The Jeeves Omnibus (220 page)

You might have supposed that my mood, as I strolled from the building to enjoy a smoke, would have been one of elation. And so, for some moments, it was. The whole aim of my foreign policy had been to ensure the making of a socko by Esmond, and he had made a socko. He had slain them and stopped the show. For perhaps the space of a quarter of a cigarette I rejoiced unstintedly.

Then my uplifted mood suddenly left me. The cigarette fell from my nerveless fingers, and I stood rooted to the spot, the lower jaw resting negligently on the shirt front. I had just realized that, what with one thing and another – my disturbed night, my taxing day, the various burdens weighing on my mind and so forth – every word of those Christopher Robin poems had been expunged from my memory.

And I was billed next but two after intermission.

HOW LONG I
stood there, rooted to the s., I cannot say. A goodish while, no doubt, for this wholly unforeseen development had unmanned me completely. I was roused from my reverie by the sound of rustic voices singing ‘Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo, a-hunting we will go, my lads, a-hunting we will go’ and discovered that the strains were proceeding from the premises of the Goose and Cowslip on the other side of the road. And it suddenly struck me – I can’t think why it hadn’t before – that here might possibly be the mental tonic of which I was in need. It might be that all that was wrong with me was that I was faint for lack of nourishment. Hitching up the lower jaw, I hurried across and plunged into the saloon bar.

The revellers who were singing the gem of the night’s Hit Parade were doing so in the public bar. The only occupant of the more posh saloon bar was a godlike man in a bowler hat with grave, finely chiselled features and a head that stuck out at the back, indicating great brain power. To cut a long story short, Jeeves. He was having a meditative beer at the table by the wall.

‘Good evening, sir,’ he said, rising with his customary polish. ‘I am happy to inform you that I was successful in obtaining the cosh from Master Thomas. I have it in my pocket.’

I raised a hand.

‘This is no time for talking about coshes.’

‘No, sir. I merely mentioned it in passing. Mr Haddock’s was an extremely gratifying triumph, did you not think, sir?’

‘Nor is it a time for talking about Esmond Haddock, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘I’m sunk.’

‘Indeed, sir?’

‘Jeeves!’

‘I beg your pardon, sir. I should have said “Really, sir?”’

‘“Really, sir?” is just as bad. What the crisis calls for is a “Gosh!” or a “Gorblimey!” There have been occasions, numerous occasions, when you have beheld Bertram Wooster in the bouillon, but never so deeply immersed in it as now. You know those damned poems I was
to
recite? I’ve forgotten every word of them. I need scarcely stress the gravity of the situation. Half an hour from now I shall be up on that platform with the Union Jack behind me and before me an expectant audience, waiting to see what I’ve got. And I haven’t got anything. I shan’t have a word to say. And while an audience at a village concert justifiably resents having Christopher Robin poems recited at it, its resentment becomes heightened if the reciter merely stands there opening and shutting his mouth in silence like a goldfish.’

‘Very true, sir. You cannot jog your memory?’

‘It was in the hope of jogging it that I came in here. Is there brandy in this joint?’

‘Yes, sir. I will procure you a double.’

‘Make it two doubles.’

‘Very good, sir.’

He moved obligingly to the little hatch thing in the wall and conveyed his desire to the unseen provider on the other side, and presently a hand came through with a brimming glass and he brought it to the table.

‘Let’s see what this does,’ I said. ‘Skin off your nose, Jeeves.’

‘Mud in your eye, sir, if I may use the expression.’

I drained the glass and laid it down.

‘The ironical thing,’ I said, while waiting for the stuff to work, ‘is that though, except for remembering in a broad, general way that he went hoppity-hoppity-hop, I am a spent force as regards Christopher Robin, I could do them “Ben Battle” without a hitch. Did you hear Master George Kegley-Bassington on the subject of “Ben Battle”?’

‘Yes, sir. A barely adequate performance, I thought.’

‘That is not the point, Jeeves. What I’m trying to tell you is that listening to him has had the effect of turning back time in its flight, if you know what I mean, so that from the reciting angle I am once more the old Bertram Wooster of bygone days and can remember every word of “Ben Battle” as clearly as in the epoch when it was constantly on my lips. I could do the whole thing without fluffing a syllable. But does that profit me?’

‘No, sir.’

‘No, sir, is correct. Thanks to George, saturation point has been reached with this particular audience as far as “Ben Battle” is concerned. If I started to give it them, too, I shouldn’t get beyond the first stanza. There would be an ugly rush for the platform, and I should be roughly handled. So what do you suggest?’

‘You have obtained no access of mental vigour from the refreshment which you have been consuming, sir?’

‘Not a scrap. The stuff might have been water.’

‘In that case, I think you would be well advised to refrain from attempting to entertain the audience, sir. It would be best to hand the whole conduct of the affair over to Mr Haddock.’

‘Eh?’

‘I am confident that Mr Haddock would gladly deputize for you. In the uplifted frame of mind in which he now is, he would welcome an opportunity to appear again before his public.’

‘But he couldn’t learn the stuff in a quarter of an hour.’

‘No, sir, but he could read it from the book. I have a copy of the book on my person, for I had been intending to station myself at the side of the stage in order to prompt you, as I believe the technical expression is, should you have need of my services.’

‘Dashed good of you, Jeeves. Very white. Very feudal.’

‘Not at all, sir. Shall I step across and explain the position of affairs to Mr Haddock and hand him the book?’

I mused. The more I examined his suggestion, the better I liked it. When you are slated to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, the idea of getting a kindly friend to take your place is always an attractive one; the only thing that restrains you, as a rule, from making the switch being the thought that it is a bit tough on the kindly f. But in the present case this objection did not apply. On this night of nights Esmond Haddock could get away with anything. There was, I seemed to remember dimly, a poem in the book about Christopher Robin having ten little toes. Even that, dished out by the idol of King’s Deverill, would not provoke mob violence.

‘Yes, buzz straight over and fix up the deal, Jeeves,’ I said hesitating no longer. ‘As always, you have found the way.’

He adjusted the bowler hat which he had courteously doffed at my entry, and went off on his errand of mercy. And I, too agitated to remain sitting, wandered out into the street and began to pace up and down outside the hostelry. And I had paused for a moment to look at the stars, wondering, as I always did when I saw stars, why Jeeves had once described them to me as quiring to the young-eyed Cherubim, when a tapping on my arm and a bleating voice saying ‘I say, Bertie’ told me that some creature of the night was trying to arrest my attention. I turned and beheld something in a green beard and a check suit of loud pattern which, as it was not tall enough to be Catsmeat, the only other person likely to be going about in that striking get-up, I took correctly to be Gussie.

‘I say, Bertie,’ said Gussie, speaking with obvious emotion, ‘do you think you could get me some brandy?’

‘You mean orange juice?’

‘No, I do not mean orange juice. I mean brandy. About a bucketful.’

Puzzled, but full of the St-Bernard-dog spirit, I returned to the saloon bar and came back with the snifter. He accepted it gratefully and downed about half of it at a gulp, gasping in a struck-by-lightning manner, as I have seen men gasp after taking one of Jeeves’s special pick-me-ups.

‘Thanks,’ he said, when he had recovered. ‘I needed that. And I didn’t like to go in myself with this beard on.’

‘Why don’t you take it off?’

‘I can’t get it off. I stuck it on with spirit gum, and it hurts like sin when I pull at it. I shall have to get Jeeves to see what he can do about it later. Is this stuff brandy?’

‘That’s what they told me.’

‘What appalling muck. Like vitriol. How on earth can you and your fellow topers drink it for pleasure?’

‘What are you drinking it for? Because you promised your mother you would?’

‘I am drinking it, Bertie, to nerve myself for a frightful ordeal.’

I gave his shoulder a kindly pat. It seemed to me that the man’s mind was wandering.

‘You’re forgetting, Gussie. Your ordeal is over. You’ve done your act. And pretty lousy it was,’ I said, unable to check the note of censure. ‘What was the matter with you?’

He blinked like a chidden codfish.

‘Wasn’t I good?’

‘No, you were not good. You were cheesy. Your work lacked fire and snap.’

‘Well, so would your work lack fire and snap, if you had to play in a knockabout cross-talk act and knew that directly the thing was over, you were going to break into a police station and steal a dog.’

The stars, ceasing for a moment to quire to the young-eyed Cherubim, did a quick buck-and-wing.

‘Say that again!’

‘What’s the point of saying it again? You heard. I’ve promised Corky I’ll go to Dobbs’s cottage and extract that dog of hers. She will be waiting in her car near at hand and will gather the animal in and whisk it off to the house of some friends of hers who live about twenty miles along the London road, well out of Dobbs’s sphere of influence. So now you know why I wanted brandy.’

I wanted brandy, too. Either that or something equally restorative.
Oh
, I was saying to myself, for a beaker full of the warm south, full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene. I have spoken earlier of the tendency of the spirit of the Woosters to rise when crushed to earth, but there is a limit, and this limit had now been reached. At these frightful words, the spirit of the Woosters felt as if it had been sat on by an elephant. And not one of your streamlined, schoolgirl-figured elephants, either. A big, fat one.

‘Gussie! You mustn’t!’

‘What do you mean, I mustn’t? Of course I must. Corky wishes it.’

‘But you don’t realize the peril. Dobbs is laying for you. Esmond Haddock is laying for you. They’re just waiting to spring.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Esmond Haddock told me so himself. He dislikes you intensely and it is his dearest hope some day to catch you bending and put you behind the bars. And he’s a JP, so is in a strong position to bring about the happy ending. You’ll look pretty silly when you find yourself doing thirty days in the jug.’

‘For Corky’s sake I’d do a year. As a matter of fact,’ said Gussie in a burst of confidence, ‘though you might not think it from the way I’ve been calling for brandy, there’s no chance of my being caught. Dobbs is watching the concert.’

This, of course, improved the outlook. I don’t say I breathed freely, but I breathed more freely than I had been breathing.

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘I saw him myself.’

‘You couldn’t have been mistaken?’

‘My dear Bertie, when Dobbs has come into a room in which you have been strewing frogs and stood face to face with you for an eternity, chewing his moustache and grinding his teeth at you, you know him when you see him again.’

‘But all the same –’

‘It’s no good saying “All the same”. Corky wants me to extract her dog, and I’m going to do it. “Gussie”, she said to me, “you’re such a
help
”, and I intend to be worthy of those words.’

And, having spoken thus, he gave his beard a hitch and vanished into the silent night, leaving me to pay for the brandy.

I had just finished doing so when Jeeves returned.

‘Everything has been satisfactorily arranged, sir,’ he said. ‘I have seen Mr Haddock, and, as I anticipated, he is more than willing to deputize for you.’

A great weight seemed to roll off my mind.

‘Then God bless Mr Haddock!’ I said. ‘There is splendid stuff in these young English landowners, Jeeves, is there not?’

‘Unquestionably, sir.’

‘The backbone of the country, I sometimes call them. But I gather from the fact that you have been gone the dickens of a time that you had to do some heavy persuading.’

‘No, sir. Mr Haddock consented immediately and with enthusiasm. My delay in returning was due to the fact that I was detained in conversation by Police Constable Dobbs. There were a number of questions of a theological nature on which he was anxious to canvas my views. He appears particularly interested in Jonah and the Whale.’

‘Is he enjoying the concert?’

‘No, sir. He spoke in disparaging terms of the quality of the entertainment provided.’

‘He didn’t like George Kegley-Bassington much?’

‘No, sir. On the subject of Master Kegley-Bassington he expressed himself strongly, and was almost equally caustic when commenting upon Miss Kegley-Bassington’s rhythmic dance. It is in order to avoid witnessing the efforts of the remaining members of the family that he has returned to his cottage, where he plans to pass what is left of the evening with a pipe and the works of Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll.’

SO THAT WAS
that. You get the picture. Above, in the serene sky, the stars quiring to the Cherubim. Off-stage, in the public bar, the local toughies quiring to the potboy. And down centre Jeeves, having exploded his bombshell, regarding me with the eye of concern, as if he feared that all was not well with the young master, in which conjecture he was one hundred per cent right. The young master was feeling as if his soul had just received the Cornish Riviera express on the seat of its pants.

I gulped perhaps half a dozen times before I was able to utter.

‘Jeeves, you didn’t really say that, did you?’