Right Ho, Jeeves
off. And he can’t slide off, because he wants to be with Miss Bassett.
No, Gussie will have to toe the line, and I shall be saved from a job
at which I confess the soul shuddered. Getting up on a platform and
delivering a short, manly speech to a lot of foul school-kids! Golly,
Jeeves. I’ve been through that sort of thing once, what? You remember
that time at the girls’ school?”
“Very vividly, sir.”
“What an ass I made of myself!”
“Certainly I have seen you to better advantage, sir.”
“I think you might bring me just one more of those dynamite specials of
yours, Jeeves. This narrow squeak has made me come over all faint.”
I suppose it must have taken Aunt Dahlia three hours or so to get
back to Brinkley, because it wasn’t till well after lunch that her
telegram arrived. It read like a telegram that had been dispatched in a
white-hot surge of emotion some two minutes after she had read mine.
As follows:
_Am taking legal advice to ascertain whether strangling an idiot
nephew counts as murder. If it doesn’t look out for yourself.
Consider your conduct frozen limit. What do you mean by planting
your loathsome friends on me like this? Do you think Brinkley Court
is a leper colony or what is it? Who is this Spink-Bottle? Love.
Travers._
I had expected some such initial reaction. I replied in temperate vein:
_Not Bottle. Nottle. Regards. Bertie._
Almost immediately after she had dispatched the above heart cry, Gussie
must have arrived, for it wasn’t twenty minutes later when I received
the following:
_Cipher telegram signed by you has reached me here. Runs “Lay off
the sausages. Avoid the ham.” Wire key immediately. Fink-Nottle._
I replied:
_Also kidneys. Cheerio. Bertie._
I had staked all on Gussie making a favourable impression on his
hostess, basing my confidence on the fact that he was one of those
timid, obsequious, teacup-passing, thin-bread-and-butter-offering
yes-men whom women of my Aunt Dahlia’s type nearly always like at
first sight. That I had not overrated my acumen was proved by her next
in order, which, I was pleased to note, assayed a markedly larger
percentage of the milk of human kindness.
As follows:
_Well, this friend of yours has got here, and I must say that for
a friend of yours he seems less sub-human than I had expected. A
bit of a pop-eyed bleater, but on the whole clean and civil, and
certainly most informative about newts. Am considering arranging
series of lectures for him in neighbourhood. All the same I like
your nerve using my house as a summer-hotel resort and shall have
much to say to you on subject when you come down. Expect you
thirtieth. Bring spats. Love. Travers._
To this I riposted:
_On consulting engagement book find impossible come Brinkley Court.
Deeply regret. Toodle-oo. Bertie._
Hers in reply stuck a sinister note:
_Oh, so it’s like that, is it? You and your engagement book,
indeed. Deeply regret my foot. Let me tell you, my lad, that you
will regret it a jolly sight more deeply if you don’t come down.
If you imagine for one moment that you are going to get out of
distributing those prizes, you are very much mistaken. Deeply
regret Brinkley Court hundred miles from London, as unable hit you
with a brick. Love. Travers._
I then put my fortune to the test, to win or lose it all. It was not a
moment for petty economies. I let myself go regardless of expense:
_No, but dash it, listen. Honestly, you don’t want me. Get
Fink-Nottle distribute prizes. A born distributor, who will do you
credit. Confidently anticipate Augustus Fink-Nottle as Master of
Revels on thirty-first inst. would make genuine sensation. Do not
miss this great chance, which may never occur again. Tinkerty-tonk.
Bertie._
There was an hour of breathless suspense, and then the joyful tidings
arrived:
_Well, all right. Something in what you say, I suppose. Consider
you treacherous worm and contemptible, spineless cowardly custard,
but have booked Spink-Bottle. Stay where you are, then, and I hope
you get run over by an omnibus. Love. Travers._
The relief, as you may well imagine, was stupendous. A great weight
seemed to have rolled off my mind. It was as if somebody had been
pouring Jeeves’s pick-me-ups into me through a funnel. I sang as I
dressed for dinner that night. At the Drones I was so gay and cheery
that there were several complaints. And when I got home and turned into
the old bed, I fell asleep like a little child within five minutes of
inserting the person between the sheets. It seemed to me that the whole
distressing affair might now be considered definitely closed.
Conceive my astonishment, therefore, when waking on the morrow and
sitting up to dig into the morning tea-cup, I beheld on the tray
another telegram.
My heart sank. Could Aunt Dahlia have slept on it and changed her mind?
Could Gussie, unable to face the ordeal confronting him, have legged
it during the night down a water-pipe? With these speculations racing
through the bean, I tore open the envelope And as I noted contents I
uttered a startled yip.
“Sir?” said Jeeves, pausing at the door.
I read the thing again. Yes, I had got the gist all right. No, I had
not been deceived in the substance.
“Jeeves,” I said, “do you know what?”
“No, sir.”
“You know my cousin Angela?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know young Tuppy Glossop?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They’ve broken off their engagement.”
“I am sorry to hear that, sir.”
“I have here a communication from Aunt Dahlia, specifically stating
this. I wonder what the row was about.”
“I could not say, sir.”
“Of course you couldn’t. Don’t be an ass, Jeeves.”
“No, sir.”
I brooded. I was deeply moved.
“Well, this means that we shall have to go down to Brinkley today. Aunt
Dahlia is obviously all of a twitter, and my place is by her side.
You had better pack this morning, and catch that 12.45 train with the
luggage. I have a lunch engagement, so will follow in the car.”
“Very good, sir.”
I brooded some more.
“I must say this has come as a great shock to me, Jeeves.”
“No doubt, sir.”
“A very great shock. Angela and Tuppy.... Tut, tut! Why, they seemed
like the paper on the wall. Life is full of sadness, Jeeves.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Still, there it is.”
“Undoubtedly, sir.”
“Right ho, then. Switch on the bath.”
“Very good, sir.”
-7-
I meditated pretty freely as I drove down to Brinkley in the old
two-seater that afternoon. The news of this rift or rupture of Angela’s
and Tuppy’s had disturbed me greatly.
The projected match, you see, was one on which I had always looked
with kindly approval. Too often, when a chap of your acquaintance is
planning to marry a girl you know, you find yourself knitting the brow
a bit and chewing the lower lip dubiously, feeling that he or she, or
both, should be warned while there is yet time.
But I have never felt anything of this nature about Tuppy and Angela.
Tuppy, when not making an ass of himself, is a soundish sort of egg.
So is Angela a soundish sort of egg. And, as far as being in love was
concerned, it had always seemed to me that you wouldn’t have been far
out in describing them as two hearts that beat as one.
True, they had had their little tiffs, notably on the occasion when
Tuppy--with what he said was fearless honesty and I considered thorough
goofiness--had told Angela that her new hat made her look like a
Pekingese. But in every romance you have to budget for the occasional
dust-up, and after that incident I had supposed that he had learned his
lesson and that from then on life would be one grand, sweet song.
And now this wholly unforeseen severing of diplomatic relations had
popped up through a trap.
I gave the thing the cream of the Wooster brain all the way down,
but it continued to beat me what could have caused the outbreak of
hostilities, and I bunged my foot sedulously on the accelerator in
order to get to Aunt Dahlia with the greatest possible speed and learn
the inside history straight from the horse’s mouth. And what with
all six cylinders hitting nicely, I made good time and found myself
closeted with the relative shortly before the hour of the evening
cocktail.
She seemed glad to see me. In fact, she actually said she was glad to
see me--a statement no other aunt on the list would have committed
herself to, the customary reaction of these near and dear ones to the
spectacle of Bertram arriving for a visit being a sort of sick horror.
“Decent of you to rally round, Bertie,” she said.
“My place was by your side, Aunt Dahlia,” I responded.
I could see at a g. that the unfortunate affair had got in amongst her
in no uncertain manner. Her usually cheerful map was clouded, and the
genial smile conspic. by its a. I pressed her hand sympathetically, to
indicate that my heart bled for her.
“Bad show this, my dear old flesh and blood,” I said. “I’m afraid
you’ve been having a sticky time. You must be worried.”
She snorted emotionally. She looked like an aunt who has just bitten
into a bad oyster.
“Worried is right. I haven’t had a peaceful moment since I got back
from Cannes. Ever since I put my foot across this blasted threshold,”
said Aunt Dahlia, returning for the nonce to the hearty _argot_ of the
hunting field, “everything’s been at sixes and sevens. First there was
that mix-up about the prize-giving.”
She paused at this point and gave me a look. “I had been meaning to
speak freely to you about your behaviour in that matter, Bertie,” she
said. “I had some good things all stored up. But, as you’ve rallied
round like this, I suppose I shall have to let you off. And, anyway, it
is probably all for the best that you evaded your obligations in that
sickeningly craven way. I have an idea that this Spink-Bottle of yours
is going to be good. If only he can keep off newts.”
“Has he been talking about newts?”
“He has. Fixing me with a glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner. But
if that was the worst I had to bear, I wouldn’t mind. What I’m worrying
about is what Tom says when he starts talking.”
“Uncle Tom?”
“I wish there was something else you could call him except ‘Uncle
Tom’,” said Aunt Dahlia a little testily. “Every time you do it, I
expect to see him turn black and start playing the banjo. Yes, Uncle
Tom, if you must have it. I shall have to tell him soon about losing
all that money at baccarat, and, when I do, he will go up like a
rocket.”
“Still, no doubt Time, the great healer----”
“Time, the great healer, be blowed. I’ve got to get a cheque for five
hundred pounds out of him for _Milady’s Boudoir_ by August the third at
the latest.”
I was concerned. Apart from a nephew’s natural interest in an aunt’s
refined weekly paper, I had always had a soft spot in my heart for
_Milady’s Boudoir_ ever since I contributed that article to it on What
the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing. Sentimental, possibly, but we old
journalists do have these feelings.
“Is the _Boudoir_ on the rocks?”
“It will be if Tom doesn’t cough up. It needs help till it has turned
the corner.”
“But wasn’t it turning the corner two years ago?”
“It was. And it’s still at it. Till you’ve run a weekly paper for
women, you don’t know what corners are.”
“And you think the chances of getting into uncle--into my uncle by
marriage’s ribs are slight?”
“I’ll tell you, Bertie. Up till now, when these subsidies were
required, I have always been able to come to Tom in the gay, confident
spirit of an only child touching an indulgent father for chocolate
cream. But he’s just had a demand from the income-tax people for an
additional fifty-eight pounds, one and threepence, and all he’s been
talking about since I got back has been ruin and the sinister trend of