Jeeves in the offing

16

Reaching the mainland some moments later and squelching back to the house, accompanied by Bobbie, like a couple of Napoleons squelching back from Moscow, we encountered Aunt Dahlia, who, wearing that hat of hers that looks like one of those baskets you carry fish in, was messing about in the herbaceous border by the tennis lawn. She gaped at us dumbly for perhaps five seconds, then uttered an ejaculation, far from suitable to mixed company, which she had no doubt picked up from fellow-Nimrods in her hunting days. Having got this off the chest, she said:

'What's been going on in this joint? Wilbert Cream came by here just now, soaked to the eyebrows, and now you two appear, leaking at every seam. Have you all been playing water polo with your clothes on?'

'Not so much water polo, more that seaside bathing belles stuff,' I said. 'But it's a long story, and one feels that the cagey thing for Kipper and me to do now is to nip along and get into some dry things, not to linger conferring with you, much,' I added courteously, 'as we always enjoy your conversation.'

'The extraordinary thing is that I saw Upjohn not long ago, and he was as dry as a bone. How was that? Couldn't you get him to play with you?'

'He had to go and talk to his lawyer on the phone,' I said, and leaving Bobbie to place the facts before her, we resumed our squelching. And I was in my room, having shed the moistened outer crust and substituted something a bit more sec in pale flannel, when there was a knock on the door. I flung wide the gates and found Bobbie and Kipper on the threshold.

The first thing I noticed about their demeanour was the strange absence of gloom, despondency and what not. I mean, considering that it was little more than a quarter of an hour since all our hopes and dreams had taken the knock, one would have expected their hearts to be bowed down with weight of woe, but their whole aspect was one of buck and optimism. It occurred to me as a possible solution that with that bulldog spirit of never admitting defeat which has made Englishmen – and, of course, Englishwomen – what they are they had decided to have another go along the same lines at some future date, and I asked if this was the case.

The answer was in the negative. Kipper said No, there was no likelihood of getting Upjohn down to the lake again, and Bobbie said that even if they did, it wouldn't be any good, because I would be sure to mess things up once more.

This stung me, I confess.

'How do you mean, mess things up?'

'You'd be bound to trip over your flat feet and fall in, as you did today.'

'Pardon me,' I said, preserving with an effort the polished suavity demanded from an English gentleman when chewing the rag with one of the other sex, 'you're talking through the back of your fatheaded little neck. I did not trip over my flat feet. I was hurled into the depths by an Act of God, to wit, a totally unexpected dachshund getting between my legs. If you're going to blame anyone blame the goof Phyllis for bringing Augustus there and calling him in his hearing a sweet pussykins. Naturally it made him sore and disinclined to stand any lip from barking dogs.'

'Yes,' said Kipper, always the staunch pal. 'It wasn't Bertie's fault, angel. Say what you will of dachshunds, their peculiar shape makes them the easiest breed of dog to trip over in existence. I feel that Bertie emerges without a stain on his character.'

'I don't,' said Bobbie. 'Still, it doesn't matter.'

'No, it doesn't really matter,' said Kipper, 'because your aunt has suggested a scheme that's just as good as the Lanchester-Simmons thing, if not better. She was telling Bobbie about the time when Boko Fittleworth was trying to ingratiate himself with your Uncle Percy, and you very sportingly offered to go and call your Uncle Percy a lot of offensive names, so that Boko, hovering outside the door, could come in and stick up for him, thus putting himself in solid with him. You probably remember the incident?'

I quivered. I remembered the incident all right.

'She thinks the same treatment would work with Upjohn, and I'm sure she's right. You know how you feel when you suddenly discover you've a real friend, a fellow who thinks you're terrific and won't hear a word said against you. It touches you. If you had anything in the nature of a prejudice against the chap, you change your opinion of him. You feel you can't do anything to injure such a sterling bloke. And that's how Upjohn is going to feel about me, Bertie, when I come in and lend him my sympathy and support as you stand there calling him all the names you can think of. You must have picked up dozens from your aunt. She used to hunt, and if you hunt, you have to know all the names there are because people are always riding over hounds and all that. Ask her to jot down a few of the best on a half-sheet of notepaper.'

'He won't need that,' said Bobbie. 'He's probably got them all tucked away in his mind.'

'Of course. Learned them at her knee as a child. Well, that's the set-up, Bertie. You wait your opportunity and corner Upjohn somewhere and tower over him-'

'As he crouches in his chair.'

' – and shake your finger in his face and abuse him roundly. And when he's quailing beneath your scorn and wishing some friend in need would intervene and save him from this terrible ordeal, I come in, having heard all. Bobbie suggests that I knock you down, but I don't think I could do that. The recollection of our ancient friendship would make me pull my punch. I shall simply rebuke you. «Wooster,» I shall say, «I am shocked. Shocked and astounded. I cannot understand how you can talk like that to a man I have always respected and looked up to, a man in whose preparatory school I spent the happiest years of my life. You strangely forget yourself, Wooster.» Upon which, you slink out, bathed in shame and confusion, and Upjohn thanks me brokenly and says if there is anything he can do for me, I have only to name it.'

'I still think you ought to knock him down.'

'Having endeared myself to him thus –'

'Much more box-office.'

'Having endeared myself to him thus, I lead the conversation round to the libel suit.'

'One good punch in the eye would do it.'

'I say that I have seen the current issue of the Thursday Review, and I can quite understand him wanting to mulct the journal in substantial damages, but «Don't forget, Mr Upjohn,» I say, «that when a weekly paper loses a chunk of money, it has to retrench, and the way it retrenches is by getting rid of the more junior members of its staff. You wouldn't want me to lose my job, would you, Mr Upjohn?» He starts. «Are you on the staff of the Thursday Review?» he says. «For the time being, yes,» I say. «But if you bring that suit, I shall be selling pencils in the street.» This is the crucial moment. Looking into his eyes, I can see that he is thinking of that five thousand quid, and for an instant quite naturally he hesitates. Then his better self prevails. His eyes soften. They fill with tears. He clasps my hand. He tells me he could use five thousand quid as well as the next man, but no money in the world would make him dream of doing an injury to the fellow who championed him so stoutly against the louse Wooster, and the scene ends with our going off together to Swordfish's pantry for a drop of port, probably with our arms round each other's waists, and that night he writes a letter to his lawyer telling him to call the suit off. Any questions?'

'Not from me. It isn't as if he could find out that it was you who wrote that review. It wasn't signed.'

'No, thank heaven for the editorial austerity that prevented that.'

'I can't see a flaw in the scenario. He'll have to withdraw the suit.'

'In common decency, one would think. The only thing that remains is to choose a time and place for Bertie to operate.'

'No time like the present.'

'But how do we locate Upjohn?'

'He's in Mr Travers's study. I saw him through the french window.'

'Excellent. Then, Bertie, if you're ready…'

It will probably have been noticed that during these exchanges I had taken no part in the conversation. This was because I was fully occupied with envisaging the horror that lay before me. I knew that it did lie before me, of course, for where the ordinary man would have met the suggestion they had made with a firm nolle prosequi, I was barred from doing this by the code of the Woosters, which, as is pretty generally known, renders it impossible for me to let a pal down. If the only way of saving a boyhood friend from having to sell pencils in the street – though I should have thought that blood oranges would have been a far more lucrative line – was by wagging my finger in the face of Aubrey Upjohn and calling him names, that finger would have to be wagged and those names called. The ordeal would whiten my hair from the roots up and leave me a mere shell of my former self, but it was one that I must go through. Mine not to reason why, as the fellow said.

So I uttered a rather husky 'Right-ho' and tried not to think of how the Upjohn face looked without its moustache. For what chilled the feet most was the mental picture of that bare upper lip which he had so often twitched at me in what are called days of yore. Dimly, as we started off for the arena, I could hear Bobbie saying 'My hero!' and Kipper asking anxiously if I was in good voice, but it would have taken a fat lot more than my-hero-ing and solicitude about my vocal cords to restore tone to Bertram's nervous system. I was, in short, feeling like an inexperienced novice going up against the heavyweight champion when in due course I drew up at the study door, opened it and tottered in. I could not forget that an Aubrey Upjohn who for years had been looking strong parents in the eye and making them wilt, and whose toughness was a byword in Bramley-on-Sea, was not a man lightly to wag a finger in the face of.

Uncle Tom's study was a place I seldom entered during my visits to Brinkley Court, because when I did go there he always grabbed me and started to talk about old silver, whereas if he caught me in the open he often touched on other topics, and the way I looked at it was that there was no sense in sticking one's neck out. It was more than a year since I had been inside this sanctum, and I had forgotten how extraordinarily like its interior was to that of Aubrey Upjohn's lair at Malvern House. Discovering this now and seeing Aubrey Upjohn seated at the desk as I had so often seen him sit on the occasions when he had sent for me to discuss some recent departure of mine from the straight and narrow path, I found what little was left of my sang froid expiring with a pop. And at the same time I spotted the flaw in this scheme I had undertaken to sit in on – viz. that you can't just charge into a room and start calling someone names – out of a blue sky, as it were – you have to lead up to the thing. Pourparlers, in short, are of the essence.

So I said 'Oh, hullo,' which seemed to me about as good a pourparler as you could have by way of an opener. I should imagine that those statesmen of whom I was speaking always edge into their conferences conducted in an atmosphere of the utmost cordiality in some such manner.

'Reading?' I said.

He lowered his book – one of Ma Cream's, I noticed –and flashed an upper lip at me.

'Your powers of observation have not led you astray, Wooster. I am reading.'

'Interesting book?'

'Very. I am counting the minutes until I can resume its perusal undisturbed.'

I'm pretty quick, and I at once spotted that the atmosphere was not of the utmost cordiality. He hadn't spoken matily, and he wasn't eyeing me matily. His whole manner seemed to suggest that he felt that I was taking up space in the room which could have been better employed for other purposes.

However, I persevered.

'I see you've shaved off your moustache.'

'I have. You do not feel, I hope, that I pursued a mistaken course?'

'Oh no, rather not. I grew a moustache myself last year, but had to get rid of it.'

'Indeed?'

'Public sentiment was against it.'

'I see. Well, I should be delighted to hear more of your reminiscences, Wooster, but at the moment I am expecting a telephone call from my lawyer.'

'I thought you'd had one.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'When you were down by the lake, didn't you go off to talk to him?'

'I did. But when I reached the telephone, he had grown tired of waiting and had rung off. I should never have allowed Miss Wickham to take me away from the house.'

'She wanted you to see the big fish.'

'So I understood her to say.'

'Talking of fish, you must have been surprised to find Kipper here.'

'Kipper?'

'Herring.'

'Oh, Herring,' he said, and one spotted the almost total lack of animation in his voice. And conversation had started to flag, when the door flew open and the goof Phyllis bounded in, full of girlish excitement.

'Oh, Daddy,' she burbled, 'are you busy?'

'No, my dear.'

'Can I speak to you about something?'

'Certainly. Goodbye, Wooster.'

I saw what this meant. He didn't want me around. There was nothing for it but to ooze out through the french window, so I oozed, and had hardly got outside when Bobbie sprang at me like a leopardess.

'What on earth are you fooling about for like this, Bertie?' she stage-whispered. 'All that rot about moustaches. I thought you'd be well into it by this time.'

I pointed out that as yet Aubrey Upjohn had not given me a cue.

'You and your cues!'

'All right, me and my cues. But I've got to sort of lead the conversation in the right direction, haven't I?'

'I see what Bertie means, darling,' said Kipper. 'He wants –'

'A point d'appui.'

'A what?' said Bobbie.

'Sort of jumping-off place.'

The beasel snorted.

'If you ask me, he's lost his nerve. I knew this would happen. The worm has got cold feet.'

I could have crushed her by drawing her attention to the fact that worms don't have feet, cold or piping hot, but I had no wish to bandy words.

'I must ask you, Kipper,' I said with frigid dignity, 'to request your girl friend to preserve the decencies of debate. My feet are not cold. I am as intrepid as a lion and only too anxious to get down to brass tacks, but just as I was working round to the res, Phyllis came in. She said she had something she wanted to speak to him about.'

Bobbie snorted again, this time in a despairing sort of way.

'She'll be there for hours. It's no good waiting.'

'No,' said Kipper. 'May as well call it off for the moment. We'll let you know time and place of next fixture, Bertie.'

'Oh, thanks,' I said, and they drifted away.

And about a couple of minutes later, as I stood there brooding on Kipper's sad case, Aunt Dahlia came along. I was glad to see her. I thought she might possibly come across with aid and comfort, for though, like the female in the poem I was mentioning, she sometimes inclined to be a toughish egg in hours of ease, she could generally be relied on to be there with the soothing solace when one had anything wrong with one's brow.

As she approached, I got the impression that her own brow had for some reason taken it on the chin. Quite a good deal of that upon-which– all-the-ends-of-the-earth-are-come stuff, it seemed to me.

Nor was I mistaken.

'Bertie,' she said, heaving to beside me and waving a trowel in an overwrought manner, 'do you know what?'

'No, what?'

'I'll tell you what,' said the aged relative, rapping out a sharp monosyllable such as she might have uttered in her Quorn and Pytchley days on observing a unit of the pack of hounds chasing a rabbit. 'That ass Phyllis has gone and got engaged to Wilbert Cream!'