The Jeeves Omnibus (260 page)

If she had added ‘With knobs on’, it would, of course, have made it stronger, but I must say I was rather impressed by Florence’s work as described in this slice of dialogue. It seemed to me snappy and forceful. I suppose girls learn this sort of cut-and-thrust stuff at their finishing schools. And Florence, one must remember, had been moving a good deal of late in Bohemian circles – Chelsea studios and the rooms of the intelligentsia in Bloomsbury and places like that – where the repartee is always of a high order.

‘So that was that,’ proceeded Stilton, having brooded for a space. ‘One thing led to another, hot words passed to and fro, and it was not long before she was returning the ring and saying she would be glad to have her letters back at my earliest convenience.’

I tut-tutted. He asked me rather abruptly not to tut-tut, so I stopped tut-tutting, explaining that my reason for having done so was that his tragic tale had moved me deeply.

‘My heart aches for you,’ I said.

‘It does, does it?’

‘Profusely.’

‘Ho!’

‘You doubt my sympathy?’

‘You bet I doubt your ruddy sympathy. I told you just now that I was trying to make up my mind, and what I’m trying to make it up about is this. Had you foreseen that that would happen? Did your cunning fiend’s brain spot what was bound to occur if you grew a moustache and flashed it on Florence?’

I tried to laugh lightly, but you know how it is with these light laughs, they don’t always come out just the way you would wish. Even to me it sounded more like a gargle.

‘Am I right? Was that the thought that came into your cunning fiend’s brain?’

‘Certainly not. As a matter of fact, I haven’t got a cunning fiend’s brain.’

‘Jeeves has. The plot could have been his. Was it Jeeves who wove this snare for my feet?’

‘My dear chap! Jeeves doesn’t weave snares for feet. He would consider it a liberty. Besides, I told you he is the spearhead of the movement which disapproves of my moustache.’

‘I see what you mean. Yes, on second thoughts I am inclined to acquit Jeeves of complicity. The evidence points to your having thought up the scheme yourself.’

‘Evidence? How do you mean, evidence?’

‘When we were at your flat and I said I was expecting Florence, I noticed a very significant thing – your face lit up.’

‘It didn’t.’

‘Pardon me. I know when a face lights up and when it doesn’t. I could read you like a book. You were saying to yourself, “This is the moment! This is where I spring it on her!”’

‘Nothing of the sort. If my face lit up – which I gravely doubt – it was merely because I reasoned that as soon as she arrived you would be leaving.’

‘You wanted me to leave?’

‘I did. You were taking up space which I required for other purposes.’

It was plausible, of course, and I could see it shook him. He passed a hamlike hand, gnarled with toiling at the oar, across his brow.

‘Well, I shall have to think it over. Yes, yes, I shall have to think it over.’

‘Go away and start now, is what I would suggest.’

‘I will. I shall be scrupulously fair. I shall weigh this and that. But if I find my suspicions are correct, I shall know what to do about it.’

And with these ominous words he withdrew, leaving me not a little bowed down with weight of woe. For apart from the fact that when
a
bird of Stilton’s impulsive temperament gets it into his nut that you have woven snares for his feet, practically anything can happen in the way of violence and mayhem, it gave me goose pimples to think of Florence being at large once more. It was with heavy heart that I finished my whisky and splash and tottered home. ‘Wooster,’ a voice seemed to be whispering in my ear, ‘things are getting hot, old sport.’

Jeeves was at the telephone when I reached the sitting-room.

‘I am sorry,’ he was saying, and I noticed that he was just as suave and firm as I had been at our recent get-together. ‘No, please, further discussion is useless. I am afraid you must accept my decision as final. Good night.’

From the fact that he had not chucked in a lot of ‘sirs’ I presumed that he had been talking to some pal of his, though from the curtness of his tone probably not the one whose strength was as the strength of ten.

‘What was that, Jeeves?’ I asked. ‘A little tiff with one of the boys at the club?’

‘No, sir. I was speaking to Mr. Percy Gorringe, who rang up shortly before you entered. Affecting to be yourself, I informed him that his request for a thousand pounds could not be entertained. I thought that this might spare you discomfort and embarrassment.’

I must say I was touched. After being worsted in that clash of wills of ours, one might have expected him to show dudgeon and be loath to do the feudal thing by the young master. But Jeeves and I, though we may have our differences – as it might be on the subject of lip-joy – do not allow them to rankle.

‘Thank you, Jeeves.’

‘Not at all, sir.’

‘Lucky you came back in time to do the needful. Did you enjoy yourself at the club?’

‘Very much, sir.’

‘More than I did at mine.’

‘Sir?’

‘I ran into Stilton Cheesewright there and found him in difficult mood. Tell me, Jeeves, what do you do at this Junior Ganymede of yours?’

‘Well, sir, many of the members play a sound game of bridge. The conversation, too, rarely fails to touch a high level of interest. And should one desire more frivolous entertainment, there are the club books.’

‘The … Oh, yes, I remember.’

Perhaps you do, too, if you happened to be around when I was relating the doings at Totleigh Towers, the country seat of Sir Watkyn Bassett, when this club book had enabled me to put it so crushingly across the powers of darkness in the shape of Roderick Spode. Under Rule Eleven at the Junior Ganymede, you may recall, members are required to supply intimate details concerning their employers for inclusion in the volume, and its pages revealed that Spode, who was an amateur Dictator of sorts, running a gang called the Black Shorts, who went about in black footer bags shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’, also secretly designed ladies’ underclothing under the trade name of Eulalie Sœurs. Armed with this knowledge, I had had, of course, little difficulty in reducing him to the level of a third-class power. These Dictators don’t want a thing like that to get spread about.

But though the club book had served me well on that occasion, I was far from approving of it. Mine has been in many ways a chequered career, and it was not pleasant to think that full details of episodes I would prefer to be buried in oblivion were giving a big laugh daily to a bunch of valets and butlers.

‘You couldn’t tear the Wooster material out of that club book, could you, Jeeves?’

‘I fear not, sir.’

‘It contains matter that can fairly be described as dynamite.’

‘Very true, sir.’

‘Suppose the contents were bruited about and reached the ears of my Aunt Agatha?’

‘You need have no concern on that point, sir. Each member fully understands that perfect discretion is a
sine qua non
.’

‘All the same I’d feel happier if that page –’

‘Those eleven pages, sir.’

‘– if those eleven pages were consigned to the flames.’ A sudden thought struck me. ‘Is there anything about Stilton Cheesewright in the book?’

‘A certain amount, sir.’

‘Damaging?’

‘Not in the real sense of the word, sir. His personal attendant merely reports that he has a habit, when moved, of saying “Ho!” and does Swedish exercises in the nude each morning before breakfast.’

I sighed. I hadn’t really hoped, and yet it had been a disappointment. I have always held – rightly, I think – that nothing eases the tension of a difficult situation like a well-spotted bit of blackmail, and it would have been agreeable to have been in a position to go to Stilton and
say
‘Cheesewright, I know your secret!’ and watch him wilt. But you can’t fulfil yourself to any real extent in that direction if all the party of the second part does is say ‘Ho!’ and tie himself into knots before sailing into the eggs and b. It was plain that with Stilton there could be no such moral triumph as I had achieved in the case of Roderick Spode.

‘Ah, well,’ I said resignedly, ‘if that’s that, that’s that, what?’

‘So it would appear, sir.’

‘Nothing to do but keep the chin up and the upper lip as stiff as can be managed. I think I’ll go to bed with an improving book. Have you read
The Mystery of the Pink Crayfish
by Rex West?’

‘No, sir, I have not enjoyed that experience. Oh, pardon me, sir, I was forgetting. Lady Florence Craye spoke to me on the telephone shortly before you came in. Her ladyship would be glad if you would ring her up. I will get the number, sir.’

I was puzzled. I could make nothing of this. No reason, of course, why she shouldn’t want me to give her a buzz, but on the other hand no reason that I could see why she should.

‘She didn’t say what she wanted?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Odd, Jeeves.’

‘Yes, sir … One moment, m’lady. Here is Mr. Wooster.’

I took the instrument from him and hullo-ed.

‘Bertie?’

‘On the spot.’

‘I hope you weren’t in bed?’

‘No, no.’

‘I thought you wouldn’t be. Bertie, will you do something for me? I want you to take me to a night club tonight.’

‘Eh?’

‘A night club. Rather a low one. I mean garish and all that sort of thing. It’s for the book I’m writing. Atmosphere.’

‘Oh, ah,’ I said, enlightened. I knew all about this atmosphere thing. Bingo Little’s wife, the well-known novelist Rosie M. Banks, is as hot as a pistol on it, Bingo has often told me. She frequently sends him off to take notes of this and that so that she shall have plenty of ammunition for her next chapter. If you’re a novelist, apparently, you have to get your atmosphere correct, or your public starts writing you stinkers beginning ‘Dear Madam, are you aware …?’ ‘You’re doing something about a night club?’

‘Yes, I’m just coming to the part where my hero goes to one, and I’ve never been to any except the respectable ones where everybody
goes,
which aren’t the sort of thing I want. What I need is something more –’

‘Garish?’

‘Yes, garish.’

‘You want to go tonight?’

‘It must be tonight, because I’m off tomorrow afternoon to Brinkley.’

‘Oh, you’re going to stay with Aunt Dahlia?’

‘Yes. Well, can you manage it?’

‘Oh, rather. Delighted.’

‘Good. D’Arcy Cheesewright,’ said Florence, and I noted the steely what-d’you-call-it in her voice, ‘was to have taken me, but he finds himself unable to. So I’ve had to fall back on you.’

This might, I thought, have been more tactfully put, but I let it go.

‘Right ho,’ I said. ‘I’ll call for you at about half-past eleven.’

You are surprised? You are saying to yourself ‘Come, come, Wooster, what’s all this?’ – wondering why I was letting myself in for a beano from which I might well have shrunk? The matter is susceptible of a ready explanation.

My quick mind, you see, had spotted instantly that this was where I might quite conceivably do myself a bit of good. Having mellowed this girl with food and drink, who knew but that I might succeed in effecting a reconciliation between her and the piece of cheese with whom until tonight she had been headed for the altar rails, thus averting the peril which must always loom on the Wooster horizon while she remained unattached and at a loose end? It needed, I was convinced, only a few kindly words from a sympathetic man of the world, and these I was prepared to supply in full measure.

‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘I shall be going out again. This will mean having to postpone finishing
The Mystery of the Pink Crayfish
to a later date, but that can’t be helped. As a matter of fact, I rather fancy I have already wrested its secret from it. Unless I am very much mistaken, the man who bumped off Sir Eustace Willoughby, Bart, was the butler.’

‘Indeed, sir?’

‘That is what I think, having sifted the clues. All that stuff throwing suspicion on the vicar doesn’t fool me for an instant. Will you ring up The Mottled Oyster and book a table in my name.’

‘Not too near the band, sir?’

‘How right you are, Jeeves. Not too near the band.’

I DON’T KNOW
why it is, but I’m not much of a lad for night clubs these days. Age creeping on me, I suppose. But I still retain my membership in about half a dozen, including this Mottled Oyster at which I had directed Jeeves to book me a table.

The old spot has passed a somewhat restless existence since I first joined, and from time to time I get a civil note from its proprietors saying that it has changed its name and address once more. When it was raided as The Feverish Cheese, it became The Frozen Limit, and when it was raided as The Frozen Limit, it bore for awhile mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device The Startled Shrimp. From that to The Mottled Oyster was, of course, but a step. In my hot youth I had passed not a few quite pleasant evenings beneath its roof in its various incarnations, and I thought that, if it preserved anything approaching the old form, it ought to be garish enough to suit Florence. As I remembered, it rather prided itself on its garishness. That was why the rozzers were always raiding it.

I picked her up at her flat at eleven-thirty, and found her in sombre mood, the lips compressed, the eyes inclined to gaze into space with a sort of hard glow in them. No doubt something along these lines is always the aftermath of a brisk dust-up with the heart-throb. During the taxi drive she remained about as silent as the tomb, and from the way her foot kept tapping on the floor of the vehicle I knew that she was thinking of Stilton, whether or not in agony of spirit I was, of course, unable to say, but I thought it probable. Following her into the joint, I was on the whole optimistic. It seemed to me that with any luck I ought to be successful in the task that lay before me – viz. softening her with well-chosen words and jerking her better self back to the surface.

When we took our seats and I looked about me, I must confess that, having this object in mind, I could have done with dimmer lights and a more romantic
tout ensemble
, if
tout ensemble
is the expression I want. I could also have dispensed with the rather strong smell of kippered herrings which hung over the establishment like a fog. But against
these
drawbacks could be set the fact that up on the platform, where the band was, a man with adenoids was singing through a megaphone and, like all men who sing through megaphones nowadays, ladling out stuff well calculated to melt the hardest heart.