Right Ho, Jeeves
“So now you understand why, as soon as I can get you clear of this
damned bench, I am going to tear you limb from limb. Why they have
these bally benches in gardens,” said Tuppy discontentedly, “is more
than I can see. They only get in the way.”
He ceased, and, grabbing out, missed me by a hair’s breadth.
It was a moment for swift thinking, and it is at such moments, as I
have already indicated, that Bertram Wooster is at his best. I suddenly
remembered the recent misunderstanding with the Bassett, and with a
flash of clear vision saw that this was where it was going to come in
handy.
“You’ve got it all wrong, Tuppy,” I said, moving to the left. “True,
I saw a lot of Angela, but my dealings with her were on a basis from
start to finish of the purest and most wholesome camaraderie. I can
prove it. During that sojourn in Cannes my affections were engaged
elsewhere.”
“What?”
“Engaged elsewhere. My affections. During that sojourn.”
I had struck the right note. He stopped sidling. His clutching hand
fell to his side.
“Is that true?”
“Quite official.”
“Who was she?”
“My dear Tuppy, does one bandy a woman’s name?”
“One does if one doesn’t want one’s ruddy head pulled off.”
I saw that it was a special case.
“Madeline Bassett,” I said.
“Who?”
“Madeline Bassett.”
He seemed stunned.
“You stand there and tell me you were in love with that Bassett
disaster?”
“I wouldn’t call her ‘that Bassett disaster’, Tuppy. Not respectful.”
“Dash being respectful. I want the facts. You deliberately assert that
you loved that weird Gawd-help-us?”
“I don’t see why you should call her a weird Gawd-help-us, either. A
very charming and beautiful girl. Odd in some of her views perhaps--one
does not quite see eye to eye with her in the matter of stars and
rabbits--but not a weird Gawd-help-us.”
“Anyway, you stick to it that you were in love with her?”
“I do.”
“It sounds thin to me, Wooster, very thin.”
I saw that it would be necessary to apply the finishing touch.
“I must ask you to treat this as entirely confidential, Glossop, but
I may as well inform you that it is not twenty-four hours since she
turned me down.”
“Turned you down?”
“Like a bedspread. In this very garden.”
“Twenty-four hours?”
“Call it twenty-five. So you will readily see that I can’t be the chap,
if any, who stole Angela from you at Cannes.”
And I was on the brink of adding that I wouldn’t touch Angela with a
barge pole, when I remembered I had said it already and it hadn’t gone
frightfully well. I desisted, therefore.
My manly frankness seemed to be producing good results. The homicidal
glare was dying out of Tuppy’s eyes. He had the aspect of a hired
assassin who had paused to think things over.
“I see,” he said, at length. “All right, then. Sorry you were troubled.”
“Don’t mention it, old man,” I responded courteously.
For the first time since the bushes had begun to pour forth Glossops,
Bertram Wooster could be said to have breathed freely. I don’t say
I actually came out from behind the bench, but I did let go of it,
and with something of the relief which those three chaps in the Old
Testament must have experienced after sliding out of the burning fiery
furnace, I even groped tentatively for my cigarette case.
The next moment a sudden snort made me take my fingers off it as if it
had bitten me. I was distressed to note in the old friend a return of
the recent frenzy.
“What the hell did you mean by telling her that I used to be covered
with ink when I was a kid?”
“My dear Tuppy----”
“I was almost finickingly careful about my personal cleanliness as a
boy. You could have eaten your dinner off me.”
“Quite. But----”
“And all that stuff about having no soul. I’m crawling with soul. And
being looked on as an outsider at the Drones----”
“But, my dear old chap, I explained that. It was all part of my ruse or
scheme.”
“It was, was it? Well, in future do me a favour and leave me out of
your foul ruses.”
“Just as you say, old boy.”
“All right, then. That’s understood.”
He relapsed into silence, standing with folded arms, staring before
him rather like a strong, silent man in a novel when he’s just been
given the bird by the girl and is thinking of looking in at the Rocky
Mountains and bumping off a few bears. His manifest pippedness excited
my compash, and I ventured a kindly word.
“I don’t suppose you know what _au pied de la lettre_ means, Tuppy, but
that’s how I don’t think you ought to take all that stuff Angela was
saying just now too much.”
He seemed interested.
“What the devil,” he asked, “are you talking about?”
I saw that I should have to make myself clearer.
“Don’t take all that guff of hers too literally, old man. You know what
girls are like.”
“I do,” he said, with another snort that came straight up from his
insteps. “And I wish I’d never met one.”
“I mean to say, it’s obvious that she must have spotted you in those
bushes and was simply talking to score off you. There you were, I mean,
if you follow the psychology, and she saw you, and in that impulsive
way girls have, she seized the opportunity of ribbing you a bit--just
told you a few home truths, I mean to say.”
“Home truths?”
“That’s right.”
He snorted once more, causing me to feel rather like royalty receiving
a twenty-one gun salute from the fleet. I can’t remember ever having
met a better right-and-left-hand snorter.
“What do you mean, ‘home truths’? I’m not fat.”
“No, no.”
“And what’s wrong with the colour of my hair?”
“Quite in order, Tuppy, old man. The hair, I mean.”
“And I’m not a bit thin on the top.... What the dickens are you
grinning about?”
“Not grinning. Just smiling slightly. I was conjuring up a sort of
vision, if you know what I mean, of you as seen through Angela’s eyes.
Fat in the middle and thin on the top. Rather funny.”
“You think it funny, do you?”
“Not a bit.”
“You’d better not.”
“Quite.”
It seemed to me that the conversation was becoming difficult again.
I wished it could be terminated. And so it was. For at this moment
something came shimmering through the laurels in the quiet evenfall,
and I perceived that it was Angela.
She was looking sweet and saintlike, and she had a plate of sandwiches
in her hand. Ham, I was to discover later.
“If you see Mr. Glossop anywhere, Bertie,” she said, her eyes resting
dreamily on Tuppy’s facade, “I wish you would give him these. I’m so
afraid he may be hungry, poor fellow. It’s nearly ten o’clock, and he
hasn’t eaten a morsel since dinner. I’ll just leave them on this bench.”
She pushed off, and it seemed to me that I might as well go with her.
Nothing to keep me here, I mean. We moved towards the house, and
presently from behind us there sounded in the night the splintering
crash of a well-kicked plate of ham sandwiches, accompanied by the
muffled oaths of a strong man in his wrath.
“How still and peaceful everything is,” said Angela.
-16-
Sunshine was gilding the grounds of Brinkley Court and the ear detected
a marked twittering of birds in the ivy outside the window when I woke
next morning to a new day. But there was no corresponding sunshine in
Bertram Wooster’s soul and no answering twitter in his heart as he
sat up in bed, sipping his cup of strengthening tea. It could not be
denied that to Bertram, reviewing the happenings of the previous night,
the Tuppy-Angela situation seemed more or less to have slipped a cog.
With every desire to look for the silver lining, I could not but feel
that the rift between these two haughty spirits had now reached such
impressive proportions that the task of bridging same would be beyond
even my powers.
I am a shrewd observer, and there had been something in Tuppy’s manner
as he booted that plate of ham sandwiches that seemed to tell me that
he would not lightly forgive.
In these circs., I deemed it best to shelve their problem for the nonce
and turn the mind to the matter of Gussie, which presented a brighter
picture.
With regard to Gussie, everything was in train. Jeeves’s morbid
scruples about lacing the chap’s orange juice had put me to a good deal
of trouble, but I had surmounted every obstacle in the old Wooster
way. I had secured an abundance of the necessary spirit, and it was
now lying in its flask in the drawer of the dressing-table. I had also
ascertained that the jug, duly filled, would be standing on a shelf in
the butler’s pantry round about the hour of one. To remove it from that
shelf, sneak it up to my room, and return it, laced, in good time for
the midday meal would be a task calling, no doubt, for address, but in
no sense an exacting one.
It was with something of the emotions of one preparing a treat for a
deserving child that I finished my tea and rolled over for that extra
spot of sleep which just makes all the difference when there is man’s
work to be done and the brain must be kept clear for it.
And when I came downstairs an hour or so later, I knew how right I
had been to formulate this scheme for Gussie’s bucking up. I ran into
him on the lawn, and I could see at a glance that if ever there was a
man who needed a snappy stimulant, it was he. All nature, as I have
indicated, was smiling, but not Augustus Fink-Nottle. He was walking
round in circles, muttering something about not proposing to detain us
long, but on this auspicious occasion feeling compelled to say a few
words.
“Ah, Gussie,” I said, arresting him as he was about to start another
lap. “A lovely morning, is it not?”
Even if I had not been aware of it already, I could have divined from
the abruptness with which he damned the lovely morning that he was not
in merry mood. I addressed myself to the task of bringing the roses
back to his cheeks.
“I’ve got good news for you, Gussie.”
He looked at me with a sudden sharp interest.
“Has Market Snodsbury Grammar School burned down?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Have mumps broken out? Is the place closed on account of measles?”
“No, no.”
“Then what do you mean you’ve got good news?”
I endeavoured to soothe.
“You mustn’t take it so hard, Gussie. Why worry about a laughably
simple job like distributing prizes at a school?”
“Laughably simple, eh? Do you realize I’ve been sweating for days and
haven’t been able to think of a thing to say yet, except that I won’t
detain them long. You bet I won’t detain them long. I’ve been timing my
speech, and it lasts five seconds. What the devil am I to say, Bertie?
What do you say when you’re distributing prizes?”
I considered. Once, at my private school, I had won a prize for
Scripture knowledge, so I suppose I ought to have been full of inside
stuff. But memory eluded me.
Then something emerged from the mists.
“You say the race is not always to the swift.”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s a good gag. It generally gets a hand.”
“I mean, why isn’t it? Why isn’t the race to the swift?”
“Ah, there you have me. But the nibs say it isn’t.”
“But what does it mean?”
“I take it it’s supposed to console the chaps who haven’t won prizes.”
“What’s the good of that to me? I’m not worrying about them. It’s the
ones that have won prizes that I’m worrying about, the little blighters
who will come up on the platform. Suppose they make faces at me.”
“They won’t.”
“How do you know they won’t? It’s probably the first thing they’ll
think of. And even if they don’t--Bertie, shall I tell you something?”
“What?”
“I’ve a good mind to take that tip of yours and have a drink.”
I smiled. He little knew, about summed up what I was thinking.
“Oh, you’ll be all right,” I said.
He became fevered again.
“How do you know I’ll be all right? I’m sure to blow up in my lines.”
“Tush!”
“Or drop a prize.”
“Tut!”