Right Ho, Jeeves
at my best when the situation seems to call for a certain soupiness,
and I’ve heard other members of the Drones say the same thing about
themselves. I remember Pongo Twistleton telling me that he was out in a
gondola with a girl by moonlight once, and the only time he spoke was
to tell her that old story about the chap who was so good at swimming
that they made him a traffic cop in Venice.
Fell rather flat, he assured me, and it wasn’t much later when the girl
said she thought it was getting a little chilly and how about pushing
back to the hotel.
So now, as I say, the talk rather hung fire. It had been all very well
for me to promise Gussie that I would cut loose to this girl about
aching hearts, but you want a cue for that sort of thing. And when,
toddling along, we reached the edge of the lake and she finally spoke,
conceive my chagrin when I discovered that what she was talking about
was stars.
Not a bit of good to me.
“Oh, look,” she said. She was a confirmed Oh-looker. I had noticed this
at Cannes, where she had drawn my attention in this manner on various
occasions to such diverse objects as a French actress, a Provençal
filling station, the sunset over the Estorels, Michael Arlen, a man
selling coloured spectacles, the deep velvet blue of the Mediterranean,
and the late mayor of New York in a striped one-piece bathing suit.
“Oh, look at that sweet little star up there all by itself.”
I saw the one she meant, a little chap operating in a detached sort of
way above a spinney.
“Yes,” I said.
“I wonder if it feels lonely.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t think so.”
“A fairy must have been crying.”
“Eh?”
“Don’t you remember? ‘Every time a fairy sheds a tear, a wee bit star
is born in the Milky Way.’ Have you ever thought that, Mr. Wooster?”
I never had. Most improbable, I considered, and it didn’t seem to me to
check up with her statement that the stars were God’s daisy chain. I
mean, you can’t have it both ways.
However, I was in no mood to dissect and criticize. I saw that I had
been wrong in supposing that the stars were not germane to the issue.
Quite a decent cue they had provided, and I leaped on it Promptly:
“Talking of shedding tears----”
But she was now on the subject of rabbits, several of which were
messing about in the park to our right.
“Oh, look. The little bunnies!”
“Talking of shedding tears----”
“Don’t you love this time of the evening, Mr. Wooster, when the sun has
gone to bed and all the bunnies come out to have their little suppers?
When I was a child, I used to think that rabbits were gnomes, and that
if I held my breath and stayed quite still, I should see the fairy
queen.”
Indicating with a reserved gesture that this was just the sort of loony
thing I should have expected her to think as a child, I returned to the
point.
“Talking of shedding tears,” I said firmly, “it may interest you to
know that there is an aching heart in Brinkley Court.”
This held her. She cheesed the rabbit theme. Her face, which had
been aglow with what I supposed was a pretty animation, clouded. She
unshipped a sigh that sounded like the wind going out of a rubber duck.
“Ah, yes. Life is very sad, isn’t it?”
“It is for some people. This aching heart, for instance.”
“Those wistful eyes of hers! Drenched irises. And they used to dance
like elves of delight. And all through a foolish misunderstanding about
a shark. What a tragedy misunderstandings are. That pretty romance
broken and over just because Mr. Glossop would insist that it was a
flatfish.”
I saw that she had got the wires crossed.
“I’m not talking about Angela.”
“But her heart is aching.”
“I know it’s aching. But so is somebody else’s.”
She looked at me, perplexed.
“Somebody else? Mr. Glossop’s, you mean?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Mrs. Travers’s?”
The exquisite code of politeness of the Woosters prevented me clipping
her one on the ear-hole, but I would have given a shilling to be able
to do it. There seemed to me something deliberately fat-headed in the
way she persisted in missing the gist.
“No, not Aunt Dahlia’s, either.”
“I’m sure she is dreadfully upset.”
“Quite. But this heart I’m talking about isn’t aching because of
Tuppy’s row with Angela. It’s aching for a different reason altogether.
I mean to say--dash it, you know why hearts ache!”
She seemed to shimmy a bit. Her voice, when she spoke, was whispery:
“You mean--for love?”
“Absolutely. Right on the bull’s-eye. For love.”
“Oh, Mr. Wooster!”
“I take it you believe in love at first sight?”
“I do, indeed.”
“Well, that’s what happened to this aching heart. It fell in love at
first sight, and ever since it’s been eating itself out, as I believe
the expression is.”
There was a silence. She had turned away and was watching a duck out
on the lake. It was tucking into weeds, a thing I’ve never been able
to understand anyone wanting to do. Though I suppose, if you face it
squarely, they’re no worse than spinach. She stood drinking it in for a
bit, and then it suddenly stood on its head and disappeared, and this
seemed to break the spell.
“Oh, Mr. Wooster!” she said again, and from the tone of her voice, I
could see that I had got her going.
“For you, I mean to say,” I proceeded, starting to put in the fancy
touches. I dare say you have noticed on these occasions that the
difficulty is to plant the main idea, to get the general outline of the
thing well fixed. The rest is mere detail work. I don’t say I became
glib at this juncture, but I certainly became a dashed glibber than I
had been.
“It’s having the dickens of a time. Can’t eat, can’t sleep--all for
love of you. And what makes it all so particularly rotten is that
it--this aching heart--can’t bring itself up to the scratch and tell
you the position of affairs, because your profile has gone and given
it cold feet. Just as it is about to speak, it catches sight of you
sideways, and words fail it. Silly, of course, but there it is.”
I heard her give a gulp, and I saw that her eyes had become moistish.
Drenched irises, if you care to put it that way.
“Lend you a handkerchief?”
“No, thank you. I’m quite all right.”
It was more than I could say for myself. My efforts had left me weak.
I don’t know if you suffer in the same way, but with me the act of
talking anything in the nature of real mashed potatoes always induces a
sort of prickly sensation and a hideous feeling of shame, together with
a marked starting of the pores.
I remember at my Aunt Agatha’s place in Hertfordshire once being put on
the spot and forced to enact the role of King Edward III saying goodbye
to that girl of his, Fair Rosamund, at some sort of pageant in aid of
the Distressed Daughters of the Clergy. It involved some rather warmish
medieval dialogue, I recall, racy of the days when they called a spade
a spade, and by the time the whistle blew, I’ll bet no Daughter of the
Clergy was half as distressed as I was. Not a dry stitch.
My reaction now was very similar. It was a highly liquid Bertram who,
hearing his _vis-à-vis_ give a couple of hiccups and start to speak
bent an attentive ear.
“Please don’t say any more, Mr. Wooster.”
Well, I wasn’t going to, of course.
“I understand.”
I was glad to hear this.
“Yes, I understand. I won’t be so silly as to pretend not to know what
you mean. I suspected this at Cannes, when you used to stand and stare
at me without speaking a word, but with whole volumes in your eyes.”
If Angela’s shark had bitten me in the leg, I couldn’t have leaped
more convulsively. So tensely had I been concentrating on Gussie’s
interests that it hadn’t so much as crossed my mind that another and an
unfortunate construction could be placed on those words of mine. The
persp., already bedewing my brow, became a regular Niagara.
My whole fate hung upon a woman’s word. I mean to say, I couldn’t
back out. If a girl thinks a man is proposing to her, and on that
understanding books him up, he can’t explain to her that she has got
hold of entirely the wrong end of the stick and that he hadn’t the
smallest intention of suggesting anything of the kind. He must simply
let it ride. And the thought of being engaged to a girl who talked
openly about fairies being born because stars blew their noses, or
whatever it was, frankly appalled me.
She was carrying on with her remarks, and as I listened I clenched my
fists till I shouldn’t wonder if the knuckles didn’t stand out white
under the strain. It seemed as if she would never get to the nub.
“Yes, all through those days at Cannes I could see what you were trying
to say. A girl always knows. And then you followed me down here, and
there was that same dumb, yearning look in your eyes when we met this
evening. And then you were so insistent that I should come out and walk
with you in the twilight. And now you stammer out those halting words.
No, this does not come as a surprise. But I am sorry----”
The word was like one of Jeeves’s pick-me-ups. Just as if a glassful of
meat sauce, red pepper, and the yolk of an egg--though, as I say, I am
convinced that these are not the sole ingredients--had been shot into
me, I expanded like some lovely flower blossoming in the sunshine. It
was all right, after all. My guardian angel had not been asleep at the
switch.
“--but I am afraid it is impossible.”
She paused.
“Impossible,” she repeated.
I had been so busy feeling saved from the scaffold that I didn’t get on
to it for a moment that an early reply was desired.
“Oh, right ho,” I said hastily.
“I’m sorry.”
“Quite all right.”
“Sorrier than I can say.”
“Don’t give it another thought.”
“We can still be friends.”
“Oh, rather.”
“Then shall we just say no more about it; keep what has happened as a
tender little secret between ourselves?”
“Absolutely.”
“We will. Like something lovely and fragrant laid away in lavender.”
“In lavender--right.”
There was a longish pause. She was gazing at me in a divinely
pitying sort of way, much as if I had been a snail she had happened
accidentally to bring her short French vamp down on, and I longed to
tell her that it was all right, and that Bertram, so far from being the
victim of despair, had never felt fizzier in his life. But, of course,
one can’t do that sort of thing. I simply said nothing, and stood there
looking brave.
“I wish I could,” she murmured.
“Could?” I said, for my attensh had been wandering.
“Feel towards you as you would like me to feel.”
“Oh, ah.”
“But I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“Absolutely O.K. Faults on both sides, no doubt.”
“Because I am fond of you, Mr.--no, I think I must call you Bertie. May
I?”
“Oh, rather.”
“Because we are real friends.”
“Quite.”
“I do like you, Bertie. And if things were different--I wonder----”
“Eh?”
“After all, we are real friends.... We have this common memory.... You
have a right to know.... I don’t want you to think----Life is such a
muddle, isn’t it?”
To many men, no doubt, these broken utterances would have appeared
mere drooling and would have been dismissed as such. But the Woosters
are quicker-witted than the ordinary and can read between the lines. I
suddenly divined what it was that she was trying to get off the chest.
“You mean there’s someone else?”
She nodded.
“You’re in love with some other bloke?”
She nodded.
“Engaged, what?”
This time she shook the pumpkin.
“No, not engaged.”
Well, that was something, of course. Nevertheless, from the way she
spoke, it certainly looked as if poor old Gussie might as well scratch
his name off the entry list, and I didn’t at all like the prospect of
having to break the bad news to him. I had studied the man closely, and
it was my conviction that this would about be his finish.