The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 4: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.4 (52 page)

I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but a thing I’ve always found about myself is that it takes very little to put me off my feed. Let the atmosphere at lunch or dinner be what you might call difficult, and my appetite tends to dwindle. I’ve often had this happen when breaking bread with my Aunt Agatha, and it had happened again at tonight’s meal. What with the strain of constantly catching Pop Bassett’s eye and looking hastily away and catching Spode’s and looking hastily away and catching Pop’s again, I had done far less than justice to Emerald Stoker’s no doubt admirable offerings. You read stories sometimes where someone merely toys with his food or even pushes away his plate untasted, and that substantially was what I had done. So now this strange hollow feeling, as if some hidden hand had scooped out my insides with a tablespoon.

This imperative demand for sustenance had probably been coming on during my Erle Stanley Gardnering, but I had been so intent on trying to keep tabs on the murder gun and the substitute gun and the gun which Perry Mason had buried in the shrubbery that I hadn’t noticed it. Only now had the pangs of hunger really started to throw their weight about, and more and more clearly as they did so there rose before my eyes the vision of that steak and kidney pie which was lurking in the kitchen, and it was as though I could hear a soft voice calling to me ‘Come and get it.’

It’s odd how often you find that out of evil cometh good, as the expression is. Here was a case in point. I had always thought of my previous visit to Totleigh Towers as a total loss. I saw now that I had
been
wrong. It had been an ordeal testing the nervous system to the utmost, but there was one thing about it to be placed on the credit side of the ledger. I allude to the fact that it had taught me the way to the kitchen. The route lay down the stairs, through the hall, into the dining-room and through the door at the end of the last named. Beyond the door I presumed that there was some sort of passage or corridor and then you were in the steak and kidney pie zone. A simple journey, not to be compared for complexity with some I had taken at night in my time.

With the Woosters to think is to act, and scarcely more than two minutes later I was on my way.

It was dark on the stairs and just as dark, if not darker, in the hall. But I was making quite satisfactory progress and was about half-way through the latter, when an unforeseen hitch occurred. I bumped into a human body, the last thing I had expected to encounter en route, and for an instant … well, I won’t say that everything went black, because everything was black already, but I was considerably perturbed. My heart did one of those spectacular leaps Nijinsky used to do in the Russian Ballet, and I was conscious of a fervent wish that I could have been elsewhere.

Elsewhere, however, being just where I wasn’t, I had no option but to grapple with this midnight marauder, and when I did so I was glad to find that he was apparently one who had stunted his growth by smoking as a boy. There was a shrimp-like quality about him which I found most encouraging. It seemed to me that it would be an easy task to throttle him into submission, and I was getting down to it with a hearty good will when my hand touched what were plainly spectacles and at the same moment a stifled ‘Hey, look out for my glasses!’ told me my diagnosis had been all wrong. This was no thief in the night, but an old crony with whom in boyhood days I had often shared my last bar of milk chocolate.

‘Oh, hullo, Gussie,’ I said. ‘Is that you? I thought you were a burglar.’

There was a touch of asperity in his voice as he replied:

‘Well, I wasn’t.’

‘No, I see that now. Pardonable mistake, though, you must admit.’

‘You nearly gave me heart failure.’

‘I, too, was somewhat taken aback. No one more surprised than the undersigned when you suddenly popped up. I thought I had a clear track.’

‘Where to?’

‘Need you ask? The steak and kidney pie. If you’ve left any.’

‘Yes, there’s quite a bit left.’

‘Was it good?’

‘Delicious.’

‘Then I think I’ll be getting along. Good night, Gussie. Sorry you were troubled.’

Continuing on my way, I think I must have lost my bearings a little. Shaken, no doubt, by the recent encounter. These get-togethers take their toll. At any rate, to cut a long story s., what happened was that as I felt my way along the wall I collided with what turned out to be a grandfather clock, for the existence of which I had not budgeted, and it toppled over with a sound like the delivery of several tons of coal through the roof of a conservatory. Glass crashed, pulleys and things parted from their moorings, and as I stood trying to separate my heart from the front teeth in which it had become entangled, the lights flashed on and I beheld Sir Watkyn Bassett.

It was a moment fraught with embarrassment. It’s bad enough to be caught by your host prowling about his house after hours even when said host is a warm admirer and close personal friend, and I have, I think, made it clear that Pop Bassett was not one of my fans. He could barely stand the sight of me by daylight, and I suppose I looked even worse to him at one o’clock in the morning.

My feeling of having been slapped between the eyes with a custard pie was deepened by the spectacle of his dressing-gown. He was a small man … you got the impression, seeing him, that when they were making magistrates there wasn’t enough material left over when they came to him … and for some reason not easy to explain it nearly always happens that the smaller the ex-magistrate, the louder the dressing-gown. His was a bright purple number with yellow frogs, and I am not deceiving my public when I say that it smote me like a blow, rendering me speechless.

Not that I’d have felt chatty even if he had been upholstered in something quiet in dark blue. I don’t believe you can ever be completely at your ease in the company of someone before whom you’ve stood in the dock saying ‘Yes, your worship’ and ‘No, your worship’ and being told by him that you’re extremely lucky to get off with a fine and not fourteen days without the option. This is particularly so if you have just smashed a grandfather clock whose welfare is no doubt very near his heart. At any rate, be that as it may, he was the one to open the conversation, not me.

‘Good God!’ he said, speaking with every evidence of horror. ‘You!’

A thing I never know, and probably never will, is what to say when somebody says ‘You!’ to me. A mild ‘Oh, hullo’ was the best I could
do
on this occasion, and I felt at the time it wasn’t good. Better, of course, than ‘What ho, there, Bassett!’ but nevertheless not good.

‘Might I ask what you are doing here at this hour, Mr. Wooster?’

Well, I might have laughed a jolly laugh and replied ‘Upsetting grandfather clocks’, keeping it light, as it were, if you know what I mean, but something told me it wouldn’t go so frightfully well. I had what amounted to an inspiration.

‘I came down to get a book. I’d finished my Erle Stanley Gardner and I couldn’t seem to drop off to sleep, so I came to see if I couldn’t pick up something from your shelves. And in the dark I bumped into the clock.’

‘Indeed?’ he said, putting a wealth of sniffiness into the word. A thing about this undersized little son of a bachelor I ought to have mentioned earlier is that during his career on the bench he was one of those unpleasant sarcastic magistrates who get themselves so disliked by the criminal classes. You know the type. Their remarks are generally printed in the evening papers with the word ‘laughter’ after them in brackets, and they count the day lost when they don’t make some unfortunate pickpocket or some wretched drunk and disorderly feel like a piece of cheese. I know that on the occasion when we stood face to face in Bosher Street police court he convulsed the audience with three solid jokes at my expense in the first two minutes, bathing me in confusion. ‘Indeed?’ he said. ‘Might I inquire why you were conducting your literary researches in the dark? It would surely have been well within the scope of even your limited abilities to press a light switch.’

He had me there, of course. The best I could say was that I hadn’t thought of it, and he sniffed a nasty sniff, as much as to suggest that I was just the sort of dead-from-the-neck-up dumb brick who wouldn’t have thought of it. He then turned to the subject of the clock, one which I would willingly have left unventilated. He said he had always valued it highly, it being more or less the apple of his eye.

‘My father bought it many years ago. He took it everywhere with him.’

Here again I might have lightened things by asking him if his parent wouldn’t have found it simpler to have worn a wrist-watch, but I felt once more that he was not in the mood.

‘My father was in the Diplomatic service, and was constantly transferred from one post to another. He was never parted from the clock. It accompanied him in perfect safety from Rome to Vienna, from Vienna to Paris, from Paris to Washington, from Washington to Lisbon. One would have said it was indestructible. But it had still to pass the supreme test of encountering Mr. Wooster, and that was too
much
for it. It did not occur to Mr. Wooster … one cannot think of everything … that light may be obtained by pressing a light switch, so he –’

Here he broke off, not so much because he had finished what he had to say as because at this point in the conversation I sprang on to the top of a large chest which stood some six or seven feet distant from the spot where we were chewing the fat. I may have touched the ground once while in transit, but not more than once and that once not willingly. A cat on hot bricks could not have moved with greater nippiness.

My motives in doing so were founded on a solid basis. Toward the later stages of his observations on the clock I had gradually become aware of a curious sound, as if someone in the vicinity was gargling mouthwash, and looking about me I found myself gazing into the eyes of the dog Bartholomew, which were fixed on me with the sinister intentness which is characteristic of this breed of animal. Aberdeen terriers, possibly owing to their heavy eyebrows, always seem to look at you as if they were in the pulpit of the church of some particularly strict Scottish sect and you were a parishioner of dubious reputation sitting in the front row of the stalls.

Not that I noticed his eyes very much, my attention being riveted on his teeth. He had an excellent set and was baring them, and all I had ever heard of his tendency to bite first and ask questions afterwards passed through my mind in a flash. Hence the leap for life. The Woosters are courageous, but they do not take chances.

Pop Bassett was plainly nonplussed, and it was only when his gaze, too, fell upon Bartholomew that he abandoned what must have been his original theory, that Bertram had cracked under the strain and would do well to lose no time in seeing a good mental specialist. He eyed Bartholomew coldly and addressed him as if he had been up before him in his police court.

‘Go away, sir! Lie down, sir! Go away!’ he said, rasping, if that’s the word.

Well, I could have told him that you can’t talk to an Aberdeen terrier in that tone of voice for, except perhaps for Doberman pinschers, there is no breed of dog quicker to take offence.

‘Really, the way my niece allows this infernal animal to roam at large about the –’

‘House’ I suppose he was about to say, but the word remained unspoken. It was a moment for rapid action, not for speech. The gargling noise had increased in volume, and Bartholomew was flexing his muscles and getting under way. He moved, he stirred, he seemed
to
feel the rush of life along his keel, as the fellow said, and Pop Bassett with a lissomness of which I would not have suspected him took to himself the wings of the dove and floated down beside me on the chest. Whether he clipped a second or two off my time I cannot say, but I rather think he did.

‘This is intolerable!’ he said as I moved courteously to make room for him, and I could see the thing from his point of view. All he asked from life, now that he had made his pile, was to be as far away as possible from Bertram Wooster, and here he was cheek by jowl, as you might say, on a rather uncomfortable chest with him. A certain peevishness was inevitable.

‘Not too good,’ I agreed. ‘Unquestionably open to criticism, the animal’s behaviour.’

‘He must be off his head. He knows me perfectly well. He sees me every day.’

‘Ah,’ I said, putting my finger on the weak spot in his argument, ‘but I don’t suppose he’s ever seen you in that dressing-gown.’

I had been too outspoken. He let me see at once that he had taken umbrage.

‘What’s wrong with my dressing-gown?’ he demanded hotly.

‘A bit on the bright side, don’t you think?’

‘No, I do not.’

‘Well, that’s how it would strike a highly-strung dog.’

I paused here to chuckle softly, and he asked what the devil I was giggling about. I put him abreast.

‘I was merely thinking that I wish we
could
strike the highly-strung dog. The trouble on these occasions is that one is always weaponless. It was the same some years ago when an angry swan chased self and friend on to the roof of a sort of boathouse building at my Aunt Agatha’s place in Hertfordshire. Nothing would have pleased us better than to bung a brick at the bird, or slosh him with a boathook, but we had no brick and were short of boathooks. We had to wait till Jeeves came along, which he eventually did in answer to our cries. It would have thrilled you to have seen Jeeves on that occasion. He advanced dauntlessly and –’

‘Mr. Wooster!’

‘Speaking.’

‘Kindly spare me your reminiscences.’

‘I was merely saying –’

‘Well, don’t.’

Silence fell. On my part, a wounded silence, for all I’d tried to do was take his mind off things with entertaining chit-chat. I moved an
inch
or two away from him in a marked manner. The Woosters do not force their conversation on the unwilling.

All this time Bartholomew had been trying to join us, making a series of energetic springs. Fortunately Providence in its infinite wisdom had given Scotties short legs, and though full of the will to win he could accomplish nothing constructive. However much an Aberdeen terrier may bear ’mid snow and ice a banner with the strange device Excelsior, he nearly always has to be content with dirty looks and the sharp, passionate bark.