I went through a precisely similar routine now, first applying the picture and then the tablecloth. After which I withdrew and went off to the Goose and Grasshopper to see Orlo.
16
* * *
ANYBODY NOT IN possession of the facts would probably have been appalled at my rashness in placing myself within disembowelling range of Orlo Porter, feeling that I was tempting fate, and in about two ticks would be wishing I hadn’t.
But I, strong in the knowledge that Orlo P. had been reduced to the level of a fifth-rate power, was able to approach the coming interview in a bumps-a-daisy spirit which might quite easily have led to my bursting into song.
Orlo, as I had predicted, was in the bar having a gin and ginger. He lowered the beaker as I drew near and regarded me in a squiggle-eyed manner like a fastidious luncher observing a caterpillar in his salad.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said.
I conceded this, for he was right. No argument about it. Assured that he wasn’t looking squiggle-eyed at the wrong chap, he proceeded.
‘What do you want?’
‘A word with you.’
‘So you have come to gloat?’
‘Certainly not, Porter,’ I said, ‘when you hear what I have to say, you will start skipping like the high hills, not that I’ve ever seen high hills skip, or low hills for that matter. Porter, what would you say if I told you all your troubles, all the little odds and ends that are bothering you now, would be over ’ere yonder sun had set?’
‘It has set.’
‘Oh, has it? I didn’t notice.’
‘And it is getting on for dinner time. So if you will kindly get the hell out of here—’
‘Not till I have spoken.’
‘Are you going to speak some more?’
‘Lots more. Let us examine the position you and I are in calmly, and in a judicial spirit. Vanessa Cook has told me she will marry me, and you are probably looking on me as a snake in the grass. Well, let me tell you that any resemblance between me and a snake in the grass is purely coincidental. I couldn’t issue a nolle prosequi, could I, when she said that? Of course not. But all the while I was right-hoing I felt I was behaving like a louse.’
‘You are a louse.’
‘No, that’s where you make your error, Porter. I am a man of sensibility, and a man of sensibility does not marry a girl who’s in love with somebody else. He gives her up.’
He finished his gin and ginger, and choked on it as he suddenly got the gist.
‘You would give her up to me?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘But, Wooster, this is noble. I’m sorry I said you were a louse.’
‘Quite all right. Sort of mistake anyone might make.’
‘You remind me of Cyrano de Bergerac’
‘One has one’s code.’
He had been all smiles – or pretty nearly all smiles – up to this point, but now melancholy marked him for her own again. He heaved a sigh, as if he had found a dead mouse at the bottom of his tankard.
‘It would be useless for you to make this sacrifice, Wooster. Vanessa would never marry me.’
‘Of course she would.’
‘You weren’t there when she broke the engagement.’
‘My representative was. At least he was listening at the door.’
‘Then you know the general run of the thing.’
‘He gave me a full report.’
‘And you say she still loves me?’
‘Like a ton of bricks. Love cannot be extinguished by a potty little lovers’ quarrel.’
‘Potty little lovers’ quarrel my left eyeball. She called me a lily-livered poltroon. And a sleekit timorous cowering beastie. One wonders where she picks up such expressions. And all because I refused to go to old Cook and demand my money. I’d been to him once and asked him in the most civil manner to cough up, and she wanted me to go again and this time to thump the table and generally throw my weight about.’
‘You should, Orlo. That’s just what you ought to do. What happened last time?’
‘He flatly refused.’
‘How flatly?’
‘Very flatly. And it would be the same if I went again.’
He had given me the cue I wanted. I had been wondering how best to introduce what I had in mind. I smiled one of my subtle smiles, and he asked me what I was grinning about.
‘Not if you select your time properly,’ I said. ‘What time was it you made your other try?’
‘About five in the afternoon.’
‘As I suspected. No wonder he gave you the bum’s rush. Five in the afternoon is when a man’s sunny disposition is down in the lowest brackets. Lunch wore off hours ago, and cocktails are not yet in sight. He isn’t in the mood to oblige anyone about anything. Cook may be a hard-boiled egg, but dinner softens the hardest. Approach him when he is full to the brim, and you’ll be surprised. Fellows at the Drones have told me that, applying after he had tucked into the evening meal, they have got substantial loans out of Oofy Prosser.’
‘Who is Oofy Prosser?’
‘The club millionaire, a man who by daylight watches his disbursement like a hawk. Cook is probably just the same. Tails up, Porter. Get cracking. Be bloody, bold and resolute,’ I said, remembering a gag from that play Macbeth, which I was mentioning some while back.
He was impressed, as who would not have been. His face lit up as if someone had pressed a button.
‘Wooster,’ he said, ‘you’re right. You have shown me the way. You have made my path straight. Thank you, Wooster, old man.’
‘Not at all, Porter, old chap.’
‘It’s an extraordinary thing; anyone looking at you would write you off as a brainless nincompoop with about as much intelligence as a dead rabbit.’
‘Thank you, Porter, old chap.’
‘Not at all, Wooster, old man. Whereas all the time you have this amazing insight into human psychology.’
‘I have hidden depths, would you say?’
‘You bet you have, Wooster, old horse.’
And in another jiffy he was pressing a gin and ginger on me as if we had been bosom pals for years and the subject of my insides had never come up between us.
Returning to Wee Nooke some twenty minutes later after what had practically amounted to a love-feast, I had that jolly feeling you don’t often get nowadays that God was in his heaven and all right with the world, as the fellow said. I counted my blessings one by one and found the sum total most satisfactory. All was quiet on the Porter front, Billy Graham was even now returning the cat to its little circle at Eggesford Court, Porter and Vanessa Cook would soon be sweethearts again, and if my popularity with Pop Cook was at a low ebb, rendering unlikely any chance of a present from him next Christmas, that was a small flaw in the ointment. Or is it fly? I never can remember. Everything, in short, was just like Mother makes it, and it was a blithe B. Wooster who, hearing the telephone tootle, went to answer it with, as you might say, a song on his lips.
It was the aged relative, and the dullest ear could have spotted that she was in something of a doodah. For some moments after we had established connection she confined herself to gasps and gurgles such as might have proceeded from some strong swimmer in his agony.
‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘Is something up?’
In the course of this narrative I have had occasion to mention several hacking laughs, but for sheer rasp and explosiveness the one the old ancestor emitted at these words topped the lot.
‘Something up?’ she boomed. ‘You would say a thing like that when I’m nearly off my rocker. Has that cat been returned to store yet?’
‘Billy Graham is in full control.’
‘You mean he hasn’t started yet?’
‘Yes, and come back. But unfortunately the cat followed him. So he says. Anyway, he arrived here with it in close attendance, and he has now taken it off again. He’s probably decanting the animal at this moment. But why the agitation?’
‘I’ll tell y
ou why the agitation. If that cat is not back where it belongs immediately, if not sooner, ruin stares me in the eyeball and Tom is in for the worst attack of indigestion he has had since the time he ate all that lobster at his club. And only myself to blame.’
‘Did you say you were to blame?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘I only wondered if I had heard you correctly.’
I have become so accustomed to being blamed for everything that goes wrong that her words had touched me deeply. You don’t often find an aunt taking the rap when she has a nephew at her disposal to shove the thing on to. It is pretty universally agreed that that is what nephews are for. My voice shook a bit as I applied for further details.
‘What seems to be the trouble?’ I asked.
Aunts as a class are seldom good listeners. She did not answer the question, but embarked on what sounded as if it was going to be a lecture on conditions in her native land.
‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the England of today, Bertie. There are too many people around with scruples and high principles and all that sort of guff. You can’t do the simplest thing without somebody jumping on the back of your neck because you’ve offended against his blasted code of ethics. You’d think a man like Jimmy Briscoe would be broadminded, but no. He couldn’t have been more puff-faced if he’d been the Archbishop of Canterbury. You probably put the blame on his brother the vicar, but I don’t agree. I can excuse him because it’s his job to be finicky about things. But Jimmy! He made me feel as if I’d shot a fox or something. And it wasn’t as if I was getting anything out of it. It was a pure act of kindness because I could see he had the interests of the organ at heart and was really worried about it. Dammit, St Francis of Assisi would have done the same and everybody would have said what a splendid chap he was and what a pity there weren’t more like him, whereas the way Jimmy went on …’
I could see that if not checked with a firm hand this would continue for a goodish time.
‘I’m sorry if I seem slow in the uptake, aged r.,’ I said, ‘but, if so, put it down to the fact that you appear to me to be delirious. Your words are like the crackling of thorns under the pot, as the fellow said. What on earth do you think you’re talking about?’
‘Haven’t you been listening?’
‘I have been listening, yes, but without coming within a mile and a quarter of getting the gist.’
‘Oh, heavens, I might have known I would have to tell you in words of one syllable. Here’s what’s happened in simple language which even you can understand. I happened to be talking to the vicar, and he told me what a weight on his mind the church organ was, it being at its last gasp and no money to pay the vet., because he’d already touched Jimmy for quite a bit to mend the church roof, and if he tried to bite his ear again so soon after that, there would, he said, be hell to pay. So what the devil to do, he said, he didn’t know.
‘Well, you know me, Bertie. Being a woman with a heart like butter and always anxious to spread a little happiness as I pass by, I told him that if he wanted a bit of easy money, to put his shirt on Jimmy’s Simla for the big race. And I told him about the cat, just to make it quite clear to him that he would be betting on a sure thing.’
‘But—’
‘Put a sock in it and listen. Can’t you stop talking for half a second? I know what you were going to say – that you were returning the cat. But this was before you told me. So I went ahead, fearing nothing, just thinking of the happiness I was bringing into his life. I ought to have known that a clergyman was bound to have scruples, but it didn’t occur to me at the time and to cut a long story short he went to Jimmy and spilled the beans, and Jimmy blew his top. “Take that cat back where it belongs,” he said, and a lot of stuff about being shocked and horrified. Which wouldn’t have mattered if he had confined himself to telling me what he thought of me, but he didn’t. He said that if that cat wasn’t back at Cook’s within the hour he would scratch Simla’s nomination. Yessir, he said Simla would not be among those present at the starting post, which meant that bang would go the vast sum I had put on his nose.’
‘But—’
‘Yes, I know you had told me you were sending the cat back, but how was I to be sure that, on thinking it over and realizing what a good thing you would be passing up, you hadn’t changed your mind?’
I could see what she meant. A nephew with a lust for gold and lacking the Wooster play-the-game spirit might quite well have done as she said. No wonder she had been all of a doodah. It was a pleasure to set her mind at rest.
‘It’s quite all right, old ancestor,’ I said. ‘Billy Graham is already en route for the Cookeries, and ought to have got there by now.’
‘Complete with cat?’
‘To the last drop.’
‘Not to worry?’
‘Not as far as Simla getting scratched is concerned.’
‘Well, that’s a weight off my mind, though it’s disappointing to feel that my bit of stuff isn’t on a cert.’
‘Teach you not to nobble horses.’
‘Yes, there’s that, I suppose.’
Some further talk followed, for an aunt who has got hold of a telephone receiver does not lightly relinquish it, but eventually she rang off, and I picked up Daffodil Days and gave it a casual glance.
Its contents proved even less fit for human consumption than I had expected. I turned away with rising nausea, and was thus enabled to get a good view of Herbert Graham, who was coming in from the kitchen.
The suddenness of his appearance, coupled with the fact that I had supposed him to be up at Eggesford Court, had made me bite my tongue, but in my concern I ignored the anguish.
‘Good Lord!’ I ejaculated, if that’s the word.
‘Sir?’
‘Haven’t you gone yet? You should have been there and back by this time.’
‘Very true, sir, but something occurred which prevented me making the immediate start which I had intended.’
‘What was that? Did they keep you a long time at the bank, counting your money?’
Bitter, yes, but I thought justified. Wasted, however, for he did not wince beneath my sarcasm.
‘No, sir,’ he replied. ‘I bank in Bridmouth-on-Sea, and it is long past office hours. The occurrence to which I refer took place on these premises, in fact in this very room. I had gone to the kitchen to get the cat, which I had left there in its little basket, and I heard sounds proceeding from in here and assuming that you were not at home I went in to investigate, fearing that a burglar might have effected an entry, and there on the floor was a human form enveloped in a tablecloth. I raised this, and there underneath it was Mr Cook with a picture round his neck, vociferating something chronic.’
He paused, and I decided not to put him abreast. Never does to take fellows like Graham too fully into one’s confidence.
‘Wrapped in a tablecloth, was he?’ I said nonchalantly. ‘I suppose chaps like Cook are bound to get wrapped in tablecloths sooner or later.’
‘The sight affected me profoundly.’
‘I bet it did. Sights like that do give one a start. But you soon got over it, eh?’
‘No, sir, I did not, and I’ll tell you why I was what you might call stupefied. It was his language that did it chiefly. As I was saying, he expressed himself in a very violent manner, and I saw that it would be madness to proceed to Eggesford Court and possibly encounter him in this dangerous mood. I am a married man and have others to think of. So if you want that cat re-established in its former quarters, you’ll have to get another operative to do it for you or else nip up to the Court and do it yourself.’
And while I looked at him with a wild surmise, silent upon a sitting-room carpet in Maiden Eggesford, Somerset, he withdrew.
I was still gazing at the spot where he had been and thinking how crazy I must have been to let Jeeves wander off, frittering away his time whooping it up with aunts, when I might have known I was bound to need his advice and moral support at any momen
t, and it was only after a bit that I realized that the telephone was ringing.
It was, as I had rather expected it would be, my late father’s sister Dahlia, and it was made clear immediately that she had just been hearing from Billy Graham and getting the bad news. In a moving passage in which she referred to him as a double-crossing rat she said that he had formally refused to fulfil his sacred obligations.
‘He had some extraordinary story about finding Cook in your cottage with a picture round his neck and a tablecloth over him and of being scared of going near him. Sounded like raving to me.’
‘No, it was quite true.’
‘You mean he really did have the picture round his neck and the tablecloth over him?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did he get that way?’
‘We had a little argument, and that was how it worked out.’
She snorted in a rather febrile manner.
‘Are you telling me that you are responsible for the man Graham’s cold feet?’
‘In a measure, yes. Let me give you a brief account of the episode,’ I said, and did so. When I had finished, she spoke again, and her manner was almost calm.
‘I might have known that if there was a chance of mucking up these very delicate negotiations, you would spring to the task. Well, as you are the cause of Graham walking out on us, you’ll have to take his place.’
I was expecting this. Graham himself, it will be remembered, had made the same suggestion. I was resolved to discourage it from the outset.
‘No!’ I cried.
‘Did you say No?’
‘Yes, a thousand times no.’
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 5: (Jeeves & Wooster) Page 28
