The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 4: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.4 (16 page)

‘She proposes to mould you?’

‘I gathered so.’

‘You won’t like that.’

‘No.’

She nodded understandingly.

‘Men don’t. I attribute my own happy marriage to the fact that I have never so much as laid a finger on old Tom. Agatha is trying to mould Worplesdon, and I believe his agonies are frightful. She made him knock off smoking the other day, and he behaved like a cinnamon bear with its foot in a trap. Has Florence told you to knock off smoking?’

‘Not yet.’

‘She will. And after that it’ll be cocktails.’ She gazed at me with a good deal of what-do-you-call-it. You could see that remorse had her in its grip. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got you into a bit of a jam, my poppet.’

‘Don’t give it a thought, old blood relation,’ I said. ‘These things happen. It is your predicament, not mine, that is exercising me. We’ve got to get you out of your sea of troubles, as Jeeves calls it. Everything else is relatively unimportant. My thoughts of self are merely in about the proportion of the vermouth to the gin in a strongish dry martini.’

She was plainly touched. Unless I am very much mistaken, her eyes were wet with unshed tears.

‘That’s very altruistic of you, Bertie dear.’

‘Not at all, not at all.’

‘One wouldn’t think it, to look at you, but you have a noble soul.’

‘
Who
wouldn’t think it, to look at me?’

‘And if that’s the way you feel, all I can say is that it does you credit and let’s get going. You’d better go and shift that ladder to the right window.’

‘You mean the left window.’

‘Well, let’s call it the correct window.’

I braced myself to break the bad news.

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘but what you’re overlooking – possibly because I forgot to tell you – is that a snag has arisen which threatens to do our aims and objects a bit of no good. The ladder isn’t there.’

‘Where?’

‘Under the right window, or perhaps I should say the wrong window. When I looked out, it was gone.’

‘Nonsense. Ladders don’t melt into thin air.’

‘They do, I assure you, at Brinkley Court, Brinkley-cum-Snodsfield-in-the-Marsh. I don’t know what conditions prevail elsewhere, but at Brinkley Court they vanish if you take your eye off them for so much as an instant.’

‘You mean the ladder’s disappeared?’

‘That is precisely the point I was endeavouring to establish. It has folded its tents like the Arabs and silently stolen away.’

She turned bright mauve, and I think was about to rap out something in the nature of a Quorn-and-Pytchley expletive, for she is a woman who seldom minces her words when stirred, but at this juncture the door opened and Uncle Tom came in. I was too distrait to be able to discern whether or not he was pottering, but a glance was enough to show me that he was definitely all of a doodah.

‘Dahlia!’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought I heard your voice. What are you doing up at this hour?’

‘Bertie had a headache,’ replied the old relative, a quick thinker. ‘I have been giving him an aspirin. The head a little better now, Bertie?’

‘One notes a slight improvement,’ I assured her, being a quick thinker myself. ‘You’re out and about a bit late, aren’t you, Uncle Tom?’

‘Yes,’ said Aunt Dahlia. ‘What are
you
doing up at this hour, my old for-better-or-for-worser? You ought to have been asleep ages ago.’

Uncle Tom shook his head. His air was grave.

‘Asleep, old girl? I shan’t get any sleep tonight. Far too worried. The place is alive with burglars.’

‘Burglars? What gives you that idea? I haven’t seen any burglars. Have you, Bertie?’

‘Not one. I remember thinking how odd it was.’

‘You probably saw an owl or something, Tom.’

‘I saw a ladder. When I was taking my stroll in the garden before going to bed. Propped up against one of the windows. I took it away in the nick of time. A minute later, and burglars would have been streaming up it in their thousands.’

Aunt Dahlia and I exchanged a glance. I think we were both feeling happier now that the mystery of the vanishing 1. had been solved. It’s an odd thing, but however much of an
aficionado
one may be of mysteries in book form, when they pop up in real life they seldom fail to give one the pip.

She endeavoured to soothe his agitation.

‘Probably just a ladder one of the gardeners was using and forgot to put back where it belonged. Though, of course,’ she went on thoughtfully, feeling no doubt that a spot of paving the way would do no harm, ‘I suppose there is always a chance of a cracksman having a try for that valuable pearl necklace of mine. I had forgotten that.’

‘I hadn’t,’ said Uncle Tom. ‘It was the first thing I thought of. I went straight to your room and got it and locked it up in the safe in the hall. A burglar will have to be pretty smart to get it out of there,’ he added with modest pride, and pushed off, leaving behind him what I have sometimes heard called a pregnant silence.

Aunt looked at nephew, nephew looked at aunt.

‘Hell’s whiskers!’ said the former, starting the conversation going again. ‘Now what do we do?’

I agreed that the situation was sticky. Indeed, off-hand it was difficult to see how it could have been more glutinous.

‘What are the chances of finding out the combination?’

‘Not a hope.’

‘I wonder if Jeeves can crack a safe.’

She brightened.

‘I’ll bet he can. There’s nothing Jeeves can’t do. Go and fetch him.’

I Lord-love-a-duck-ed impatiently.

‘How the dickens can I fetch him? I don’t know which his room is. Do you?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I can’t go from door to door, rousing the whole domestic staff. Who do you think I am? Paul Revere?’

I paused for a reply, and as I did so who should come in but Jeeves in person. Late though it was, the hour had produced the man.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said. ‘I am happy to find that I have not interrupted your slumbers. I ventured to come to inquire whether
matters
had developed satisfactorily. Were you successful in your enterprise, sir?’

I shook the coconut.

‘No, Jeeves. I moved in a mysterious way my wonders to perform, but was impeded by a number of Acts of God,’ I said, and in a few crisp words put him abreast. ‘So the necklace is now in the safe,’ I concluded, ‘and the problem as I see it, and as Aunt Dahlia sees it, is how the dickens to get it out. You grasp the position?’

‘Yes, sir. It is disturbing.’

Aunt Dahlia uttered a passionate cry.

‘Don’t
do
it!’ she boomed with extraordinary vehemence. ‘If I hear that word “disturbing” once more … Can you bust a safe, Jeeves?’

‘No, madam.’

‘Don’t say “No, madam” in that casual way. How do you know you can’t?’

‘It requires a specialized education and upbringing, madam.’

‘Then I’m for it,’ said Aunt Dahlia, making for the door. Her face was grim and set. She might have been a marquise about to hop into the tumbril at the time when there was all that unpleasantness over in France. ‘You weren’t through the San Francisco earthquake, were you, Jeeves?’

‘No, madam. I have never visited the western coastal towns of the United States.’

‘I was only thinking that if you had been, what’s going to happen tomorrow when this Lord Sidcup arrives and tells Tom the awful truth would have reminded you of old times. Well, good night, all. I’ll be running along and getting my beauty sleep.’

She buzzed off, a gallant figure. The Quorn trains its daughters well. No weakness there. In the fell clutch of circumstance, as I remember Jeeves putting it once, they do not wince or cry aloud. I mentioned this to him as the door closed, and he agreed that it was substantially so.

‘Under the tiddly-poms of whatever-it-is … How does the rest of it go?’

‘Under the bludgeonings of chance their heads are … pardon me … bloody but unbowed, sir.’

‘That’s right. Your own?’

‘No, sir. The late William Ernest Henley, 1849–1903.’

‘Ah?’

‘The title of the poem is “Invictus”. But did I understand Mrs. Travers to say that Lord Sidcup was expected, sir?’

‘He arrives tomorrow.’

‘Would he be the gentleman of whom you were speaking, who is to examine Mrs. Travers’s necklace?’

‘That’s the chap.’

‘Then I fancy that all is well, sir.’

I started. It seemed to me that I must have misunderstood him. Either that, or he was talking through his hat.

‘All is
well
, did you say, Jeeves?’

‘Yes, sir. You are not aware who Lord Sidcup is, sir?’

‘I never heard of him in my life.’

‘You will possibly remember him, sir, as Mr. Roderick Spode.’

I stared at him. You could have knocked me down with a toothpick.

‘Roderick Spode?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You mean the Roderick Spode of Totleigh Towers?’

‘Precisely, sir. He recently succeeded to the title on the demise of the late Lord Sidcup, his uncle.’

‘Great Scot, Jeeves!’

‘Yes, sir. I think you will agree with me, sir, that in these circumstances the problem confronting Mrs. Travers is susceptible of a ready solution. A word to his lordship, reminding him of the fact that he sells ladies’ underclothing under the trade name of Eulalie Sœurs, should go far towards inducing him to preserve a tactful silence with regard to the spurious nature of the necklace. At the time of our visit to Totleigh Towers you will recollect that Mr. Spode, as he then was, showed unmistakably his reluctance to let the matter become generally known.’

‘Egad, Jeeves!’

‘Yes, sir. I thought I would mention it, sir. Good night, sir.’

He oozed off.

WE WOOSTERS ARE
never very early risers, and the sun was highish in the heavens next morning when I woke to greet a new day. And I had just finished tucking away a refreshing scrambled eggs and coffee, when the door opened as if a hurricane had hit it and Aunt Dahlia came pirouetting in.

I use the word ‘pirouetting’ advisedly, for there was an elasticity in her bearing which impressed itself immediately upon the eye. Of the drooping mourner of last night there remained no trace. The woman was plainly right above herself.

‘Bertie,’ she said, after a brief opening speech in the course of which she described me as a lazy young hound who ought to be ashamed to be wallowing in bed on what, if you asked her, was the maddest merriest day of all the glad new year, ‘I’ve just been talking to Jeeves, and if ever a life-saving friend in need drew breath, it is he. Hats off to Jeeves is the way I look at it.’

Pausing for a moment to voice the view that my moustache was an offence against God and man but that she saw in it nothing that a good weed-killer couldn’t cure, she resumed.

‘He tells me this Lord Sidcup who’s coming here today is none other than our old pal Roderick Spode.’

I nodded. I had divined from her exuberance that he must have been spilling the big news.

‘Correct,’ I said. ‘Apparently, all unknown to us, Spode was right from the start the secret nephew of the holder of the title, and since that sojourn of ours at Totleigh Towers the latter has gone to reside with the morning stars, giving him a step up. Jeeves has also, I take it, told you about Eulalie Sœurs?’

‘The whole thing. Why didn’t you ever let me in on that? You know how I enjoy a good laugh.’

I spread the hands in a dignified gesture, upsetting the coffee-pot, which was fortunately empty.

‘My lips were sealed.’

‘You and your lips!’

‘All right, me and my lips. But I repeat. The information was imparted to me in confidence.’

‘You could have told Auntie.’

I shook my head. Women do not understand these things.
Noblesse oblige
means nothing to the gentler sex.

‘One does not impart confidential confidences even to Auntie, not if one is a confidant of the right sort.’

‘Well, anyway, I know the facts, and I hold Spode, alias Sidcup, in the hollow of my hand. Bless my soul,’ she went on, a far-off ecstatic look on her face, ‘how well I remember that day at Totleigh Towers. There he was, advancing on you with glittering eyes and foam-flecked lips, and you drew yourself up as cool as some cucumbers, as Anatole would say, and said “One minute, Spode, just one minute. It may interest you to learn that I know all about Eulalie.” Gosh, how I admired you!’

‘I don’t wonder.’

‘You were like one of those lion tamers in circuses who defy murderous man-eating monarchs of the jungle.’

‘There was a resemblance, no doubt.’

‘And how he wilted! I’ve never seen anything like it. Before my eyes he wilted like a wet sock. And he’s going to do it again when he gets here this evening.’

‘You propose to draw him aside and tell him you know his guilty secret?’

‘Exactly. Strongly recommending him, when Tom shows him the necklace, to say it’s a lovely bit of work and worth every penny he paid for it. It can’t fail. Fancy him owning Eulalie Sœurs! He must make a packet out of it. I was in there last month, buying some cami-knickers, and the place was doing a roaring trade. Money pouring in like a tidal wave. By the way, laddie, talking of cami-knickers, Florence was showing me hers just now. Not the ones she had on, I don’t mean; her reserve supply. She wanted my opinion of them. And I’m sorry to tell you, my poor lamb,’ she said, eyeing me with auntly pity, ‘that things look pretty serious in that quarter.’

‘They do?’

‘Extremely serious. She’s all set to start those wedding bells ringing out. Somewhere around next November, she seems to think, at St. George’s, Hanover Square. Already she is speaking freely of bridesmaids and caterers.’ She paused, and looked at me in a surprised sort of way. ‘You don’t seem very upset,’ she said. ‘Are you one of these men of chilled steel one reads about?’

I spread the hands again, this time without disaster to the breakfast tray.

‘Well, I’ll tell you, old ancestor. When a fellow has been engaged as often as I have and each time saved from the scaffold at the eleventh hour, he comes to have faith in his star. He feels that all is not lost till they have actually got him at the altar rails with the organ playing “Oh, perfect love” and the clergyman saying “Wilt thou?” At the moment, admittedly, I am in the soup, but it may well be that in God’s good time it will be granted to me to emerge unscathed from the tureen.’