Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (14 page)

‘But
can even Jeeves adjust matters?’

‘I’m
banking on him. After all, he’s a hell of an adjuster.’

‘True.’

‘He’s
got you out of some deepish holes in his time.’

‘Quite.
I often say there is none like him, none. He should be with us at any moment
now. He stepped out to get me a tankard of the old familiar juice.’

Her
eyes gleamed with a strange light.

‘Bags I
first go at it!’

I
patted her hand.

‘Of
course,’ I said, ‘of course. You may take that as read. You don’t find Bertram
Wooster hogging the drink supply when a suffering aunt is at his side with her
tongue hanging out. Your need is greater than mine, as whoever-it-was said to
the stretcher case. Ah!’

Jeeves
had come in bearing the elixir, not a split second before we were ready for it.
I took the beaker from him and offered it to the aged relative with a courteous
gesture. With a brief ‘Mud in your eye ‘she drank deeply. I then finished what
was left at a gulp.

‘Oh,
Jeeves,’ I said.

‘Sir?’

‘Lend
me your ears.’

‘Very
good, sir.’

It had
needed but a glance at my late father’s sister to tell me that if there was
going to be any lucid exposition of the
res,
I was the one who would
have to attend to it. After moistening her clay she had relapsed into a sort of
frozen coma, staring before her with unseeing eyes and showing a disposition to
pant like a hart when heated in the chase. Nor was this to be wondered at. Few women
would have been in vivacious mood, had Fate touched off beneath them a similar
stick of trinitrotoluol. I imagine her emotions after Uncle Tom had said his
say must have been of much the same nature as those which she had no doubt
frequently experienced in her hunting days when her steed, having bucked her
from the saddle, had proceeded to roll on her. And while the blushful
Hippocrene of which she had just imbibed her share had been robust and full of
inner meaning, it had obviously merely scratched the surface.

‘A
rather tight place has popped up out of a trap, Jeeves, and we should be glad
of your counsel and advice. This is the posish. Aunt Dahlia has a pearl
necklace, the Christmas gift of Uncle Tom, whose second name, I’ll bet you
didn’t know, is Portarlington. The one you picked up at Aspinall’s this
morning. Are you with me?’

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘Well,
this is where the plot thickens. It isn’t a pearl necklace, if I make my
meaning clear. For reasons into which we need not go, she put the
Uncle-Tom-Merry-Christmas one up the spout. What is now in her possession is an
imitation of little or no intrinsic value.’

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘You
don’t seem amazed.’

‘No,
sir. I became aware of the fact when I saw the necklace this morning. I
perceived at once that what had been given to me was a cultured replica.’.

‘Good
Lord! Was it as easy to spot as that?’

‘Oh,
no, sir. I have no doubt that it would deceive the untutored eye. But I spent
some months at one time studying jewellery under the auspices of a cousin of
mine who is in the trade. The genuine pearl has no core.’

‘No
what?’

‘Core,
sir. In its interior. The cultured pearl has. A cultured pearl differs from a
real one in this respect, that it is the result of introducing into the oyster
a foreign substance designed to irritate it and induce it to coat the substance
with layer upon layer of nacre. Nature’s own irritant is invariably so small as
to be invisible, but the core in the cultured imitation can be discerned, as a
rule merely by holding the cultured pearl up before a strong light. This was
what I did in the matter of Mrs. Travers’s necklace. I had no need of the
endoscope.’

‘The
what?’

‘Endoscope,
sir. An instrument which enables one to peer into the cultured pearl’s interior
and discern the core.’

I was
conscious of a passing pang for the oyster world, feeling —and I think
correctly — that life for these unfortunate bivalves must be one damn thing
after another, but my principal emotion was one of astonishment.

‘Great
Scot, Jeeves! Do you know everything?’

‘Oh,
no, sir. It just happens that jewellery is something of a hobby of mine. With
diamonds, of course, the test would be different. To ascertain the genuineness
of a diamond it would be necessary to take a sapphire-point gramophone needle —
which is, as you are no doubt aware, corundum having a hardness of 9 — and make
a small test scratch on the underside of the suspect stone. A genuine diamond,
I need scarcely remind you, is the only substance with a hardness of 10 — Moh’s
scale of hardness. Most of the hard objects we see about us are approximately 7
in the hardness scale. But you were saying, sir?’

I was
still blinking a bit. When Jeeves gets going nicely, he often has this effect
on me. With a strong effort I pulled myself together and was able to continue.

‘Well,
that’s the nub of the story,’ I said. ‘Aunt Dahlia’s necklace, the one now in
her possession, is, as your trained senses told you, a seething mass of cores
and not worth the paper it’s written on. Right. Well, here’s the point. If no
complications had been introduced into the scenario, all would be well, because
Uncle Tom couldn’t tell the difference between a real necklace and an imitation
one if he tried for months. But a whale of a complication has been introduced.
A pal of his is coming tomorrow to look at the thing, and this pal, like you,
is an expert on jewellery. You see what will happen the moment he cocks an eye
at the worthless substitute. Exposure, ruin, desolation and despair. Uncle Tom,
learning the truth, will blow his top, and Aunt Dahlia’s prestige will be down
among the wines and spirits. You get me, Jeeves?’

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘Then
let us have your views.’

‘It is
disturbing, sir.’

I
wouldn’t have thought that anything would have been able to rouse that crushed
aunt from her trance, but this did the trick. She came up like a rocketing
pheasant from the chair into which she had slumped.

‘Disturbing!
What a word to use!’

I
sympathized with her distress, but checked her with an upraised hand.

‘Please,
old relative! Yes, Jeeves, it is, as you say, a bit on the disturbing side, but
one feels that you will probably have something constructive to place before
the board. We shall be glad to hear your solution.’

He
allowed a muscle at the side of his mouth to twitch regretfully. ‘With a
problem of such magnitude, sir, I fear I am not able to provide a solution
off-hand, if I may use the expression. I should require to give the matter
thought. Perhaps if I might be permitted to pace the corridor for awhile?’

‘Certainly,
Jeeves. Pace all the corridors you wish.’

‘Thank
you, sir. I shall hope to return shortly with some suggestion which will give
satisfaction.’

I
closed the door behind him and turned to the aged r., who, her face bright
purple, was still muttering ‘Disturbing’.

‘I know
just how you feel, old flesh and blood,’ I said. ‘I ought to have warned you
that Jeeves never leaps about and rolls the eyes when you spring something
sensational on him, preferring to preserve the calm impassivity of a stuffed
frog.’

‘“Disturbing”!’

‘I have
grown not to mind this much myself, though occasionally, as I was about to do
tonight, administering a rather stern rebuke, for experience has taught me —‘

‘“Disturbing”,
for God’s sake!
“Disturbing”!’

‘I
know, I know. That manner of his does afflict the nerve centres quite a bit,
does it not? But, as I was saying, experience has taught me that there always
follows some ripe solution of whatever the problem may be. As the fellow said,
if stuffed frogs come, can ripe solutions be far behind?’

She sat
up. I could see the light of hope dawning in her eyes.

‘You
really think he will find the way?’

‘I am
convinced of it. He always finds the way. I wish I had a quid for every way he
has found since first he started to serve under the Wooster banner. Remember
how he enabled me to put it across Roderick Spode at Totleigh Towers.’

‘He
did, didn’t he?’

‘He
certainly did. One moment, Spode was a dark menace, the next a mere blob of
jelly with all his fangs removed, grovelling at my feet.

You can
rely implicitly on Jeeves. Ah,’ I said, as the door opened. ‘Here he comes, his
head sticking out at the back and his eyes shining with intelligence and what
not. You have thought of something, Jeeves?’

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘I knew
it. I was saying a moment ago that you always find the way. Well, let us have it.’

‘There
is a method by means of which Mrs. Travers can be extricated from her sea of
troubles. Shakespeare.’

I
didn’t know why he was addressing me as Shakespeare, but I motioned him to
continue.

‘Proceed,
Jeeves.’

He did
so, turning now to Aunt Dahlia, who was gazing at him like a bear about to
receive a bun.

‘If, as
Mr. Wooster has told me, madam, this jewellery expert is to be with us shortly,
it would seem that your best plan is to cause the necklace to disappear before
he arrives. If I may make my meaning clearer, madam,’ he went on in response to
a query from the sizzling woman as to whether he supposed her to be a bally
conjuror. ‘What I had in mind was something in the nature of a burglarious
entry, as the result of which the piece of jewellery would be abstracted. You
will readily see, madam, that if the gentleman, coming to examine the necklace,
finds that there is no necklace for him to examine —‘He won’t be able to
examine it?’

‘Precisely,
madam.
Rem acu tetigisti.’

I shook
the lemon. I had expected something better than this. It seemed to me that that
great brain had at last come unglued, and this saddened me.

‘But,
Jeeves,’ I said gently, ‘where do you get your burglar? From the Army and Navy
Stores?’

‘I was
thinking that you might consent to undertake the task, sir.’

‘Me?’

‘Gosh,
yes,’ said Aunt Dahlia, her dial lighting up like a stage moon. ‘How right you
are, Jeeves! You wouldn’t mind doing a little thing like that for me, would
you, Bertie? Of course you wouldn’t. You’ve grasped the idea? You get a ladder,
prop it up against my window, pop in, pinch the necklace and streak off with
it. And tomorrow I go to Tom in floods of tears and say, “Tom! My pearls!
They’ve gone! Some low bounder sneaked in last night and snitched them as I
slept.” That’s the idea, isn’t it, Jeeves?’

‘Precisely,
madam. It would be a simple task for Mr. Wooster. I notice that since my last
visit to Brinkley Court the bars which protected the windows have been
removed.’

‘Yes, I
had that done after that time when we were all locked out. You remember?’

‘Very
vividly, madam.’

‘So
there’s nothing to stop you, Bertie.’

‘Nothing
but —‘

I
paused. I had been about to say ‘Nothing but my total and absolute refusal to
take on the assignment in any shape or form’, but I checked the words before
they could pass the lips. I saw that I was exaggerating what I had supposed to
be the dangers and difficulties of the enterprise.

After
all, I felt, there was nothing so very hazardous about it. A ludicrously simple
feat for one of my agility and lissomness. A nuisance, of course, having to
turn out at this time of night, but I was quite prepared to do so in order to
bring the roses back to the cheeks of a woman who in my bib-and-cradle days had
frequently dandled me on her knee, not to mention saving my life on one
occasion when I had half-swallowed a rubber comforter.

‘Nothing
at all,’ I replied cordially. ‘Nothing whatever. You provide the necklace, and
I will do the rest. Which is your room?’

‘That
last one on the left.’

‘Right.’

‘Left, fool.
I’ll be going there now, so as to be in readiness. Golly, Jeeves, you’ve taken
a weight off my mind. I feel a new woman. You won’t mind if you hear me singing
about the house?’

‘Not at
all, madam.’

‘I
shall probably start first thing tomorrow.’

‘Any time
that suits you, madam.’

He
closed the door behind her with an indulgent smile, or something as nearly
resembling a smile as he ever allows to appear on his map.

‘One is
glad to see Mrs. Travers so happy, sir.’

‘Yes,
you certainly bucked her up like a tonic. No difficulty about finding a ladder,
I take it?’

‘Oh,
no, sir. I chanced to observe one outside the tool-shed by the kitchen garden.’

‘So did
I, now you mention it. No doubt it’s still there, so let’s go. If it were …
what’s that expression of yours?’