-11-

-11-

The makings were neatly laid out on a side-table, and to pour into a glass an inch or so of the raw spirit and shoosh some soda-water on top of it was with me the work of a moment. This done, I retired to an arm-chair and put my feet up, sipping the mixture with carefree enjoyment, rather like Caesar having one in his tent the day he overcame the Nervii.

As I let the mind dwell on what must even now be taking place in that peaceful garden, I felt bucked and uplifted. Though never for an instant faltering in my opinion that Augustus Fink-Nottle was Nature’s final word in cloth-headed guffins, I liked the man, wished him well, and could not have felt more deeply involved in the success of his wooing if I, and not he, had been under the ether.

The thought that by this time he might quite easily have completed the preliminary pourparlers and be deep in an informal discussion of honeymoon plans was very pleasant to me.

Of course, considering the sort of girl Madeline Bassett was—stars and rabbits and all that, I mean—you might say that a sober sadness would have been more fitting. But in these matters you have got to realize that tastes differ. The impulse of right-thinking men might be to run a mile when they saw the Bassett, but for some reason she appealed to the deeps in Gussie, so that was that.

I had reached this point in my meditations, when I was aroused by the sound of the door opening. Somebody came in and started moving like a leopard toward the side-table and, lowering the feet, I perceived that it was Tuppy Glossop.

The sight of him gave me a momentary twinge of remorse, reminding me, as it did, that in the excitement of getting Gussie fixed up I had rather forgotten about this other client. It is often that way when you’re trying to run two cases at once.

However, Gussie now being off my mind, I was prepared to devote my whole attention to the Glossop problem.

I had been much pleased by the way he had carried out the task assigned him at the dinner-table. No easy one, I can assure you, for the browsing and sluicing had been of the highest quality, and there had been one dish in particular—I allude to the nonnettes de poulet Agnès Sorel—which might well have broken down the most iron resolution. But he had passed it up like a professional fasting man, and I was proud of him.

“Oh, hullo, Tuppy,” I said, “I wanted to see you.”

He turned, snifter in hand, and it was easy to see that his privations had tried him sorely. He was looking like a wolf on the steppes of Russia which has seen its peasant shin up a high tree.

“Yes?” he said, rather unpleasantly. “Well, here I am.”

“Well?”

“How do you mean——well?”

“Make your report.”

“What report?”

“Have you nothing to tell me about Angela?”

“Only that she’s a blister.”

I was concerned.

“Hasn’t she come clustering round you yet?”

“She has not.”

“Very odd.”

“Why odd?”

“She must have noted your lack of appetite.”

He barked raspingly, as if he were having trouble with the tonsils of the soul.

“Lack of appetite! I’m as hollow as the Grand Canyon.”

“Courage, Tuppy! Think of Gandhi.”

“What about Gandhi?”

“He hasn’t had a square meal for years.”

“Nor have I. Or I could swear I hadn’t. Gandhi, my left foot.”

I saw that it might be best to let the Gandhi motif slide. I went back to where we had started.

“She’s probably looking for you now.”

“Who is? Angela?”

“Yes. She must have noticed your supreme sacrifice.”

“I don’t suppose she noticed it at all, the little fathead. I’ll bet it didn’t register in any way whatsoever.”

“Come, Tuppy,” I urged, “this is morbid. Don’t take this gloomy view. She must at least have spotted that you refused those nonnettes de poulet Agnès Sorel. It was a sensational renunciation and stuck out like a sore thumb. And the cèpes à la Rossini——”

A hoarse cry broke from his twisted lips:

“Will you stop it, Bertie! Do you think I am made of marble? Isn’t it bad enough to have sat watching one of Anatole’s supremest dinners flit by, course after course, without having you making a song about it? Don’t remind me of those nonnettes. I can’t stand it.”

I endeavoured to hearten and console.

“Be brave, Tuppy. Fix your thoughts on that cold steak-and-kidney pie in the larder. As the Good Book says, it cometh in the morning.”

“Yes, in the morning. And it’s now about half-past nine at night. You would bring that pie up, wouldn’t you? Just when I was trying to keep my mind off it.”

I saw what he meant. Hours must pass before he could dig into that pie. I dropped the subject, and we sat for a pretty good time in silence. Then he rose and began to pace the room in an overwrought sort of way, like a zoo lion who has heard the dinner-gong go and is hoping the keeper won’t forget him in the general distribution. I averted my gaze tactfully, but I could hear him kicking chairs and things. It was plain that the man’s soul was in travail and his blood pressure high.

Presently he returned to his seat, and I saw that he was looking at me intently. There was that about his demeanour that led me to think that he had something to communicate.

Nor was I wrong. He tapped me significantly on the knee and spoke:

“Bertie.”

“Hullo?”

“Shall I tell you something?”

“Certainly, old bird,” I said cordially. “I was just beginning to feel that the scene could do with a bit more dialogue.”

“This business of Angela and me.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve been putting in a lot of solid thinking about it.”

“Oh, yes?”

“I have analysed the situation pitilessly, and one thing stands out as clear as dammit. There has been dirty work afoot.”

“I don’t get you.”

“All right. Let me review the facts. Up to the time she went to Cannes Angela loved me. She was all over me. I was the blue-eyed boy in every sense of the term. You’ll admit that?”

“Indisputably.”

“And directly she came back we had this bust-up.”

“Quite.”

“About nothing.”

“Oh, dash it, old man, nothing? You were a bit tactless, what, about her shark.”

“I was frank and candid about her shark. And that’s my point. Do you seriously believe that a trifling disagreement about sharks would make a girl hand a man his hat, if her heart were really his?”

“Certainly.”

It beats me why he couldn’t see it. But then poor old Tuppy has never been very hot on the finer shades. He’s one of those large, tough, football-playing blokes who lack the more delicate sensibilities, as I’ve heard Jeeves call them. Excellent at blocking a punt or walking across an opponent’s face in cleated boots, but not so good when it comes to understanding the highly-strung female temperament. It simply wouldn’t occur to him that a girl might be prepared to give up her life’s happiness rather than waive her shark.

“Rot! It was just a pretext.”

“What was?”

“This shark business. She wanted to get rid of me, and grabbed at the first excuse.”

“No, no.”

“I tell you she did.”

“But what on earth would she want to get rid of you for?”

“Exactly. That’s the very question I asked myself. And here’s the answer: Because she has fallen in love with somebody else. It sticks out a mile. There’s no other possible solution. She goes to Cannes all for me, she comes back all off me. Obviously during those two months, she must have transferred her affections to some foul blister she met out there.”

“No, no.”

“Don’t keep saying ‘No, no’. She must have done. Well, I’ll tell you one thing, and you can take this as official. If ever I find this slimy, slithery snake in the grass, he had better make all the necessary arrangements at his favourite nursing-home without delay, because I am going to be very rough with him. I propose, if and when found, to take him by his beastly neck, shake him till he froths, and pull him inside out and make him swallow himself.”

With which words he biffed off; and I, having given him a minute or two to get out of the way, rose and made for the drawing-room. The tendency of females to roost in drawing-rooms after dinner being well marked, I expected to find Angela there. It was my intention to have a word with Angela.

To Tuppy’s theory that some insinuating bird had stolen the girl’s heart from him at Cannes I had given, as I have indicated, little credence, considering it the mere unbalanced apple sauce of a bereaved man. It was, of course, the shark, and nothing but the shark, that had caused love’s young dream to go temporarily off the boil, and I was convinced that a word or two with the cousin at this juncture would set everything right.

For, frankly, I thought it incredible that a girl of her natural sweetness and tender-heartedness should not have been moved to her foundations by what she had seen at dinner that night. Even Seppings, Aunt Dahlia’s butler, a cold, unemotional man, had gasped and practically reeled when Tuppy waved aside those nonnettes de poulet Agnès Sorel, while the footman, standing by with the potatoes, had stared like one seeing a vision. I simply refused to consider the possibility of the significance of the thing having been lost on a nice girl like Angela. I fully expected to find her in the drawing-room with her heart bleeding freely, all ripe for an immediate reconciliation.

In the drawing-room, however, when I entered, only Aunt Dahlia met the eye. It seemed to me that she gave me rather a jaundiced look as I hove in sight, but this, having so recently beheld Tuppy in his agony, I attributed to the fact that she, like him, had been going light on the menu. You can’t expect an empty aunt to beam like a full aunt.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” she said.

Well, it was, of course.

“Where’s Angela?” I asked.

“Gone to bed.”

“Already?”

“She said she had a headache.”

“H’m.”

I wasn’t so sure that I liked the sound of that so much. A girl who has observed the sundered lover sensationally off his feed does not go to bed with headaches if love has been reborn in her heart. She sticks around and gives him the swift, remorseful glance from beneath the drooping eyelashes and generally endeavours to convey to him that, if he wants to get together across a round table and try to find a formula, she is all for it too. Yes, I am bound to say I found that going-to-bed stuff a bit disquieting.

“Gone to bed, eh?” I murmured musingly.

“What did you want her for?”

“I thought she might like a stroll and a chat.”

“Are you going for a stroll?” said Aunt Dahlia, with a sudden show of interest. “Where?”

“Oh, hither and thither.”

“Then I wonder if you would mind doing something for me.”

“Give it a name.”

“It won’t take you long. You know that path that runs past the greenhouses into the kitchen garden. If you go along it, you come to a pond.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, will you get a good, stout piece of rope or cord and go down that path till you come to the pond——”

“To the pond. Right.”

“—and look about you till you find a nice, heavy stone. Or a fairly large brick would do.”

“I see,” I said, though I didn’t, being still fogged. “Stone or brick. Yes. And then?”

“Then,” said the relative, “I want you, like a good boy, to fasten the rope to the brick and tie it around your damned neck and jump into the pond and drown yourself. In a few days I will send and have you fished up and buried because I shall need to dance on your grave.”

I was more fogged than ever. And not only fogged—wounded and resentful. I remember reading a book where a girl “suddenly fled from the room, afraid to stay for fear dreadful things would come tumbling from her lips; determined that she would not remain another day in this house to be insulted and misunderstood.” I felt much about the same.

Then I reminded myself that one has got to make allowances for a woman with only about half a spoonful of soup inside her, and I checked the red-hot crack that rose to the lips.

“What,” I said gently, “is this all about? You seem pipped with Bertram.”

“Pipped!”

“Noticeably pipped. Why this ill-concealed animus?”

A sudden flame shot from her eyes, singeing my hair.

“Who was the ass, who was the chump, who was the dithering idiot who talked me, against my better judgment, into going without my dinner? I might have guessed——”

I saw that I had divined correctly the cause of her strange mood.

“It’s all right, Aunt Dahlia. I know just how you’re feeling. A bit on the hollow side, what? But the agony will pass. If I were you, I’d sneak down and raid the larder after the household have gone to bed. I am told there’s a pretty good steak-and-kidney pie there which will repay inspection. Have faith, Aunt Dahlia,” I urged. “Pretty soon Uncle Tom will be along, full of sympathy and anxious inquiries.”

“Will he? Do you know where he is now?”

“I haven’t seen him.”

“He is in the study with his face buried in his hands, muttering about civilization and melting pots.”

“Eh? Why?”

“Because it has just been my painful duty to inform him that Anatole has given notice.”

I own that I reeled.

“What?”

“Given notice. As the result of that drivelling scheme of yours. What did you expect a sensitive, temperamental French cook to do, if you went about urging everybody to refuse all food? I hear that when the first two courses came back to the kitchen practically untouched, his feelings were so hurt that he cried like a child. And when the rest of the dinner followed, he came to the conclusion that the whole thing was a studied and calculated insult, and decided to hand in his portfolio.”

“Golly!”

“You may well say ‘Golly!’ Anatole, God’s gift to the gastric juices, gone like the dew off the petal of a rose, all through your idiocy. Perhaps you understand now why I want you to go and jump in that pond. I might have known that some hideous disaster would strike this house like a thunderbolt if once you wriggled your way into it and started trying to be clever.”

Harsh words, of course, as from aunt to nephew, but I bore her no resentment. No doubt, if you looked at it from a certain angle, Bertram might be considered to have made something of a floater.

“I am sorry.”

“What’s the good of being sorry?”

“I acted for what I deemed the best.”

“Another time try acting for the worst. Then we may possibly escape with a mere flesh wound.”

“Uncle Tom’s not feeling too bucked about it all, you say?”

“He’s groaning like a lost soul. And any chance I ever had of getting that money out of him has gone.”

I stroked the chin thoughtfully. There was, I had to admit, reason in what she said. None knew better than I how terrible a blow the passing of Anatole would be to Uncle Tom.

I have stated earlier in this chronicle that this curious object of the seashore with whom Aunt Dahlia has linked her lot is a bloke who habitually looks like a pterodactyl that has suffered, and the reason he does so is that all those years he spent in making millions in the Far East put his digestion on the blink, and the only cook that has ever been discovered capable of pushing food into him without starting something like Old Home Week in Moscow under the third waistcoat button is this uniquely gifted Anatole. Deprived of Anatole’s services, all he was likely to give the wife of his b. was a dirty look. Yes, unquestionably, things seemed to have struck a somewhat rocky patch, and I must admit that I found myself, at moment of going to press, a little destitute of constructive ideas.

Confident, however, that these would come ere long, I kept the stiff upper lip.

“Bad,” I conceded. “Quite bad, beyond a doubt. Certainly a nasty jar for one and all. But have no fear, Aunt Dahlia, I will fix everything.”

I have alluded earlier to the difficulty of staggering when you’re sitting down, showing that it is a feat of which I, personally, am not capable. Aunt Dahlia, to my amazement, now did it apparently without an effort. She was well wedged into a deep arm-chair, but, nevertheless, she staggered like billy-o. A sort of spasm of horror and apprehension contorted her face.

“If you dare to try any more of your lunatic schemes——”

I saw that it would be fruitless to try to reason with her. Quite plainly, she was not in the vein. Contenting myself, accordingly, with a gesture of loving sympathy, I left the room. Whether she did or did not throw a handsomely bound volume of the Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, at me, I am not in a position to say. I had seen it lying on the table beside her, and as I closed the door I remember receiving the impression that some blunt instrument had crashed against the woodwork, but I was feeling too pre-occupied to note and observe.

I blame myself for not having taken into consideration the possible effects of a sudden abstinence on the part of virtually the whole strength of the company on one of Anatole’s impulsive Provençal temperament. These Gauls, I should have remembered, can’t take it. Their tendency to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation is well known. No doubt the man had put his whole soul into those nonnettes de poulet, and to see them come homing back to him must have gashed him like a knife.

However, spilt milk blows nobody any good, and it is useless to dwell upon it. The task now confronting Bertram was to put matters right, and I was pacing the lawn, pondering to this end, when I suddenly heard a groan so lost-soulish that I thought it must have proceeded from Uncle Tom, escaped from captivity and come to groan in the garden.

Looking about me, however, I could discern no uncles. Puzzled, I was about to resume my meditations, when the sound came again. And peering into the shadows I observed a dim form seated on one of the rustic benches which so liberally dotted this pleasance and another dim form standing beside same. A second and more penetrating glance and I had assembled the facts.

These dim forms were, in the order named, Gussie Fink-Nottle and Jeeves. And what Gussie was doing, groaning all over the place like this, was more than I could understand.

Because, I mean to say, there was no possibility of error. He wasn’t singing. As I approached, he gave an encore, and it was beyond question a groan. Moreover, I could now see him clearly, and his whole aspect was definitely sand-bagged.

“Good evening, sir,” said Jeeves. “Mr. Fink-Nottle is not feeling well.”

Nor was I. Gussie had begun to make a low, bubbling noise, and I could no longer disguise it from myself that something must have gone seriously wrong with the works. I mean, I know marriage is a pretty solemn business and the realization that he is in for it frequently churns a chap up a bit, but I had never come across a case of a newly-engaged man taking it on the chin so completely as this.

Gussie looked up. His eye was dull. He clutched the thatch.

“Goodbye, Bertie,” he said, rising.

I seemed to spot an error.

“You mean ‘Hullo,’ don’t you?”

“No, I don’t. I mean goodbye. I’m off.”

“Off where?”

“To the kitchen garden. To drown myself.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“I’m not an ass.... Am I an ass, Jeeves?”

“Possibly a little injudicious, sir.”

“Drowning myself, you mean?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You think, on the whole, not drown myself?”

“I should not advocate it, sir.”

“Very well, Jeeves. I accept your ruling. After all, it would be unpleasant for Mrs. Travers to find a swollen body floating in her pond.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And she has been very kind to me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you have been very kind to me, Jeeves.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“So have you, Bertie. Very kind. Everybody has been very kind to me. Very, very kind. Very kind indeed. I have no complaints to make. All right, I’ll go for a walk instead.”

I followed him with bulging eyes as he tottered off into the dark.

“Jeeves,” I said, and I am free to admit that in my emotion I bleated like a lamb drawing itself to the attention of the parent sheep, “what the dickens is all this?”

“Mr. Fink-Nottle is not quite himself, sir. He has passed through a trying experience.”

I endeavoured to put together a brief synopsis of previous events.

“I left him out here with Miss Bassett.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I had softened her up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He knew exactly what he had to do. I had coached him thoroughly in lines and business.”

“Yes, sir. So Mr. Fink-Nottle informed me.”

“Well, then——”

“I regret to say, sir, that there was a slight hitch.”

“You mean, something went wrong?”

“Yes, sir.”

I could not fathom. The brain seemed to be tottering on its throne.

“But how could anything go wrong? She loves him, Jeeves.”

“Indeed, sir?”

“She definitely told me so. All he had to do was propose.”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, didn’t he?”

“No, sir.”

“Then what the dickens did he talk about?”

“Newts, sir.”

“Newts?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Newts?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But why did he want to talk about newts?”

“He did not want to talk about newts, sir. As I gather from Mr. Fink-Nottle, nothing could have been more alien to his plans.”

I simply couldn’t grasp the trend.

“But you can’t force a man to talk about newts.”

“Mr. Fink-Nottle was the victim of a sudden unfortunate spasm of nervousness, sir. Upon finding himself alone with the young lady, he admits to having lost his morale. In such circumstances, gentlemen frequently talk at random, saying the first thing that chances to enter their heads. This, in Mr. Fink-Nottle’s case, would seem to have been the newt, its treatment in sickness and in health.”

The scales fell from my eyes. I understood. I had had the same sort of thing happen to me in moments of crisis. I remember once detaining a dentist with the drill at one of my lower bicuspids and holding him up for nearly ten minutes with a story about a Scotchman, an Irishman, and a Jew. Purely automatic. The more he tried to jab, the more I said “Hoots, mon,” “Begorrah,” and “Oy, oy”. When one loses one’s nerve, one simply babbles.

I could put myself in Gussie’s place. I could envisage the scene. There he and the Bassett were, alone together in the evening stillness. No doubt, as I had advised, he had shot the works about sunsets and fairy princesses, and so forth, and then had arrived at the point where he had to say that bit about having something to say to her. At this, I take it, she lowered her eyes and said, “Oh, yes?”

He then, I should imagine, said it was something very important; to which her response would, one assumes, have been something on the lines of “Really?” or “Indeed?” or possibly just the sharp intake of the breath. And then their eyes met, just as mine met the dentist’s, and something suddenly seemed to catch him in the pit of the stomach and everything went black and he heard his voice starting to drool about newts. Yes, I could follow the psychology.

Nevertheless, I found myself blaming Gussie. On discovering that he was stressing the newt note in this manner, he ought, of course, to have tuned out, even if it had meant sitting there saying nothing. No matter how much of a twitter he was in, he should have had sense enough to see that he was throwing a spanner into the works. No girl, when she has been led to expect that a man is about to pour forth his soul in a fervour of passion, likes to find him suddenly shelving the whole topic in favour of an address on aquatic Salamandridae.

“Bad, Jeeves.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And how long did this nuisance continue?”

“For some not inconsiderable time, I gather, sir. According to Mr. Fink-Nottle, he supplied Miss Bassett with very full and complete information not only with respect to the common newt, but also the crested and palmated varieties. He described to her how newts, during the breeding season, live in the water, subsisting upon tadpoles, insect larvae, and crustaceans; how, later, they make their way to the land and eat slugs and worms; and how the newly born newt has three pairs of long, plumlike, external gills. And he was just observing that newts differ from salamanders in the shape of the tail, which is compressed, and that a marked sexual dimorphism prevails in most species, when the young lady rose and said that she thought she would go back to the house.”

“And then——”

“She went, sir.”

I stood musing. More and more, it was beginning to be borne in upon me what a particularly difficult chap Gussie was to help. He seemed to so marked an extent to lack snap and finish. With infinite toil, you manoeuvred him into a position where all he had to do was charge ahead, and he didn’t charge ahead, but went off sideways, missing the objective completely.

“Difficult, Jeeves.”

“Yes, sir.”

In happier circs., of course, I would have canvassed his views on the matter. But after what had occurred in connection with that mess-jacket, my lips were sealed.

“Well, I must think it over.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Burnish the brain a bit and endeavour to find the way out.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, good night, Jeeves.”

“Good night, sir.”

He shimmered off, leaving a pensive Bertram Wooster standing motionless in the shadows. It seemed to me that it was hard to know what to do for the best.

---

-12-

I don’t know if it has happened to you at all, but a thing I’ve noticed with myself is that, when I’m confronted by a problem which seems for the moment to stump and baffle, a good sleep will often bring the solution in the morning.

It was so on the present occasion.

The nibs who study these matters claim, I believe, that this has got something to do with the subconscious mind, and very possibly they may be right. I wouldn’t have said off-hand that I had a subconscious mind, but I suppose I must without knowing it, and no doubt it was there, sweating away diligently at the old stand, all the while the corporeal Wooster was getting his eight hours.

For directly I opened my eyes on the morrow, I saw daylight. Well, I don’t mean that exactly, because naturally I did. What I mean is that I found I had the thing all mapped out. The good old subconscious m. had delivered the goods, and I perceived exactly what steps must be taken in order to put Augustus Fink-Nottle among the practising Romeos.

I should like you, if you can spare me a moment of your valuable time, to throw your mind back to that conversation he and I had had in the garden on the previous evening. Not the glimmering landscape bit, I don’t mean that, but the concluding passages of it. Having done so, you will recall that when he informed me that he never touched alcoholic liquor, I shook the head a bit, feeling that this must inevitably weaken him as a force where proposing to girls was concerned.

And events had shown that my fears were well founded.

Put to the test, with nothing but orange juice inside him, he had proved a complete bust. In a situation calling for words of molten passion of a nature calculated to go through Madeline Bassett like a red-hot gimlet through half a pound of butter, he had said not a syllable that could bring a blush to the cheek of modesty, merely delivering a well-phrased but, in the circumstances, quite misplaced lecture on newts.

A romantic girl is not to be won by such tactics. Obviously, before attempting to proceed further, Augustus Fink-Nottle must be induced to throw off the shackling inhibitions of the past and fuel up. It must be a primed, confident Fink-Nottle who squared up to the Bassett for Round No. 2.

Only so could the Morning Post make its ten bob, or whatever it is, for printing the announcement of the forthcoming nuptials.

Having arrived at this conclusion I found the rest easy, and by the time Jeeves brought me my tea I had evolved a plan complete in every detail. This I was about to place before him—indeed, I had got as far as the preliminary “I say, Jeeves”—when we were interrupted by the arrival of Tuppy.

He came listlessly into the room, and I was pained to observe that a night’s rest had effected no improvement in the unhappy wreck’s appearance. Indeed, I should have said, if anything, that he was looking rather more moth-eaten than when I had seen him last. If you can visualize a bulldog which has just been kicked in the ribs and had its dinner sneaked by the cat, you will have Hildebrand Glossop as he now stood before me.

“Stap my vitals, Tuppy, old corpse,” I said, concerned, “you’re looking pretty blue round the rims.”

Jeeves slid from the presence in that tactful, eel-like way of his, and I motioned the remains to take a seat.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

He came to anchor on the bed, and for awhile sat picking at the coverlet in silence.

“I’ve been through hell, Bertie.”

“Through where?”

“Hell.”

“Oh, hell? And what took you there?”

Once more he became silent, staring before him with sombre eyes. Following his gaze, I saw that he was looking at an enlarged photograph of my Uncle Tom in some sort of Masonic uniform which stood on the mantelpiece. I’ve tried to reason with Aunt Dahlia about this photograph for years, placing before her two alternative suggestions: (a) To burn the beastly thing; or (b) if she must preserve it, to shove me in another room when I come to stay. But she declines to accede. She says it’s good for me. A useful discipline, she maintains, teaching me that there is a darker side to life and that we were not put into this world for pleasure only.

“Turn it to the wall, if it hurts you, Tuppy,” I said gently.

“Eh?”

“That photograph of Uncle Tom as the bandmaster.”

“I didn’t come here to talk about photographs. I came for sympathy.”

“And you shall have it. What’s the trouble? Worrying about Angela, I suppose? Well, have no fear. I have another well-laid plan for encompassing that young shrimp. I’ll guarantee that she will be weeping on your neck before yonder sun has set.”

He barked sharply.

“A fat chance!”

“Tup, Tushy!”

“Eh?”

“I mean ‘Tush, Tuppy.’ I tell you I will do it. I was just going to describe this plan of mine to Jeeves when you came in. Care to hear it?”

“I don’t want to hear any of your beastly plans. Plans are no good. She’s gone and fallen in love with this other bloke, and now hates my gizzard.”

“Rot.”

“It isn’t rot.”

“I tell you, Tuppy, as one who can read the female heart, that this Angela loves you still.”

“Well, it didn’t look much like it in the larder last night.”

“Oh, you went to the larder last night?”

“I did.”

“And Angela was there?”

“She was. And your aunt. Also your uncle.”

I saw that I should require foot-notes. All this was new stuff to me. I had stayed at Brinkley Court quite a lot in my time, but I had no idea the larder was such a social vortex. More like a snack bar on a race-course than anything else, it seemed to have become.

“Tell me the whole story in your own words,” I said, “omitting no detail, however apparently slight, for one never knows how important the most trivial detail may be.”

He inspected the photograph for a moment with growing gloom.

“All right,” he said. “This is what happened. You know my views about that steak-and-kidney pie.”

“Quite.”

“Well, round about one a.m. I thought the time was ripe. I stole from my room and went downstairs. The pie seemed to beckon me.”

I nodded. I knew how pies do.

“I got to the larder. I fished it out. I set it on the table. I found knife and fork. I collected salt, mustard, and pepper. There were some cold potatoes. I added those. And I was about to pitch in when I heard a sound behind me, and there was your aunt at the door. In a blue-and-yellow dressing gown.”

“Embarrassing.”

“Most.”

“I suppose you didn’t know where to look.”

“I looked at Angela.”

“She came in with my aunt?”

“No. With your uncle, a minute or two later. He was wearing mauve pyjamas and carried a pistol. Have you ever seen your uncle in pyjamas and a pistol?”

“Never.”

“You haven’t missed much.”

“Tell me, Tuppy,” I asked, for I was anxious to ascertain this, “about Angela. Was there any momentary softening in her gaze as she fixed it on you?”

“She didn’t fix it on me. She fixed it on the pie.”

“Did she say anything?”

“Not right away. Your uncle was the first to speak. He said to your aunt, ‘God bless my soul, Dahlia, what are you doing here?’ To which she replied, ‘Well, if it comes to that, my merry somnambulist, what are you?’ Your uncle then said that he thought there must be burglars in the house, as he had heard noises.”

I nodded again. I could follow the trend. Ever since the scullery window was found open the year Shining Light was disqualified in the Cesarewitch for boring, Uncle Tom has had a marked complex about burglars. I can still recall my emotions when, paying my first visit after he had bars put on all the windows and attempting to thrust the head out in order to get a sniff of country air, I nearly fractured my skull on a sort of iron grille, as worn by the tougher kinds of mediaeval prison.

“‘What sort of noises?’ said your aunt. ‘Funny noises,’ said your uncle. Whereupon Angela—with a nasty, steely tinkle in her voice, the little buzzard—observed, ‘I expect it was Mr. Glossop eating.’ And then she did give me a look. It was the sort of wondering, revolted look a very spiritual woman would give a fat man gulping soup in a restaurant. The kind of look that makes a fellow feel he’s forty-six round the waist and has great rolls of superfluous flesh pouring down over the back of his collar. And, still speaking in the same unpleasant tone, she added, ‘I ought to have told you, father, that Mr. Glossop always likes to have a good meal three or four times during the night. It helps to keep him going till breakfast. He has the most amazing appetite. See, he has practically finished a large steak-and-kidney pie already’.”

As he spoke these words, a feverish animation swept over Tuppy. His eyes glittered with a strange light, and he thumped the bed violently with his fist, nearly catching me a juicy one on the leg.

“That was what hurt, Bertie. That was what stung. I hadn’t so much as started on that pie. But that’s a woman all over.”

“The eternal feminine.”

“She continued her remarks. ‘You’ve no idea,’ she said, ‘how Mr. Glossop loves food. He just lives for it. He always eats six or seven meals a day, and then starts in again after bedtime. I think it’s rather wonderful.’ Your aunt seemed interested, and said it reminded her of a boa constrictor. Angela said, didn’t she mean a python? And then they argued as to which of the two it was. Your uncle, meanwhile, poking about with that damned pistol of his till human life wasn’t safe in the vicinity. And the pie lying there on the table, and me unable to touch it. You begin to understand why I said I had been through hell.”

“Quite. Can’t have been at all pleasant.”

“Presently your aunt and Angela settled their discussion, deciding that Angela was right and that it was a python that I reminded them of. And shortly after that we all pushed back to bed, Angela warning me in a motherly voice not to take the stairs too quickly. After seven or eight solid meals, she said, a man of my build ought to be very careful, because of the danger of apoplectic fits. She said it was the same with dogs. When they became very fat and overfed, you had to see that they didn’t hurry upstairs, as it made them puff and pant, and that was bad for their hearts. She asked your aunt if she remembered the late spaniel, Ambrose; and your aunt said, ‘Poor old Ambrose, you couldn’t keep him away from the garbage pail’; and Angela said, ‘Exactly, so do please be careful, Mr. Glossop.’ And you tell me she loves me still!”

I did my best to encourage.

“Girlish banter, what?”

“Girlish banter be dashed. She’s right off me. Once her ideal, I am now less than the dust beneath her chariot wheels. She became infatuated with this chap, whoever he was, at Cannes, and now she can’t stand the sight of me.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“My dear Tuppy, you are not showing your usual good sense in this Angela-chap-at-Cannes matter. If you will forgive me saying so, you have got an idée fixe.”

“A what?”

“An idée fixe. You know. One of those things fellows get. Like Uncle Tom’s delusion that everybody who is known even slightly to the police is lurking in the garden, waiting for a chance to break into the house. You keep talking about this chap at Cannes, and there never was a chap at Cannes, and I’ll tell you why I’m so sure about this. During those two months on the Riviera, it so happens that Angela and I were practically inseparable. If there had been somebody nosing round her, I should have spotted it in a second.”

He started. I could see that this had impressed him.

“Oh, she was with you all the time at Cannes, was she?”

“I don’t suppose she said two words to anybody else, except, of course, idle conv. at the crowded dinner table or a chance remark in a throng at the Casino.”

“I see. You mean that anything in the shape of mixed bathing and moonlight strolls she conducted solely in your company?”

“That’s right. It was quite a joke in the hotel.”

“You must have enjoyed that.”

“Oh, rather. I’ve always been devoted to Angela.”

“Oh, yes?”

“When we were kids, she used to call herself my little sweetheart.”

“She did?”

“Absolutely.”

“I see.”

He sat plunged in thought, while I, glad to have set his mind at rest, proceeded with my tea. And presently there came the banging of a gong from the hall below, and he started like a war horse at the sound of the bugle.

“Breakfast!” he said, and was off to a flying start, leaving me to brood and ponder. And the more I brooded and pondered, the more did it seem to me that everything now looked pretty smooth. Tuppy, I could see, despite that painful scene in the larder, still loved Angela with all the old fervour.

This meant that I could rely on that plan to which I had referred to bring home the bacon. And as I had found the way to straighten out the Gussie-Bassett difficulty, there seemed nothing more to worry about.

It was with an uplifted heart that I addressed Jeeves as he came in to remove the tea tray.

---

-13-

“Jeeves,” I said.

“Sir?”

“I’ve just been having a chat with young Tuppy, Jeeves. Did you happen to notice that he wasn’t looking very roguish this morning?”

“Yes, sir. It seemed to me that Mr. Glossop’s face was sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

“Quite. He met my cousin Angela in the larder last night, and a rather painful interview ensued.”

“I am sorry, sir.”

“Not half so sorry as he was. She found him closeted with a steak-and-kidney pie, and appears to have been a bit caustic about fat men who lived for food alone.”

“Most disturbing, sir.”

“Very. In fact, many people would say that things had gone so far between these two nothing now could bridge the chasm. A girl who could make cracks about human pythons who ate nine or ten meals a day and ought to be careful not to hurry upstairs because of the danger of apoplectic fits is a girl, many people would say, in whose heart love is dead. Wouldn’t people say that, Jeeves?”

“Undeniably, sir.”

“They would be wrong.”

“You think so, sir?”

“I am convinced of it. I know these females. You can’t go by what they say.”

“You feel that Miss Angela’s strictures should not be taken too much au pied de la lettre, sir?”

“Eh?”

“In English, we should say ‘literally’.”

“Literally. That’s exactly what I mean. You know what girls are. A tiff occurs, and they shoot their heads off. But underneath it all the old love still remains. Am I correct?”

“Quite correct, sir. The poet Scott——”

“Right ho, Jeeves.”

“Very good, sir.”

“And in order to bring that old love whizzing to the surface once more, all that is required is the proper treatment.”

“By ‘proper treatment,’ sir, you mean——”

“Clever handling, Jeeves. A spot of the good old snaky work. I see what must be done to jerk my Cousin Angela back to normalcy. I’ll tell you, shall I?”

“If you would be so kind, sir.”

I lit a cigarette, and eyed him keenly through the smoke. He waited respectfully for me to unleash the words of wisdom. I must say for Jeeves that—till, as he is so apt to do, he starts shoving his oar in and cavilling and obstructing—he makes a very good audience. I don’t know if he is actually agog, but he looks agog, and that’s the great thing.

“Suppose you were strolling through the illimitable jungle, Jeeves, and happened to meet a tiger cub.”

“The contingency is a remote one, sir.”

“Never mind. Let us suppose it.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Let us now suppose that you sloshed that tiger cub, and let us suppose further that word reached its mother that it was being put upon. What would you expect the attitude of that mother to be? In what frame of mind do you consider that that tigress would approach you?”

“I should anticipate a certain show of annoyance, sir.”

“And rightly. Due to what is known as the maternal instinct, what?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very good, Jeeves. We will now suppose that there has recently been some little coolness between this tiger cub and this tigress. For some days, let us say, they have not been on speaking terms. Do you think that that would make any difference to the vim with which the latter would leap to the former’s aid?”

“No, sir.”

“Exactly. Here, then, in brief, is my plan, Jeeves. I am going to draw my Cousin Angela aside to a secluded spot and roast Tuppy properly.”

“Roast, sir?”

“Knock. Slam. Tick-off. Abuse. Denounce. I shall be very terse about Tuppy, giving it as my opinion that in all essentials he is more like a wart hog than an ex-member of a fine old English public school. What will ensue? Hearing him attacked, my Cousin Angela’s womanly heart will be as sick as mud. The maternal tigress in her will awake. No matter what differences they may have had, she will remember only that he is the man she loves, and will leap to his defence. And from that to falling into his arms and burying the dead past will be but a step. How do you react to that?”

“The idea is an ingenious one, sir.”

“We Woosters are ingenious, Jeeves, exceedingly ingenious.”

“Yes, sir.”

“As a matter of fact, I am not speaking without a knowledge of the form book. I have tested this theory.”

“Indeed, sir?”

“Yes, in person. And it works. I was standing on the Eden rock at Antibes last month, idly watching the bathers disport themselves in the water, and a girl I knew slightly pointed at a male diver and asked me if I didn’t think his legs were about the silliest-looking pair of props ever issued to human being. I replied that I did, indeed, and for the space of perhaps two minutes was extraordinarily witty and satirical about this bird’s underpinning. At the end of that period, I suddenly felt as if I had been caught up in the tail of a cyclone.

“Beginning with a critique of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum. Subsequent investigation proved that she was engaged to the fellow with the legs and had had a slight disagreement with him the evening before on the subject of whether she should or should not have made an original call of two spades, having seven, but without the ace. That night I saw them dining together with every indication of relish, their differences made up and the lovelight once more in their eyes. That shows you, Jeeves.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I expect precisely similar results from my Cousin Angela when I start roasting Tuppy. By lunchtime, I should imagine, the engagement will be on again and the diamond-and-platinum ring glittering as of yore on her third finger. Or is it the fourth?”

“Scarcely by luncheon time, sir. Miss Angela’s maid informs me that Miss Angela drove off in her car early this morning with the intention of spending the day with friends in the vicinity.”

“Well, within half an hour of whatever time she comes back, then. These are mere straws, Jeeves. Do not let us chop them.”

“No, sir.”

“The point is that, as far as Tuppy and Angela are concerned, we may say with confidence that everything will shortly be hotsy-totsy once more. And what an agreeable thought that is, Jeeves.”

“Very true, sir.”

“If there is one thing that gives me the pip, it is two loving hearts being estranged.”

“I can readily appreciate the fact, sir.”

I placed the stub of my gasper in the ash tray and lit another, to indicate that that completed Chap. I.

“Right ho, then. So much for the western front. We now turn to the eastern.”

“Sir?”

“I speak in parables, Jeeves. What I mean is, we now approach the matter of Gussie and Miss Bassett.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Here, Jeeves, more direct methods are required. In handling the case of Augustus Fink-Nottle, we must keep always in mind the fact that we are dealing with a poop.”

“A sensitive plant would, perhaps, be a kinder expression, sir.”

“No, Jeeves, a poop. And with poops one has to employ the strong, forceful, straightforward policy. Psychology doesn’t get you anywhere. You, if I may remind you without wounding your feelings, fell into the error of mucking about with psychology in connection with this Fink-Nottle, and the result was a wash-out. You attempted to push him over the line by rigging him out in a Mephistopheles costume and sending him off to a fancy-dress ball, your view being that scarlet tights would embolden him. Futile.”

“The matter was never actually put to the test, sir.”

“No. Because he didn’t get to the ball. And that strengthens my argument. A man who can set out in a cab for a fancy-dress ball and not get there is manifestly a poop of no common order. I don’t think I have ever known anybody else who was such a dashed silly ass that he couldn’t even get to a fancy-dress ball. Have you, Jeeves?”

“No, sir.”

“But don’t forget this, because it is the point I wish, above all, to make: Even if Gussie had got to that ball; even if those scarlet tights, taken in conjunction with his horn-rimmed spectacles, hadn’t given the girl a fit of some kind; even if she had rallied from the shock and he had been able to dance and generally hobnob with her; even then your efforts would have been fruitless, because, Mephistopheles costume or no Mephistopheles costume, Augustus Fink-Nottle would never have been able to summon up the courage to ask her to be his. All that would have resulted would have been that she would have got that lecture on newts a few days earlier. And why, Jeeves? Shall I tell you why?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Because he would have been attempting the hopeless task of trying to do the thing on orange juice.”

“Sir?”

“Gussie is an orange-juice addict. He drinks nothing else.”

“I was not aware of that, sir.”

“I have it from his own lips. Whether from some hereditary taint, or because he promised his mother he wouldn’t, or simply because he doesn’t like the taste of the stuff, Gussie Fink-Nottle has never in the whole course of his career pushed so much as the simplest gin and tonic over the larynx. And he expects—this poop expects, Jeeves—this wabbling, shrinking, diffident rabbit in human shape expects under these conditions to propose to the girl he loves. One hardly knows whether to smile or weep, what?”

“You consider total abstinence a handicap to a gentleman who wishes to make a proposal of marriage, sir?”

The question amazed me.

“Why, dash it,” I said, astounded, “you must know it is. Use your intelligence, Jeeves. Reflect what proposing means. It means that a decent, self-respecting chap has got to listen to himself saying things which, if spoken on the silver screen, would cause him to dash to the box-office and demand his money back. Let him attempt to do it on orange juice, and what ensues? Shame seals his lips, or, if it doesn’t do that, makes him lose his morale and start to babble. Gussie, for example, as we have seen, babbles of syncopated newts.”

“Palmated newts, sir.”

“Palmated or syncopated, it doesn’t matter which. The point is that he babbles and is going to babble again, if he has another try at it. Unless—and this is where I want you to follow me very closely, Jeeves—unless steps are taken at once through the proper channels. Only active measures, promptly applied, can provide this poor, pusillanimous poop with the proper pep. And that is why, Jeeves, I intend tomorrow to secure a bottle of gin and lace his luncheon orange juice with it liberally.”

“Sir?”

I clicked the tongue.

“I have already had occasion, Jeeves,” I said rebukingly, “to comment on the way you say ‘Well, sir’ and ‘Indeed, sir?’ I take this opportunity of informing you that I object equally strongly to your ‘Sir?’ pure and simple. The word seems to suggest that in your opinion I have made a statement or mooted a scheme so bizarre that your brain reels at it. In the present instance, there is absolutely nothing to say ‘Sir?’ about. The plan I have put forward is entirely reasonable and icily logical, and should excite no sirring whatsoever. Or don’t you think so?”

“Well, sir——”

“Jeeves!”

“I beg your pardon, sir. The expression escaped me inadvertently. What I intended to say, since you press me, was that the action which you propose does seem to me somewhat injudicious.”

“Injudicious? I don’t follow you, Jeeves.”

“A certain amount of risk would enter into it, in my opinion, sir. It is not always a simple matter to gauge the effect of alcohol on a subject unaccustomed to such stimulant. I have known it to have distressing results in the case of parrots.”

“Parrots?”

“I was thinking of an incident of my earlier life, sir, before I entered your employment. I was in the service of the late Lord Brancaster at the time, a gentleman who owned a parrot to which he was greatly devoted, and one day the bird chanced to be lethargic, and his lordship, with the kindly intention of restoring it to its customary animation, offered it a portion of seed cake steeped in the ’84 port. The bird accepted the morsel gratefully and consumed it with every indication of satisfaction. Almost immediately afterwards, however, its manner became markedly feverish. Having bitten his lordship in the thumb and sung part of a sea-chanty, it fell to the bottom of the cage and remained there for a considerable period of time with its legs in the air, unable to move. I merely mention this, sir, in order to——”

I put my finger on the flaw. I had spotted it all along.

“But Gussie isn’t a parrot.”

“No, sir, but——”

“It is high time, in my opinion, that this question of what young Gussie really is was threshed out and cleared up. He seems to think he is a male newt, and you now appear to suggest that he is a parrot. The truth of the matter being that he is just a plain, ordinary poop and needs a snootful as badly as ever man did. So no more discussion, Jeeves. My mind is made up. There is only one way of handling this difficult case, and that is the way I have outlined.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Right ho, Jeeves. So much for that, then. Now here’s something else: You noticed that I said I was going to put this project through tomorrow, and no doubt you wondered why I said tomorrow. Why did I, Jeeves?”

“Because you feel that if it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly, sir?”

“Partly, Jeeves, but not altogether. My chief reason for fixing the date as specified is that tomorrow, though you have doubtless forgotten, is the day of the distribution of prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School, at which, as you know, Gussie is to be the male star and master of the revels. So you see we shall, by lacing that juice, not only embolden him to propose to Miss Bassett, but also put him so into shape that he will hold that Market Snodsbury audience spellbound.”

“In fact, you will be killing two birds with one stone, sir.”

“Exactly. A very neat way of putting it. And now here is a minor point. On second thoughts, I think the best plan will be for you, not me, to lace the juice.”

“Sir?”

“Jeeves!”

“I beg your pardon, sir.”

“And I’ll tell you why that will be the best plan. Because you are in a position to obtain ready access to the stuff. It is served to Gussie daily, I have noticed, in an individual jug. This jug will presumably be lying about the kitchen or somewhere before lunch tomorrow. It will be the simplest of tasks for you to slip a few fingers of gin in it.”

“No doubt, sir, but——”

“Don’t say ‘but,’ Jeeves.”

“I fear, sir——”

“‘I fear, sir’ is just as bad.”

“What I am endeavouring to say, sir, is that I am sorry, but I am afraid I must enter an unequivocal nolle prosequi.”

“Do what?”

“The expression is a legal one, sir, signifying the resolve not to proceed with a matter. In other words, eager though I am to carry out your instructions, sir, as a general rule, on this occasion I must respectfully decline to co-operate.”

“You won’t do it, you mean?”

“Precisely, sir.”

I was stunned. I began to understand how a general must feel when he has ordered a regiment to charge and has been told that it isn’t in the mood.

“Jeeves,” I said, “I had not expected this of you.”

“No, sir?”

“No, indeed. Naturally, I realize that lacing Gussie’s orange juice is not one of those regular duties for which you receive the monthly stipend, and if you care to stand on the strict letter of the contract, I suppose there is nothing to be done about it. But you will permit me to observe that this is scarcely the feudal spirit.”

“I am sorry, sir.”

“It is quite all right, Jeeves, quite all right. I am not angry, only a little hurt.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Right ho, Jeeves.”

---

-14-

Investigation proved that the friends Angela had gone to spend the day with were some stately-home owners of the name of Stretchley-Budd, hanging out in a joint called Kingham Manor, about eight miles distant in the direction of Pershore. I didn’t know these birds, but their fascination must have been considerable, for she tore herself away from them only just in time to get back and dress for dinner. It was, accordingly, not until coffee had been consumed that I was able to get matters moving. I found her in the drawing-room and at once proceeded to put things in train.

It was with very different feelings from those which had animated the bosom when approaching the Bassett twenty-four hours before in the same manner in this same drawing-room that I headed for where she sat. As I had told Tuppy, I have always been devoted to Angela, and there is nothing I like better than a ramble in her company.

And I could see by the look of her now how sorely in need she was of my aid and comfort.

Frankly, I was shocked by the unfortunate young prune’s appearance. At Cannes she had been a happy, smiling English girl of the best type, full of beans and buck. Her face now was pale and drawn, like that of a hockey centre-forward at a girls’ school who, in addition to getting a fruity one on the shin, has just been penalized for “sticks”. In any normal gathering, her demeanour would have excited instant remark, but the standard of gloom at Brinkley Court had become so high that it passed unnoticed. Indeed, I shouldn’t wonder if Uncle Tom, crouched in his corner waiting for the end, didn’t think she was looking indecently cheerful.

I got down to the agenda in my debonair way.

“What ho, Angela, old girl.”

“Hullo, Bertie, darling.”

“Glad you’re back at last. I missed you.”

“Did you, darling?”

“I did, indeed. Care to come for a saunter?”

“I’d love it.”

“Fine. I have much to say to you that is not for the public ear.”

I think at this moment poor old Tuppy must have got a sudden touch of cramp. He had been sitting hard by, staring at the ceiling, and he now gave a sharp leap like a gaffed salmon and upset a small table containing a vase, a bowl of potpourri, two china dogs, and a copy of Omar Khayyám bound in limp leather.

Aunt Dahlia uttered a startled hunting cry. Uncle Tom, who probably imagined from the noise that this was civilization crashing at last, helped things along by breaking a coffee-cup.

Tuppy said he was sorry. Aunt Dahlia, with a deathbed groan, said it didn’t matter. And Angela, having stared haughtily for a moment like a princess of the old régime confronted by some notable example of gaucherie on the part of some particularly foul member of the underworld, accompanied me across the threshold. And presently I had deposited her and self on one of the rustic benches in the garden, and was ready to snap into the business of the evening.

I considered it best, however, before doing so, to ease things along with a little informal chitchat. You don’t want to rush a delicate job like the one I had in hand. And so for a while we spoke of neutral topics. She said that what had kept her so long at the Stretchley-Budds was that Hilda Stretchley-Budd had made her stop on and help with the arrangements for their servants’ ball tomorrow night, a task which she couldn’t very well decline, as all the Brinkley Court domestic staff were to be present. I said that a jolly night’s revelry might be just what was needed to cheer Anatole up and take his mind off things. To which she replied that Anatole wasn’t going. On being urged to do so by Aunt Dahlia, she said, he had merely shaken his head sadly and gone on talking of returning to Provence, where he was appreciated.

It was after the sombre silence induced by this statement that Angela said the grass was wet and she thought she would go in.

This, of course, was entirely foreign to my policy.

“No, don’t do that. I haven’t had a chance to talk to you since you arrived.”

“I shall ruin my shoes.”

“Put your feet up on my lap.”

“All right. And you can tickle my ankles.”

“Quite.”

Matters were accordingly arranged on these lines, and for some minutes we continued chatting in desultory fashion. Then the conversation petered out. I made a few observations in re the scenic effects, featuring the twilight hush, the peeping stars, and the soft glimmer of the waters of the lake, and she said yes. Something rustled in the bushes in front of us, and I advanced the theory that it was possibly a weasel, and she said it might be. But it was plain that the girl was distraite, and I considered it best to waste no more time.

“Well, old thing,” I said, “I’ve heard all about your little dust-up. So those wedding bells are not going to ring out, what?”

“No.”

“Definitely over, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if you want my opinion, I think that’s a bit of goose for you, Angela, old girl. I think you’re extremely well out of it. It’s a mystery to me how you stood this Glossop so long. Take him for all in all, he ranks very low down among the wines and spirits. A washout, I should describe him as. A frightful oik, and a mass of side to boot. I’d pity the girl who was linked for life to a bargee like Tuppy Glossop.”

And I emitted a hard laugh—one of the sneering kind.

“I always thought you were such friends,” said Angela.

I let go another hard one, with a bit more top spin on it than the first time:

“Friends? Absolutely not. One was civil, of course, when one met the fellow, but it would be absurd to say one was a friend of his. A club acquaintance, and a mere one at that. And then one was at school with the man.”

“At Eton?”

“Good heavens, no. We wouldn’t have a fellow like that at Eton. At a kid’s school before I went there. A grubby little brute he was, I recollect. Covered with ink and mire generally, washing only on alternate Thursdays. In short, a notable outsider, shunned by all.”

I paused. I was more than a bit perturbed. Apart from the agony of having to talk in this fashion of one who, except when he was looping back rings and causing me to plunge into swimming baths in correct evening costume, had always been a very dear and esteemed crony, I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Business was not resulting. Staring into the bushes without a yip, she appeared to be bearing these slurs and innuendos of mine with an easy calm.

I had another pop at it:

“‘Uncouth’ about sums it up. I doubt if I’ve ever seen an uncouther kid than this Glossop. Ask anyone who knew him in those days to describe him in a word, and the word they will use is ‘uncouth’. And he’s just the same today. It’s the old story. The boy is the father of the man.”

She appeared not to have heard.

“The boy,” I repeated, not wishing her to miss that one, “is the father of the man.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about this Glossop.”

“I thought you said something about somebody’s father.”

“I said the boy was the father of the man.”

“What boy?”

“The boy Glossop.”

“He hasn’t got a father.”

“I never said he had. I said he was the father of the boy—or, rather, of the man.”

“What man?”

I saw that the conversation had reached a point where, unless care was taken, we should be muddled.

“The point I am trying to make,” I said, “is that the boy Glossop is the father of the man Glossop. In other words, each loathsome fault and blemish that led the boy Glossop to be frowned upon by his fellows is present in the man Glossop, and causes him—I am speaking now of the man Glossop—to be a hissing and a byword at places like the Drones, where a certain standard of decency is demanded from the inmates. Ask anyone at the Drones, and they will tell you that it was a black day for the dear old club when this chap Glossop somehow wriggled into the list of members. Here you will find a man who dislikes his face; there one who could stand his face if it wasn’t for his habits. But the universal consensus of opinion is that the fellow is a bounder and a tick, and that the moment he showed signs of wanting to get into the place he should have been met with a firm nolle prosequi and heartily blackballed.”

I had to pause again here, partly in order to take in a spot of breath, and partly to wrestle with the almost physical torture of saying these frightful things about poor old Tuppy.

“There are some chaps,” I resumed, forcing myself once more to the nauseous task, “who, in spite of looking as if they had slept in their clothes, can get by quite nicely because they are amiable and suave. There are others who, for all that they excite adverse comment by being fat and uncouth, find themselves on the credit side of the ledger owing to their wit and sparkling humour. But this Glossop, I regret to say, falls into neither class. In addition to looking like one of those things that come out of hollow trees, he is universally admitted to be a dumb brick of the first water. No soul. No conversation. In short, any girl who, having been rash enough to get engaged to him, has managed at the eleventh hour to slide out is justly entitled to consider herself dashed lucky.”

I paused once more, and cocked an eye at Angela to see how the treatment was taking. All the while I had been speaking, she had sat gazing silently into the bushes, but it seemed to me incredible that she should not now turn on me like a tigress, according to specifications. It beat me why she hadn’t done it already. It seemed to me that a mere tithe of what I had said, if said to a tigress about a tiger of which she was fond, would have made her—the tigress, I mean—hit the ceiling.

And the next moment you could have knocked me down with a toothpick.

“Yes,” she said, nodding thoughtfully, “you’re quite right.”

“Eh?”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking myself.”

“What!”

“‘Dumb brick.’ It just describes him. One of the six silliest asses in England, I should think he must be.”

I did not speak. I was endeavouring to adjust the faculties, which were in urgent need of a bit of first-aid treatment.

I mean to say, all this had come as a complete surprise. In formulating the well-laid plan which I had just been putting into effect, the one contingency I had not budgeted for was that she might adhere to the sentiments which I expressed. I had braced myself for a gush of stormy emotion. I was expecting the tearful ticking off, the girlish recriminations and all the rest of the bag of tricks along those lines.

But this cordial agreement with my remarks I had not foreseen, and it gave me what you might call pause for thought.

She proceeded to develop her theme, speaking in ringing, enthusiastic tones, as if she loved the topic. Jeeves could tell you the word I want. I think it’s “ecstatic”, unless that’s the sort of rash you get on your face and have to use ointment for. But if that is the right word, then that’s what her manner was as she ventilated the subject of poor old Tuppy. If you had been able to go simply by the sound of her voice, she might have been a court poet cutting loose about an Oriental monarch, or Gussie Fink-Nottle describing his last consignment of newts.

“It’s so nice, Bertie, talking to somebody who really takes a sensible view about this man Glossop. Mother says he’s a good chap, which is simply absurd. Anybody can see that he’s absolutely impossible. He’s conceited and opinionative and argues all the time, even when he knows perfectly well that he’s talking through his hat, and he smokes too much and eats too much and drinks too much, and I don’t like the colour of his hair. Not that he’ll have any hair in a year or two, because he’s pretty thin on the top already, and before he knows where he is he’ll be as bald as an egg, and he’s the last man who can afford to go bald. And I think it’s simply disgusting, the way he gorges all the time. Do you know, I found him in the larder at one o’clock this morning, absolutely wallowing in a steak-and-kidney pie? There was hardly any of it left. And you remember what an enormous dinner he had. Quite disgusting, I call it. But I can’t stop out here all night, talking about men who aren’t worth wasting a word on and haven’t even enough sense to tell sharks from flatfish. I’m going in.”

And gathering about her slim shoulders the shawl which she had put on as a protection against the evening dew, she buzzed off, leaving me alone in the silent night.

Well, as a matter of fact, not absolutely alone, because a few moments later there was a sort of upheaval in the bushes in front of me, and Tuppy emerged.

---

-15-

I gave him the eye. The evening had begun to draw in a bit by now and the visibility, in consequence, was not so hot, but there still remained ample light to enable me to see him clearly. And what I saw convinced me that I should be a lot easier in my mind with a stout rustic bench between us. I rose, accordingly, modelling my style on that of a rocketing pheasant, and proceeded to deposit myself on the other side of the object named.

My prompt agility was not without its effect. He seemed somewhat taken aback. He came to a halt, and, for about the space of time required to allow a bead of persp. to trickle from the top of the brow to the tip of the nose, stood gazing at me in silence.

“So!” he said at length, and it came as a complete surprise to me that fellows ever really do say “So!” I had always thought it was just a thing you read in books. Like “Quotha!” I mean to say, or “Odds bodikins!” or even “Eh, ba goom!”

Still, there it was. Quaint or not quaint, bizarre or not bizarre, he had said “So!” and it was up to me to cope with the situation on those lines.

It would have been a duller man than Bertram Wooster who had failed to note that the dear old chap was a bit steamed up. Whether his eyes were actually shooting forth flame, I couldn’t tell you, but there appeared to me to be a distinct incandescence. For the rest, his fists were clenched, his ears quivering, and the muscles of his jaw rotating rhythmically, as if he were making an early supper off something.

His hair was full of twigs, and there was a beetle hanging to the side of his head which would have interested Gussie Fink-Nottle. To this, however, I paid scant attention. There is a time for studying beetles and a time for not studying beetles.

“So!” he said again.

Now, those who know Bertram Wooster best will tell you that he is always at his shrewdest and most level-headed in moments of peril. Who was it who, when gripped by the arm of the law on boat-race night not so many years ago and hauled off to Vine Street police station, assumed in a flash the identity of Eustace H. Plimsoll, of The Laburnums, Alleyn Road, West Dulwich, thus saving the grand old name of Wooster from being dragged in the mire and avoiding wide publicity of the wrong sort? Who was it ...

But I need not labour the point. My record speaks for itself. Three times pinched, but never once sentenced under the correct label. Ask anyone at the Drones about this.

So now, in a situation threatening to become every moment more scaly, I did not lose my head. I preserved the old sang-froid. Smiling a genial and affectionate smile, and hoping that it wasn’t too dark for it to register, I spoke with a jolly cordiality:

“Why, hallo, Tuppy. You here?”

He said, yes, he was here.

“Been here long?”

“I have.”

“Fine. I wanted to see you.”

“Well, here I am. Come out from behind that bench.”

“No, thanks, old man. I like leaning on it. It seems to rest the spine.”

“In about two seconds,” said Tuppy, “I’m going to kick your spine up through the top of your head.”

I raised the eyebrows. Not much good, of course, in that light, but it seemed to help the general composition.

“Is this Hildebrand Glossop speaking?” I said.

He replied that it was, adding that if I wanted to make sure I might move a few feet over in his direction. He also called me an opprobrious name.

I raised the eyebrows again.

“Come, come, Tuppy, don’t let us let this little chat become acrid. Is ‘acrid’ the word I want?”

“I couldn’t say,” he replied, beginning to sidle round the bench.

I saw that anything I might wish to say must be said quickly. Already he had sidled some six feet. And though, by dint of sidling, too, I had managed to keep the bench between us, who could predict how long this happy state of affairs would last?

I came to the point, therefore.

“I think I know what’s on your mind, Tuppy,” I said. “If you were in those bushes during my conversation with the recent Angela, I dare say you heard what I was saying about you.”

“I did.”

“I see. Well, we won’t go into the ethics of the thing. Eavesdropping, some people might call it, and I can imagine stern critics drawing in the breath to some extent. Considering it—I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Tuppy—but considering it un-English. A bit un-English, Tuppy, old man, you must admit.”

“I’m Scotch.”

“Really?” I said. “I never knew that before. Rummy how you don’t suspect a man of being Scotch unless he’s Mac-something and says ‘Och, aye’ and things like that. I wonder,” I went on, feeling that an academic discussion on some neutral topic might ease the tension, “if you can tell me something that has puzzled me a good deal. What exactly is it that they put into haggis? I’ve often wondered about that.”

From the fact that his only response to the question was to leap over the bench and make a grab at me, I gathered that his mind was not on haggis.

“However,” I said, leaping over the bench in my turn, “that is a side issue. If, to come back to it, you were in those bushes and heard what I was saying about you——”

He began to move round the bench in a nor’-nor’-easterly direction. I followed his example, setting a course sou’-sou’-west.

“No doubt you were surprised at the way I was talking.”

“Not a bit.”

“What? Did nothing strike you as odd in the tone of my remarks?”

“It was just the sort of stuff I should have expected a treacherous, sneaking hound like you to say.”

“My dear chap,” I protested, “this is not your usual form. A bit slow in the uptake, surely? I should have thought you would have spotted right away that it was all part of a well-laid plan.”

“I’ll get you in a jiffy,” said Tuppy, recovering his balance after a swift clutch at my neck. And so probable did this seem that I delayed no longer, but hastened to place all the facts before him.

Speaking rapidly and keeping moving, I related my emotions on receipt of Aunt Dahlia’s telegram, my instant rush to the scene of the disaster, my meditations in the car, and the eventual framing of this well-laid plan of mine. I spoke clearly and well, and it was with considerable concern, consequently, that I heard him observe—between clenched teeth, which made it worse—that he didn’t believe a damned word of it.

“But, Tuppy,” I said, “why not? To me the thing rings true to the last drop. What makes you sceptical? Confide in me, Tuppy.”

He halted and stood taking a breather. Tuppy, pungently though Angela might have argued to the contrary, isn’t really fat. During the winter months you will find him constantly booting the football with merry shouts, and in the summer the tennis racket is seldom out of his hand.

But at the recently concluded evening meal, feeling, no doubt, that after that painful scene in the larder there was nothing to be gained by further abstinence, he had rather let himself go and, as it were, made up leeway; and after really immersing himself in one of Anatole’s dinners, a man of his sturdy build tends to lose elasticity a bit. During the exposition of my plans for his happiness a certain animation had crept into this round-and-round-the mulberry-bush jamboree of ours—so much so, indeed, that for the last few minutes we might have been a rather oversized greyhound and a somewhat slimmer electric hare doing their stuff on a circular track for the entertainment of the many-headed.

This, it appeared, had taken it out of him a bit, and I was not displeased. I was feeling the strain myself, and welcomed a lull.

“It absolutely beats me why you don’t believe it,” I said. “You know we’ve been pals for years. You must be aware that, except at the moment when you caused me to do a nose dive into the Drones’ swimming bath, an incident which I long since decided to put out of my mind and let the dead past bury its dead about, if you follow what I mean—except on that one occasion, as I say, I have always regarded you with the utmost esteem. Why, then, if not for the motives I have outlined, should I knock you to Angela? Answer me that. Be very careful.”

“What do you mean, be very careful?”

Well, as a matter of fact, I didn’t quite know myself. It was what the magistrate had said to me on the occasion when I stood in the dock as Eustace Plimsoll, of The Laburnums: and as it had impressed me a good deal at the time, I just bunged it in now by way of giving the conversation a tone.

“All right. Never mind about being careful, then. Just answer me that question. Why, if I had not your interests sincerely at heart, should I have ticked you off, as stated?”

A sharp spasm shook him from base to apex. The beetle, which, during the recent exchanges, had been clinging to his head, hoping for the best, gave it up at this and resigned office. It shot off and was swallowed in the night.

“Ah!” I said. “Your beetle,” I explained. “No doubt you were unaware of it, but all this while there has been a beetle of sorts parked on the side of your head. You have now dislodged it.”

He snorted.

“Beetles!”

“Not beetles. One beetle only.”

“I like your crust!” cried Tuppy, vibrating like one of Gussie’s newts during the courting season. “Talking of beetles, when all the time you know you’re a treacherous, sneaking hound.”

It was a debatable point, of course, why treacherous, sneaking hounds should be considered ineligible to talk about beetles, and I dare say a good cross-examining counsel would have made quite a lot of it.

But I let it go.

“That’s the second time you’ve called me that. And,” I said firmly, “I insist on an explanation. I have told you that I acted throughout from the best and kindliest motives in roasting you to Angela. It cut me to the quick to have to speak like that, and only the recollection of our lifelong friendship would have made me do it. And now you say you don’t believe me and call me names for which I am not sure I couldn’t have you up before a beak and jury and mulct you in very substantial damages. I should have to consult my solicitor, of course, but it would surprise me very much if an action did not lie. Be reasonable, Tuppy. Suggest another motive I could have had. Just one.”

“I will. Do you think I don’t know? You’re in love with Angela yourself.”

“What?”

“And you knocked me in order to poison her mind against me and finally remove me from your path.”

I had never heard anything so absolutely loopy in my life. Why, dash it, I’ve known Angela since she was so high. You don’t fall in love with close relations you’ve known since they were so high. Besides, isn’t there something in the book of rules about a man may not marry his cousin? Or am I thinking of grandmothers?

“Tuppy, my dear old ass,” I cried, “this is pure banana oil! You’ve come unscrewed.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Me in love with Angela? Ha-ha!”

“You can’t get out of it with ha-ha’s. She called you ‘darling’.”

“I know. And I disapproved. This habit of the younger g. of scattering ‘darlings’ about like birdseed is one that I deprecate. Lax, is how I should describe it.”

“You tickled her ankles.”

“In a purely cousinly spirit. It didn’t mean a thing. Why, dash it, you must know that in the deeper and truer sense I wouldn’t touch Angela with a barge pole.”

“Oh? And why not? Not good enough for you?”

“You misunderstand me,” I hastened to reply. “When I say I wouldn’t touch Angela with a barge pole, I intend merely to convey that my feelings towards her are those of distant, though cordial, esteem. In other words, you may rest assured that between this young prune and myself there never has been and never could be any sentiment warmer and stronger than that of ordinary friendship.”

“I believe it was you who tipped her off that I was in the larder last night, so that she could find me there with that pie, thus damaging my prestige.”

“My dear Tuppy! A Wooster?” I was shocked. “You think a Wooster would do that?”

He breathed heavily.

“Listen,” he said. “It’s no good your standing there arguing. You can’t get away from the facts. Somebody stole her from me at Cannes. You told me yourself that she was with you all the time at Cannes and hardly saw anybody else. You gloated over the mixed bathing, and those moonlight walks you had together——”

“Not gloated. Just mentioned them.”

“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!”

“Or something. I can feel it in my bones. As sure as I’m standing here, something is going to happen this afternoon which will make everybody laugh themselves sick at me. I can hear them now. Like hyenas.... Bertie!”

“Hullo?”

“Do you remember that kids’ school we went to before Eton?”

“Quite. It was there I won my Scripture prize.”

“Never mind about your Scripture prize. I’m not talking about your Scripture prize. Do you recollect the Bosher incident?”

I did, indeed. It was one of the high spots of my youth.

“Major-General Sir Wilfred Bosher came to distribute the prizes at that school,” proceeded Gussie in a dull, toneless voice. “He dropped a book. He stooped to pick it up. And, as he stooped, his trousers split up the back.”

“How we roared!”

Gussie’s face twisted.

“We did, little swine that we were. Instead of remaining silent and exhibiting a decent sympathy for a gallant officer at a peculiarly embarrassing moment, we howled and yelled with mirth. I loudest of any. That is what will happen to me this afternoon, Bertie. It will be a judgment on me for laughing like that at Major-General Sir Wilfred Bosher.”

“No, no, Gussie, old man. Your trousers won’t split.”

“How do you know they won’t? Better men than I have split their trousers. General Bosher was a D.S.O., with a fine record of service on the north-western frontier of India, and his trousers split. I shall be a mockery and a scorn. I know it. And you, fully cognizant of what I am in for, come babbling about good news. What news could possibly be good to me at this moment except the information that bubonic plague had broken out among the scholars of Market Snodsbury Grammar School, and that they were all confined to their beds with spots?”

The moment had come for me to speak. I laid a hand gently on his shoulder. He brushed it off. I laid it on again. He brushed it off once more. I was endeavouring to lay it on for the third time, when he moved aside and desired, with a certain petulance, to be informed if I thought I was a ruddy osteopath.

I found his manner trying, but one has to make allowances. I was telling myself that I should be seeing a very different Gussie after lunch.

“When I said I had good news, old man, I meant about Madeline Bassett.”

The febrile gleam died out of his eyes, to be replaced by a look of infinite sadness.

“You can’t have good news about her. I’ve dished myself there completely.”

“Not at all. I am convinced that if you take another whack at her, all will be well.”

And, keeping it snappy, I related what had passed between the Bassett and myself on the previous night.

“So all you have to do is play a return date, and you cannot fail to swing the voting. You are her dream man.”

He shook his head.

“No.”

“What?”

“No use.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not a bit of good trying.”

“But I tell you she said in so many words——”

“It doesn’t make any difference. She may have loved me once. Last night will have killed all that.”

“Of course it won’t.”

“It will. She despises me now.”

“Not a bit of it. She knows you simply got cold feet.”

“And I should get cold feet if I tried again. It’s no good, Bertie. I’m hopeless, and there’s an end of it. Fate made me the sort of chap who can’t say ‘bo’ to a goose.”

“It isn’t a question of saying ‘bo’ to a goose. The point doesn’t arise at all. It is simply a matter of——”

“I know, I know. But it’s no good. I can’t do it. The whole thing is off. I am not going to risk a repetition of last night’s fiasco. You talk in a light way of taking another whack at her, but you don’t know what it means. You have not been through the experience of starting to ask the girl you love to marry you and then suddenly finding yourself talking about the plumlike external gills of the newly-born newt. It’s not a thing you can do twice. No, I accept my destiny. It’s all over. And now, Bertie, like a good chap, shove off. I want to compose my speech. I can’t compose my speech with you mucking around. If you are going to continue to muck around, at least give me a couple of stories. The little hell hounds are sure to expect a story or two.”

“Do you know the one about——”

“No good. I don’t want any of your off-colour stuff from the Drones’ smoking-room. I need something clean. Something that will be a help to them in their after lives. Not that I care a damn about their after lives, except that I hope they’ll all choke.”

“I heard a story the other day. I can’t quite remember it, but it was about a chap who snored and disturbed the neighbours, and it ended, ‘It was his adenoids that adenoid them.’”

He made a weary gesture.

“You expect me to work that in, do you, into a speech to be delivered to an audience of boys, every one of whom is probably riddled with adenoids? Damn it, they’d rush the platform. Leave me, Bertie. Push off. That’s all I ask you to do. Push off.... Ladies and gentlemen,” said Gussie, in a low, soliloquizing sort of way, “I do not propose to detain this auspicious occasion long——”

It was a thoughtful Wooster who walked away and left him at it. More than ever I was congratulating myself on having had the sterling good sense to make all my arrangements so that I could press a button and set things moving at an instant’s notice.

Until now, you see, I had rather entertained a sort of hope that when I had revealed to him the Bassett’s mental attitude, Nature would have done the rest, bracing him up to such an extent that artificial stimulants would not be required. Because, naturally, a chap doesn’t want to have to sprint about country houses lugging jugs of orange juice, unless it is absolutely essential.

But now I saw that I must carry on as planned. The total absence of pep, ginger, and the right spirit which the man had displayed during these conversational exchanges convinced me that the strongest measures would be necessary. Immediately upon leaving him, therefore, I proceeded to the pantry, waited till the butler had removed himself elsewhere, and nipped in and secured the vital jug. A few moments later, after a wary passage of the stairs, I was in my room. And the first thing I saw there was Jeeves, fooling about with trousers.

He gave the jug a look which—wrongly, as it was to turn out—I diagnosed as censorious. I drew myself up a bit. I intended to have no rot from the fellow.

“Yes, Jeeves?”

“Sir?”

“You have the air of one about to make a remark, Jeeves.”

“Oh, no, sir. I note that you are in possession of Mr. Fink-Nottle’s orange juice. I was merely about to observe that in my opinion it would be injudicious to add spirit to it.”

“That is a remark, Jeeves, and it is precisely——”

“Because I have already attended to the matter, sir.”

“What?”

“Yes, sir. I decided, after all, to acquiesce in your wishes.”

I stared at the man, astounded. I was deeply moved. Well, I mean, wouldn’t any chap who had been going about thinking that the old feudal spirit was dead and then suddenly found it wasn’t have been deeply moved?

“Jeeves,” I said, “I am touched.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Touched and gratified.”

“Thank you very much, sir.”

“But what caused this change of heart?”

“I chanced to encounter Mr. Fink-Nottle in the garden, sir, while you were still in bed, and we had a brief conversation.”

“And you came away feeling that he needed a bracer?”

“Very much so, sir. His attitude struck me as defeatist.”

I nodded.

“I felt the same. ‘Defeatist’ sums it up to a nicety. Did you tell him his attitude struck you as defeatist?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But it didn’t do any good?”

“No, sir.”

“Very well, then, Jeeves. We must act. How much gin did you put in the jug?”

“A liberal tumblerful, sir.”

“Would that be a normal dose for an adult defeatist, do you think?”

“I fancy it should prove adequate, sir.”

“I wonder. We must not spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar. I think I’ll add just another fluid ounce or so.”

“I would not advocate it, sir. In the case of Lord Brancaster’s parrot——”

“You are falling into your old error, Jeeves, of thinking that Gussie is a parrot. Fight against this. I shall add the oz.”

“Very good, sir.”

“And, by the way, Jeeves, Mr. Fink-Nottle is in the market for bright, clean stories to use in his speech. Do you know any?”

“I know a story about two Irishmen, sir.”

“Pat and Mike?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who were walking along Broadway?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Just what he wants. Any more?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, every little helps. You had better go and tell it to him.”

“Very good, sir.”

He passed from the room, and I unscrewed the flask and tilted into the jug a generous modicum of its contents. And scarcely had I done so, when there came to my ears the sound of footsteps without. I had only just time to shove the jug behind the photograph of Uncle Tom on the mantelpiece before the door opened and in came Gussie, curveting like a circus horse.

“What-ho, Bertie,” he said. “What-ho, what-ho, what-ho, and again what-ho. What a beautiful world this is, Bertie. One of the nicest I ever met.”

I stared at him, speechless. We Woosters are as quick as lightning, and I saw at once that something had happened.

I mean to say, I told you about him walking round in circles. I recorded what passed between us on the lawn. And if I portrayed the scene with anything like adequate skill, the picture you will have retained of this Fink-Nottle will have been that of a nervous wreck, sagging at the knees, green about the gills, and picking feverishly at the lapels of his coat in an ecstasy of craven fear. In a word, defeatist. Gussie, during that interview, had, in fine, exhibited all the earmarks of one licked to a custard.

Vastly different was the Gussie who stood before me now. Self-confidence seemed to ooze from the fellow’s every pore. His face was flushed, there was a jovial light in his eyes, the lips were parted in a swashbuckling smile. And when with a genial hand he sloshed me on the back before I could sidestep, it was as if I had been kicked by a mule.

“Well, Bertie,” he proceeded, as blithely as a linnet without a thing on his mind, “you will be glad to hear that you were right. Your theory has been tested and proved correct. I feel like a fighting cock.”

My brain ceased to reel. I saw all.

“Have you been having a drink?”

“I have. As you advised. Unpleasant stuff. Like medicine. Burns your throat, too, and makes one as thirsty as the dickens. How anyone can mop it up, as you do, for pleasure, beats me. Still, I would be the last to deny that it tunes up the system. I could bite a tiger.”

“What did you have?”

“Whisky. At least, that was the label on the decanter, and I have no reason to suppose that a woman like your aunt—staunch, true-blue, British—would deliberately deceive the public. If she labels her decanters Whisky, then I consider that we know where we are.”

“A whisky and soda, eh? You couldn’t have done better.”

“Soda?” said Gussie thoughtfully. “I knew there was something I had forgotten.”

“Didn’t you put any soda in it?”

“It never occurred to me. I just nipped into the dining-room and drank out of the decanter.”

“How much?”

“Oh, about ten swallows. Twelve, maybe. Or fourteen. Say sixteen medium-sized gulps. Gosh, I’m thirsty.”

He moved over to the wash-stand and drank deeply out of the water bottle. I cast a covert glance at Uncle Tom’s photograph behind his back. For the first time since it had come into my life, I was glad that it was so large. It hid its secret well. If Gussie had caught sight of that jug of orange juice, he would unquestionably have been on to it like a knife.

“Well, I’m glad you’re feeling braced,” I said.

He moved buoyantly from the wash-hand stand, and endeavoured to slosh me on the back again. Foiled by my nimble footwork, he staggered to the bed and sat down upon it.

“Braced? Did I say I could bite a tiger?”

“You did.”

“Make it two tigers. I could chew holes in a steel door. What an ass you must have thought me out there in the garden. I see now you were laughing in your sleeve.”

“No, no.”

“Yes,” insisted Gussie. “That very sleeve,” he said, pointing. “And I don’t blame you. I can’t imagine why I made all that fuss about a potty job like distributing prizes at a rotten little country grammar school. Can you imagine, Bertie?”

“No.”

“Exactly. Nor can I imagine. There’s simply nothing to it. I just shin up on the platform, drop a few gracious words, hand the little blighters their prizes, and hop down again, admired by all. Not a suggestion of split trousers from start to finish. I mean, why should anybody split his trousers? I can’t imagine. Can you imagine?”

“No.”

“Nor can I imagine. I shall be a riot. I know just the sort of stuff that’s needed—simple, manly, optimistic stuff straight from the shoulder. This shoulder,” said Gussie, tapping. “Why I was so nervous this morning I can’t imagine. For anything simpler than distributing a few footling books to a bunch of grimy-faced kids I can’t imagine. Still, for some reason I can’t imagine, I was feeling a little nervous, but now I feel fine, Bertie—fine, fine, fine—and I say this to you as an old friend. Because that’s what you are, old man, when all the smoke has cleared away—an old friend. I don’t think I’ve ever met an older friend. How long have you been an old friend of mine, Bertie?”

“Oh, years and years.”

“Imagine! Though, of course, there must have been a time when you were a new friend.... Hullo, the luncheon gong. Come on, old friend.”

And, rising from the bed like a performing flea, he made for the door.

I followed rather pensively. What had occurred was, of course, so much velvet, as you might say. I mean, I had wanted a braced Fink-Nottle— indeed, all my plans had had a braced Fink-Nottle as their end and aim —but I found myself wondering a little whether the Fink-Nottle now sliding down the banister wasn’t, perhaps, a shade too braced. His demeanour seemed to me that of a man who might quite easily throw bread about at lunch.

Fortunately, however, the settled gloom of those round him exercised a restraining effect upon him at the table. It would have needed a far more plastered man to have been rollicking at such a gathering. I had told the Bassett that there were aching hearts in Brinkley Court, and it now looked probable that there would shortly be aching tummies. Anatole, I learned, had retired to his bed with a fit of the vapours, and the meal now before us had been cooked by the kitchen maid—as C3 a performer as ever wielded a skillet.

This, coming on top of their other troubles, induced in the company a pretty unanimous silence—a solemn stillness, as you might say—which even Gussie did not seem prepared to break. Except, therefore, for one short snatch of song on his part, nothing untoward marked the occasion, and presently we rose, with instructions from Aunt Dahlia to put on festal raiment and be at Market Snodsbury not later than 3.30. This leaving me ample time to smoke a gasper or two in a shady bower beside the lake, I did so, repairing to my room round about the hour of three.

Jeeves was on the job, adding the final polish to the old topper, and I was about to apprise him of the latest developments in the matter of Gussie, when he forestalled me by observing that the latter had only just concluded an agreeable visit to the Wooster bedchamber.

“I found Mr. Fink-Nottle seated here when I arrived to lay out your clothes, sir.”

“Indeed, Jeeves? Gussie was in here, was he?”

“Yes, sir. He left only a few moments ago. He is driving to the school with Mr. and Mrs. Travers in the large car.”

“Did you give him your story of the two Irishmen?”

“Yes, sir. He laughed heartily.”

“Good. Had you any other contributions for him?”

“I ventured to suggest that he might mention to the young gentlemen that education is a drawing out, not a putting in. The late Lord Brancaster was much addicted to presenting prizes at schools, and he invariably employed this dictum.”

“And how did he react to that?”

“He laughed heartily, sir.”

“This surprised you, no doubt? This practically incessant merriment, I mean.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You thought it odd in one who, when you last saw him, was well up in Group A of the defeatists.”

“Yes, sir.”

“There is a ready explanation, Jeeves. Since you last saw him, Gussie has been on a bender. He’s as tight as an owl.”

“Indeed, sir?”

“Absolutely. His nerve cracked under the strain, and he sneaked into the dining-room and started mopping the stuff up like a vacuum cleaner. Whisky would seem to be what he filled the radiator with. I gather that he used up most of the decanter. Golly, Jeeves, it’s lucky he didn’t get at that laced orange juice on top of that, what?”

“Extremely, sir.”

I eyed the jug. Uncle Tom’s photograph had fallen into the fender, and it was standing there right out in the open, where Gussie couldn’t have helped seeing it. Mercifully, it was empty now.

“It was a most prudent act on your part, if I may say so, sir, to dispose of the orange juice.”

I stared at the man.

“What? Didn’t you?”

“No, sir.”

“Jeeves, let us get this clear. Was it not you who threw away that o.j.?”

“No, sir. I assumed, when I entered the room and found the pitcher empty, that you had done so.”

We looked at each other, awed. Two minds with but a single thought.

“I very much fear, sir——”

“So do I, Jeeves.”

“It would seem almost certain——”

“Quite certain. Weigh the facts. Sift the evidence. The jug was standing on the mantelpiece, for all eyes to behold. Gussie had been complaining of thirst. You found him in here, laughing heartily. I think that there can be little doubt, Jeeves, that the entire contents of that jug are at this moment reposing on top of the existing cargo in that already brilliantly lit man’s interior. Disturbing, Jeeves.”

“Most disturbing, sir.”

“Let us face the position, forcing ourselves to be calm. You inserted in that jug—shall we say a tumblerful of the right stuff?”

“Fully a tumblerful, sir.”

“And I added of my plenty about the same amount.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And in two shakes of a duck’s tail Gussie, with all that lapping about inside him, will be distributing the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School before an audience of all that is fairest and most refined in the county.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It seems to me, Jeeves, that the ceremony may be one fraught with considerable interest.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What, in your opinion, will the harvest be?”

“One finds it difficult to hazard a conjecture, sir.”

“You mean imagination boggles?”

“Yes, sir.”

I inspected my imagination. He was right. It boggled.

---

-17-

“And yet, Jeeves,” I said, twiddling a thoughtful steering wheel, “there is always the bright side.”

Some twenty minutes had elapsed, and having picked the honest fellow up outside the front door, I was driving in the two-seater to the picturesque town of Market Snodsbury. Since we had parted—he to go to his lair and fetch his hat, I to remain in my room and complete the formal costume—I had been doing some close thinking.

The results of this I now proceeded to hand on to him.

“However dark the prospect may be, Jeeves, however murkily the storm clouds may seem to gather, a keen eye can usually discern the blue bird. It is bad, no doubt, that Gussie should be going, some ten minutes from now, to distribute prizes in a state of advanced intoxication, but we must never forget that these things cut both ways.”

“You imply, sir——”

“Precisely. I am thinking of him in his capacity of wooer. All this ought to have put him in rare shape for offering his hand in marriage. I shall be vastly surprised if it won’t turn him into a sort of caveman. Have you ever seen James Cagney in the movies?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Something on those lines.”

I heard him cough, and sniped him with a sideways glance. He was wearing that informative look of his.

“Then you have not heard, sir?”

“Eh?”

“You are not aware that a marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place between Mr. Fink-Nottle and Miss Bassett?”

“What?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When did this happen?”

“Shortly after Mr. Fink-Nottle had left your room, sir.”

“Ah! In the post-orange-juice era?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But are you sure of your facts? How do you know?”

“My informant was Mr. Fink-Nottle himself, sir. He appeared anxious to confide in me. His story was somewhat incoherent, but I had no difficulty in apprehending its substance. Prefacing his remarks with the statement that this was a beautiful world, he laughed heartily and said that he had become formally engaged.”

“No details?”

“No, sir.”

“But one can picture the scene.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I mean, imagination doesn’t boggle.”

“No, sir.”

And it didn’t. I could see exactly what must have happened. Insert a liberal dose of mixed spirits in a normally abstemious man, and he becomes a force. He does not stand around, twiddling his fingers and stammering. He acts. I had no doubt that Gussie must have reached for the Bassett and clasped her to him like a stevedore handling a sack of coals. And one could readily envisage the effect of that sort of thing on a girl of romantic mind.

“Well, well, well, Jeeves.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is splendid news.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You see now how right I was.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It must have been rather an eye-opener for you, watching me handle this case.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The simple, direct method never fails.”

“No, sir.”

“Whereas the elaborate does.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Right ho, Jeeves.”

We had arrived at the main entrance of Market Snodsbury Grammar School. I parked the car, and went in, well content. True, the Tuppy-Angela problem still remained unsolved and Aunt Dahlia’s five hundred quid seemed as far off as ever, but it was gratifying to feel that good old Gussie’s troubles were over, at any rate.

The Grammar School at Market Snodsbury had, I understood, been built somewhere in the year 1416, and, as with so many of these ancient foundations, there still seemed to brood over its Great Hall, where the afternoon’s festivities were to take place, not a little of the fug of the centuries. It was the hottest day of the summer, and though somebody had opened a tentative window or two, the atmosphere remained distinctive and individual.

In this hall the youth of Market Snodsbury had been eating its daily lunch for a matter of five hundred years, and the flavour lingered. The air was sort of heavy and languorous, if you know what I mean, with the scent of Young England and boiled beef and carrots.

Aunt Dahlia, who was sitting with a bevy of the local nibs in the second row, sighted me as I entered and waved to me to join her, but I was too smart for that. I wedged myself in among the standees at the back, leaning up against a chap who, from the aroma, might have been a corn chandler or something on that order. The essence of strategy on these occasions is to be as near the door as possible.

The hall was gaily decorated with flags and coloured paper, and the eye was further refreshed by the spectacle of a mixed drove of boys, parents, and what not, the former running a good deal to shiny faces and Eton collars, the latter stressing the black-satin note rather when female, and looking as if their coats were too tight, if male. And presently there was some applause—sporadic, Jeeves has since told me it was—and I saw Gussie being steered by a bearded bloke in a gown to a seat in the middle of the platform.

And I confess that as I beheld him and felt that there but for the grace of God went Bertram Wooster, a shudder ran through the frame. It all reminded me so vividly of the time I had addressed that girls’ school.

Of course, looking at it dispassionately, you may say that for horror and peril there is no comparison between an almost human audience like the one before me and a mob of small girls with pigtails down their backs, and this, I concede, is true. Nevertheless, the spectacle was enough to make me feel like a fellow watching a pal going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, and the thought of what I had escaped caused everything for a moment to go black and swim before my eyes.

When I was able to see clearly once more, I perceived that Gussie was now seated. He had his hands on his knees, with his elbows out at right angles, like a nigger minstrel of the old school about to ask Mr. Bones why a chicken crosses the road, and he was staring before him with a smile so fixed and pebble-beached that I should have thought that anybody could have guessed that there sat one in whom the old familiar juice was splashing up against the back of the front teeth.

In fact, I saw Aunt Dahlia, who, having assisted at so many hunting dinners in her time, is second to none as a judge of the symptoms, give a start and gaze long and earnestly. And she was just saying something to Uncle Tom on her left when the bearded bloke stepped to the footlights and started making a speech. From the fact that he spoke as if he had a hot potato in his mouth without getting the raspberry from the lads in the ringside seats, I deduced that he must be the head master.

With his arrival in the spotlight, a sort of perspiring resignation seemed to settle on the audience. Personally, I snuggled up against the chandler and let my attention wander. The speech was on the subject of the doings of the school during the past term, and this part of a prize-giving is always apt rather to fail to grip the visiting stranger. I mean, you know how it is. You’re told that J.B. Brewster has won an Exhibition for Classics at Cat’s, Cambridge, and you feel that it’s one of those stories where you can’t see how funny it is unless you really know the fellow. And the same applies to G. Bullett being awarded the Lady Jane Wix Scholarship at the Birmingham College of Veterinary Science.

In fact, I and the corn chandler, who was looking a bit fagged I thought, as if he had had a hard morning chandling the corn, were beginning to doze lightly when things suddenly brisked up, bringing Gussie into the picture for the first time.

“Today,” said the bearded bloke, “we are all happy to welcome as the guest of the afternoon Mr. Fitz-Wattle——”

At the beginning of the address, Gussie had subsided into a sort of daydream, with his mouth hanging open. About half-way through, faint signs of life had begun to show. And for the last few minutes he had been trying to cross one leg over the other and failing and having another shot and failing again. But only now did he exhibit any real animation. He sat up with a jerk.

“Fink-Nottle,” he said, opening his eyes.

“Fitz-Nottle.”

“Fink-Nottle.”

“I should say Fink-Nottle.”

“Of course you should, you silly ass,” said Gussie genially. “All right, get on with it.”

And closing his eyes, he began trying to cross his legs again.

I could see that this little spot of friction had rattled the bearded bloke a bit. He stood for a moment fumbling at the fungus with a hesitating hand. But they make these head masters of tough stuff. The weakness passed. He came back nicely and carried on.

“We are all happy, I say, to welcome as the guest of the afternoon Mr. Fink-Nottle, who has kindly consented to award the prizes. This task, as you know, is one that should have devolved upon that well-beloved and vigorous member of our board of governors, the Rev. William Plomer, and we are all, I am sure, very sorry that illness at the last moment should have prevented him from being here today. But, if I may borrow a familiar metaphor from the—if I may employ a homely metaphor familiar to you all—what we lose on the swings we gain on the roundabouts.”

He paused, and beamed rather freely, to show that this was comedy. I could have told the man it was no use. Not a ripple. The corn chandler leaned against me and muttered “Whoddidesay?” but that was all.

It’s always a nasty jar to wait for the laugh and find that the gag hasn’t got across. The bearded bloke was visibly discomposed. At that, however, I think he would have got by, had he not, at this juncture, unfortunately stirred Gussie up again.

“In other words, though deprived of Mr. Plomer, we have with us this afternoon Mr. Fink-Nottle. I am sure that Mr. Fink-Nottle’s name is one that needs no introduction to you. It is, I venture to assert, a name that is familiar to us all.”

“Not to you,” said Gussie.

And the next moment I saw what Jeeves had meant when he had described him as laughing heartily. “Heartily” was absolutely the mot juste. It sounded like a gas explosion.

“You didn’t seem to know it so dashed well, what, what?” said Gussie. And, reminded apparently by the word “what” of the word “Wattle,” he repeated the latter some sixteen times with a rising inflection.

“Wattle, Wattle, Wattle,” he concluded. “Right-ho. Push on.”

But the bearded bloke had shot his bolt. He stood there, licked at last; and, watching him closely, I could see that he was now at the crossroads. I could spot what he was thinking as clearly as if he had confided it to my personal ear. He wanted to sit down and call it a day, I mean, but the thought that gave him pause was that, if he did, he must then either uncork Gussie or take the Fink-Nottle speech as read and get straight on to the actual prize-giving.

It was a dashed tricky thing, of course, to have to decide on the spur of the moment. I was reading in the paper the other day about those birds who are trying to split the atom, the nub being that they haven’t the foggiest as to what will happen if they do. It may be all right. On the other hand, it may not be all right. And pretty silly a chap would feel, no doubt, if, having split the atom, he suddenly found the house going up in smoke and himself torn limb from limb.

So with the bearded bloke. Whether he was abreast of the inside facts in Gussie’s case, I don’t know, but it was obvious to him by this time that he had run into something pretty hot. Trial gallops had shown that Gussie had his own way of doing things. Those interruptions had been enough to prove to the perspicacious that here, seated on the platform at the big binge of the season, was one who, if pushed forward to make a speech, might let himself go in a rather epoch-making manner.

On the other hand, chain him up and put a green-baize cloth over him, and where were you? The proceeding would be over about half an hour too soon.

It was, as I say, a difficult problem to have to solve, and, left to himself, I don’t know what conclusion he would have come to. Personally, I think he would have played it safe. As it happened, however, the thing was taken out of his hands, for at this moment, Gussie, having stretched his arms and yawned a bit, switched on that pebble-beached smile again and tacked down to the edge of the platform.

“Speech,” he said affably.

He then stood with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, waiting for the applause to die down.

It was some time before this happened, for he had got a very fine hand indeed. I suppose it wasn’t often that the boys of Market Snodsbury Grammar School came across a man public-spirited enough to call their head master a silly ass, and they showed their appreciation in no uncertain manner. Gussie may have been one over the eight, but as far as the majority of those present were concerned he was sitting on top of the world.

“Boys,” said Gussie, “I mean ladies and gentlemen and boys, I do not detain you long, but I suppose on this occasion to feel compelled to say a few auspicious words; Ladies—and boys and gentlemen—we have all listened with interest to the remarks of our friend here who forgot to shave this morning—I don’t know his name, but then he didn’t know mine—Fitz-Wattle, I mean, absolutely absurd—which squares things up a bit—and we are all sorry that the Reverend What-ever-he-was-called should be dying of adenoids, but after all, here today, gone tomorrow, and all flesh is as grass, and what not, but that wasn’t what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say was this—and I say it confidently—without fear of contradiction—I say, in short, I am happy to be here on this auspicious occasion and I take much pleasure in kindly awarding the prizes, consisting of the handsome books you see laid out on that table. As Shakespeare says, there are sermons in books, stones in the running brooks, or, rather, the other way about, and there you have it in a nutshell.”

It went well, and I wasn’t surprised. I couldn’t quite follow some of it, but anybody could see that it was real ripe stuff, and I was amazed that even the course of treatment he had been taking could have rendered so normally tongue-tied a dumb brick as Gussie capable of it.

It just shows, what any member of Parliament will tell you, that if you want real oratory, the preliminary noggin is essential. Unless pie-eyed, you cannot hope to grip.

“Gentlemen,” said Gussie, “I mean ladies and gentlemen and, of course, boys, what a beautiful world this is. A beautiful world, full of happiness on every side. Let me tell you a little story. Two Irishmen, Pat and Mike, were walking along Broadway, and one said to the other, ‘Begorrah, the race is not always to the swift,’ and the other replied, ‘Faith and begob, education is a drawing out, not a putting in.’”

I must say it seemed to me the rottenest story I had ever heard, and I was surprised that Jeeves should have considered it worth while shoving into a speech. However, when I taxed him with this later, he said that Gussie had altered the plot a good deal, and I dare say that accounts for it.

At any rate, that was the conte as Gussie told it, and when I say that it got a very fair laugh, you will understand what a popular favourite he had become with the multitude. There might be a bearded bloke or so on the platform and a small section in the second row who were wishing the speaker would conclude his remarks and resume his seat, but the audience as a whole was for him solidly.

There was applause, and a voice cried: “Hear, hear!”

“Yes,” said Gussie, “it is a beautiful world. The sky is blue, the birds are singing, there is optimism everywhere. And why not, boys and ladies and gentlemen? I’m happy, you’re happy, we’re all happy, even the meanest Irishman that walks along Broadway. Though, as I say, there were two of them—Pat and Mike, one drawing out, the other putting in. I should like you boys, taking the time from me, to give three cheers for this beautiful world. All together now.”

Presently the dust settled down and the plaster stopped falling from the ceiling, and he went on.

“People who say it isn’t a beautiful world don’t know what they are talking about. Driving here in the car today to award the kind prizes, I was reluctantly compelled to tick off my host on this very point. Old Tom Travers. You will see him sitting there in the second row next to the large lady in beige.”

He pointed helpfully, and the hundred or so Market Snods-buryians who craned their necks in the direction indicated were able to observe Uncle Tom blushing prettily.

“I ticked him off properly, the poor fish. He expressed the opinion that the world was in a deplorable state. I said, ‘Don’t talk rot, old Tom Travers.’ ‘I am not accustomed to talk rot,’ he said. ‘Then, for a beginner,’ I said, ‘you do it dashed well.’ And I think you will admit, boys and ladies and gentlemen, that that was telling him.”

The audience seemed to agree with him. The point went big. The voice that had said, “Hear, hear” said “Hear, hear” again, and my corn chandler hammered the floor vigorously with a large-size walking stick.

“Well, boys,” resumed Gussie, having shot his cuffs and smirked horribly, “this is the end of the summer term, and many of you, no doubt, are leaving the school. And I don’t blame you, because there’s a froust in here you could cut with a knife. You are going out into the great world. Soon many of you will be walking along Broadway. And what I want to impress upon you is that, however much you may suffer from adenoids, you must all use every effort to prevent yourselves becoming pessimists and talking rot like old Tom Travers. There in the second row. The fellow with a face rather like a walnut.”

He paused to allow those wishing to do so to refresh themselves with another look at Uncle Tom, and I found myself musing in some little perplexity. Long association with the members of the Drones has put me pretty well in touch with the various ways in which an overdose of the blushful Hippocrene can take the individual, but I had never seen anyone react quite as Gussie was doing.

There was a snap about his work which I had never witnessed before, even in Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps on New Year’s Eve.

Jeeves, when I discussed the matter with him later, said it was something to do with inhibitions, if I caught the word correctly, and the suppression of, I think he said, the ego. What he meant, I gathered, was that, owing to the fact that Gussie had just completed a five years’ stretch of blameless seclusion among the newts, all the goofiness which ought to have been spread out thin over those five years and had been bottled up during that period came to the surface on this occasion in a lump—or, if you prefer to put it that way, like a tidal wave.

There may be something in this. Jeeves generally knows.

Anyway, be that as it may, I was dashed glad I had had the shrewdness to keep out of that second row. It might be unworthy of the prestige of a Wooster to squash in among the proletariat in the standing-room-only section, but at least, I felt, I was out of the danger zone. So thoroughly had Gussie got it up his nose by now that it seemed to me that had he sighted me he might have become personal about even an old school friend.

“If there’s one thing in the world I can’t stand,” proceeded Gussie, “it’s a pessimist. Be optimists, boys. You all know the difference between an optimist and a pessimist. An optimist is a man who—well, take the case of two Irishmen walking along Broadway. One is an optimist and one is a pessimist, just as one’s name is Pat and the other’s Mike.... Why, hullo, Bertie; I didn’t know you were here.”

Too late, I endeavoured to go to earth behind the chandler, only to discover that there was no chandler there. Some appointment, suddenly remembered—possibly a promise to his wife that he would be home to tea—had caused him to ooze away while my attention was elsewhere, leaving me right out in the open.

Between me and Gussie, who was now pointing in an offensive manner, there was nothing but a sea of interested faces looking up at me.

“Now, there,” boomed Gussie, continuing to point, “is an instance of what I mean. Boys and ladies and gentlemen, take a good look at that object standing up there at the back—morning coat, trousers as worn, quiet grey tie, and carnation in buttonhole—you can’t miss him. Bertie Wooster, that is, and as foul a pessimist as ever bit a tiger. I tell you I despise that man. And why do I despise him? Because, boys and ladies and gentlemen, he is a pessimist. His attitude is defeatist. When I told him I was going to address you this afternoon, he tried to dissuade me. And do you know why he tried to dissuade me? Because he said my trousers would split up the back.”

The cheers that greeted this were the loudest yet. Anything about splitting trousers went straight to the simple hearts of the young scholars of Market Snodsbury Grammar School. Two in the row in front of me turned purple, and a small lad with freckles seated beside them asked me for my autograph.

“Let me tell you a story about Bertie Wooster.”

A Wooster can stand a good deal, but he cannot stand having his name bandied in a public place. Picking my feet up softly, I was in the very process of executing a quiet sneak for the door, when I perceived that the bearded bloke had at last decided to apply the closure.

Why he hadn’t done so before is beyond me. Spell-bound, I take it. And, of course, when a chap is going like a breeze with the public, as Gussie had been, it’s not so dashed easy to chip in. However, the prospect of hearing another of Gussie’s anecdotes seemed to have done the trick. Rising rather as I had risen from my bench at the beginning of that painful scene with Tuppy in the twilight, he made a leap for the table, snatched up a book and came bearing down on the speaker.

He touched Gussie on the arm, and Gussie, turning sharply and seeing a large bloke with a beard apparently about to bean him with a book, sprang back in an attitude of self-defence.

“Perhaps, as time is getting on, Mr. Fink-Nottle, we had better——”

“Oh, ah,” said Gussie, getting the trend. He relaxed. “The prizes, eh? Of course, yes. Right-ho. Yes, might as well be shoving along with it. What’s this one?”

“Spelling and dictation—P.K. Purvis,” announced the bearded bloke.

“Spelling and dictation—P.K. Purvis,” echoed Gussie, as if he were calling coals. “Forward, P.K. Purvis.”

Now that the whistle had been blown on his speech, it seemed to me that there was no longer any need for the strategic retreat which I had been planning. I had no wish to tear myself away unless I had to. I mean, I had told Jeeves that this binge would be fraught with interest, and it was fraught with interest. There was a fascination about Gussie’s methods which gripped and made one reluctant to pass the thing up provided personal innuendoes were steered clear of. I decided, accordingly, to remain, and presently there was a musical squeaking and P.K. Purvis climbed the platform.

The spelling-and-dictation champ was about three foot six in his squeaking shoes, with a pink face and sandy hair. Gussie patted his hair. He seemed to have taken an immediate fancy to the lad.

“You P.K. Purvis?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“It’s a beautiful world, P.K. Purvis.”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“Ah, you’ve noticed it, have you? Good. You married, by any chance?”

“Sir, no, sir.”

“Get married, P.K. Purvis,” said Gussie earnestly. “It’s the only life ... Well, here’s your book. Looks rather bilge to me from a glance at the title page, but, such as it is, here you are.”

P.K. Purvis squeaked off amidst sporadic applause, but one could not fail to note that the sporadic was followed by a rather strained silence. It was evident that Gussie was striking something of a new note in Market Snodsbury scholastic circles. Looks were exchanged between parent and parent. The bearded bloke had the air of one who has drained the bitter cup. As for Aunt Dahlia, her demeanour now told only too clearly that her last doubts had been resolved and her verdict was in. I saw her whisper to the Bassett, who sat on her right, and the Bassett nodded sadly and looked like a fairy about to shed a tear and add another star to the Milky Way.

Gussie, after the departure of P.K. Purvis, had fallen into a sort of daydream and was standing with his mouth open and his hands in his pockets. Becoming abruptly aware that a fat kid in knickerbockers was at his elbow, he started violently.

“Hullo!” he said, visibly shaken. “Who are you?”

“This,” said the bearded bloke, “is R.V. Smethurst.”

“What’s he doing here?” asked Gussie suspiciously.

“You are presenting him with the drawing prize, Mr. Fink-Nottle.”

This apparently struck Gussie as a reasonable explanation. His face cleared.

“That’s right, too,” he said.... “Well, here it is, cocky. You off?” he said, as the kid prepared to withdraw.

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“Wait, R.V. Smethurst. Not so fast. Before you go, there is a question I wish to ask you.”

But the beard bloke’s aim now seemed to be to rush the ceremonies a bit. He hustled R.V. Smethurst off stage rather like a chucker-out in a pub regretfully ejecting an old and respected customer, and starting paging G.G. Simmons. A moment later the latter was up and coming, and conceive my emotion when it was announced that the subject on which he had clicked was Scripture knowledge. One of us, I mean to say.

G.G. Simmons was an unpleasant, perky-looking stripling, mostly front teeth and spectacles, but I gave him a big hand. We Scripture-knowledge sharks stick together.

Gussie, I was sorry to see, didn’t like him. There was in his manner, as he regarded G.G. Simmons, none of the chumminess which had marked it during his interview with P.K. Purvis or, in a somewhat lesser degree, with R.V. Smethurst. He was cold and distant.

“Well, G.G. Simmons.”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“What do you mean—sir, yes, sir? Dashed silly thing to say. So you’ve won the Scripture-knowledge prize, have you?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“Yes,” said Gussie, “you look just the sort of little tick who would. And yet,” he said, pausing and eyeing the child keenly, “how are we to know that this has all been open and above board? Let me test you, G.G. Simmons. What was What’s-His-Name—the chap who begat Thingummy? Can you answer me that, Simmons?”

“Sir, no, sir.”

Gussie turned to the bearded bloke.

“Fishy,” he said. “Very fishy. This boy appears to be totally lacking in Scripture knowledge.”

The bearded bloke passed a hand across his forehead.

“I can assure you, Mr. Fink-Nottle, that every care was taken to ensure a correct marking and that Simmons outdistanced his competitors by a wide margin.”

“Well, if you say so,” said Gussie doubtfully. “All right, G.G. Simmons, take your prize.”

“Sir, thank you, sir.”

“But let me tell you that there’s nothing to stick on side about in winning a prize for Scripture knowledge. Bertie Wooster——”

I don’t know when I’ve had a nastier shock. I had been going on the assumption that, now that they had stopped him making his speech, Gussie’s fangs had been drawn, as you might say. To duck my head down and resume my edging toward the door was with me the work of a moment.

“Bertie Wooster won the Scripture-knowledge prize at a kids’ school we were at together, and you know what he’s like. But, of course, Bertie frankly cheated. He succeeded in scrounging that Scripture-knowledge trophy over the heads of better men by means of some of the rawest and most brazen swindling methods ever witnessed even at a school where such things were common. If that man’s pockets, as he entered the examination-room, were not stuffed to bursting-point with lists of the kings of Judah——”

I heard no more. A moment later I was out in God’s air, fumbling with a fevered foot at the self-starter of the old car.

The engine raced. The clutch slid into position. I tooted and drove off.

My ganglions were still vibrating as I ran the car into the stables of Brinkley Court, and it was a much shaken Bertram who tottered up to his room to change into something loose. Having donned flannels, I lay down on the bed for a bit, and I suppose I must have dozed off, for the next thing I remember is finding Jeeves at my side.

I sat up. “My tea, Jeeves?”

“No, sir. It is nearly dinner-time.”

The mists cleared away.

“I must have been asleep.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nature taking its toll of the exhausted frame.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And enough to make it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And now it’s nearly dinner-time, you say? All right. I am in no mood for dinner, but I suppose you had better lay out the clothes.”

“It will not be necessary, sir. The company will not be dressing tonight. A cold collation has been set out in the dining-room.”

“Why’s that?”

“It was Mrs. Travers’s wish that this should be done in order to minimize the work for the staff, who are attending a dance at Sir Percival Stretchley-Budd’s residence tonight.”

“Of course, yes. I remember. My Cousin Angela told me. Tonight’s the night, what? You going, Jeeves?”

“No, sir. I am not very fond of this form of entertainment in the rural districts, sir.”

“I know what you mean. These country binges are all the same. A piano, one fiddle, and a floor like sandpaper. Is Anatole going? Angela hinted not.”

“Miss Angela was correct, sir. Monsieur Anatole is in bed.”

“Temperamental blighters, these Frenchmen.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was a pause.

“Well, Jeeves,” I said, “it was certainly one of those afternoons, what?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I cannot recall one more packed with incident. And I left before the finish.”

“Yes, sir. I observed your departure.”

“You couldn’t blame me for withdrawing.”

“No, sir. Mr. Fink-Nottle had undoubtedly become embarrassingly personal.”

“Was there much more of it after I went?”

“No, sir. The proceedings terminated very shortly. Mr. Fink-Nottle’s remarks with reference to Master G.G. Simmons brought about an early closure.”

“But he had finished his remarks about G.G. Simmons.”

“Only temporarily, sir. He resumed them immediately after your departure. If you recollect, sir, he had already proclaimed himself suspicious of Master Simmons’s bona fides, and he now proceeded to deliver a violent verbal attack upon the young gentleman, asserting that it was impossible for him to have won the Scripture-knowledge prize without systematic cheating on an impressive scale. He went so far as to suggest that Master Simmons was well known to the police.”

“Golly, Jeeves!”

“Yes, sir. The words did create a considerable sensation. The reaction of those present to this accusation I should describe as mixed. The young students appeared pleased and applauded vigorously, but Master Simmons’s mother rose from her seat and addressed Mr. Fink-Nottle in terms of strong protest.”

“Did Gussie seem taken aback? Did he recede from his position?”

“No, sir. He said that he could see it all now, and hinted at a guilty liaison between Master Simmons’s mother and the head master, accusing the latter of having cooked the marks, as his expression was, in order to gain favour with the former.”

“You don’t mean that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Egad, Jeeves! And then——”

“They sang the national anthem, sir.”

“Surely not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“At a moment like that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you were there and you know, of course, but I should have thought the last thing Gussie and this woman would have done in the circs. would have been to start singing duets.”

“You misunderstand me, sir. It was the entire company who sang. The head master turned to the organist and said something to him in a low tone. Upon which the latter began to play the national anthem, and the proceedings terminated.”

“I see. About time, too.”

“Yes, sir. Mrs. Simmons’s attitude had become unquestionably menacing.”

I pondered. What I had heard was, of course, of a nature to excite pity and terror, not to mention alarm and despondency, and it would be paltering with the truth to say that I was pleased about it. On the other hand, it was all over now, and it seemed to me that the thing to do was not to mourn over the past but to fix the mind on the bright future. I mean to say, Gussie might have lowered the existing Worcestershire record for goofiness and definitely forfeited all chance of becoming Market Snodsbury’s favourite son, but you couldn’t get away from the fact that he had proposed to Madeline Bassett, and you had to admit that she had accepted him.

I put this to Jeeves.

“A frightful exhibition,” I said, “and one which will very possibly ring down history’s pages. But we must not forget, Jeeves, that Gussie, though now doubtless looked upon in the neighbourhood as the world’s worst freak, is all right otherwise.”

“No, sir.”

I did not get quite this.

“When you say ‘No, sir,’ do you mean ‘Yes, sir’?”

“No, sir. I mean ‘No, sir.’”

“He is not all right otherwise?”

“No, sir.”

“But he’s betrothed.”

“No longer, sir. Miss Bassett has severed the engagement.”

“You don’t mean that?”

“Yes, sir.”

I wonder if you have noticed a rather peculiar thing about this chronicle. I allude to the fact that at one time or another practically everybody playing a part in it has had occasion to bury his or her face in his or her hands. I have participated in some pretty glutinous affairs in my time, but I think that never before or since have I been mixed up with such a solid body of brow clutchers.

Uncle Tom did it, if you remember. So did Gussie. So did Tuppy. So, probably, though I have no data, did Anatole, and I wouldn’t put it past the Bassett. And Aunt Dahlia, I have no doubt, would have done it, too, but for the risk of disarranging the carefully fixed coiffure.

Well, what I am trying to say is that at this juncture I did it myself. Up went the hands and down went the head, and in another jiffy I was clutching as energetically as the best of them.

And it was while I was still massaging the coconut and wondering what the next move was that something barged up against the door like the delivery of a ton of coals.

“I think this may very possibly be Mr. Fink-Nottle himself, sir,” said Jeeves.

His intuition, however, had led him astray. It was not Gussie but Tuppy. He came in and stood breathing asthmatically. It was plain that he was deeply stirred.

---

-18-

I eyed him narrowly. I didn’t like his looks. Mark you, I don’t say I ever had, much, because Nature, when planning this sterling fellow, shoved in a lot more lower jaw than was absolutely necessary and made the eyes a bit too keen and piercing for one who was neither an Empire builder nor a traffic policeman. But on the present occasion, in addition to offending the aesthetic sense, this Glossop seemed to me to be wearing a distinct air of menace, and I found myself wishing that Jeeves wasn’t always so dashed tactful. I mean, it’s all very well to remove yourself like an eel sliding into mud when the employer has a visitor, but there are moments—and it looked to me as if this was going to be one of them—when the truer tact is to stick round and stand ready to lend a hand in the free-for-all.

For Jeeves was no longer with us. I hadn’t seen him go, and I hadn’t heard him go, but he had gone. As far as the eye could reach, one noted nobody but Tuppy. And in Tuppy’s demeanour, as I say, there was a certain something that tended to disquiet. He looked to me very much like a man who had come to reopen that matter of my tickling Angela’s ankles.

However, his opening remark told me that I had been alarming myself unduly. It was of a pacific nature, and came as a great relief.

“Bertie,” he said, “I owe you an apology. I have come to make it.”

My relief on hearing these words, containing as they did no reference of any sort to tickled ankles, was, as I say, great. But I don’t think it was any greater than my surprise. Months had passed since that painful episode at the Drones, and until now he hadn’t given a sign of remorse and contrition. Indeed, word had reached me through private sources that he frequently told the story at dinners and other gatherings and, when doing so, laughed his silly head off.

I found it hard to understand, accordingly, what could have caused him to abase himself at this later date. Presumably he had been given the elbow by his better self, but why?

Still, there it was.

“My dear chap,” I said, gentlemanly to the gills, “don’t mention it.”

“What’s the sense of saying, ‘Don’t mention it’? I have mentioned it.”

“I mean, don’t mention it any more. Don’t give the matter another thought. We all of us forget ourselves sometimes and do things which, in our calmer moments, we regret. No doubt you were a bit tight at the time.”

“What the devil do you think you’re talking about?”

I didn’t like his tone. Brusque.

“Correct me if I am wrong,” I said, with a certain stiffness, “but I assumed that you were apologizing for your foul conduct in looping back the last ring that night in the Drones, causing me to plunge into the swimming b. in the full soup and fish.”

“Ass! Not that, at all.”

“Then what?”

“This Bassett business.”

“What Bassett business?”

“Bertie,” said Tuppy, “when you told me last night that you were in love with Madeline Bassett, I gave you the impression that I believed you, but I didn’t. The thing seemed too incredible. However, since then I have made inquiries, and the facts appear to square with your statement. I have now come to apologize for doubting you.”

“Made inquiries?”

“I asked her if you had proposed to her, and she said, yes, you had.”

“Tuppy! You didn’t?”

“I did.”

“Have you no delicacy, no proper feeling?”

“No.”

“Oh? Well, right-ho, of course, but I think you ought to have.”

“Delicacy be dashed. I wanted to be certain that it was not you who stole Angela from me. I now know it wasn’t.”

So long as he knew that, I didn’t so much mind him having no delicacy.

“Ah,” I said. “Well, that’s fine. Hold that thought.”

“I have found out who it was.”

“What?”

He stood brooding for a moment. His eyes were smouldering with a dull fire. His jaw stuck out like the back of Jeeves’s head.

“Bertie,” he said, “do you remember what I swore I would do to the chap who stole Angela from me?”

“As nearly as I recall, you planned to pull him inside out——”

“—and make him swallow himself. Correct. The programme still holds good.”

“But, Tuppy, I keep assuring you, as a competent eyewitness, that nobody snitched Angela from you during that Cannes trip.”

“No. But they did after she got back.”

“What?”

“Don’t keep saying, ‘What?’ You heard.”

“But she hasn’t seen anybody since she got back.”

“Oh, no? How about that newt bloke?”

“Gussie?”

“Precisely. The serpent Fink-Nottle.”

This seemed to me absolute gibbering.

“But Gussie loves the Bassett.”

“You can’t all love this blighted Bassett. What astonishes me is that anyone can do it. He loves Angela, I tell you. And she loves him.”

“But Angela handed you your hat before Gussie ever got here.”

“No, she didn’t. Couple of hours after.”

“He couldn’t have fallen in love with her in a couple of hours.”

“Why not? I fell in love with her in a couple of minutes. I worshipped her immediately we met, the popeyed little excrescence.”

“But, dash it——”

“Don’t argue, Bertie. The facts are all docketed. She loves this newt-nuzzling blister.”

“Quite absurd, laddie—quite absurd.”

“Oh?” He ground a heel into the carpet—a thing I’ve often read about, but had never seen done before. “Then perhaps you will explain how it is that she happens to come to be engaged to him?”

You could have knocked me down with a f.

“Engaged to him?”

“She told me herself.”

“She was kidding you.”

“She was not kidding me. Shortly after the conclusion of this afternoon’s binge at Market Snodsbury Grammar School he asked her to marry him, and she appears to have right-hoed without a murmur.”

“There must be some mistake.”

“There was. The snake Fink-Nottle made it, and by now I bet he realizes it. I’ve been chasing him since 5.30.”

“Chasing him?”

“All over the place. I want to pull his head off.”

“I see. Quite.”

“You haven’t seen him, by any chance?”

“No.”

“Well, if you do, say goodbye to him quickly and put in your order for lilies.... Oh, Jeeves.”

“Sir?”

I hadn’t heard the door open, but the man was on the spot once more. My private belief, as I think I have mentioned before, is that Jeeves doesn’t have to open doors. He’s like one of those birds in India who bung their astral bodies about—the chaps, I mean, who having gone into thin air in Bombay, reassemble the parts and appear two minutes later in Calcutta. Only some such theory will account for the fact that he’s not there one moment and is there the next. He just seems to float from Spot A to Spot B like some form of gas.

“Have you seen Mr. Fink-Nottle, Jeeves?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m going to murder him.”

“Very good, sir.”

Tuppy withdrew, banging the door behind him, and I put Jeeves abreast.

“Jeeves,” I said, “do you know what? Mr. Fink-Nottle is engaged to my Cousin Angela.”

“Indeed, sir?”

“Well, how about it? Do you grasp the psychology? Does it make sense? Only a few hours ago he was engaged to Miss Bassett.”

“Gentlemen who have been discarded by one young lady are often apt to attach themselves without delay to another, sir. It is what is known as a gesture.”

I began to grasp.

“I see what you mean. Defiant stuff.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A sort of ‘Oh, right-ho, please yourself, but if you don’t want me, there are plenty who do.’”

“Precisely, sir. My Cousin George——”

“Never mind about your Cousin George, Jeeves.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Keep him for the long winter evenings, what?”

“Just as you wish, sir.”

“And, anyway, I bet your Cousin George wasn’t a shrinking, non-goose-bo-ing jellyfish like Gussie. That is what astounds me, Jeeves—that it should be Gussie who has been putting in all this heavy gesture-making stuff.”

“You must remember, sir, that Mr. Fink-Nottle is in a somewhat inflamed cerebral condition.”

“That’s true. A bit above par at the moment, as it were?”

“Exactly, sir.”

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing—he’ll be in a jolly sight more inflamed cerebral condition if Tuppy gets hold of him.... What’s the time?”

“Just on eight o’clock, sir.”

“Then Tuppy has been chasing him for two hours and a half. We must save the unfortunate blighter, Jeeves.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A human life is a human life, what?”

“Exceedingly true, sir.”

“The first thing, then, is to find him. After that we can discuss plans and schemes. Go forth, Jeeves, and scour the neighbourhood.”

“It will not be necessary, sir. If you will glance behind you, you will see Mr. Fink-Nottle coming out from beneath your bed.”

And, by Jove, he was absolutely right.

There was Gussie, emerging as stated. He was covered with fluff and looked like a tortoise popping forth for a bit of a breather.

“Gussie!” I said.

“Jeeves,” said Gussie.

“Sir?” said Jeeves.

“Is that door locked, Jeeves?”

“No, sir, but I will attend to the matter immediately.”

Gussie sat down on the bed, and I thought for a moment that he was going to be in the mode by burying his face in his hands. However, he merely brushed a dead spider from his brow.

“Have you locked the door, Jeeves?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Because you can never tell that that ghastly Glossop may not take it into his head to come——”

The word “back” froze on his lips. He hadn’t got any further than a b-ish sound, when the handle of the door began to twist and rattle. He sprang from the bed, and for an instant stood looking exactly like a picture my Aunt Agatha has in her dining-room—The Stag at Bay—Landseer. Then he made a dive for the cupboard and was inside it before one really got on to it that he had started leaping. I have seen fellows late for the 9.15 move less nippily.

I shot a glance at Jeeves. He allowed his right eyebrow to flicker slightly, which is as near as he ever gets to a display of the emotions.

“Hullo?” I yipped.

“Let me in, blast you!” responded Tuppy’s voice from without. “Who locked this door?”

I consulted Jeeves once more in the language of the eyebrow. He raised one of his. I raised one of mine. He raised his other. I raised my other. Then we both raised both. Finally, there seeming no other policy to pursue, I flung wide the gates and Tuppy came shooting in.

“Now what?” I said, as nonchalantly as I could manage.

“Why was the door locked?” demanded Tuppy.

I was in pretty good eyebrow-raising form by now, so I gave him a touch of it.

“Is one to have no privacy, Glossop?” I said coldly. “I instructed Jeeves to lock the door because I was about to disrobe.”

“A likely story!” said Tuppy, and I’m not sure he didn’t add “Forsooth!” “You needn’t try to make me believe that you’re afraid people are going to run excursion trains to see you in your underwear. You locked that door because you’ve got the snake Fink-Nottle concealed in here. I suspected it the moment I’d left, and I decided to come back and investigate. I’m going to search this room from end to end. I believe he’s in that cupboard.... What’s in this cupboard?”

“Just clothes,” I said, having another stab at the nonchalant, though extremely dubious as to whether it would come off. “The usual wardrobe of the English gentleman paying a country-house visit.”

“You’re lying!”

Well, I wouldn’t have been if he had only waited a minute before speaking, because the words were hardly out of his mouth before Gussie was out of the cupboard. I have commented on the speed with which he had gone in. It was as nothing to the speed with which he emerged. There was a sort of whir and blur, and he was no longer with us.

I think Tuppy was surprised. In fact, I’m sure he was. Despite the confidence with which he had stated his view that the cupboard contained Fink-Nottles, it plainly disconcerted him to have the chap fizzing out at him like this. He gargled sharply, and jumped back about five feet. The next moment, however, he had recovered his poise and was galloping down the corridor in pursuit. It only needed Aunt Dahlia after them, shouting “Yoicks!” or whatever is customary on these occasions, to complete the resemblance to a brisk run with the Quorn.

I sank into a handy chair. I am not a man whom it is easy to discourage, but it seemed to me that things had at last begun to get too complex for Bertram.

“Jeeves,” I said, “all this is a bit thick.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The head rather swims.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I think you had better leave me, Jeeves. I shall need to devote the very closest thought to the situation which has arisen.”

“Very good, sir.”

The door closed. I lit a cigarette and began to ponder.

---

-19-

Most chaps in my position, I imagine, would have pondered all the rest of the evening without getting a bite, but we Woosters have an uncanny knack of going straight to the heart of things, and I don’t suppose it was much more than ten minutes after I had started pondering before I saw what had to be done.

What was needed to straighten matters out, I perceived, was a heart-to- heart talk with Angela. She had caused all the trouble by her mutton- headed behaviour in saying “Yes” instead of “No” when Gussie, in the grip of mixed drinks and cerebral excitement, had suggested teaming up. She must obviously be properly ticked off and made to return him to store. A quarter of an hour later, I had tracked her down to the summer-house in which she was taking a cooler and was seating myself by her side.

“Angela,” I said, and if my voice was stern, well, whose wouldn’t have been, “this is all perfect drivel.”

She seemed to come out of a reverie. She looked at me inquiringly.

“I’m sorry, Bertie, I didn’t hear. What were you talking drivel about?”

“I was not talking drivel.”

“Oh, sorry, I thought you said you were.”

“Is it likely that I would come out here in order to talk drivel?”

“Very likely.”

I thought it best to haul off and approach the matter from another angle.

“I’ve just been seeing Tuppy.”

“Oh?”

“And Gussie Fink-Nottle.”

“Oh, yes?”

“It appears that you have gone and got engaged to the latter.”

“Quite right.”

“Well, that’s what I meant when I said it was all perfect drivel. You can’t possibly love a chap like Gussie.”

“Why not?”

“You simply can’t.”

Well, I mean to say, of course she couldn’t. Nobody could love a freak like Gussie except a similar freak like the Bassett. The shot wasn’t on the board. A splendid chap, of course, in many ways—courteous, amiable, and just the fellow to tell you what to do till the doctor came, if you had a sick newt on your hands—but quite obviously not of Mendelssohn’s March timber. I have no doubt that you could have flung bricks by the hour in England’s most densely populated districts without endangering the safety of a single girl capable of becoming Mrs. Augustus Fink-Nottle without an anaesthetic.

I put this to her, and she was forced to admit the justice of it.

“All right, then. Perhaps I don’t.”

“Then what,” I said keenly, “did you want to go and get engaged to him for, you unreasonable young fathead?”

“I thought it would be fun.”

“Fun!”

“And so it has been. I’ve had a lot of fun out of it. You should have seen Tuppy’s face when I told him.”

A sudden bright light shone upon me.

“Ha! A gesture!”

“What?”

“You got engaged to Gussie just to score off Tuppy?”

“I did.”

“Well, then, that was what I was saying. It was a gesture.”

“Yes, I suppose you could call it that.”

“And I’ll tell you something else I’ll call it—viz. a dashed low trick. I’m surprised at you, young Angela.”

“I don’t see why.”

I curled the lip about half an inch. “Being a female, you wouldn’t. You gentler sexes are like that. You pull off the rawest stuff without a pang. You pride yourselves on it. Look at Jael, the wife of Heber.”

“Where did you ever hear of Jael, the wife of Heber?”

“Possibly you are not aware that I once won a Scripture-knowledge prize at school?”

“Oh, yes. I remember Augustus mentioning it in his speech.”

“Quite,” I said, a little hurriedly. I had no wish to be reminded of Augustus’s speech. “Well, as I say, look at Jael, the wife of Heber. Dug spikes into the guest’s coconut while he was asleep, and then went swanking about the place like a Girl Guide. No wonder they say, ‘Oh, woman, woman!’”

“Who?”

“The chaps who do. Coo, what a sex! But you aren’t proposing to keep this up, of course?”

“Keep what up?”

“This rot of being engaged to Gussie.”

“I certainly am.”

“Just to make Tuppy look silly.”

“Do you think he looks silly?”

“I do.”

“So he ought to.”

I began to get the idea that I wasn’t making real headway. I remember when I won that Scripture-knowledge prize, having to go into the facts about Balaam’s ass. I can’t quite recall what they were, but I still retain a sort of general impression of something digging its feet in and putting its ears back and refusing to co-operate; and it seemed to me that this was what Angela was doing now. She and Balaam’s ass were, so to speak, sisters under the skin. There’s a word beginning with r——“re” something——“recal” something—No, it’s gone. But what I am driving at is that is what this Angela was showing herself.

“Silly young geezer,” I said.

She pinkened.

“I’m not a silly young geezer.”

“You are a silly young geezer. And, what’s more, you know it.”

“I don’t know anything of the kind.”

“Here you are, wrecking Tuppy’s life, wrecking Gussie’s life, all for the sake of a cheap score.”

“Well, it’s no business of yours.”

I sat on this promptly:

“No business of mine when I see two lives I used to go to school with wrecked? Ha! Besides, you know you’re potty about Tuppy.”

“I’m not!”

“Is that so? If I had a quid for every time I’ve seen you gaze at him with the lovelight in your eyes——”

She gazed at me, but without the lovelight.

“Oh, for goodness sake, go away and boil your head, Bertie!”

I drew myself up.

“That,” I replied, with dignity, “is just what I am going to go away and boil. At least, I mean, I shall now leave you. I have said my say.”

“Good.”

“But permit me to add——”

“I won’t.”

“Very good,” I said coldly. “In that case, tinkerty tonk.”

And I meant it to sting.

“Moody” and “discouraged” were about the two adjectives you would have selected to describe me as I left the summer-house. It would be idle to deny that I had expected better results from this little chat.

I was surprised at Angela. Odd how you never realize that every girl is at heart a vicious specimen until something goes wrong with her love affair. This cousin and I had been meeting freely since the days when I wore sailor suits and she hadn’t any front teeth, yet only now was I beginning to get on to her hidden depths. A simple, jolly, kindly young pimple she had always struck me as—the sort you could more or less rely on not to hurt a fly. But here she was now laughing heartlessly—at least, I seemed to remember hearing her laugh heartlessly—like something cold and callous out of a sophisticated talkie, and fairly spitting on her hands in her determination to bring Tuppy’s grey hairs in sorrow to the grave.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again—girls are rummy. Old Pop Kipling never said a truer word than when he made that crack about the f. of the s. being more d. than the m.

It seemed to me in the circs. that there was but one thing to do—that is head for the dining-room and take a slash at the cold collation of which Jeeves had spoken. I felt in urgent need of sustenance, for the recent interview had pulled me down a bit. There is no gainsaying the fact that this naked-emotion stuff reduces a chap’s vitality and puts him in the vein for a good whack at the beef and ham.

To the dining-room, accordingly, I repaired, and had barely crossed the threshold when I perceived Aunt Dahlia at the sideboard, tucking into salmon mayonnaise.

The spectacle drew from me a quick “Oh, ah,” for I was somewhat embarrassed. The last time this relative and I had enjoyed a tête-à-tête, it will be remembered, she had sketched out plans for drowning me in the kitchen-garden pond, and I was not quite sure what my present standing with her was.

I was relieved to find her in genial mood. Nothing could have exceeded the cordiality with which she waved her fork.

“Hallo, Bertie, you old ass,” was her very matey greeting. “I thought I shouldn’t find you far away from the food. Try some of this salmon. Excellent.”

“Anatole’s?” I queried.

“No. He’s still in bed. But the kitchen maid has struck an inspired streak. It suddenly seems to have come home to her that she isn’t catering for a covey of buzzards in the Sahara Desert, and she has put out something quite fit for human consumption. There is good in the girl, after all, and I hope she enjoys herself at the dance.”

I ladled out a portion of salmon, and we fell into pleasant conversation, chatting of this servants’ ball at the Stretchley-Budds and speculating idly, I recall, as to what Seppings, the butler, would look like, doing the rumba.

It was not till I had cleaned up the first platter and was embarking on a second that the subject of Gussie came up. Considering what had passed at Market Snodsbury that afternoon, it was one which I had been expecting her to touch on earlier. When she did touch on it, I could see that she had not yet been informed of Angela’s engagement.

“I say, Bertie,” she said, meditatively chewing fruit salad. “This Spink-Bottle.”

“Nottle.”

“Bottle,” insisted the aunt firmly. “After that exhibition of his this afternoon, Bottle, and nothing but Bottle, is how I shall always think of him. However, what I was going to say was that, if you see him, I wish you would tell him that he has made an old woman very, very happy. Except for the time when the curate tripped over a loose shoelace and fell down the pulpit steps, I don’t think I have ever had a more wonderful moment than when good old Bottle suddenly started ticking Tom off from the platform. In fact, I thought his whole performance in the most perfect taste.”

I could not but demur.

“Those references to myself——”

“Those were what I liked next best. I thought they were fine. Is it true that you cheated when you won that Scripture-knowledge prize?”

“Certainly not. My victory was the outcome of the most strenuous and unremitting efforts.”

“And how about this pessimism we hear of? Are you a pessimist, Bertie?”

I could have told her that what was occurring in this house was rapidly making me one, but I said no, I wasn’t.

“That’s right. Never be a pessimist. Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. It’s a long lane that has no turning. It’s always darkest before the dawn. Have patience and all will come right. The sun will shine, although the day’s a grey one.... Try some of this salad.”

I followed her advice, but even as I plied the spoon my thoughts were elsewhere. I was perplexed. It may have been the fact that I had recently been hobnobbing with so many bowed-down hearts that made this cheeriness of hers seem so bizarre, but bizarre was certainly what I found it.

“I thought you might have been a trifle peeved,” I said.

“Peeved?”

“By Gussie’s manoeuvres on the platform this afternoon. I confess that I had rather expected the tapping foot and the drawn brow.”

“Nonsense. What was there to be peeved about? I took the whole thing as a great compliment, proud to feel that any drink from my cellars could have produced such a majestic jag. It restores one’s faith in post-war whisky. Besides, I couldn’t be peeved at anything tonight. I am like a little child clapping its hands and dancing in the sunshine. For though it has been some time getting a move on, Bertie, the sun has at last broken through the clouds. Ring out those joy bells. Anatole has withdrawn his notice.”

“What? Oh, very hearty congratulations.”

“Thanks. Yes, I worked on him like a beaver after I got back this afternoon, and finally, vowing he would ne’er consent, he consented. He stays on, praises be, and the way I look at it now is that God’s in His heaven and all’s right with——”

She broke off. The door had opened, and we were plus a butler.

“Hullo, Seppings,” said Aunt Dahlia. “I thought you had gone.”

“Not yet, madam.”

“Well, I hope you will all have a good time.”

“Thank you, madam.”

“Was there something you wanted to see me about?”

“Yes, madam. It is with reference to Monsieur Anatole. Is it by your wish, madam, that Mr. Fink-Nottle is making faces at Monsieur Anatole through the skylight of his bedroom?”

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