The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 4: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.4 (61 page)

I was, of course, able to supply the desired information.

‘She’s the daughter of a well-to-do American millionaire called Stoker, who, I imagine, will be full of strange oaths when he hears she’s married Gussie, the latter being, as you will concede, not everybody’s cup of tea.’

‘So he isn’t going to marry Madeline Bassett?’

‘No, the fixture has been scratched.’

‘That’s definite, is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can’t have been much success as a raisonneur.’

‘No.’

‘Well, I think she’ll make Spink-Bottle a good wife. Seems a very nice girl.’

‘Few better.’

‘But this leaves you in rather a spot, doesn’t it? If Madeline Bassett is now at large, won’t she expect you to fill in?’

‘That, aged relative, is the fear that haunts me.’

‘Has Jeeves nothing to suggest?’

‘He says he hasn’t. But I’ve known him on previous occasions to be temporarily baffled and then suddenly to wave his magic wand and fix everything up. So I haven’t entirely lost hope.’

‘No, I expect you’ll wriggle out of it somehow, as you always do. I wish I had a fiver for every time you’ve been within a step of the altar rails and have managed to escape unscathed. I remember you telling me once that you had faith in your star.’

‘Quite. Still, it’s no good trying to pretend that peril doesn’t loom. It looms like the dickens. The corner in which I find myself is tight.’

‘And you would like to get that way, too, I suppose? All right, you can get back to your orgy when I’ve told you why I rang you up.’

‘Haven’t you?’ I said, surprised.

‘Certainly not. You don’t catch me wasting time and money chatting with you about your amours. Here is the nub. You know that black amber thing of Bassett’s?’

‘The statuette? Of course.’

‘I want to buy it for Tom. I’ve come into a bit of money. The reason I went to London today was to see my lawyer about a legacy someone’s left me. Old school friend, if that’s of any interest to you. It works out at about a couple of thousand quid, and I want you to get that statuette for me.’

‘It’s going to be pretty hard to get away with it.’

‘Oh, you’ll manage. Go as high as fifteen hundred pounds, if you have to. I suppose you couldn’t just slip it in your pocket? It would save a lot of overhead. But probably that’s asking too much of you, so tackle Bassett and get him to sell it.’

‘Well, I’ll do my best. I know how much Uncle Tom covets that statuette. Rely on me, Aunt Dahlia.’

‘That’s my boy.’

I returned to the drawing-room in somewhat pensive mood, for my relations with Pop Bassett were such that it was going to be embarrassing trying to do business with him, but I was relieved that the aged relative had dismissed the idea of purloining the thing. Surprised, too, as well as relieved, because the stern lesson association with her over the years has taught me is that when she wants to do a loved husband a good turn, she is seldom fussy about the methods employed to that end. It was she who had initiated, if that’s the word I want,
the
theft of the cow-creamer, and you would have thought she would have wanted to save money on the current deal. Her view has always been that if a collector pinches something from another collector, it doesn’t count as stealing, and of course there may be something in it. Pop Bassett, when at Brinkley, would unquestionably have looted Uncle Tom’s collection, had he not been closely watched. These collectors have about as much conscience as the smash-and-grab fellows for whom the police are always spreading dragnets.

I was musing along these lines and trying to think what would be the best way of approaching Pop, handicapped as I would be by the fact that he shuddered like a jelly in a high wind every time he saw me and preferred when in my presence to sit and stare before him without uttering, when the door opened, and Spode came in.

THE FIRST THING
that impressed itself on the senses was that he had about as spectacular a black eye as you could meet with in a month of Sundays, and I found myself at a momentary loss to decide how it was best to react to it. I mean, some fellows with bunged-up eyes want sympathy, others prefer that you pretend that you’ve noticed nothing unusual in their appearance. I came to the conclusion that it was wisest to greet him with a careless ‘Ah, Spode,’ and I did so, though I suppose, looking back, that ‘Ah, Sidcup’ would have been more suitable, and it was as I spoke that I became aware that he was glaring at me in a sinister manner with the eye that wasn’t closed. I have spoken of these eyes of his as being capable of opening an oyster at sixty paces, and even when only one of them was functioning the impact of his gaze was disquieting. I have known my Aunt Agatha’s gaze to affect me in the same way.

‘I was looking for you, Wooster,’ he said.

He uttered the words in the unpleasant rasping voice which had once kept his followers on the jump. Before succeeding to his new title he had been one of those Dictators who were fairly common at one time in the metropolis, and had gone about with a mob of underlings wearing black shorts and shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’ or words along those general lines. He gave it up when he became Lord Sidcup, but he was still apt to address all and sundry as if he were ticking off some erring member of his entourage whose shorts had got a patch on them.

‘Oh, were you?’ I said.

‘I was.’ He paused for a moment, continuing to give me the eye, then he said ‘So!’

‘So!’ is another of those things, like ‘You!’ and ‘Ha!’, which it’s never easy to find the right answer to. Nothing in the way of a come-back suggested itself to me, so I merely lit a cigarette in what I intended to be a nonchalant manner, though I may have missed it by a considerable margin, and he proceeded.

‘So I was right!’

‘Eh?’

‘In my suspicions.’

‘Eh?’

‘They have been confirmed.’

‘Eh?’

‘Stop saying “Eh?”, you miserable worm, and listen to me.’

I humoured him. You might have supposed that having so recently seen him knocked base over apex by the Rev. H.P. Pinker and subsequently laid out cold by Emerald Stoker and her basin of beans I would have regarded him with contempt as pretty small-time stuff and rebuked him sharply for calling me a miserable worm, but the idea never so much as crossed my mind. He had suffered reverses, true, but they had left him with his spirit unbroken and the muscles of his brawny arms just as much like iron bands as they had always been, and the way I looked at it was that if he wanted me to go easy on the word ‘Eh?’ he had only to say so.

Continuing to pierce me with the eye that was still on duty, he said:

‘I happened to be passing through the hall just now.’

‘Oh?’

‘I heard you talking on the telephone.’

‘Oh?’

‘You were speaking to your aunt.’

‘Oh?’

‘Don’t keep saying “Oh?”, blast you.’

Well, these restrictions were making it a bit hard for me to hold up my end of the conversation, but there seemed nothing to be done about it. I maintained a rather dignified silence, and he resumed his remarks.

‘Your aunt was urging you to steal Sir Watkyn’s amber statuette.’

‘She wasn’t!’

‘Pardon me. I thought you would try to deny the charge, so I took the precaution of jotting down your actual words. The statuette was mentioned and you said “It’s going to be pretty hard to get away with it.” She then presumably urged you to spare no effort, for you said “Well, I’ll do my best. I know how much Uncle Tom covets that statuette. Rely on me, Aunt Dahlia.” What the devil are you gargling about?’

‘Not gargling,’ I corrected. ‘Laughing lightly. Because you’ve got the whole thing wrong, though I must say the way you’ve managed to record the dialogue does you a good deal of credit. Do you use shorthand?’

‘How do you mean I’ve got it wrong?’

‘Aunt Dahlia was asking me to try to buy the thing from Sir Watkyn.’

He snorted and said ‘Ha!’ and I thought it a bit unjust that he should say ‘Ha!’ if I wasn’t allowed to say ‘Eh?’ and ‘Oh?’ There should always be a certain give and take in these matters, or where are you?

‘Do you expect me to believe that?’

‘Don’t you believe it?’

‘No, I don’t. I’m not an ass.’

This, of course, was a debatable point, as I once heard Jeeves describe it, but I didn’t press it.

‘I know that aunt of yours,’ he proceeded. ‘She would steal the filling out of your back teeth if she thought she could do it without detection.’ He paused for a moment, and I knew that he was thinking of the cow-creamer. He had always – and, I must admit, not without reason – suspected the old flesh-and-blood of being the motive force behind its disappearance, and I imagine it had been a nasty knock to him that nothing could be proved. ‘Well, I strongly advise you, Wooster, not to let her make a catspaw of you this time, because if you’re caught, as you certainly will be, you’ll be for it. Don’t think that Sir Watkyn will hush the thing up to avoid a scandal. You’ll go to prison, that’s where you’ll go. He dislikes you intensely, and nothing would please him more than to be able to give you a long stretch without the option.’

I thought this showed a vindictive spirit in the old wart hog and one that I deplored, but I felt it would be injudicious to say so. I merely nodded understandingly. I was thankful that there was no danger of this contingency, as Jeeves would have called it, arising. Strong in the knowledge that nothing would induce me to pinch their ruddy statuette, I was able to remain calm and nonchalant, or as calm and nonchalant as you can be when a fellow eight foot six in height with one eye bunged up and the other behaving like an oxyacetylene blowpipe is glaring at you.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Spode, ‘it’ll be chokey for you.’

And he was going on to say that he would derive great pleasure from coming on visiting days and making faces at me through the bars, when Pop Bassett returned.

But a very different Bassett from the fizzy rejoicer who had exited so short a while before. Then he had been all buck and beans, as any father would have been whose daughter was not going to marry Gussie Fink-Nottle. Now his face was drawn and his general demeanour that of an incautious luncher who discovers when there is no time to draw back that he has swallowed a rather too elderly oyster.

‘Madeline tells me,’ he began. Then he saw Spode’s eye, and broke off. It was the sort of eye which, even if you have a lot on your mind, you can’t help noticing. ‘Good gracious, Roderick,’ he said, ‘did you have a fall?’

‘Fall, my foot,’ said Spode, ‘I was socked by a curate.’

‘Good heavens! What curate?’

‘There’s only one in these parts, isn’t there?’

‘You mean you were assaulted by Mr. Pinker? You astound me, Roderick.’

Spode spoke with genuine feeling.

‘Not half as much as he astounded
me
. He was more or less of a revelation to me, I don’t mind telling you, because I didn’t know curates had left hooks like that. He’s got a knack of feinting you off balance and then coming in with a sort of corkscrew punch which it’s impossible not to admire. I must get him to teach it to me some time.’

‘You speak as though you bore him no animosity.’

‘Of course I don’t. A very pleasant little scrap with no ill feeling on either side. I’ve nothing against Pinker. The one I’ve got it in for is the cook. She beaned me with a china basin. From behind, of all unsporting things. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and have a word with that cook.’

He was so obviously looking forward to telling Emerald Stoker what he thought of her that it gave me quite a pang to have to break it to him that his errand would be bootless.

‘You can’t,’ I pointed out. ‘She is no longer with us.’

‘Don’t be an ass. She’s in the kitchen, isn’t she?’

‘I’m sorry, no. She’s eloped with Gussie Fink-Nottle. A wedding has been arranged and will take place as soon as the Archbish of Canterbury lets him have a special licence.’

Spode reeled. He had only one eye to stare at me with, but he got all the mileage out of it that was possible.

‘Is that true?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Well, that makes up for everything. If Madeline’s back in circulation … Thank you for telling me, Wooster, old chap.’

‘Don’t mention it, Spode, old man, or, rather, Lord Sidcup, old man.’

For the first time Pop Bassett appeared to become aware that the slight, distinguished-looking young fellow standing on one leg by the sofa was Bertram.

‘Mr. Wooster,’ he said. Then he stopped, swallowed once or twice and groped his way to the table where the drinks were. His manner
was
feverish. Having passed a liberal snootful down the hatch, he was able to resume. ‘I have just seen Madeline.’

‘Oh, yes?’ I said courteously. ‘How is she?’

‘Off her head, in my opinion. She says she is going to marry you.’

Well, I had more or less steeled myself to something along these lines, so except for quivering like a stricken blancmange and letting my lower jaw fall perhaps six inches I betrayed no sign of discomposure, in which respect I differed radically from Spode, who reeled for the second time and uttered a cry like that of a cinnamon bear that has stubbed its toe on a passing rock.

‘You’re joking!’

Pop Bassett shook his head regretfully. His face was haggard.

‘I wish I were, Roderick. I am not surprised that you are upset. I feel the same myself. I am distraught. I can see no light on the horizon. When she told me, it was as if I had been struck by a thunderbolt.’

Spode was staring at me, aghast. Even now, it seemed, he was unable to take in the full horror of the situation. There was incredulity in his one good eye.

‘But she can’t marry
that
!’

‘She seems resolved to.’

‘But he’s worse than that fishfaced blighter.’

‘I agree with you. Far worse. No comparison.’

‘I’ll go and talk to her,’ said Spode, and left us before I could express my resentment at being called
that
.

It was perhaps fortunate that only half a minute later Stiffy and Stinker entered, for if I had been left alone with Pop Bassett, I would have been hard put to it to hit on a topic of conversation calculated to interest, elevate and amuse.