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has passed, the scales have fallen from my eyes, and we're just good
friends. The snag in this business of falling in love, aged relative,
is that the parties of the first part so often get mixed up with the
wrong parties of the second part, robbed of their cooler judgment by
the parties of the second part's glamour. Put it like this. The male
sex is divided into rabbits and non-rabbits and the female sex into
dashers and dormice, and the trouble is that the male rabbit has a way
of getting attracted by the female dasher (who would be fine for the
male non-rabbit) and realizing too late that he ought to have been
concentrating on some mild, gentle dormouse with whom he could settle
down peacefully and nibble lettuce.'
'The whole thing, in short, a bit of a mix-up?' 'Exactly. Take me
and Bobbie. I yield to no one in my appreciation of her espieglerie,
but I'm one of the rabbits and always have been while she is about as
pronounced a dasher as ever dashed. What I like is the quiet life, and
Roberta Wickham wouldn't recognize the quiet life if you brought it to
her on a plate with watercress round it. She's all for not letting the
sun go down without having started something calculated to stagger
humanity. In a word, she needs the guiding hand, which is a thing I
couldn't supply her with. Whereas from Kipper she will get it in
abundance, he being one of those tough non-rabbits for whom it is
child's play to make the little woman draw the line somewhere. That is
why the union of these twain has my support and approval and why, when
she told me all that in the pub, I felt like doing a buck-and-wing
dance. Where is Kipper? I should like to shake him by the hand and pat
his back.'
'He went on a picnic with Wilbert and Phyllis.'
The significance of this did not escape me.
'Tailing up stuff, eh? Right on the job, is he?'
'Wilbert is constantly under his eye.'
'And if ever a man needed to be constantly under an eye, it's the
above kleptomaniac.'
'The what?'
'Haven't you been told? Wilbert's a pincher.'
'How do you mean, a pincher?'
'He pinches things. Everything that isn't nailed down is grist to
his mill.'
'Don't be an ass.'
'I'm not being an ass. He's got Uncle Tom's cow-creamer.'
'I know.'
'You know?'
'Of course I know.'
Her ... what's the word? ... phlegm, is it? ... something beginning
with a p... astounded me. I had expected to freeze her young - or,
rather, middle-aged -blood and have her perm stand on end like quills
upon the fretful porpentine, and she hadn't moved a muscle.
'Beshrew me,' I said, 'you take it pretty calmly.'
'Well, what's there to get excited about? Tom sold him the thing.'
'What?'
'Wilbert got in touch with him at Harrogate and put in his bid, and
Tom phoned me to give it to him. Just shows how important that deal
must be to Tom. I'd have thought he would rather have parted with his
eyeteeth.'
I drew a deep breath, this time fortunately unmixed with gin and
tonic. I was profoundly stirred.
'You mean,' said, my voice quavering like that of a coloratura
soprano, 'that I went through that soul-shattering experience all for
nothing?'
'Who's been shattering your soul, if any?'
'Ma Cream. By popping in while I was searching Wilbert's room for
the loathsome object. Naturally I thought he'd swiped it and hidden it
there.'
'And she caught you?'
'Not once, but twice.'
'What did she say?'
'She recommended me to take treatment from Roddy Glossop, of whose
skill in ministering to the mentally afflicted she had heard such good
reports. One sees what gave her the idea. I was half-way under the
dressing-table at the moment, and no doubt she thought it odd.'
'Bertie! How absolutely priceless!'
The adjective 'priceless' seemed to me an ill-chosen one, and I said
so. But my words were lost in the gale of mirth into which she now
exploded. I had never heard anyone laugh so heartily, not even Bobbie
on the occasion when the rake jumped up and hit me on the tip of the
nose.
'I'd have given fifty quid to have been there,' she said, when she
was able to get the vocal cords working. 'Half-way under the dressing-
table, were you?'
'The second time. When we first forgathered, I was sitting on the floor
with a chair round my neck.'
'Like an Elizabethan ruff, as worn by Thomas Botway.'
'Otway,' I said stiffly. As I have mentioned, I like to get things
right. And I was about to tell her that what I had hoped for from a
blood relation was sympathy and condolence rather than this crackling
of thorns under a pot, as it is sometimes called, when the door opened
and Bobbie came in.
The moment I cast an eye on her, it seemed to me that there was
something strange about her aspect. Normally, this beasel presents to
the world the appearance of one who is feeling that if it isn't the
best of all possible worlds, it's quite good enough to be going on with
till a better one comes along. Verve, I mean, and animation and all
that sort of thing. But now there was a listlessness about her, not the
listlessness of the cat Augustus but more that of the female in the
picture in the Louvre, of whom Jeeves, on the occasion when he lugged
me there to take a dekko at her, said that here was the head upon which
all the ends of the world are come. He drew my attention, I remember,
to the weariness of the eyelids. I got just the same impression of
weariness from Bobbie's eyelids.
Unparting her lips which were set in a thin line as if she had just
been taking a suck at a lemon, she said:
'I came to get that book of Mrs Cream's that I was reading, Mrs
Travers.'
'Help yourself, child,' said the ancestor. 'The more people in this
joint reading her stuff, the better. It all goes to help the
composition.'
'So you got here all right, Bobbie,' I said. 'Have you seen Kipper?'
I wouldn't say she snorted, but she certainly sniffed.
'Bertie,' she said in a voice straight from the frigidaire, 'will
you do me a favour?'
'Of course. What?'
'Don't mention that rat's name in my presence,' she said, and pushed
off, the eyelids still weary.
She left me fogged and groping for the inner meaning, and I could
see from Aunt Dahlia's goggling eyes that the basic idea hadn't got
across with her either.
'Well!' she said. 'What's all this? I thought you told me she loved
young Herring with a passion like boiling oil.'
'That was her story.'
'The oil seems to have gone off the boil. Yes, sir, if that was the
language of love, I'll eat my hat,' said the blood relation, alluding,
I took it, to the beastly straw contraption in which she does her
gardening, concerning which I can only say that it is almost as foul as
Uncle Tom's Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, which has frightened more
crows than any other lid in Worcestershire. 'They must have had a
fight.'
'It does look like it,' I agreed, 'and I don't understand how it can
have happened considering that she left me with the love light in her
eyes and can't have been back here more than about half an hour. What,
one asks oneself, in so short a time can have changed a girl full of
love and ginger ale into a girl who speaks of the adored object as
"that rat" and doesn't want to hear his name mentioned? These are deep
waters. Should I send for Jeeves?'
'What on earth can Jeeves do?'
'Well, now you put it that way, I'm bound to admit that I don't
know. It's just that one drops into the habit of sending for Jeeves
whenever things have gone agley, if that's the word I'm thinking of.
Scotch, isn't it? Agley, I mean. It sounds Scotch to me. However,
passing lightly over that, the thing to do when you want the low-down
is to go to the fountainhead and get it straight from the horse's
mouth. Kipper can solve this mystery. I'll pop along and find him.'
I was, however, spared the trouble of popping, for at this moment he
entered left centre.
'Oh, there you are, Bertie,' he said. 'I heard you were back. I was
looking for you.'
He had spoken in a low, husky sort of way, like a voice from the
tomb, and I now saw that he was exhibiting all the earmarks of a man
who has recently had a bomb explode in his vicinity. His shoulders
sagged and his eyes were glassy. He looked, in short, like the fellow
who hadn't started to take Old Doctor Gordon's Bile Magnesia, and I
snapped into it without preamble. This was no time for being tactful
and pretending not to notice.
'What's all this strained-relations stuff between you and Bobbie,
Kipper?' I said, and when he said, 'Oh, nothing,' rapped the table
sharply and told him to cut out the coy stuff and come clean.
'Yes,' said Aunt Dahlia. 'What's happened, young Herring?'
I think for a moment he was about to draw himself up with hauteur
and say he would prefer, if we didn't mind, not to discuss his private
affairs, but when he was half-way up he caught Aunt Dahlia's eye and
returned to position one. Aunt Dahlia's eye, while not in the same
class as that of my Aunt Agatha, who is known to devour her young and
conduct human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, has lots of
authority. He subsided into a chair and sat there looking filleted.
'Well, if you must know,' he said, 'she's broken the engagement.'
This didn't get us any farther. We had assumed as much. You don't go
calling people rats if love still lingers.
'But it's only an hour or so,' I said, 'since I left her outside a
hostelry called the "Fox and Goose", and she had just been giving you a
rave notice. What came unstuck? What did you do to the girl?'
'Oh, nothing.'
'Come, come!'
'Well, it was this way.'
There was a pause here while he said that he would give a hundred
quid for a stiff whisky-and-soda, but as this would have involved all
the delay of ringing for Pop Glossop and having it fetched from the
lowest bin, Aunt Dahlia would have none of it. In lieu of the desired
refreshment she offered him a cold crumpet, which he declined, and told
him to get on with it.
'Where I went wrong,' he said, still speaking in that low, husky
voice as if he had been a ghost suffering from catarrh, 'was in getting
engaged to Phyllis Mills.'
'What?' I cried.
'What?' cried Aunt Dahlia.
'Egad!' I said.
'What on earth did you do that for?' said Aunt Dahlia.
He shifted uneasily in his chair, like a man troubled with ants in
the pants.
'It seemed a good idea at the time,' he said. 'Bobbie had told me on
the telephone that she never wanted to speak to me again in this world
or the next, and Phyllis had been telling me that, while she shrank
from Wilbert Cream because of his murky past, she found him so magnetic
that she knew she wouldn't be able to refuse him if he proposed, and I
had been commissioned to stop him proposing, so I thought the simplest
thing to do was to get engaged to her myself. So we talked it over, and
having reached a thorough understanding that it was simply a ruse and
nothing binding on either side, we announced it to Cream.'
'Very shrewd,' said Aunt Dahlia. 'How did he take it?'
'He reeled.'
'Lot of reeling there's been in this business,' I said. 'You reeled,
if you recollect, when you remembered you'd written that letter to
Bobbie.'
'And I reeled again when she suddenly appeared from nowhere just as
I was kissing Phyllis.'
I pursed the lips. Getting a bit French, this sequence, it seemed to
me.
'There was no need for you to do that.'
'No need, perhaps, but I wanted to make it look natural to Cream.'
'Oh, I see. Driving it home, as it were?'
'That was the idea. Of course I wouldn't have done it if I'd known
that Bobbie had changed her mind and wanted things to be as they were
before that telephone
conversation. But I didn't know. It's just one of life's little
ironies. You get the same sort of thing in Thomas Hardy.'
I knew nothing of this T. Hardy of whom he spoke, but I saw what he
meant. It was like what's always happening in the novels of suspense,
where the girl goes around saying, 'Had I but known.'
'Didn't you explain?'
He gave me a pitying look.
'Have you ever tried explaining something to a red-haired girl who's
madder than a wet hen?'
I took his point.
'What happened then?'
'Oh, she was very lady-like. Talked amiably of this and that till
Phyllis had left us. Then she started in. She said she had raced here
with a heart overflowing with love, longing to be in my arms, and a
jolly surprise it was to find those arms squeezing the stuffing out of
another and ... Oh, well, a lot more along those lines. The trouble is,
she's always been a bit squiggle-eyed about Phyllis, because in
Switzerland she held the view that we were a shade too matey. Nothing
in it, of course.'
'Just good friends?'
'Exactly.'
'Well, if you want to know what I think,' said Aunt Dahlia.
But we never did get around to knowing what she thought, for at this
moment Phyllis came in.
Giving the wench the once-over as she entered, I found myself well
able to understand why Bobbie on observing her entangled with Kipper
had exploded with so loud a report. I'm not myself, of course, an
idealistic girl in love with a member of the staff of the Thursday
Review and never have been, but if I were I know I'd get the megrims
somewhat severely if I caught him in a clinch with anyone as personable
as this stepdaughter of Aubrey Upjohn, for though shaky on the IQ,
physically she was a pipterino of the first water. Her eyes were
considerably bluer than the skies above, she was wearing a simple
summer dress which accentuated rather than hid the graceful outlines of
her figure, if you know what I mean, and it was not surprising that
Wilbert Cream, seeing her, should have lost no time in reaching for the
book of poetry and making a bee line with her to the nearest leafy
glade.
'Oh, Mrs Travers,' she said, spotting Aunt Dahlia, 'I've just been
talking to Daddy on the telephone.'
This took the old ancestor's mind right off the tangled affairs of
the Kipper-Bobbie axis, to which a moment before she had been according
her best attention, and I didn't wonder. With the prize-giving at
Market Snodsbury Grammar School, a function at which all that was
bravest and fairest in the neighbourhood would be present, only two
days away, she must have been getting pretty uneasy about the continued
absence of the big shot slated to address the young scholars on ideals
and life in the world outside. If you are on the board of governors of
a school and have contracted to supply an orator for the great day of
the year, you can be forgiven for feeling a trifle jumpy when you learn
that the silver-tongued one has gadded off to the metropolis, leaving
no word as to when he will be returning, if ever. For all she knew,
Upjohn might have got the holiday spirit and be planning to remain
burning up the boulevards indefinitely, and of course nothing gives a
big beano a black eye more surely than the failure to show up of the
principal speaker. So now she quite naturally blossomed like a rose in
June and asked if the old son of a bachelor had mentioned anything
about when he was coming back.
'He's coming back tonight. He says he hopes you haven't been
worrying.'
A snort of about the calibre of an explosion in an ammunition dump
escaped my late father's sister.
'Oh, does he? Well, I've a piece of news for him. I have been
worrying. What's kept him in London so long?'
'He's been seeing his lawyer about this libel action he's bringing
against the Thursday Review.'
I have often asked myself how many inches it was that Kipper leaped
from his chair at these words. Sometimes I think it was ten, sometimes
only six, but whichever it was he unquestionably came up from the
padded seat like an athlete competing in the Sitting High Jump event.
Scarface McColl couldn't have risen more nippily.
'Against the Thursday Review?' said Aunt Dahlia. 'That's your rag,
isn't it, young Herring? What have they done to stir him up?'
'It's this book Daddy wrote about preparatory schools. He wrote a
book about preparatory schools. Did you know he had written a book
about preparatory schools?'
'Hadn't an inkling. Nobody tells me anything.'
'Well, he wrote this book about preparatory schools. It was about
preparatory schools.'
'About preparatory schools, was it?'
'Yes, about preparatory schools.'
'Thank God we've got that straightened out at last. I had a feeling
we should get somewhere if we dug long enough. And - ?'
'And the Thursday Review said something libellous about it, and
Daddy's lawyer says the jury ought to give Daddy at least five thousand
pounds. Because they libelled him. So he's been in London all this time
seeing his lawyer. But he's coming back tonight. He'll be here for the
prize-giving, and I've got his speech all typed out and ready for him.
Oh, there's my precious Poppet,' said Phyllis, as a distant barking
reached the ears. 'He's asking for his dinner, the sweet little angel.
All right, darling, Mother's coming,' she fluted, and buzzed off on the
errand of mercy.
A brief silence followed her departure.
'I don't care what you say,' said Aunt Dahlia at length in a defiant
sort of way. 'Brains aren't everything. She's a dear, sweet girl. I
love her like a daughter, and to hell with anyone who calls her a half-
wit. Why, hullo,' she proceeded, seeing that Kipper was slumped back in
his chair trying without much success to hitch up a drooping lower jaw.
'What's eating you, young Herring?'
I could see that Kipper was in no shape for conversation, so took it
upon myself to explain.
'A certain stickiness has arisen, aged relative. You heard what P.
Mills said before going to minister to Poppet. Those words tell the
story.'
'What do you mean?'
'The facts are readily stated. Upjohn wrote this slim volume, which,
if you recall, was about preparatory schools, and in it, so Kipper
tells me, said that the time spent in these establishments was the
happiest of our lives. Ye Ed passed it on to Kipper for comment, and
he, remembering the dark days at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, when he
and I were plucking the gowans fine there, slated it with no uncertain
hand. Correct, Kipper?'
He found speech, if you could call making a noise like a buffalo
taking its foot out of a swamp finding speech.
'But, dash it,' he said, finding a bit more, 'it was perfectly
legitimate criticism. I didn't mince my words, of course -'
'It would be interesting to find out what these unminced words
were,' said Aunt Dahlia, 'for among them there appear to have been one
or two which seem likely to set your proprietor back five thousand of
the best and brightest. Bertie, get your car out and go to Market
Snodsbury station and see if the bookstall has a copy of this week's
... No, wait, hold the line. Cancel that order. I shan't be a minute,'
she said, and went out, leaving me totally fogged as to what she was up
to. What aunts are up to is never an easy thing to divine.
I turned to Kipper.
'Bad show,' I said.
From the way he writhed I gathered that he was feeling it could
scarcely be worse.
'What happens when an editorial assistant on a weekly paper lets the
bosses in for substantial libel damages?'
He was able to answer that one.
'He gets the push and, what's more, finds it pretty damned difficult
to land another job. He's on the blacklist.'
I saw what he meant. These birds who run weekly papers believe in
watching the pennies. They like to get all that's coming to them and
when the stuff, instead of pouring in, starts pouring out as the result
of an injudicious move on the part of a unit of the staff, what they do
to that unit is plenty. I think Kipper's outfit was financed by some
sort of board or syndicate, but boards and syndicates are just as
sensitive about having to cough up as individual owners. As Kipper had
indicated, they not only give the erring unit the heave-ho but pass the
word round to the other boards and syndicates.
'Herring?' the latter say when Kipper comes seeking employment.
'Isn't he the bimbo who took the bread out of the mouths of the
Thursday Review people? Chuck the blighter out of the window and we
want to see him bounce.' If this action of Upjohn's went through, his
chances of any sort of salaried post were meagre, if not slim. It might
be years before all was forgiven and forgotten.
'Selling pencils in the gutter is about the best I'll be able to
look forward to,' said Kipper, and he had just buried his face in his
hands, as fellows are apt to do when contemplating a future that's a
bit on the bleak side, when the door opened, to reveal not, as I had
expected, Aunt Dahlia, but Bobbie.
'I got the wrong book,' she said. 'The one I wanted was -'
Then her eye fell on Kipper and she stiffened in every limb, rather
like Lot's wife, who, as you probably know, did the wrong thing that
time there was all that unpleasantness with the cities of the plain and
got turned into a pillar of salt, though what was the thought behind
this I've never been able to understand. Salt, I mean. Seems so bizarre
somehow and not at all what you would expect.
'Oh!' she said haughtily, as if offended by this glimpse into the
underworld, and even as she spoke a hollow groan burst from Kipper's
interior and he raised an ashen face. And at the sight of that ashen f.
the haughtiness went out of Roberta Wickham with a whoosh, to be
replaced by all the old love, sympathy, womanly tenderness and what
not, and she bounded at him like a leopardess getting together with a
lost cub.
'Reggie! Oh, Reggie! Reggie, darling, what is it?' she cried, her
whole demeanour undergoing a marked change for the better. She was, in
short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex.
Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with
the one who said 'Oh, woman in our hours of ease turn tumty tiddly
something please, when something something something something brow, a
something something something thou.'
She turned on me with an animal snarl.
'What have you been doing to the poor lamb?' she demanded, giving me
one of the nastiest looks seen that summer in the midland counties, and
I had just finished explaining that it was not I but Fate or Destiny
that had removed the sunshine from the poor lamb's life, when Aunt
Dahlia returned. She had a slip of paper in her hand.
'I was right,' she said. 'I knew Upjohn's first move on getting a
book published would be to subscribe to a press-cutting agency. I found
this on the hall table. It's your review of his slim volume, young
Herring, and having run an eye over it I'm not surprised that he's a
little upset. I'll read it to you.'
As might have been expected, this having been foreshadowed a good
deal in one way and another, what Kipper had written was on the severe
side, and as far as I was concerned it fell into the rare and
refreshing fruit class. I enjoyed every minute of it. It concluded as
follows:
'Aubrey Upjohn might have taken a different view of preparatory
schools if he had done a stretch at the Dotheboys Hall conducted by him
at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, as we had the misfortune to do. We
have not forgotten the sausages on Sunday, which were made not from
contented pigs but from pigs which had expired, regretted by all, of
glanders, the botts and tuberculosis.'
Until this passage left the aged relative's lips Kipper had been
sitting with the tips of his fingers together, nodding from time to
time as much as to say 'Caustic, yes, but perfectly legitimate
criticism,' but on hearing this excerpt he did another of his sitting
high jumps, lowering all previous records by several inches. It
occurred to me as a passing thought that if all other sources of income
failed, he had a promising future as an acrobat.
'But I never wrote that,' he gasped.
'Well, it's here in cold print.'
'Why, that's libellous!'
'So Upjohn and his legal eagle seem to feel. And I must say it reads
like a pretty good five thousand pounds' worth to me.'
'Let me look at that,' yipped Kipper. 'I don't understand this. No,
half a second, darling. Not now. Later. I want to concentrate,' he
said, for Bobbie had flung herself on him and was clinging to him like
the ivy on the old garden wall.
'Reggie!' she wailed - yes, wail's the word. 'It was me!'
'Eh?'
'That thing Mrs Travers just read. You remember you showed me the
proof at lunch that day and told me to drop it off at the office, as
you had to rush along to keep a golf date. I read it again after you'd
gone, and saw you had left out that bit about the sausages -
accidentally, I thought - and it seemed to me so frightfully funny and
clever that... Well, I put it in at the end. I felt it just rounded the
thing off.'
There was silence for some moments, broken only by the sound of an
aunt saying 'Lord love a duck!' Kipper stood blinking, as I had
sometimes seen him do at the boxing tourneys in which he indulged when
in receipt of a shrewd buffet on some tender spot like the tip of the
nose. Whether or not the idea of taking Bobbie's neck in both hands and
twisting it into a spiral floated through his mind, I cannot say, but
if so it was merely the ideal dream of a couple of seconds or so, for
almost immediately love prevailed. She had described him as a lamb, and
it was with all the mildness for which lambs are noted that he now
spoke.
'Oh, I see. So that's how it was.'
'I'm so sorry.'
'Don't mention it.'
'Can you ever forgive me?'
'Oh, rather.'
'I meant so well.'
'Of course you did.'
'Will you really get into trouble about this?'
'There may be some slight unpleasantness.'
'Oh, Reggie!'
'Quite all right.'
'I've ruined your life.'
'Nonsense. The Thursday Review isn't the only paper in London. If
they fire me, I'll accept employment elsewhere.'
This scarcely squared with what he had told me about being
blacklisted, but I forbore to mention this, for I saw that his words
had cheered Bobbie up considerably, and I didn't want to bung a spanner
into her mood of bien etre. Never does to dash the cup of happiness
from a girl's lips when after plumbing the depths she has started to
take a swig at it.
'Of course!' she said. 'Any paper would be glad to have a valuable
man like you.'
'They'll fight like tigers for his services,' I said, helping things
along. 'You don't find a chap like Kipper out of circulation for more
than a day or so.'
'You're so clever.'
'Oh, thanks.'
'I don't mean you, ass, I mean Reggie.'
'Ah, yes. Kipper has what it takes, all right.'
'All the same,' said Aunt Dahlia, 'I think, when Upjohn arrives, you
had better do all you can to ingratiate yourself with him.'
I got her meaning. She was recommending that grappling-to-the-soul-
with-hoops-of-steel stuff.
'Yes,' I said. 'Exert the charm, Kipper, and there's a chance he
might call the thing off.'
'Bound to,' said Bobbie. 'Nobody can resist you, darling.'
'Do you think so, darling?'
'Of course I do, darling.'
'Well, let's hope you're right, darling. In the meantime,' said
Kipper, 'if I don't get that whisky-and-soda soon, I shall
disintegrate. Would you mind if I went in search of it, Mrs Travers?'
'It's the very thing I was about to suggest myself. Dash along and
drink your fill, my unhappy young stag at eve.'
'I'm feeling rather like a restorative, too,' said Bobbie.
'Me also,' I said, swept along on the tide of the popular movement.
'Though I would advise,' I said, when we were outside, 'making it port.
More authority. We'll look in on Swordfish. He will provide.'
We found Pop Glossop in his pantry polishing silver, and put in our
order. He seemed a little surprised at the inrush of such a multitude,
but on learning that our tongues were hanging out obliged with a bottle
of the best, and after we had done a bit of tissue-restoring, Kipper,
who had preserved a brooding silence since entering, rose and left us,
saying that if we didn't mind he would like to muse apart for a while.
I saw Pop Glossop give him a sharp look as he went out and knew that
Kipper's demeanour had roused his professional interest, causing him to
scent in the young visitor a potential customer. These brain
specialists are always on the job and never miss a trick. Tactfully
waiting till the door had closed, he said:
'Is Mr Herring an old friend of yours, Mr Wooster?'
'Bertie.'
'I beg your pardon. Bertie. You have known him for some time?'
'Practically from the egg.'
'And is Miss Wickham a friend of his?'
'Reggie Herring and I are engaged, Sir Roderick,' said Bobbie. Her
words seemed to seal the Glossop lips. He said 'Oh' and began to talk
about the weather and continued to do so until Bobbie, who since
Kipper's departure had been exhibiting signs of restlessness, said she
thought she would go and see how he was making out. Finding himself de-
Wickham-ed, he unsealed his lips without delay.
'I did not like to mention it before Miss Wickham, as she and Mr
Herring are engaged, for one is always loath to occasion anxiety, but
that young man has a neurosis.'
'He isn't always as dippy as he looked just now.'
'Nevertheless-'
'And let me tell you something, Roddy. If you were as up against it
as he is, you'd have a neurosis, too.'
And feeling that it would do no harm to get his views on the Kipper
situation, I unfolded the tale.
'So you see the posish,' I concluded. 'The only way he can avoid the
fate that is worse than death - viz. Letting his employers get nicked
for a sum beyond the dreams of avarice - is by ingratiating himself
with Upjohn, which would seem to any thinking man a shot that's not on
the board. I mean, he had four years with him at Malvern House and
didn't ingratiate himself once, so it's difficult to see how he's going
to start doing it now. It seems to me the thing's an impasse. French
expression,' I explained, 'meaning that we're stymied good and proper
with no hope of finding a formula.'
To my surprise, instead of clicking the tongue and waggling the head
gravely to indicate that he saw the stickiness of the dilemma, he
chuckled fatly, as if having spotted an amusing side to the thing which
had escaped me. Having done this, he blessed his soul, which was his
way of saying 'Gorblimey'.
'It really is quite extraordinary, my dear Bertie,' he said, 'how
associating with you restores my youth. Your lightest word seems to
bring back old memories. I find myself recollecting episodes in the
distant past which I have not thought of for years and years. It is as
though you waved a magic wand of some kind. This matter of the problem
confronting your friend Mr Herring is a case in point. While you were
telling me of his troubles, the mists shredded away, the hands of the
clock turned back, and I was once again a young fellow in my early
twenties, deeply involved in the strange affair of Bertha Simmons,
George Lanchester and Bertha's father, old Mr Simmons, who at that time
resided in Putney. He was in the imported lard and butter business.'
'The - what was that strange affair again?'
He repeated the cast of characters, asked me if I would care for
another drop of port, a suggestion with which I readily fell in, and
proceeded.
'George, a young man of volcanic passions, met Bertha Simmons at a
dance at Putney Town Hall in aid of the widows of deceased railway
porters and became instantly enamoured. And his love was returned. When
he encountered Bertha next day in Putney High Street and, taking her
off to a confectioner's for an ice cream, offered her with it his hand
and heart, she accepted them enthusiastically. She said that when they
were dancing together on the previous night something had seemed to go
all over her, and he said he had had exactly the same experience.'
'Twin souls, what?'
'A most accurate description.'
'In fact, so far, so good.'
'Precisely. But there was an obstacle, and a very serious one.
George was a swimming instructor at the local baths, and Mr Simmons had
higher views for his daughter. He forbade the marriage. I am speaking,
of course, of the days when fathers did forbid marriage. It was only
when George saved him from drowning that he relented and gave the young
couple his consent and blessing.'
'How did that happen?'
'Perfectly simple. I took Mr Simmons for a stroll on the river bank
and pushed him in, and George, who was waiting in readiness, dived into
the water and pulled him out. Naturally I had to undergo a certain
amount of criticism of my clumsiness, and it was many weeks before I
received another invitation to Sunday supper at Chatsworth, the Simmons
residence, quite a privation in those days when I was a penniless
medical student and perpetually hungry, but I was glad to sacrifice
myself to help a friend and the results, as far as George was
concerned, were of the happiest. And what crossed my mind, as you were
telling me of Mr Herring's desire to ingratiate himself with Mr Upjohn,
was that a similar -is "set-up" the term you young fellows use? - would
answer in his case. All the facilities are here at Brinkley Court. In
my rambles about the grounds I have noticed a small but quite adequate
lake, and ... well, there you have it, my dear Bertie. I throw it out,
of course, merely as a suggestion.'
His words left me all of a glow. When I thought how I had misjudged
him in the days when our relations had been distant, I burned with
shame and remorse. It seemed incredible that I could ever have looked
on this admirable loony-doctor as the menace in the treatment. What a
lesson, I felt, this should teach all of us that a man may have a bald
head and bushy eyebrows and still remain at heart a jovial sportsman
and one of the boys. There was about an inch of the ruby juice nestling
in my glass, and as he finished speaking I raised the beaker in a
reverent toast. I told him he had hit the bull's eye and was entitled
to a cigar or coconut according to choice.
'I'll go and take the matter up with my principals immediately.'
'Can Mr Herring swim?'
'Like several fishes.'
'Then I see no obstacle in the path.'
We parted with mutual expressions of good will, and it was only
after I had emerged into the summer air that I remembered I hadn't told
him that Wilbert had purchased, not pinched, the cow-creamer, and for a
moment I thought of going back to apprise him. But I thought again, and
didn't. First things first, I said to myself, and the item at the top
of the agenda paper was the bringing of a new sparkle to Kipper's eyes.
Later on, I told myself, would do, and carried on to where he and
Bobbie were pacing the lawn with bowed heads. It would not be long, I
anticipated, before I would be bringing those heads up with a jerk.
Nor was I in error. Their enthusiasm was unstinted. Both agreed
unreservedly that if Upjohn had the merest spark of human feeling in
him, which of course had still to be proved, the thing was in the bag.
'But you never thought this up yourself, Bertie,' said Bobbie,
always inclined to underestimate the Wooster shrewdness. 'You've been
talking to Jeeves.'
'No, as a matter of fact, it was Swordfish who had the idea.'
Kipper seemed surprised.
'You mean you told him about it?'
'I thought it the strategic move. Four heads are better than three.'
'And he advised shoving Upjohn into the lake?'
'That's right.'
'Rather a peculiar butler.'
I turned this over in my mind.
'Peculiar? Oh, I don't know. Fairly run-of-the-mill I should call
him. Yes, more or less the usual type,' I said.
With self all eagerness and enthusiasm for the work in hand,
straining at the leash, as you might say, and full of the will to win,
it came as a bit of a damper when I found on the following afternoon
that Jeeves didn't think highly of Operation Upjohn. I told him about
it just before starting out for the tryst, feeling that it would be
helpful to have his moral support, and was stunned to see that his
manner was austere and even puff-faced. He was giving me a description
at the time of how it felt to act as judge at a seaside bathing belles
contest, and it was with regret that I was compelled to break into
this, for he had been holding me spellbound.
'I'm sorry, Jeeves,' I said, consulting my watch, 'but I shall have
to be dashing off. Urgent appointment. You must tell me the rest
later.'
'At any time that suits you, sir.'
'Are you doing anything for the next half-hour or so?'
'No, sir.'
'Not planning to curl up in some shady nook with a cigarette and
Spinoza?'
'No, sir.'
'Then I strongly advise you to come down to the lake and witness a
human drama.'
And in a few brief words I outlined the programme and the events
which had led up to it. He listened attentively and raised his left
eyebrow a fraction of an inch.
'Was this Miss Wickham's idea, sir?'
'No. I agree that it sounds like one of hers, but actually it was
Sir Roderick Glossop who suggested it. By the way, you were probably
surprised to find him buttling here.'
'It did occasion me a momentary astonishment, but Sir Roderick
explained the circumstances.'
'Fearing that if he didn't let you in on it, you might unmask him in
front of Mrs Cream?'
'No doubt, sir. He would naturally wish to take all precautions. I
gathered from his remarks that he has not yet reached a definite
conclusion regarding the mental condition of Mr Cream.'
'No, he's still observing. Well, as I say, it was from his fertile
bean that the idea sprang. What do you think of it?'
'Ill-advised, sir, in my opinion.'
I was amazed. I could hardly b. my e.
'Ill-advised?'
'Yes, sir.'
'But it worked without a hitch in the case of Bertha Simmons, George
Lanchester and old Mr Simmons.'
'Very possibly, sir.'
Then why this defeatist attitude?'
'It is merely a feeling, sir, due probably to my preference for
finesse. I mistrust these elaborate schemes. One cannot depend on them.
As the poet Burns says, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft
agley.'
'Scotch, isn't it, that word?'
'Yes, sir.'
'I thought as much. The "gang" told the story. Why do Scotsmen say
gang?'
'I have no information, sir. They have not confided in me.'
I was getting a bit peeved by now, not at all liking the sniffiness
of his manner. I had expected him to speed me on my way with words of
encouragement and.uplift, not to go trying to blunt the keen edge of my
zest like this. I was rather in the position of a child who runs to his
mother hoping for approval and endorsement of something he's done, and
is awarded instead a brusque kick in the pants. It was with a good deal
of warmth that I came back at him.
'So you think the poet Burns would look askance at this enterprise
of ours, do you? Well, you can tell him from me he's an ass. We've
thought the thing out to the last detail. Miss Wickham asks Mr Upjohn
to come for a stroll with her. She leads him to the lake. I am standing
on the brink, ostensibly taking a look at the fishes playing amongst
the reeds. Kipper, ready to the last button, is behind a neighbouring
tree. On the cue "Oh, look!" from Miss Wickham, accompanied by business
of pointing with girlish excitement at something in the water, Upjohn
bends over to peer. I push, Kipper dives in, and there we are. Nothing
can possibly go wrong.'
'Just as you say, sir. But I still have that feeling.'
The blood of the Woosters is hot, and I was about to tell him in set
terms what I thought of his bally feeling, when I suddenly spotted what
it was that was making him crab the act. The green-eyed monster had
bitten him. He was miffed because he wasn't the brains behind this
binge, the blue prints for it having been laid down by a rival. Even
great men have their weaknesses. So I held back the acid crack I might
have made, and went off with a mere 'Oh, yeah?' No sense in twisting
the knife in the wound, I mean.
All the same, I remained a bit hot under the collar, because when
you're all strung up and tense and all that, the last thing you want is
people upsetting you by bringing in the poet Burns. I hadn't told him,
but our plans had already nearly been wrecked at the outset by the
unfortunate circumstance of Upjohn, while in the metropolis, having
shaved his moustache, this causing Kipper to come within a toucher of
losing his nerve and calling the whole thing off. The sight of that
bare expanse or steppe of flesh beneath the nose, he said, did
something to him, bringing back the days when he had so often found his
blood turning to ice on beholding it. It had required quite a series of
pep talks to revive his manly spirits.
However, there was good stuff in the lad, and though for a while the
temperature of his feet had dropped sharply, threatening to reduce him
to the status of a non-co-operative cat in an adage, at 3.30 Greenwich
Mean Time he was at his post behind the selected tree, resolved to do
his bit. He poked his head round the tree as I arrived, and when I
waved a cheery hand at him, waved a fairly cheery hand at me. Though I
only caught a glimpse of him, I could see that his upper lip was stiff.
There being no signs as yet of the female star and her companion, I
deduced that I was a bit on the early side. I lit a cigarette and stood
awaiting their entrance, and was pleased to note that conditions could
scarcely have been better for the coming water fete. Too often on an
English summer day you find the sun going behind the clouds and a nippy
wind springing up from the north-east, but this afternoon was one of
those still, sultry afternoons when the slightest movement brings the
persp. in beads to the brow, an afternoon, in short, when it would be a
positive pleasure to be shoved into a lake. 'Most refreshing,' Upjohn
would say to himself as the cool water played about his limbs.
I was standing there running over the stage directions in my mind to
see that I had got them all clear, when I beheld Wilbert Cream
approaching, the dog Poppet curvetting about his ankles. On seeing me,
the hound rushed forward with uncouth cries as was his wont, but on
heaving alongside and getting a whiff of Wooster Number Five calmed
down, and I was at liberty to attend to Wilbert, who I could see
desired speech with me.
He was looking, I noticed, fairly green about the gills, and he
conveyed the same suggestion of having just swallowed a bad oyster
which I had observed in Kipper on his arrival at Brinkley. It was plain
that the loss of Phyllis Mills, goofy though she unquestionably was,
had hit him a shrewd wallop, and I presumed that he was coming to me
for sympathy and heart balm, which I would have been only too pleased
to dish out. I hoped, of course, that he would make it crisp and remove
himself at an early date, for when the moment came for the balloon to
go up I didn't want to be hampered by an audience. When you're pushing
someone into a lake, nothing embarrasses you more than having the front
seats filled up with goggling spectators.
It was not, however, on the subject of Phyllis that he proceeded to
touch.
'Oh, Wooster,' he said, 'I was talking to my mother a night or two
ago.'
'Oh, yes?' I said, with a slight wave of the hand intended to
indicate that if he liked to talk to his mother anywhere, all over the
house, he had my approval.
'She tells me you are interested in mice.'
I didn't like the trend the conversation was taking, but I preserved
my aplomb.
'Why, yes, fairly interested.'
'She says she found you trying to catch one in my bedroom!'
'Yes, that's right.'
'Good of you to bother.'
'Not at all. Always a pleasure.'
'She says you seemed to be making a very thorough search of my
room.'
'Oh, well, you know, when one sets one's hand to the plough.'
'You didn't find a mouse?'
'No, no mouse. Sorry.'
'I wonder if by any chance you happened to find an eighteenth-
century cow-creamer?'
'Eh?'
'A silver jug shaped like a cow.'
'No. Why, was it on the floor somewhere?'
'It was in a drawer of the bureau.'
'Ah, then I would have missed it.'
'You'd certainly miss it now. It's gone.'
friends. The snag in this business of falling in love, aged relative,
is that the parties of the first part so often get mixed up with the
wrong parties of the second part, robbed of their cooler judgment by
the parties of the second part's glamour. Put it like this. The male
sex is divided into rabbits and non-rabbits and the female sex into
dashers and dormice, and the trouble is that the male rabbit has a way
of getting attracted by the female dasher (who would be fine for the
male non-rabbit) and realizing too late that he ought to have been
concentrating on some mild, gentle dormouse with whom he could settle
down peacefully and nibble lettuce.'
'The whole thing, in short, a bit of a mix-up?' 'Exactly. Take me
and Bobbie. I yield to no one in my appreciation of her espieglerie,
but I'm one of the rabbits and always have been while she is about as
pronounced a dasher as ever dashed. What I like is the quiet life, and
Roberta Wickham wouldn't recognize the quiet life if you brought it to
her on a plate with watercress round it. She's all for not letting the
sun go down without having started something calculated to stagger
humanity. In a word, she needs the guiding hand, which is a thing I
couldn't supply her with. Whereas from Kipper she will get it in
abundance, he being one of those tough non-rabbits for whom it is
child's play to make the little woman draw the line somewhere. That is
why the union of these twain has my support and approval and why, when
she told me all that in the pub, I felt like doing a buck-and-wing
dance. Where is Kipper? I should like to shake him by the hand and pat
his back.'
'He went on a picnic with Wilbert and Phyllis.'
The significance of this did not escape me.
'Tailing up stuff, eh? Right on the job, is he?'
'Wilbert is constantly under his eye.'
'And if ever a man needed to be constantly under an eye, it's the
above kleptomaniac.'
'The what?'
'Haven't you been told? Wilbert's a pincher.'
'How do you mean, a pincher?'
'He pinches things. Everything that isn't nailed down is grist to
his mill.'
'Don't be an ass.'
'I'm not being an ass. He's got Uncle Tom's cow-creamer.'
'I know.'
'You know?'
'Of course I know.'
Her ... what's the word? ... phlegm, is it? ... something beginning
with a p... astounded me. I had expected to freeze her young - or,
rather, middle-aged -blood and have her perm stand on end like quills
upon the fretful porpentine, and she hadn't moved a muscle.
'Beshrew me,' I said, 'you take it pretty calmly.'
'Well, what's there to get excited about? Tom sold him the thing.'
'What?'
'Wilbert got in touch with him at Harrogate and put in his bid, and
Tom phoned me to give it to him. Just shows how important that deal
must be to Tom. I'd have thought he would rather have parted with his
eyeteeth.'
I drew a deep breath, this time fortunately unmixed with gin and
tonic. I was profoundly stirred.
'You mean,' said, my voice quavering like that of a coloratura
soprano, 'that I went through that soul-shattering experience all for
nothing?'
'Who's been shattering your soul, if any?'
'Ma Cream. By popping in while I was searching Wilbert's room for
the loathsome object. Naturally I thought he'd swiped it and hidden it
there.'
'And she caught you?'
'Not once, but twice.'
'What did she say?'
'She recommended me to take treatment from Roddy Glossop, of whose
skill in ministering to the mentally afflicted she had heard such good
reports. One sees what gave her the idea. I was half-way under the
dressing-table at the moment, and no doubt she thought it odd.'
'Bertie! How absolutely priceless!'
The adjective 'priceless' seemed to me an ill-chosen one, and I said
so. But my words were lost in the gale of mirth into which she now
exploded. I had never heard anyone laugh so heartily, not even Bobbie
on the occasion when the rake jumped up and hit me on the tip of the
nose.
'I'd have given fifty quid to have been there,' she said, when she
was able to get the vocal cords working. 'Half-way under the dressing-
table, were you?'
'The second time. When we first forgathered, I was sitting on the floor
with a chair round my neck.'
'Like an Elizabethan ruff, as worn by Thomas Botway.'
'Otway,' I said stiffly. As I have mentioned, I like to get things
right. And I was about to tell her that what I had hoped for from a
blood relation was sympathy and condolence rather than this crackling
of thorns under a pot, as it is sometimes called, when the door opened
and Bobbie came in.
The moment I cast an eye on her, it seemed to me that there was
something strange about her aspect. Normally, this beasel presents to
the world the appearance of one who is feeling that if it isn't the
best of all possible worlds, it's quite good enough to be going on with
till a better one comes along. Verve, I mean, and animation and all
that sort of thing. But now there was a listlessness about her, not the
listlessness of the cat Augustus but more that of the female in the
picture in the Louvre, of whom Jeeves, on the occasion when he lugged
me there to take a dekko at her, said that here was the head upon which
all the ends of the world are come. He drew my attention, I remember,
to the weariness of the eyelids. I got just the same impression of
weariness from Bobbie's eyelids.
Unparting her lips which were set in a thin line as if she had just
been taking a suck at a lemon, she said:
'I came to get that book of Mrs Cream's that I was reading, Mrs
Travers.'
'Help yourself, child,' said the ancestor. 'The more people in this
joint reading her stuff, the better. It all goes to help the
composition.'
'So you got here all right, Bobbie,' I said. 'Have you seen Kipper?'
I wouldn't say she snorted, but she certainly sniffed.
'Bertie,' she said in a voice straight from the frigidaire, 'will
you do me a favour?'
'Of course. What?'
'Don't mention that rat's name in my presence,' she said, and pushed
off, the eyelids still weary.
She left me fogged and groping for the inner meaning, and I could
see from Aunt Dahlia's goggling eyes that the basic idea hadn't got
across with her either.
'Well!' she said. 'What's all this? I thought you told me she loved
young Herring with a passion like boiling oil.'
'That was her story.'
'The oil seems to have gone off the boil. Yes, sir, if that was the
language of love, I'll eat my hat,' said the blood relation, alluding,
I took it, to the beastly straw contraption in which she does her
gardening, concerning which I can only say that it is almost as foul as
Uncle Tom's Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, which has frightened more
crows than any other lid in Worcestershire. 'They must have had a
fight.'
'It does look like it,' I agreed, 'and I don't understand how it can
have happened considering that she left me with the love light in her
eyes and can't have been back here more than about half an hour. What,
one asks oneself, in so short a time can have changed a girl full of
love and ginger ale into a girl who speaks of the adored object as
"that rat" and doesn't want to hear his name mentioned? These are deep
waters. Should I send for Jeeves?'
'What on earth can Jeeves do?'
'Well, now you put it that way, I'm bound to admit that I don't
know. It's just that one drops into the habit of sending for Jeeves
whenever things have gone agley, if that's the word I'm thinking of.
Scotch, isn't it? Agley, I mean. It sounds Scotch to me. However,
passing lightly over that, the thing to do when you want the low-down
is to go to the fountainhead and get it straight from the horse's
mouth. Kipper can solve this mystery. I'll pop along and find him.'
I was, however, spared the trouble of popping, for at this moment he
entered left centre.
'Oh, there you are, Bertie,' he said. 'I heard you were back. I was
looking for you.'
He had spoken in a low, husky sort of way, like a voice from the
tomb, and I now saw that he was exhibiting all the earmarks of a man
who has recently had a bomb explode in his vicinity. His shoulders
sagged and his eyes were glassy. He looked, in short, like the fellow
who hadn't started to take Old Doctor Gordon's Bile Magnesia, and I
snapped into it without preamble. This was no time for being tactful
and pretending not to notice.
'What's all this strained-relations stuff between you and Bobbie,
Kipper?' I said, and when he said, 'Oh, nothing,' rapped the table
sharply and told him to cut out the coy stuff and come clean.
'Yes,' said Aunt Dahlia. 'What's happened, young Herring?'
I think for a moment he was about to draw himself up with hauteur
and say he would prefer, if we didn't mind, not to discuss his private
affairs, but when he was half-way up he caught Aunt Dahlia's eye and
returned to position one. Aunt Dahlia's eye, while not in the same
class as that of my Aunt Agatha, who is known to devour her young and
conduct human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, has lots of
authority. He subsided into a chair and sat there looking filleted.
'Well, if you must know,' he said, 'she's broken the engagement.'
This didn't get us any farther. We had assumed as much. You don't go
calling people rats if love still lingers.
'But it's only an hour or so,' I said, 'since I left her outside a
hostelry called the "Fox and Goose", and she had just been giving you a
rave notice. What came unstuck? What did you do to the girl?'
'Oh, nothing.'
'Come, come!'
'Well, it was this way.'
There was a pause here while he said that he would give a hundred
quid for a stiff whisky-and-soda, but as this would have involved all
the delay of ringing for Pop Glossop and having it fetched from the
lowest bin, Aunt Dahlia would have none of it. In lieu of the desired
refreshment she offered him a cold crumpet, which he declined, and told
him to get on with it.
'Where I went wrong,' he said, still speaking in that low, husky
voice as if he had been a ghost suffering from catarrh, 'was in getting
engaged to Phyllis Mills.'
'What?' I cried.
'What?' cried Aunt Dahlia.
'Egad!' I said.
'What on earth did you do that for?' said Aunt Dahlia.
He shifted uneasily in his chair, like a man troubled with ants in
the pants.
'It seemed a good idea at the time,' he said. 'Bobbie had told me on
the telephone that she never wanted to speak to me again in this world
or the next, and Phyllis had been telling me that, while she shrank
from Wilbert Cream because of his murky past, she found him so magnetic
that she knew she wouldn't be able to refuse him if he proposed, and I
had been commissioned to stop him proposing, so I thought the simplest
thing to do was to get engaged to her myself. So we talked it over, and
having reached a thorough understanding that it was simply a ruse and
nothing binding on either side, we announced it to Cream.'
'Very shrewd,' said Aunt Dahlia. 'How did he take it?'
'He reeled.'
'Lot of reeling there's been in this business,' I said. 'You reeled,
if you recollect, when you remembered you'd written that letter to
Bobbie.'
'And I reeled again when she suddenly appeared from nowhere just as
I was kissing Phyllis.'
I pursed the lips. Getting a bit French, this sequence, it seemed to
me.
'There was no need for you to do that.'
'No need, perhaps, but I wanted to make it look natural to Cream.'
'Oh, I see. Driving it home, as it were?'
'That was the idea. Of course I wouldn't have done it if I'd known
that Bobbie had changed her mind and wanted things to be as they were
before that telephone
conversation. But I didn't know. It's just one of life's little
ironies. You get the same sort of thing in Thomas Hardy.'
I knew nothing of this T. Hardy of whom he spoke, but I saw what he
meant. It was like what's always happening in the novels of suspense,
where the girl goes around saying, 'Had I but known.'
'Didn't you explain?'
He gave me a pitying look.
'Have you ever tried explaining something to a red-haired girl who's
madder than a wet hen?'
I took his point.
'What happened then?'
'Oh, she was very lady-like. Talked amiably of this and that till
Phyllis had left us. Then she started in. She said she had raced here
with a heart overflowing with love, longing to be in my arms, and a
jolly surprise it was to find those arms squeezing the stuffing out of
another and ... Oh, well, a lot more along those lines. The trouble is,
she's always been a bit squiggle-eyed about Phyllis, because in
Switzerland she held the view that we were a shade too matey. Nothing
in it, of course.'
'Just good friends?'
'Exactly.'
'Well, if you want to know what I think,' said Aunt Dahlia.
But we never did get around to knowing what she thought, for at this
moment Phyllis came in.
Giving the wench the once-over as she entered, I found myself well
able to understand why Bobbie on observing her entangled with Kipper
had exploded with so loud a report. I'm not myself, of course, an
idealistic girl in love with a member of the staff of the Thursday
Review and never have been, but if I were I know I'd get the megrims
somewhat severely if I caught him in a clinch with anyone as personable
as this stepdaughter of Aubrey Upjohn, for though shaky on the IQ,
physically she was a pipterino of the first water. Her eyes were
considerably bluer than the skies above, she was wearing a simple
summer dress which accentuated rather than hid the graceful outlines of
her figure, if you know what I mean, and it was not surprising that
Wilbert Cream, seeing her, should have lost no time in reaching for the
book of poetry and making a bee line with her to the nearest leafy
glade.
'Oh, Mrs Travers,' she said, spotting Aunt Dahlia, 'I've just been
talking to Daddy on the telephone.'
This took the old ancestor's mind right off the tangled affairs of
the Kipper-Bobbie axis, to which a moment before she had been according
her best attention, and I didn't wonder. With the prize-giving at
Market Snodsbury Grammar School, a function at which all that was
bravest and fairest in the neighbourhood would be present, only two
days away, she must have been getting pretty uneasy about the continued
absence of the big shot slated to address the young scholars on ideals
and life in the world outside. If you are on the board of governors of
a school and have contracted to supply an orator for the great day of
the year, you can be forgiven for feeling a trifle jumpy when you learn
that the silver-tongued one has gadded off to the metropolis, leaving
no word as to when he will be returning, if ever. For all she knew,
Upjohn might have got the holiday spirit and be planning to remain
burning up the boulevards indefinitely, and of course nothing gives a
big beano a black eye more surely than the failure to show up of the
principal speaker. So now she quite naturally blossomed like a rose in
June and asked if the old son of a bachelor had mentioned anything
about when he was coming back.
'He's coming back tonight. He says he hopes you haven't been
worrying.'
A snort of about the calibre of an explosion in an ammunition dump
escaped my late father's sister.
'Oh, does he? Well, I've a piece of news for him. I have been
worrying. What's kept him in London so long?'
'He's been seeing his lawyer about this libel action he's bringing
against the Thursday Review.'
I have often asked myself how many inches it was that Kipper leaped
from his chair at these words. Sometimes I think it was ten, sometimes
only six, but whichever it was he unquestionably came up from the
padded seat like an athlete competing in the Sitting High Jump event.
Scarface McColl couldn't have risen more nippily.
'Against the Thursday Review?' said Aunt Dahlia. 'That's your rag,
isn't it, young Herring? What have they done to stir him up?'
'It's this book Daddy wrote about preparatory schools. He wrote a
book about preparatory schools. Did you know he had written a book
about preparatory schools?'
'Hadn't an inkling. Nobody tells me anything.'
'Well, he wrote this book about preparatory schools. It was about
preparatory schools.'
'About preparatory schools, was it?'
'Yes, about preparatory schools.'
'Thank God we've got that straightened out at last. I had a feeling
we should get somewhere if we dug long enough. And - ?'
'And the Thursday Review said something libellous about it, and
Daddy's lawyer says the jury ought to give Daddy at least five thousand
pounds. Because they libelled him. So he's been in London all this time
seeing his lawyer. But he's coming back tonight. He'll be here for the
prize-giving, and I've got his speech all typed out and ready for him.
Oh, there's my precious Poppet,' said Phyllis, as a distant barking
reached the ears. 'He's asking for his dinner, the sweet little angel.
All right, darling, Mother's coming,' she fluted, and buzzed off on the
errand of mercy.
A brief silence followed her departure.
'I don't care what you say,' said Aunt Dahlia at length in a defiant
sort of way. 'Brains aren't everything. She's a dear, sweet girl. I
love her like a daughter, and to hell with anyone who calls her a half-
wit. Why, hullo,' she proceeded, seeing that Kipper was slumped back in
his chair trying without much success to hitch up a drooping lower jaw.
'What's eating you, young Herring?'
I could see that Kipper was in no shape for conversation, so took it
upon myself to explain.
'A certain stickiness has arisen, aged relative. You heard what P.
Mills said before going to minister to Poppet. Those words tell the
story.'
'What do you mean?'
'The facts are readily stated. Upjohn wrote this slim volume, which,
if you recall, was about preparatory schools, and in it, so Kipper
tells me, said that the time spent in these establishments was the
happiest of our lives. Ye Ed passed it on to Kipper for comment, and
he, remembering the dark days at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, when he
and I were plucking the gowans fine there, slated it with no uncertain
hand. Correct, Kipper?'
He found speech, if you could call making a noise like a buffalo
taking its foot out of a swamp finding speech.
'But, dash it,' he said, finding a bit more, 'it was perfectly
legitimate criticism. I didn't mince my words, of course -'
'It would be interesting to find out what these unminced words
were,' said Aunt Dahlia, 'for among them there appear to have been one
or two which seem likely to set your proprietor back five thousand of
the best and brightest. Bertie, get your car out and go to Market
Snodsbury station and see if the bookstall has a copy of this week's
... No, wait, hold the line. Cancel that order. I shan't be a minute,'
she said, and went out, leaving me totally fogged as to what she was up
to. What aunts are up to is never an easy thing to divine.
I turned to Kipper.
'Bad show,' I said.
From the way he writhed I gathered that he was feeling it could
scarcely be worse.
'What happens when an editorial assistant on a weekly paper lets the
bosses in for substantial libel damages?'
He was able to answer that one.
'He gets the push and, what's more, finds it pretty damned difficult
to land another job. He's on the blacklist.'
I saw what he meant. These birds who run weekly papers believe in
watching the pennies. They like to get all that's coming to them and
when the stuff, instead of pouring in, starts pouring out as the result
of an injudicious move on the part of a unit of the staff, what they do
to that unit is plenty. I think Kipper's outfit was financed by some
sort of board or syndicate, but boards and syndicates are just as
sensitive about having to cough up as individual owners. As Kipper had
indicated, they not only give the erring unit the heave-ho but pass the
word round to the other boards and syndicates.
'Herring?' the latter say when Kipper comes seeking employment.
'Isn't he the bimbo who took the bread out of the mouths of the
Thursday Review people? Chuck the blighter out of the window and we
want to see him bounce.' If this action of Upjohn's went through, his
chances of any sort of salaried post were meagre, if not slim. It might
be years before all was forgiven and forgotten.
'Selling pencils in the gutter is about the best I'll be able to
look forward to,' said Kipper, and he had just buried his face in his
hands, as fellows are apt to do when contemplating a future that's a
bit on the bleak side, when the door opened, to reveal not, as I had
expected, Aunt Dahlia, but Bobbie.
'I got the wrong book,' she said. 'The one I wanted was -'
Then her eye fell on Kipper and she stiffened in every limb, rather
like Lot's wife, who, as you probably know, did the wrong thing that
time there was all that unpleasantness with the cities of the plain and
got turned into a pillar of salt, though what was the thought behind
this I've never been able to understand. Salt, I mean. Seems so bizarre
somehow and not at all what you would expect.
'Oh!' she said haughtily, as if offended by this glimpse into the
underworld, and even as she spoke a hollow groan burst from Kipper's
interior and he raised an ashen face. And at the sight of that ashen f.
the haughtiness went out of Roberta Wickham with a whoosh, to be
replaced by all the old love, sympathy, womanly tenderness and what
not, and she bounded at him like a leopardess getting together with a
lost cub.
'Reggie! Oh, Reggie! Reggie, darling, what is it?' she cried, her
whole demeanour undergoing a marked change for the better. She was, in
short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex.
Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with
the one who said 'Oh, woman in our hours of ease turn tumty tiddly
something please, when something something something something brow, a
something something something thou.'
She turned on me with an animal snarl.
'What have you been doing to the poor lamb?' she demanded, giving me
one of the nastiest looks seen that summer in the midland counties, and
I had just finished explaining that it was not I but Fate or Destiny
that had removed the sunshine from the poor lamb's life, when Aunt
Dahlia returned. She had a slip of paper in her hand.
'I was right,' she said. 'I knew Upjohn's first move on getting a
book published would be to subscribe to a press-cutting agency. I found
this on the hall table. It's your review of his slim volume, young
Herring, and having run an eye over it I'm not surprised that he's a
little upset. I'll read it to you.'
As might have been expected, this having been foreshadowed a good
deal in one way and another, what Kipper had written was on the severe
side, and as far as I was concerned it fell into the rare and
refreshing fruit class. I enjoyed every minute of it. It concluded as
follows:
'Aubrey Upjohn might have taken a different view of preparatory
schools if he had done a stretch at the Dotheboys Hall conducted by him
at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, as we had the misfortune to do. We
have not forgotten the sausages on Sunday, which were made not from
contented pigs but from pigs which had expired, regretted by all, of
glanders, the botts and tuberculosis.'
Until this passage left the aged relative's lips Kipper had been
sitting with the tips of his fingers together, nodding from time to
time as much as to say 'Caustic, yes, but perfectly legitimate
criticism,' but on hearing this excerpt he did another of his sitting
high jumps, lowering all previous records by several inches. It
occurred to me as a passing thought that if all other sources of income
failed, he had a promising future as an acrobat.
'But I never wrote that,' he gasped.
'Well, it's here in cold print.'
'Why, that's libellous!'
'So Upjohn and his legal eagle seem to feel. And I must say it reads
like a pretty good five thousand pounds' worth to me.'
'Let me look at that,' yipped Kipper. 'I don't understand this. No,
half a second, darling. Not now. Later. I want to concentrate,' he
said, for Bobbie had flung herself on him and was clinging to him like
the ivy on the old garden wall.
'Reggie!' she wailed - yes, wail's the word. 'It was me!'
'Eh?'
'That thing Mrs Travers just read. You remember you showed me the
proof at lunch that day and told me to drop it off at the office, as
you had to rush along to keep a golf date. I read it again after you'd
gone, and saw you had left out that bit about the sausages -
accidentally, I thought - and it seemed to me so frightfully funny and
clever that... Well, I put it in at the end. I felt it just rounded the
thing off.'
There was silence for some moments, broken only by the sound of an
aunt saying 'Lord love a duck!' Kipper stood blinking, as I had
sometimes seen him do at the boxing tourneys in which he indulged when
in receipt of a shrewd buffet on some tender spot like the tip of the
nose. Whether or not the idea of taking Bobbie's neck in both hands and
twisting it into a spiral floated through his mind, I cannot say, but
if so it was merely the ideal dream of a couple of seconds or so, for
almost immediately love prevailed. She had described him as a lamb, and
it was with all the mildness for which lambs are noted that he now
spoke.
'Oh, I see. So that's how it was.'
'I'm so sorry.'
'Don't mention it.'
'Can you ever forgive me?'
'Oh, rather.'
'I meant so well.'
'Of course you did.'
'Will you really get into trouble about this?'
'There may be some slight unpleasantness.'
'Oh, Reggie!'
'Quite all right.'
'I've ruined your life.'
'Nonsense. The Thursday Review isn't the only paper in London. If
they fire me, I'll accept employment elsewhere.'
This scarcely squared with what he had told me about being
blacklisted, but I forbore to mention this, for I saw that his words
had cheered Bobbie up considerably, and I didn't want to bung a spanner
into her mood of bien etre. Never does to dash the cup of happiness
from a girl's lips when after plumbing the depths she has started to
take a swig at it.
'Of course!' she said. 'Any paper would be glad to have a valuable
man like you.'
'They'll fight like tigers for his services,' I said, helping things
along. 'You don't find a chap like Kipper out of circulation for more
than a day or so.'
'You're so clever.'
'Oh, thanks.'
'I don't mean you, ass, I mean Reggie.'
'Ah, yes. Kipper has what it takes, all right.'
'All the same,' said Aunt Dahlia, 'I think, when Upjohn arrives, you
had better do all you can to ingratiate yourself with him.'
I got her meaning. She was recommending that grappling-to-the-soul-
with-hoops-of-steel stuff.
'Yes,' I said. 'Exert the charm, Kipper, and there's a chance he
might call the thing off.'
'Bound to,' said Bobbie. 'Nobody can resist you, darling.'
'Do you think so, darling?'
'Of course I do, darling.'
'Well, let's hope you're right, darling. In the meantime,' said
Kipper, 'if I don't get that whisky-and-soda soon, I shall
disintegrate. Would you mind if I went in search of it, Mrs Travers?'
'It's the very thing I was about to suggest myself. Dash along and
drink your fill, my unhappy young stag at eve.'
'I'm feeling rather like a restorative, too,' said Bobbie.
'Me also,' I said, swept along on the tide of the popular movement.
'Though I would advise,' I said, when we were outside, 'making it port.
More authority. We'll look in on Swordfish. He will provide.'
We found Pop Glossop in his pantry polishing silver, and put in our
order. He seemed a little surprised at the inrush of such a multitude,
but on learning that our tongues were hanging out obliged with a bottle
of the best, and after we had done a bit of tissue-restoring, Kipper,
who had preserved a brooding silence since entering, rose and left us,
saying that if we didn't mind he would like to muse apart for a while.
I saw Pop Glossop give him a sharp look as he went out and knew that
Kipper's demeanour had roused his professional interest, causing him to
scent in the young visitor a potential customer. These brain
specialists are always on the job and never miss a trick. Tactfully
waiting till the door had closed, he said:
'Is Mr Herring an old friend of yours, Mr Wooster?'
'Bertie.'
'I beg your pardon. Bertie. You have known him for some time?'
'Practically from the egg.'
'And is Miss Wickham a friend of his?'
'Reggie Herring and I are engaged, Sir Roderick,' said Bobbie. Her
words seemed to seal the Glossop lips. He said 'Oh' and began to talk
about the weather and continued to do so until Bobbie, who since
Kipper's departure had been exhibiting signs of restlessness, said she
thought she would go and see how he was making out. Finding himself de-
Wickham-ed, he unsealed his lips without delay.
'I did not like to mention it before Miss Wickham, as she and Mr
Herring are engaged, for one is always loath to occasion anxiety, but
that young man has a neurosis.'
'He isn't always as dippy as he looked just now.'
'Nevertheless-'
'And let me tell you something, Roddy. If you were as up against it
as he is, you'd have a neurosis, too.'
And feeling that it would do no harm to get his views on the Kipper
situation, I unfolded the tale.
'So you see the posish,' I concluded. 'The only way he can avoid the
fate that is worse than death - viz. Letting his employers get nicked
for a sum beyond the dreams of avarice - is by ingratiating himself
with Upjohn, which would seem to any thinking man a shot that's not on
the board. I mean, he had four years with him at Malvern House and
didn't ingratiate himself once, so it's difficult to see how he's going
to start doing it now. It seems to me the thing's an impasse. French
expression,' I explained, 'meaning that we're stymied good and proper
with no hope of finding a formula.'
To my surprise, instead of clicking the tongue and waggling the head
gravely to indicate that he saw the stickiness of the dilemma, he
chuckled fatly, as if having spotted an amusing side to the thing which
had escaped me. Having done this, he blessed his soul, which was his
way of saying 'Gorblimey'.
'It really is quite extraordinary, my dear Bertie,' he said, 'how
associating with you restores my youth. Your lightest word seems to
bring back old memories. I find myself recollecting episodes in the
distant past which I have not thought of for years and years. It is as
though you waved a magic wand of some kind. This matter of the problem
confronting your friend Mr Herring is a case in point. While you were
telling me of his troubles, the mists shredded away, the hands of the
clock turned back, and I was once again a young fellow in my early
twenties, deeply involved in the strange affair of Bertha Simmons,
George Lanchester and Bertha's father, old Mr Simmons, who at that time
resided in Putney. He was in the imported lard and butter business.'
'The - what was that strange affair again?'
He repeated the cast of characters, asked me if I would care for
another drop of port, a suggestion with which I readily fell in, and
proceeded.
'George, a young man of volcanic passions, met Bertha Simmons at a
dance at Putney Town Hall in aid of the widows of deceased railway
porters and became instantly enamoured. And his love was returned. When
he encountered Bertha next day in Putney High Street and, taking her
off to a confectioner's for an ice cream, offered her with it his hand
and heart, she accepted them enthusiastically. She said that when they
were dancing together on the previous night something had seemed to go
all over her, and he said he had had exactly the same experience.'
'Twin souls, what?'
'A most accurate description.'
'In fact, so far, so good.'
'Precisely. But there was an obstacle, and a very serious one.
George was a swimming instructor at the local baths, and Mr Simmons had
higher views for his daughter. He forbade the marriage. I am speaking,
of course, of the days when fathers did forbid marriage. It was only
when George saved him from drowning that he relented and gave the young
couple his consent and blessing.'
'How did that happen?'
'Perfectly simple. I took Mr Simmons for a stroll on the river bank
and pushed him in, and George, who was waiting in readiness, dived into
the water and pulled him out. Naturally I had to undergo a certain
amount of criticism of my clumsiness, and it was many weeks before I
received another invitation to Sunday supper at Chatsworth, the Simmons
residence, quite a privation in those days when I was a penniless
medical student and perpetually hungry, but I was glad to sacrifice
myself to help a friend and the results, as far as George was
concerned, were of the happiest. And what crossed my mind, as you were
telling me of Mr Herring's desire to ingratiate himself with Mr Upjohn,
was that a similar -is "set-up" the term you young fellows use? - would
answer in his case. All the facilities are here at Brinkley Court. In
my rambles about the grounds I have noticed a small but quite adequate
lake, and ... well, there you have it, my dear Bertie. I throw it out,
of course, merely as a suggestion.'
His words left me all of a glow. When I thought how I had misjudged
him in the days when our relations had been distant, I burned with
shame and remorse. It seemed incredible that I could ever have looked
on this admirable loony-doctor as the menace in the treatment. What a
lesson, I felt, this should teach all of us that a man may have a bald
head and bushy eyebrows and still remain at heart a jovial sportsman
and one of the boys. There was about an inch of the ruby juice nestling
in my glass, and as he finished speaking I raised the beaker in a
reverent toast. I told him he had hit the bull's eye and was entitled
to a cigar or coconut according to choice.
'I'll go and take the matter up with my principals immediately.'
'Can Mr Herring swim?'
'Like several fishes.'
'Then I see no obstacle in the path.'
We parted with mutual expressions of good will, and it was only
after I had emerged into the summer air that I remembered I hadn't told
him that Wilbert had purchased, not pinched, the cow-creamer, and for a
moment I thought of going back to apprise him. But I thought again, and
didn't. First things first, I said to myself, and the item at the top
of the agenda paper was the bringing of a new sparkle to Kipper's eyes.
Later on, I told myself, would do, and carried on to where he and
Bobbie were pacing the lawn with bowed heads. It would not be long, I
anticipated, before I would be bringing those heads up with a jerk.
Nor was I in error. Their enthusiasm was unstinted. Both agreed
unreservedly that if Upjohn had the merest spark of human feeling in
him, which of course had still to be proved, the thing was in the bag.
'But you never thought this up yourself, Bertie,' said Bobbie,
always inclined to underestimate the Wooster shrewdness. 'You've been
talking to Jeeves.'
'No, as a matter of fact, it was Swordfish who had the idea.'
Kipper seemed surprised.
'You mean you told him about it?'
'I thought it the strategic move. Four heads are better than three.'
'And he advised shoving Upjohn into the lake?'
'That's right.'
'Rather a peculiar butler.'
I turned this over in my mind.
'Peculiar? Oh, I don't know. Fairly run-of-the-mill I should call
him. Yes, more or less the usual type,' I said.
With self all eagerness and enthusiasm for the work in hand,
straining at the leash, as you might say, and full of the will to win,
it came as a bit of a damper when I found on the following afternoon
that Jeeves didn't think highly of Operation Upjohn. I told him about
it just before starting out for the tryst, feeling that it would be
helpful to have his moral support, and was stunned to see that his
manner was austere and even puff-faced. He was giving me a description
at the time of how it felt to act as judge at a seaside bathing belles
contest, and it was with regret that I was compelled to break into
this, for he had been holding me spellbound.
'I'm sorry, Jeeves,' I said, consulting my watch, 'but I shall have
to be dashing off. Urgent appointment. You must tell me the rest
later.'
'At any time that suits you, sir.'
'Are you doing anything for the next half-hour or so?'
'No, sir.'
'Not planning to curl up in some shady nook with a cigarette and
Spinoza?'
'No, sir.'
'Then I strongly advise you to come down to the lake and witness a
human drama.'
And in a few brief words I outlined the programme and the events
which had led up to it. He listened attentively and raised his left
eyebrow a fraction of an inch.
'Was this Miss Wickham's idea, sir?'
'No. I agree that it sounds like one of hers, but actually it was
Sir Roderick Glossop who suggested it. By the way, you were probably
surprised to find him buttling here.'
'It did occasion me a momentary astonishment, but Sir Roderick
explained the circumstances.'
'Fearing that if he didn't let you in on it, you might unmask him in
front of Mrs Cream?'
'No doubt, sir. He would naturally wish to take all precautions. I
gathered from his remarks that he has not yet reached a definite
conclusion regarding the mental condition of Mr Cream.'
'No, he's still observing. Well, as I say, it was from his fertile
bean that the idea sprang. What do you think of it?'
'Ill-advised, sir, in my opinion.'
I was amazed. I could hardly b. my e.
'Ill-advised?'
'Yes, sir.'
'But it worked without a hitch in the case of Bertha Simmons, George
Lanchester and old Mr Simmons.'
'Very possibly, sir.'
Then why this defeatist attitude?'
'It is merely a feeling, sir, due probably to my preference for
finesse. I mistrust these elaborate schemes. One cannot depend on them.
As the poet Burns says, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft
agley.'
'Scotch, isn't it, that word?'
'Yes, sir.'
'I thought as much. The "gang" told the story. Why do Scotsmen say
gang?'
'I have no information, sir. They have not confided in me.'
I was getting a bit peeved by now, not at all liking the sniffiness
of his manner. I had expected him to speed me on my way with words of
encouragement and.uplift, not to go trying to blunt the keen edge of my
zest like this. I was rather in the position of a child who runs to his
mother hoping for approval and endorsement of something he's done, and
is awarded instead a brusque kick in the pants. It was with a good deal
of warmth that I came back at him.
'So you think the poet Burns would look askance at this enterprise
of ours, do you? Well, you can tell him from me he's an ass. We've
thought the thing out to the last detail. Miss Wickham asks Mr Upjohn
to come for a stroll with her. She leads him to the lake. I am standing
on the brink, ostensibly taking a look at the fishes playing amongst
the reeds. Kipper, ready to the last button, is behind a neighbouring
tree. On the cue "Oh, look!" from Miss Wickham, accompanied by business
of pointing with girlish excitement at something in the water, Upjohn
bends over to peer. I push, Kipper dives in, and there we are. Nothing
can possibly go wrong.'
'Just as you say, sir. But I still have that feeling.'
The blood of the Woosters is hot, and I was about to tell him in set
terms what I thought of his bally feeling, when I suddenly spotted what
it was that was making him crab the act. The green-eyed monster had
bitten him. He was miffed because he wasn't the brains behind this
binge, the blue prints for it having been laid down by a rival. Even
great men have their weaknesses. So I held back the acid crack I might
have made, and went off with a mere 'Oh, yeah?' No sense in twisting
the knife in the wound, I mean.
All the same, I remained a bit hot under the collar, because when
you're all strung up and tense and all that, the last thing you want is
people upsetting you by bringing in the poet Burns. I hadn't told him,
but our plans had already nearly been wrecked at the outset by the
unfortunate circumstance of Upjohn, while in the metropolis, having
shaved his moustache, this causing Kipper to come within a toucher of
losing his nerve and calling the whole thing off. The sight of that
bare expanse or steppe of flesh beneath the nose, he said, did
something to him, bringing back the days when he had so often found his
blood turning to ice on beholding it. It had required quite a series of
pep talks to revive his manly spirits.
However, there was good stuff in the lad, and though for a while the
temperature of his feet had dropped sharply, threatening to reduce him
to the status of a non-co-operative cat in an adage, at 3.30 Greenwich
Mean Time he was at his post behind the selected tree, resolved to do
his bit. He poked his head round the tree as I arrived, and when I
waved a cheery hand at him, waved a fairly cheery hand at me. Though I
only caught a glimpse of him, I could see that his upper lip was stiff.
There being no signs as yet of the female star and her companion, I
deduced that I was a bit on the early side. I lit a cigarette and stood
awaiting their entrance, and was pleased to note that conditions could
scarcely have been better for the coming water fete. Too often on an
English summer day you find the sun going behind the clouds and a nippy
wind springing up from the north-east, but this afternoon was one of
those still, sultry afternoons when the slightest movement brings the
persp. in beads to the brow, an afternoon, in short, when it would be a
positive pleasure to be shoved into a lake. 'Most refreshing,' Upjohn
would say to himself as the cool water played about his limbs.
I was standing there running over the stage directions in my mind to
see that I had got them all clear, when I beheld Wilbert Cream
approaching, the dog Poppet curvetting about his ankles. On seeing me,
the hound rushed forward with uncouth cries as was his wont, but on
heaving alongside and getting a whiff of Wooster Number Five calmed
down, and I was at liberty to attend to Wilbert, who I could see
desired speech with me.
He was looking, I noticed, fairly green about the gills, and he
conveyed the same suggestion of having just swallowed a bad oyster
which I had observed in Kipper on his arrival at Brinkley. It was plain
that the loss of Phyllis Mills, goofy though she unquestionably was,
had hit him a shrewd wallop, and I presumed that he was coming to me
for sympathy and heart balm, which I would have been only too pleased
to dish out. I hoped, of course, that he would make it crisp and remove
himself at an early date, for when the moment came for the balloon to
go up I didn't want to be hampered by an audience. When you're pushing
someone into a lake, nothing embarrasses you more than having the front
seats filled up with goggling spectators.
It was not, however, on the subject of Phyllis that he proceeded to
touch.
'Oh, Wooster,' he said, 'I was talking to my mother a night or two
ago.'
'Oh, yes?' I said, with a slight wave of the hand intended to
indicate that if he liked to talk to his mother anywhere, all over the
house, he had my approval.
'She tells me you are interested in mice.'
I didn't like the trend the conversation was taking, but I preserved
my aplomb.
'Why, yes, fairly interested.'
'She says she found you trying to catch one in my bedroom!'
'Yes, that's right.'
'Good of you to bother.'
'Not at all. Always a pleasure.'
'She says you seemed to be making a very thorough search of my
room.'
'Oh, well, you know, when one sets one's hand to the plough.'
'You didn't find a mouse?'
'No, no mouse. Sorry.'
'I wonder if by any chance you happened to find an eighteenth-
century cow-creamer?'
'Eh?'
'A silver jug shaped like a cow.'
'No. Why, was it on the floor somewhere?'
'It was in a drawer of the bureau.'
'Ah, then I would have missed it.'
'You'd certainly miss it now. It's gone.'