Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (10 page)

I was
still at a loss, and said so, and this time she did click her tongue.

‘Can’t
you grasp it, chump? I bought the serial to make the paper look good to
Trotter. He sees the announcement that a Daphne Morehead opus is coming along
and is terrifically impressed. “Gosh!” he says to himself. “Daphne Dolores
Morehead and everything!
Mi-lady’s Boudoir
must be hot stuff”.’

‘But
don’t these blokes want to see books and figures and things before they brass
up?’

‘Not if
they’ve been having Anatole’s cooking for a week or more. That’s why I asked
him down here.’

I saw
what she meant, and her reasoning struck me as sound. There is something about
those lunches and dinners of Anatole’s that mellows you and saps your cool
judgment. After tucking into them all this time I presumed that L.G. Trotter
was going about in a sort of rosy mist, wanting to do kind acts right and left
like a Boy Scout. Continue the treatment a few more days, and he would probably
beg her as a personal favour to accept twice what she was asking.

‘Very
shrewd,’ I said. ‘Yes, I think you’re on the right lines. Has Anatole been
giving you his
Rognons aux Montagnes?’

‘And
his
Selle d’Agneau aux laitues à la Grecque.’

‘Then I
would say the thing was in the bag. All over but the cheering. But here’s a
point that has been puzzling me,’ I said. ‘Florence tells me that La Morehead
is one of the more costly of our female pen-pushers and has to have purses of
gold flung to her in great profusion before she will consent to sign on the
dotted line. Correct?’

‘Quite
correct.’

‘Then
how the dickens,’ I said, getting down to it in my keen way, ‘did you contrive
to extract the necessary ore from Uncle Tom? Didn’t he pay his income-tax this
year?’

‘You
bet he did. I should have thought you would have heard his screams in London. Poor
old boy, how he does suffer on these occasions.

She
spoke sooth. Uncle Tom, though abundantly provided with the chips, having been
until his retirement one of those merchant princes who scoop it up in sackfuls
out East, has a rooted objection to letting the hellhounds of the Inland
Revenue dip in and get theirs. For weeks after they have separated him from his
hard-earned he is inclined to go off into corners and sit with his head between
his hands, muttering about ruin and the sinister trend of socialistic
legislation and what is to become of us all if this continues.

‘He
certainly does,’ I assented. ‘Quite the soul in torment, what? And yet, despite
this, you succeeded in nicking him for what must have been a small fortune. How
did you do it? From what you were saying on the phone last night I got the
impression that he was in more than usually non-parting mood these days. You
conjured up in my mind’s eye the picture of a man who was sticking his ears
back and refusing to play ball, like Balaam’s ass.’

‘What
do you know about Balaam’s ass?’

‘Me? I
know Balaam’s ass from soup to nuts. Have you forgotten that when a pupil at
the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn’s educational establishment at Bramley-on-Sea I once won
a prize for Scripture Knowledge?’

‘I’ll
bet you cribbed.’

‘Not at
all. My triumph was due to sheer merit. But, getting back to it, how did you
induce Uncle Tom to scare the moths from his pocket-book? It must have required
quite a scuttleful of wifely wiles on your part?’

I
wouldn’t like to say of a loved aunt that she giggled, but unquestionably the
sound that proceeded from her lips closely resembled a giggle.

‘Oh, I
managed.’

‘But
how?’

‘Never
mind how, you pestilential young Nosy Parker. I managed.’

‘I
see,’ I said, letting it go. Something told me she did not wish to spill the
data. ‘And how is the Trotter deal coming along?’

I
seemed to have touched an exposed nerve. The giggle died on her lips, and her
face — always, as I have said, on the reddish side —deepened in colour to a
rich mauve.

‘Blister
his blighted insides!’ she said, speaking with the explosive heat which had
once made fellow-members of the Quorn and Pytchley leap convulsively in their
saddles. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with the son of Belial. Here he is,
with nine of Anatole’s lunches and eight of Anatole’s dinners tucked away among
the gastric juices, and he refuses to get down to brass tacks. He hums _‘

‘What
on earth does he do that for?’

‘— and
haws. He evades the issue. I strain every nerve to make him talk turkey, but I
can’t pin him down. He doesn’t say Yes and he doesn’t say No.’

‘There’s
a song called that… or, rather, “She didn’t say Yes and she didn’t say No”. I
sing it a good deal in my bath. It goes like this.’

I
started to render the refrain in a pleasant light baritone, but desisted on
receiving Agatha Christie abaft the frontal bone. The old relative seemed to
have fired from the hip like somebody in a Western B. picture.

‘Don’t
try me too high, Bertie dear,’ she said gently, and fell into what looked like
a reverie. ‘Do you know what I think is the trouble?’ she went on, coming out
of it. ‘I believe Ma Trotter is responsible for this non-co-operation of his.
For some reason she doesn’t want him to put the deal through, and has told him
he mustn’t. It’s the only explanation I can think of. When I met him at
Agatha’s, he spoke as if it were just a matter of arranging terms, but these
last few days he has come over all coy, as if acting under orders from up top.
When you stood them dinner that night, did he strike you as being crushed
beneath her heel?’

‘Very
much so. He wept with delight when she gave him a smile and trembled with fear
at her frown. But why would she object to him buying the
Boudoir?’

‘Don’t
ask me. It’s a complete mystery.’

‘You
haven’t put her back up somehow since she got here?’

‘Certainly
not. I’ve been fascinating.’

‘And
yet there it is, what?’

‘Exactly.
There it blasted well is, curse it!’

I
heaved a sympathetic sigh. Mine is a tender heart, easily wrung, and the
spectacle of this good old egg mourning over what might have been had wrung it
like a ton of bricks.

‘Too
bad,’ I said. ‘One had hoped for better things.’

‘One
had,’ she assented. ‘I was so sure that Morehead serial would have brought home
the bacon.’

‘Of
course, he may be just thinking it over.’

‘That’s
true.’

‘A
fellow thinking it over would naturally hum.’

‘And
haw?’

‘And,
possibly, also haw. You could scarcely expect him to do less.’ We would no doubt
have proceeded to go more deeply into the matter, subjecting this humming and
hawing of L.G. Trotter’s to a close analysis, but at this moment the door
opened and a careworn face peered in, a face disfigured on either side by short
whiskers and in the middle by tortoiseshell—rimmed spectacles.

‘I
say,’ said the face, contorted with anguish, ‘have you seen Florence?’

Aunt
Dahlia replied that she had not been privileged to do so since lunch.

‘I
thought she might be with you.’

‘She
isn‘t.’

‘Oh,’
said the face, still running the gamut of the emotions, and began to recede.

‘Hey!’
cried Aunt Dahlia, arresting it as it was about to disappear. She went to the
desk and picked up a buff envelope. ‘This telegram came for her just now. Will
you give it to her if you see her. And while you’re here, meet my nephew Bertie
Wooster, the pride of Piccadilly.’

Well, I
hadn’t expected him on learning of my identity to dance about the room on the
tips of his toes, and he didn’t. He gave me a long, reproachful look, similar
in its essentials to that which a black beetle gives a cook when the latter is
sprinkling insect powder on it.

‘I have
corresponded with Mr. Wooster,’ he said coldly. ‘We have also spoken on the
telephone.’

He
turned and was gone, gazing at me reproachfully to the last. It was plain that
the Gorringes did not lightly forget.

‘That
was Percy,’ said Aunt Dahlia.

I
replied that I had divined as much.

‘Did
you notice how he looked when he said “Florence”? Like a dying duck in a
thunderstorm.’

‘And
did you notice,’ I inquired in my turn, ‘how he looked when you said “Bertie
Wooster”? Like someone finding a dead mouse in his pint of beer. Not a
bonhomous bird. Not my type.’

‘No.
You would scarcely suppose that even a mother could view him without nausea,
would you? And yet he is the apple of Ma Trotter’s eye. She loves him as much
as she hates Mrs. Alderman Blenkinsop. Did she touch on Mrs. Alderman
Blenkinsop at that dinner of yours?’

‘At
several points during the meal. Who is she?’

‘Her
bitterest social rival up in Liverpool.’

‘Do
they have social rivals up in Liverpool?’

‘You
bet they do, in droves. I gather that it is nip and tuck between the Trotter
and the Blenkinsop as to who shall be the uncrowned queen of Liverpudlian
society. Sometimes one gets her nose in front, sometimes the other. It’s like
what one used to read about the death struggles for supremacy in New York’s
Four Hundred in the old days. But why am I telling you all this? You ought to
be out there in the sunset, racing after Percy and bucking him up with your
off-colour stories. You have a fund of off-colour stories, I presume?’

‘Oh,
rather.’

‘Then
get going, laddie. Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more, or close
the wall up with our English dead. Yoicks! Tally—ho! Hark for’ard!’ she added,
reverting to the argot of the hunting field.

Well,
when Aunt Dahlia tells you to get going, you get going, if you know what’s good
for you. But I was in no cheery mood as I made my way into the great open
spaces. That look of Percy’s had told me he was going to be a hard audience. It
had had in it much of the austerity which I had noticed in Stilton
Cheesewright’s Uncle Joseph during our get-together at Vinton Street police
court.

It was
with not a little satisfaction, accordingly, that I found on arriving in the
open no signs of him. Relieved, I abandoned the chase and started to stroll
hither and thither, taking the air. And I hadn’t taken much of it, when there
he was, rounding a rhododendron bush in my very path.

10

If it hadn’t been for the
whiskers, I don’t believe I would have recognized him. It was only about ten
minutes since he had shoved his face in at the door of Aunt Dahlia’s lair, but
in that brief interval his whole aspect had changed. No longer the downcast
duck in a thunderstorm from whom I had so recently parted, he had become gay
and bobbish. His air was jaunty, his smile bright, and there was in his
demeanour more than a suggestion of a man who might at any moment break into a
tap dance. It was as if he had spent a considerable time watching that trick of
Freddie Widgeon’s with the two corks and the bit of string.

‘Hullo
there, Wooster,’ he cried buoyantly, and you would have supposed that finding
Bertram in his midst had just about made his day. ‘Taking a stroll, eh?’

I said Yes
I was taking a stroll, and he beamed as though feeling that I could have
pursued no wiser and more admirable course. ‘Sensible chap, Wooster,’ he seemed
to be saying. ‘He takes strolls.’

There
was a short intermission here, during which he looked at me lovingly and slid
his feet about a bit in the manner of one trying out dance steps. Then he said
it was a beautiful evening, and I endorsed this.

‘The
sunset,’ he said, indicating it.

‘Very
fruity,’ I agreed, for the whole horizon was aflame with glorious Technicolor.

‘Seeing
it,’ he said, ‘I am reminded of a poem I wrote the other day for
Parnassus.
Just
a little thing I dashed off. You might care to hear it.’

‘Oh,
rather.’

‘It’s
called “Caliban at Sunset”.’

‘What
at sunset?’

‘Caliban.’

He
cleared his throat, and began:

I stood with a man

Watching the sun go down.

The air was full of murmurous summer scents

And a brave breeze sang like a bugle

From a sky that smouldered in the west,

A sky of crimson, amethyst and gold and sepia

And blue as blue as were the eyes of Helen

When she sat

Gazing from some high tower in Ilium

Upon the Grecian tents darkling below.

And he,

This man who stood beside me,

Gaped like some dull, half-witted animal