when she proceeded.
'I know I can mould you, Bertie. You want to improve yourself, and that is half the battle. What have you been reading lately?'
'Well, what with one thing and another, my reading has been a bit cut into these last days, but I am in the process of plugging away at a thing called The Mystery of the Pink Crayfish.!
Her slender frame was more or less hidden beneath the bedclothes, but I got the impression that a shudder had run through it.
'Oh, Bertie!' she said, this time with something more nearly approaching the normal intonation.
'Well, it's dashed good,' I insisted stoutly. 'This baronet, this Sir Eustace Willoughby, is discovered in his library with his head bashed in–'
A look of pain came into her face.
'Please!' she sighed. 'Oh, dear,' she said, 'I'm afraid it's going to be uphill work fostering the latent potentialities of your budding mind.'
'I wouldn't try, if I were
you. Give it a miss, is my advice.'
'But I hate to think of leaving you in the darkness, doing nothing but smoke and drink at the Drones Club.'
I put her straight about this. She had her facts wrong.
'I also play Darts.'
'Darts!'
'As a matter of fact, I shall very soon be this year's club champion. The event is a snip for me. Ask anybody.'
'How can you fritter away your time like that, when you might be reading T. S. Eliot? I would like to see you –'
What it was she would have liked to see me doing she did not say, though I presumed it was something foul and educational, for at this juncture someone knocked on the door.
It was the last contingency I had been anticipating, and it caused my heart to leap like a salmon in the spawning season and become entangled with my front teeth. I looked at the door with what I have heard Jeeves call a wild surmise, the persp. breaking out on my brow.
Florence, I noticed, seemed a bit startled, too. One gathered that she hadn't expected, when setting out for Brinkley Court, that her bedroom was going to be such a social centre. There's a song I used to sing a good deal at one time, the refrain or burthen of which began with the words 'Let's all go round to Maud's'. Much the same sentiment appeared to be animating the guests beneath Aunt Dahlia's roof, and it was, of course, upsetting for the poor child. At one in the morning girls like a bit of privacy, and she couldn't have had much less privacy if she had been running a snack bar on a racecourse.
'Who's that?' she cried.
'Me,' responded a deep, resonant voice, and Florence clapped a hand to her throat, a thing I didn't know anybody ever did off the stage.
For the d.r.v. was that of G. D'Arcy Cheesewright. To cut a long story short, the man was in again.
It was with a distinctly fevered hand that Florence reached out for a dressing-gown, and in her deportment, as she hopped from between the sheets, I noted a marked suggestion of a pea on a hot shovel. She is one of those cool, calm, well-poised modern girls from whom, as a rule, you can seldom get more than a raised eyebrow, but I could see that this thing of having Stilton a pleasant visitor at a moment when her room was all cluttered up with Woosters had rattled her more than slightly.
'What do you want?'
'I have brought your letters.'
'Leave them on the mat.'
'I will not leave them on the mat. I wish to confront you in person.'
'At this time of night! You aren't coming in here!'
'That,' said Stilton crisply, 'is where you make your ruddy error. I am coming in there.'
I remember Jeeves saying something once about the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling and glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. It was in much the same manner that Florence's eye now rolled and glanced. I could see what was disturbing her, of course. It was that old problem which always bothers chaps in mystery thrillers – viz. how to get rid of the body – in this case, that of Bertram. If Stilton proposed to enter, it was essential that Bertram be placed in storage somewhere for the time being, but the question that arose was where.
There was a cupboard on the other side of the room, and she nipped across and flung open the door.
'Quick!' she hissed, and it's all rot to say you can't hiss a word that hasn't an V in it. She did it on her head.
'In here!'
The suggestion struck me as a good one. I popped in and she closed the door behind me.
Well, actually, the fingers being, I suppose, nerveless, she didn't, but left it ajar. I was able, consequently, to follow the ensuing conversation as clearly as if it had been coming over the wireless.
Stilton began it.
'Here are your letters,' he said stiffly.
'Thank you,' she said stiffly.
'Don't mention it,' he said stiffly.
'Put them on the dressing-table,' she said stiffly.
'Right ho!' he said stiffly.
I don't know when I've known a bigger night for stiff speakers.
After a brief interval, during which I presumed that he was depositing the correspondence as directed, Stilton resumed.
'You got my telegram?'
'Of course I got your telegram.'
'You notice I have shaved my moustache?'
'I do.'
'It was my first move on finding out about your underhanded skulduggery.'
'What do you mean, my underhanded skulduggery?'
'If you don't call it underhanded skulduggery, sneaking off to night clubs with the louse Wooster, it would be extremely entertaining to be informed how you would describe it.'
'You know perfectly well that I wanted atmosphere for my book.'
'Ho!'
'And don't say "Ho".'
'I will say "Ho!"' retorted Stilton with spirit. 'Your book, my foot! I don't believe there is any book. I don't believe you've ever written a book.'
'Indeed? How about Spindrift, now in its fifth edition and soon to be translated into the Scandinavian?'
'Probably the work of the louse Gorringe.'
I imagine that at this coarse insult Florence's eyes flashed fire. The voice in which she spoke certainly suggested it.
'Mr Cheesewright, you have had a couple!'
'Nothing of the kind.'
'Then you must be insane, and I wish you would have the courtesy to take that pumpkin head of yours out of here.'
I rather think, though I can't be sure, that at these words Stilton ground his teeth. Certainly there was a peculiar sound, as if a coffee mill had sprung into action. The voice that filtered through to my cosy retreat quivered hoarsely.
'My head is not like a pumpkin!'
'It is, too, like a pumpkin.'
'It is not like a pumpkin at all. I have this on the authority of Bertie Wooster, who says it is more like the dome of St Paul's.' He broke off, and there was a smacking sound. He had apparently smitten his brow. 'Wooster!' he cried, emitting an animal snarl. 'I didn't come here to talk about my head, I came to talk about Wooster, the slithery serpent who slinks behind chaps' backs, stealing fellows' girls from them. Wooster the homewrecker! Wooster the snake in the grass from whom no woman is safe! Wooster the modern Don what's-his-name! You've been conducting a clandestine intrigue with him right along. You thought you were fooling me, didn't you? You thought I didn't see through your pitiful... your pitiful... Dammit, what's the word? ... your pitiful... No, it's gone.'
'I wish you would follow its excellent example.'
'Subterfuges! I knew I'd get it. Do you think I didn't see through your pitiful subterfuges? All that bilge about wanting me to grow a moustache. Do you think I'm not on to it that the whole of that moustache sequence was just a ruse to enable you to break it off with me and switch over to the grass snake Wooster? "How can I get rid of this Cheesewright?" you said to yourself. "Ha, I have it!" you said to yourself "I'll tell him he's got to grow a moustache. He'll say like hell he'll grow any bally moustache. And then I'll say Ho! You won't, won't you? All right, then all is over between us. That'll fix it." It must have been a nasty shock to you when I yielded to your request. Upset your plans quite a bit, I imagine? You hadn't bargained for that, had you?'
Florence spoke in a voice that would have frozen an Eskimo.
The door is just behind you, Mr Cheesewright. It opens if you turn the handle.'
He came right back at her.
'Never mind the door. I'm talking about you and the leper Wooster. I suppose you will now hitch on to him, or what's left of him after I've finished stepping on his face. Am I right?'
'You are.'
'It is your intention to marry this human gumboil?'
'It is.'
'Ho!'
Well, I don't know how you would have behaved in my place, hearing these words and realizing for the first time that the evil had spread as far as this. You would probably have started violently, as I did. No doubt I ought to have spotted the impending doom, but for some reason or other, possibly because I had been dev
oting so much thought to Stilton, I hadn't. This abrupt announcement of my betrothal to a girl of whom I took the gravest view shook me to my depths, with the result, as I say, that I started violently.
And, of course, the one place where it is unwise to start violently, if you wish to remain unobserved and incognito, is a cupboard in a female's bedroom. What exactly it was that now rained down on me, dislodged by my sudden movement, I cannot say, but I think it was hat-boxes. Whatever it was, it sounded in the stilly night like coal being lowered down a chute into a cellar, and I heard a sharp exclamation. A moment later a hand wrenched open the door and a suffused face glared in on me as I brushed the hat-boxes, if they were hat-boxes, from my hair.
'Ho!' said Stilton, speaking with difficulty like a cat with a fishbone in its throat. 'Come on out of there, serpent,' he added, attaching himself to my left ear and pulling vigorously.
I emerged like a cork out of a bottle.
CHAPTER 14
It is always a bit difficult to know just what to say on occasions like this. I said 'Oh, there you are, Stilton. Nice evening,' but it seemed to be the wrong thing, for he merely quivered as if he had got a beetle down his back and increased the incandescence of his gaze. I saw that it was going to require quite a good deal of suavity and tact on my part to put us all at our ease.
'You are doubtless surprised –' I began, but he held up a hand as if he had been back in the Force directing the traffic. He then spoke in a quiet, if rumbling, voice.
'You will find me waiting in the corridor, Wooster,' he said, and strode out.
I understood the spirit which had prompted the words. It was the preux chevalier in him coming to the surface. You can stir up a Cheesewright till he froths at the mouth, but you cannot make him forget that he is an Old Etonian and a pukka Sahib. Old Etonians do not brawl in the presence of the other sex. Nor do pukka Sahibs. They wait till they are alone with the party of the second part in some secluded nook.
Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit Page 11
