Jeeves in the offing

7

This cow-creamer, in case you're interested, was a silver jug or pitcher or whatever you call it shaped, of all silly things, like a cow with an arching tail and a juvenile-delinquent expression on its face, a cow that looked as if it were planning, next time it was milked, to haul off and let the milkmaid have it in the lower ribs. Its back opened on a hinge and the tip of the tail touched the spine, thus giving the householder something to catch hold of when pouring. Why anyone should want such a revolting object had always been a mystery to me, it ranking high up on the list of things I would have been reluctant to be found dead in a ditch with, but apparently they liked that sort of jug in the eighteenth century and, coming down to more modern times, Uncle Tom was all for it and so, according to the evidence of the witness Glossop, was Wilbert. No accounting for tastes is the way one has to look at these things, one man's caviar being another man's major-general, as the old saw says.

However, be that as it may and whether you liked the bally thing or didn't, the point was that it had vanished, leaving not a wrack behind, and I was about to apprise Pop Glossop of this and canvass his views, when we were joined by Bobbie Wickham. She had doffed the shirt and Bermuda-shorts which she had been wearing and was now dressed for her journey home.

'Hullo, souls,' she said. 'How goes it? You look a bit hot and bothered, Bertie. What's up?'

I made no attempt to break the n. gently.

'I'll tell you what's up. You know that cow-creamer of Uncle Tom's?'

'No, I don't. What is it?'

'Sort of cream jug kind of thing, ghastly but very valuable. One would not be far out in describing it as Uncle Tom's ewe lamb. He loves it dearly.'

'Bless his heart.'

'It's all right blessing his heart, but the damn thing's gone.'

The still summer air was disturbed by a sound like beer coming out of a bottle. It was Pop Glossop gurgling. His eyes were round, his nose wiggled, and one could readily discern that this news item had come to him not as rare and refreshing fruit but more like a buffet on the base of the skull with a sock full of wet sand.

'Gone?'

'Gone.'

'Are you sure?'

I said that sure was just what I wasn't anything but.

'It is not possible that you may have overlooked it?'

'You can't overlook a thing like that.'

He re-gurgled.

'But this is terrible.'

'Might be considerably better, I agree.'

'Your uncle will be most upset.'

'He'll have kittens.'

'Kittens?'

'That's right.'

'Why kittens?'

'Why not?'

From the look on Bobbie's face, as she stood listening to our cross– talk act, I could see that the inner gist was passing over her head. Cryptic, she seemed to be registering it as.

'I don't get this,' she said. 'How do you mean it's gone?'

'It's been pinched.'

'Things don't get pinched in country-houses.'

'They do if there's a Wilbert Cream on the premises. He's a klep– whatever-it-is,' I said, and thrust Jeeves's letter on her. She perused it with an interested eye and having mastered its contents said, 'Cor chase my Aunt Fanny up a gum tree,' adding that you never knew what was going to happen next these days. There was, however, she said, a bright side.

'You'll be able now to give it as your considered opinion that the man is as loony as a coot, Sir Roderick.'

A pause ensued during which Pop Glossop appeared to be weighing this, possibly thinking back to coots he had met in the course of his professional career and trying to estimate their dippiness as compared with that of W. Cream.

'Unquestionably his metabolism is unduly susceptible to stresses resulting from the interaction of external excitations,' he said, and Bobbie patted him on the shoulder in a maternal sort of way, a thing I wouldn't have cared to do myself though our relations were, as I have indicated, more cordial than they had been at one time, and told him he had said a mouthful.

'That's how I like to hear you talk. You must tell Mrs Travers that when she gets back. It'll put her in a strong position to cope with Upjohn in this matter of Wilbert and Phyllis. With this under her belt, she'll be able to forbid the banns in no uncertain manner. «What price his metabolism?» she'll say, and Upjohn won't know which way to look. So everything's fine.'

'Everything,' I pointed out, 'except that Uncle Tom is short one ewe lamb.'

She chewed the lower lip.

'Yes, that's true. You have a point there. What steps do we take about that?'

She looked at me, and I said I didn't know, and then she looked at Pop Glossop, and he said he didn't know.

'The situation is an extremely delicate one. You concur, Mr Wooster?'

'Like billy-o.'

'Placed as he is, your uncle can hardly go to the young man and demand restitution. Mrs Travers impressed it upon me with all the emphasis at her disposal that the greatest care must be exercised to prevent Mr and Mrs Cream taking –'

'Umbrage?'

'I was about to say offence.'

'Just as good, probably. Not much in it either way.'

'And they would certainly take offence, were their son to be accused of theft.'

'It would stir them up like an egg whisk. I mean, however well they know that Wilbert is a pincher, they don't want to have it rubbed in.'

'Exactly.'

'It's one of the things the man of tact does not mention in their presence.'

'Precisely. So really I cannot see what is to be done. I am baffled.'

'So am I.'

'I'm not,' said Bobbie.

I quivered like a startled what-d'you-call-it. She had spoken with a cheery ring in her voice that told an experienced ear like mine that she was about to start something. In a matter of seconds by Shrewsbury clock, as Aunt Dahlia would have said, I could see that she was going to come out with one of those schemes or plans of hers that not only stagger humanity and turn the moon to blood but lead to some unfortunate male – who on the present occasion would, I strongly suspected, be me –getting immersed in what Shakespeare calls a sea of troubles, if it was Shakespeare. I had heard that ring in her voice before, to name but one time, at the moment when she was pressing the darning needle into my hand and telling me where I would find Sir Roderick Glossop's hot-water bottle. Many people are of the opinion that Roberta, daughter of the late Sir Cuthbert and Lady Wickham of Skeldings Hall, Herts, ought not to be allowed at large. I string along with that school of thought.

Pop Glossop, having only a sketchy acquaintance with this female of the species and so not knowing that from childhood up her motto had been 'Anything goes', was all animation and tell-me-more.

'You have thought of some course of action that it will be feasible for us to pursue, Miss Wickham?'

'Certainly. It sticks out like a sore thumb. Do you know which Wilbert's room is?'

He said he did.

'And do you agree that if you snitch things when you're staying at a country-house, the only place you can park them in is your room?'

He said that this was no doubt so.

'Very well, then.'

He looked at her with what I have heard Jeeves call a wild surmise.

'Can you be … Is it possible that you are suggesting… ?'

'That somebody nips into Wilbert's room and hunts around? That's right. And it's obvious who the people's choice is. You're elected, Bertie.'

Well, I wasn't surprised. As I say, I had seen it coming. I don't know why it is, but whenever there's dirty work to be undertaken at the crossroads, the cry that goes round my little circle is always 'Let Wooster do it.' It never fails. But though I hadn't much hope that any words of mine would accomplish anything in the way of averting the doom, I put in a rebuttal.

'Why me?'

'It's young man's work.'

Though with a growing feeling that I was fighting in the last ditch, I continued rebutting.

'I don't see that,' I said. 'I should have thought a mature, experienced man of the world would have been far more likely to bring home the bacon than a novice like myself, who as a child was never any good at hunt-the-slipper. Stands to reason.'

'Now don't be difficult, Bertie. You'll enjoy it,' said Bobbie, though where she got that idea I was at a loss to understand. 'Try to imagine you're someone in the Secret Service on the track of the naval treaty which was stolen by a mysterious veiled woman diffusing a strange exotic scent. You'll have the time of your life. What did you say?'

'I said «Ha!» Suppose someone pops in?'

'Don't be silly. Mrs Cream is working on her book. Phyllis is in her room, typing Upjohn's speech. Wilbert's gone for a walk. Upjohn isn't here. The only character who could pop in would be the Brinkley Court ghost. If it does, give it a cold look and walk through it. That'll teach it not to come butting in where it isn't wanted, ha ha.'

'Ha ha,' trilled Pop Glossop.

I thought their mirth ill-timed and in dubious taste, and I let them see it by my manner as I strode off. For of course I did stride off. These clashings of will with the opposite sex always end with Bertram Wooster bowing to the inev. But I was not in jocund mood, and when Bobbie, speeding me on my way, called me her brave little man and said she had known all along I had it in me, I ignored the remark with a coldness which must have made itself felt.

It was a lovely afternoon, replete with blue sky, beaming sun, buzzing insects and what not, an afternoon that seemed to call to one to be out in the open with God's air playing on one's face and something cool in a glass at one's side, and here was I, just to oblige Bobbie Wickham, tooling along a corridor indoors on my way to search a comparative stranger's bedroom, this involving crawling on floors and routing under beds and probably getting covered with dust and fluff. The thought was a bitter one, and I don't suppose I have ever come closer to saying 'Faugh!' It amazed me that I could have allowed myself to be let in for a binge of this description simply because a woman wished it. Too bally chivalrous for our own good, we Woosters, and always have been.

As I reached Wilbert's door and paused outside doing a bit of screwing the courage to the sticking point, as I have heard Jeeves call it, I found the proceedings reminding me of something, and I suddenly remembered what. I was feeling just as I had felt in the old Malvem House epoch when I used to sneak down to Aubrey Upjohn's study at dead of night in quest of the biscuits he kept there in a tin on his desk, and there came back to me the memory of the occasion when, not letting a twig snap beneath my feet, I had entered his sanctum in pyjamas and a dressing-gown, to find him seated in his chair, tucking into the biscuits himself. A moment fraught with embarrassment. The What-does– this-mean-Wooster-ing that ensued and the aftermath next morning – six of the best on the old spot – had always remained on the tablets of my mind, if that's the expression I want.

Except for the tapping of a typewriter in a room along the corridor, showing that Ma Cream was hard at her self-appointed task of curdling the blood of the reading public, all was still. I stood outside the door for a space, letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would', as Jeeves tells me cats do in adages, then turned the handle softly, pushed – also softly – and, carrying on into the interior, found myself confronted by a girl in housemaid's costume who put a hand to her throat like somebody in a play and leaped several inches in the direction of the ceiling.

'Coo!' she said, having returned to terra firma and taken aboard a spot of breath. 'You gave me a start, sir!'

'Frightfully sorry, my dear old housemaid,' I responded cordially. 'As a matter of fact, you gave me a start, making two starts in all. I'm looking for Mr Cream.'

'I'm looking for a mouse.'

This opened up an interesting line of thought.

'You feel there are mice in these parts?'

'I saw one this morning, when I was doing the room. So I brought Augustus,' she said, and indicated a large black cat who until then had escaped my notice. I recognized him as an old crony with whom I had often breakfasted, I wading into the scrambled eggs, he into the saucer of milk.

'Augustus will teach him,' she said.

Now, right from the start, as may readily be imagined, I had been wondering how this housemaid was to be removed, for of course her continued presence would render my enterprise null and void. You can't search rooms with the domestic staff standing on the sidelines, but on the other hand it was impossible for anyone with any claim to be a preux chevalier to take her by the slack of her garment and heave her out. For a while the thing had seemed an impasse, but this statement of hers that Augustus would teach the mouse gave me an idea.

'I doubt it,' I said. 'You're new here, aren't you?'

She conceded this, saying that she had taken office only in the previous month.

'I thought as much, or you would be aware that Augustus is a broken reed to lean on in the matter of catching mice. My own acquaintance with him is a longstanding one, and I have come to know his psychology from soup to nuts. He hasn't caught a mouse since he was a slip of a kitten. Except when eating, he does nothing but sleep. Lethargic is the word that springs to the lips. If you cast an eye on him, you will see that he's asleep now.'

'Coo! So he is.'

'It's a sort of disease. There's a scientific name for it. Trau– something. Traumatic symplegia, that's it. This cat has traumatic symplegia. In other words, putting it in simple language adapted to the lay mind, where other cats are content to get their eight hours, Augustus wants his twenty-four. If you will be ruled by me, you will abandon the whole project and take him back to the kitchen. You're simply wasting your time here.'

My eloquence was not without its effect. She said 'Coo!' again, picked up the cat, who muttered something drowsily which I couldn't follow, and went out, leaving me to carry on.