The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3 (78 page)

The back-seat drivers gave tongue.

‘What’s the matter? What has happened? Why don’t you go on? What are you stopping for?’

I explained.

‘I’m not stopping. It’s the car.’

‘Why has the car stopped?’

‘Ah!’ I said, with a manly frankness that became me well. ‘There you have me.’

You see, I’m one of those birds who drive a lot but don’t know the first thing about the works. The policy I pursue is to get aboard, prod
the
self-starter, and leave the rest to Nature. If anything goes wrong, I scream for an AA scout. It’s a system that answers admirably as a rule, but on the present occasion it blew a fuse owing to the fact that there wasn’t an AA scout within miles. I explained as much to the fair cargo and received in return a ‘Tchah!’ from the Pyke that nearly lifted the top of my head off. What with having a covey of female relations who have regarded me from childhood as about ten degrees short of a half-wit, I have become rather a connoisseur of ‘Tchahs’, and the Pyke’s seemed to me well up in Class A, possessing much of the
timbre
and
brio
of my Aunt Agatha’s.

‘Perhaps I can find out what the trouble is,’ she said, becoming calmer. ‘I understand cars.’

She got out and began peering into the thing’s vitals. I thought for a moment of suggesting that its gastric juices might have taken a turn for the worse owing to lack of fat-soluble vitamins, but decided on the whole not. I’m a pretty close observer, and it didn’t seem to me that she was in the mood.

And yet, as a matter of fact, I should have been about right, at that. For after fiddling with the engine for a while in a discontented sort of way the female was suddenly struck with an idea. She tested it, and it was proved correct. There was not a drop of petrol in the tank. No gas. In other words, a complete lack of fat-soluble vitamins. What it amounted to was that the job now before us was to get the old bus home purely by will-power.

Feeling that, from whatever angle they regarded the regrettable occurrence, they could hardly blame me, I braced up a trifle in fact, to the extent of a hearty ‘Well, well, well!’

‘No petrol,’ I said. ‘Fancy that.’

‘But Bingo told me he was going to fill the tank this morning,’ said Mrs Bingo.

‘I suppose he forgot,’ said the Pyke. ‘He would!’

‘What do you mean by that?’ said Mrs Bingo, and I noted in her voice a touch of what-is-it.

‘I mean he is just the sort of man who would forget to fill the tank,’ replied the Pyke, who also appeared somewhat moved.

‘I should be very much obliged, Laura,’ said Mrs Bingo, doing the heavy loyal-little-woman stuff, ‘if you would refrain from criticizing my husband.’

‘Tchah!’ said the Pyke.

‘And don’t say “Tchah!”’ said Mrs Bingo.

‘I shall say whatever I please,’ said the Pyke.

‘Ladies, ladies!’ I said. ‘Ladies, ladies, ladies!’

It was rash. Looking back, I can see that. One of the first lessons life teaches us is that on these occasions of back-chat between the delicately-nurtured, a man should retire into the offing, curl up in a ball, and imitate the prudent tactics of the opossum, which, when danger is in the air, pretends to be dead, frequently going to the length of hanging out crêpe and instructing its friends to stand round and say what a pity it all is. The only result of my dash at the soothing intervention was that the Pyke turned on me like a wounded leopardess.

‘Well!’ she said. ‘Aren’t you proposing to do anything, Mr Wooster?’

‘What can I do?’

‘There’s a house over there. I should have thought it would be well within even your powers to go and borrow a tin of petrol.’

I looked. There was a house. And one of the lower windows was lighted, indicating to the trained mind of the presence of a ratepayer.

‘A very sound and brainy scheme,’ I said ingratiatingly. ‘I will first honk a little on the horn to show we’re here, and then rapid action.’

I honked, with the most gratifying results. Almost immediately a human form appeared in the window. It seemed to be waving its arms in a matey and welcoming sort of way. Stimulated and encouraged, I hastened to the front door and gave it a breezy bang with the knocker. Things, I felt, were moving.

The first bang produced no result. I had just lifted the knocker for the encore, when it was wrenched out of my hand. The door flew open, and there was a bloke with spectacles on his face and all round the spectacles an expression of strained anguish. A bloke with a secret sorrow.

I was sorry he had troubles, of course, but, having some of my own, I came right down to the agenda without delay.

‘I say …’ I began.

The bloke’s hair was standing up in a kind of tousled mass, and at this juncture, as if afraid it would not stay like that without assistance, he ran a hand through it. And for the first time I noted that the spectacles had a hostile gleam.

‘Was that you making that infernal noise?’ he asked.

‘Er – yes,’ I said. ‘I did toot.’

‘Toot once more – just once,’ said the bloke, speaking in a low, strangled voice, ‘and I’ll shred you up into little bits with my bare hands. My wife’s gone out for the evening and after hours of ceaseless toil I’ve at last managed to get the baby to sleep, and you come along
making
that hideous din with your damned horn. What do you mean by it, blast you?’

‘Er –’

‘Well, that’s how matters stand,’ said the bloke, summing up. ‘One more toot – just one single, solitary suggestion of the faintest shadow or suspicion of anything remotely approaching a toot – and may the Lord have mercy on your soul.’

‘What I want,’ I said, ‘is petrol.’

‘What you’ll get,’ said the bloke, ‘is a thick ear.’

And, closing the door with the delicate caution of one brushing flies off a sleeping Venus, he passed out of my life.

Women as a sex are always apt to be a trifle down on the defeated warrior. Returning to the car, I was not well received. The impression seemed to be that Bertram had not acquitted himself in a fashion worthy of his Crusading ancestors. I did my best to smooth matters over, but you know how it is. When you’ve broken down on a chilly autumn evening miles from anywhere and have missed lunch and look like missing tea as well, mere charm of manner can never be a really satisfactory substitute for a tinful of the juice.

Things got so noticeably unpleasant, in fact, that after a while, mumbling something about getting help, I sidled off down the road. And, by Jove, I hadn’t gone half a mile before I saw lights in the distance and there, in the middle of this forsaken desert, was a car.

I stood in the road and whooped as I had never whooped before.

‘Hi!’ I shouted. ‘I say! Hi! Half a minute! Hi! Ho! I say! Ho! Hi! Just a second if you don’t mind.’

The car reached me and slowed up. A voice spoke.

‘Is that you, Bertie?’

‘Hullo, Bingo! Is that you? I say, Bingo, we’ve broken down.’

Bingo hopped out.

‘Give us five minutes, Jeeves,’ he said, ‘and then drive slowly on.’

‘Very good, sir.’

Bingo joined me.

‘We aren’t going to walk, are we?’ I asked. ‘Where’s the sense?’

‘Yes, walk, laddie,’ said Bingo, ‘and warily withal. I want to make sure of something. Bertie, how were things when you left? Hotting up?’

‘A trifle.’

‘You observed symptoms of a row, a quarrel, a parting of brass rags between Rosie and the Pyke?’

‘There did seem a certain liveliness.’

‘Tell me.’

I related what had occurred. He listened intently.

‘Bertie,’ he said as we walked along, ‘you are present at a crisis in your old friend’s life. It may be that this vigil in a broken-down car will cause Rosie to see what you’d have thought she ought to have seen years ago – viz: that the Pyke is entirely unfit for human consumption and must be cast into outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. I am not betting on it, but stranger things have happened. Rosie is the sweetest girl in the world, but, like all women, she gets edgy towards tea-time. And today, having missed lunch … Hark!’

He grabbed my arm, and we paused. Tense. Agog. From down the road came the sound of voices, and a mere instant was enough to tell us that it was Mrs Bingo and the Pyke talking things over.

I had never listened in on a real, genuine female row before, and I’m bound to say it was pretty impressive. During my absence, matters appeared to have developed on rather a spacious scale. They had reached the stage now where the combatants had begun to dig into the past and rake up old scores. Mrs Bingo was saying that the Pyke would never have got into the hockey team at St Adela’s if she hadn’t flattered and fawned upon the captain in a way that it made Mrs Bingo, even after all these years, sick to think of. The Pyke replied that she had refrained from mentioning it until now, having always felt it better to let bygones be bygones, but that if Mrs Bingo supposed her to be unaware that Mrs Bingo had won the Scripture prize by taking a list of the Kings of Judah into the examination room, tucked into her middy-blouse, Mrs Bingo was vastly mistaken.

Furthermore, the Pyke proceeded, Mrs Bingo was also labouring under an error if she imagined that the Pyke proposed to remain a night longer under her roof. It had been in a moment of weakness, a moment of mistaken kindliness, supposing her to be lonely and in need of intellectual society, that the Pyke had decided to pay her a visit at all. Her intention now was, if ever Providence sent them aid and enabled her to get out of this beastly car and back to her trunks, to pack those trunks and leave by the next train, even if that train was a milk-train, stopping at every station. Indeed, rather than endure another night at Mrs Bingo’s, the Pyke was quite willing to walk to London.

To this, Mrs Bingo’s reply was long and eloquent and touched on the fact that in her last term at St Adela’s a girl named Simpson had told her (Mrs Bingo) that a girl named Waddesley had told her (the Simpson) that the Pyke, while pretending to be a friend of hers (the
Bingo’s
), had told her (the Waddesley) that she (the Bingo) couldn’t eat strawberries and cream without coming out in spots, and, in addition, had spoken in the most catty manner about the shape of her nose. It could all have been condensed, however, into the words ‘Right ho’.

It was when the Pyke had begun to say that she had never had such a hearty laugh in her life as when she read the scene in Mrs Bingo’s last novel where the heroine’s little boy dies of croup that we felt it best to call the meeting to order before bloodshed set in. Jeeves had come up in the car, and Bingo, removing a tin of petrol from the dickey, placed it in the shadows at the side of the road. Then we hopped on and made the spectacular entry.

‘Hullo, hullo, hullo,’ said Bingo brightly. ‘Bertie tells me you’ve had a breakdown.’

‘Oh, Bingo!’ cried Mrs Bingo, wifely love thrilling in every syllable. ‘Thank goodness you’ve come.’

‘Now, perhaps,’ said the Pyke, ‘I can get home and do my packing. If Mr Wooster will allow me to use his car, his man can drive me back to the house in time to catch the six-fifteen.’

‘You aren’t leaving us?’ said Bingo.

‘I am,’ said the Pyke.

‘Too bad,’ said Bingo.

She climbed in beside Jeeves and they popped off. There was a short silence after they had gone. It was too dark to see her, but I could feel Mrs Bingo struggling between love of her mate and the natural urge to say something crisp about his forgetting to fill the petrol tank that morning. Eventually nature took its course.

‘I must say, sweetie-pie,’ she said, ‘it was a little careless of you to leave the tank almost empty when we started today. You promised me you would fill it, darling.’

‘But I did fill it, darling.’

‘But, darling, it’s empty.’

‘It can’t be, darling.’

‘Laura said it was.’

‘The woman’s an ass,’ said Bingo. ‘There’s plenty of petrol. What’s wrong is probably that the sprockets aren’t running true with the differential gear. It happens that way sometimes. I’ll fix it in a second. But I don’t want you to sit freezing out here while I’m doing it. Why not go to that house over there and ask them if you can’t come in and sit down for ten minutes? They might give you a cup of tea, too.’

A soft moan escaped Mrs Bingo.

‘Tea!’ I heard her whisper.

I had to bust Bingo’s daydream.

‘I’m sorry, old man,’ I said, ‘but I fear the old English hospitality which you outline is off. That house is inhabited by a sort of bandit. As unfriendly a bird as I ever met. His wife’s out and he’s just got the baby to sleep, and this has darkened his outlook. Tap even lightly on his front door and you take your life into your hands.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Bingo. ‘Come along.’

He banged the knocker, and produced an immediate reaction.

‘Hell!’ said the Bandit, appearing as if out of a trap.

‘I say,’ said young Bingo, ‘I’m just fixing our car outside. Would you object to my wife coming in out of the cold for a few minutes?’

‘Yes,’ said the Bandit, ‘I would.’

‘And you might give her a cup of tea.’

‘I might,’ said the Bandit, ‘but I won’t.’

‘You won’t?’

‘No. And for heaven’s sake don’t talk so loud. I know that baby. A whisper sometimes does it.’

‘Let us get this straight,’ said Bingo. ‘You refuse to give my wife tea?’

‘Yes.’

‘You would see a woman starve?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you jolly well aren’t going to,’ said young Bingo. ‘Unless you go straight to your kitchen, put the kettle on, and start slicing bread for the buttered toast, I’ll yell and wake the baby.’

The Bandit turned ashen.

‘You wouldn’t do that?’

‘I would.’

‘Have you no heart?’

‘No.’

‘No human feeling?’

‘No.’

The Bandit turned to Mrs Bingo. You could see his spirit was broken.

‘Do your shoes squeak?’ he asked humbly.

‘No.’

‘Then come on in.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mrs Bingo.

She turned for an instant to Bingo, and there was a look in her eyes that one of those damsels in distress might have given the knight as he shot his cuffs and turned away from the dead dragon. It was a
look
of adoration, of almost reverent respect. Just the sort of look, in fact, that a husband likes to see.