'Gone?'
'Gone.'
'You mean disappeared, as it were?'
'I do.'
'Strange.'
'Very strange.'
'Yes, does seem extremely strange, doesn't it?'
I had spoken with all the old Wooster coolness, and I doubt if a
casual observer would have detected that Bertram was not at his ease,
but I can assure my public that he wasn't by a wide margin. My heart
had leaped in the manner popularized by Kipper Herring and Scarface
McColl, crashing against my front teeth with a thud which must have
been audible in Market Snodsbury. A far less astute man would have been
able to divine what had happened. Not knowing the score owing to having
missed the latest stop-press news and looking on the cow-creamer purely
in the light of a bit of the swag collected by Wilbert in the course of
his larcenous career, Pop Glossop, all zeal, had embarked on the search
he had planned to make, and intuition, developed by years of hunt-the-
slipper, had led him to the right spot. Too late I regretted sorely
that, concentrating so tensely on Operation Upjohn, I had failed to
place the facts before him. Had he but known, about summed it up.
'I was going to ask you,' said Wilbert, 'if you think I should
inform Mrs Travers.'
The cigarette I was smoking was fortunately one of the kind that
make you nonchalant, so it was nonchalantly - or fairly nonchalantly -
that I was able to reply.
'Oh, I wouldn't do that.'
'Why not?'
'Might upset her.'
'You consider her a sensitive plant?'
'Oh, very. Rugged exterior, of course, but you can't go by that. No,
I'd just wait a while, if I were you. I expect it'll turn out that the
thing's somewhere you put it but didn't think you'd put it. I mean, you
often put a thing somewhere and think you've put it somewhere else and
then find you didn't put it somewhere else but somewhere. I don't know
if you follow me?'
'I don't.'
'What I mean is, just stick around and you'll probably find the
thing.'
'You think it will return?'
'I do.'
'Like a homing pigeon?'
'That's the idea.'
'Oh?' said Wilbert, and turned away to greet Bobbie and Upjohn, who
had just arrived on the boat-house landing stage. I had found his
manner a little peculiar, particularly that last 'Oh?' but I was glad
that there was no lurking suspicion in his mind that I had taken the
bally thing. He might so easily have got the idea that Uncle Tom,
regretting having parted with his ewe lamb, had employed me to recover
it privily, this being the sort of thing, I believe, that collectors
frequently do. Nevertheless, I was still much shaken, and I made a
mental note to tell Roddy Glossop to slip it back among his effects at
the earliest possible moment.
I shifted over to where Bobbie and Upjohn were standing, and though
up and doing with a heart for any fate couldn't help getting that
feeling you get at times like this of having swallowed a double portion
of butterflies. My emotions were somewhat similar to those I had
experienced when I first sang the Yeoman's Wedding Song. In public, I
mean, for of course I had long been singing it in my bath.
'Hullo, Bobbie,' I said.
'Hullo, Bertie,' she said.
'Hullo, Upjohn,' I said.
The correct response to this would have been 'Hullo, Wooster', but
he blew up in his lines and merely made a noise like a wolf with its
big toe caught in a trap. Seemed a bit restive, I thought, as if
wishing he were elsewhere.
Bobbie was all girlish animation.
'I've been telling Mr Upjohn about that big fish we saw in the lake
yesterday, Bertie.'
'Ah yes, the big fish.'
'It was a whopper, wasn't it?'
'Very well-developed.'
'I brought him down here to show it to him.'
'Quite right. You'll enjoy the big fish, Upjohn.'
I had been perfectly correct in supposing him to be restive. He did
his wolf impersonation once more.
'I shall do nothing of the sort,' he said, and you couldn't find a
better word than 'testily' to describe the way he spoke. 'It is most
inconvenient for me to be away from the house at this time. I am
expecting a telephone call from my lawyer.'
'Oh, I wouldn't bother about telephone calls from lawyers,' said
heartily. 'These legal birds never say anything worth listening to.
Just gab gab gab. You'll never forgive yourself if you miss the big
fish. You were saying, Upjohn?' I broke off courteously, for he had
spoken.
'I am saying, Mr Wooster, that both you and Miss Wickham are
labouring under a singular delusion in supposing that I am interested
in fish, whether large or small. I ought never to have left the house.
I shall return there at once.'
'Oh, don't go yet,' said.
'Wait for the big fish,' said Bobbie.
'Bound to be along shortly,' I said.
'At any moment now,' said Bobbie.
Her eyes met mine, and I read in them the message she was trying to
convey - viz. that the time had come to act. There is a tide in the
affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Not my
own. Jeeves's. She bent over and pointed with an eager finger.
'Oh, look!' she cried.
This, as I had explained to Jeeves, should have been the cue for
Upjohn to bend over, too, thus making it a simple task for me to do my
stuff, but he didn't bend over an inch. And why? Because at this moment
the goof Phyllis, suddenly appearing in our midst, said:
'Daddy, dear, you're wanted on the telephone.'
Upon which, standing not on the order of his going, Upjohn was off
as if propelled from a gun. He couldn't have moved quicker if he had
been the dachshund Poppet, who at this juncture was running round in
circles, trying, if I read his thoughts aright, to work off the rather
heavy lunch he had had earlier in the afternoon.
One began to see what the poet Burns had meant. I don't know
anything that more promptly gums up a dramatic sequence than the sudden
and unexpected exit of an important member of the cast at a critical
point in the proceedings. I was reminded of the time when we did
Charley's Aunt at the Market Snodsbury Town Hall in aid of the local
church organ fund and half-way through the second act, just when we
were all giving of our best, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, who was playing
Lord Fancourt Babberley, left the stage abruptly to attend to an
unforeseen nose bleed.
As far as Bobbie and I were concerned, silence reigned, this novel
twist in the scenario having wiped speech from our lips, as the
expression is, but Phyllis continued vocal.
'I found this darling pussycat in the garden,' she said, and for the
first time I observed that she was bearing Augustus in her arms. He was
looking a bit disgruntled, and one could readily see why. He wanted to
catch up with his sleep and was being kept awake by the endearments she
was murmuring in his ear.
She lowered him to the ground.
'I brought him here to talk to Poppet. Poppet loves cats, don't you
angel? Come and say how-d'you-do to the sweet pussykins, darling.'
I shot a quick look at Wilbert Cream, to see how he was reacting to
this. It was the sort of observation which might well have quenched the
spark of love in his bosom, for nothing tends to cool the human heart
more swiftly than babytalk. But so far from being revolted he was
gazing yearningly at her as if her words were music to his ears. Very
odd, I felt, and I was just saying to myself that you never could tell,
when I became aware of a certain liveliness in my immediate vicinity.
At the moment when Augustus touched ground and curling himself into
a ball fell into a light doze, Poppet had completed his tenth lap and
was preparing to start on his eleventh. Seeing Augustus, he halted in
mid-stride, smiled broadly, turned his ears inside out, stuck his tail
straight up at right angles to the parent body and bounded forward,
barking merrily.
I could have told the silly ass his attitude was all wrong. Roused
abruptly from slumber, the most easy-going cat is apt to wake up cross.
Already Augustus had had much to endure from Phyllis, who had doubtless
jerked him out of dreamland when scooping him up in the garden, and all
this noise and heartiness breaking out just as he dropped off again put
the lid on his sullen mood. He spat peevishly, there was a sharp yelp,
and something long and brown came shooting between my legs,
precipitating itself and me into the depths. The waters closed about
me, and for an instant I knew no more.
When I rose to the surface, I found that Poppet and I were not the
only bathers. We had been joined by Wilbert Cream, who had dived in,
seized the hound by the scruff of the neck, and was towing him at a
brisk pace to the shore. And by one of those odd coincidences I was at
this moment seized by the scruff of the neck myself.
'It's all right, Mr Upjohn, keep quite cool, keep quite ... What the
hell are you doing here, Bertie?' said Kipper, for it was he. I may
have been wrong, but it seemed to me that he spoke petulantly.
I expelled a pint or so of H2O.
'You may well ask,' I said, moodily detaching a water beetle from my
hair. 'I don't know if you know the meaning of the word "agley",
Kipper, but that, to put it in a nutshell, is the way things have
ganged.'


    16


Reaching the mainland some moments later and squelching back to the
house, accompanied by Bobbie, like a couple of Napoleons squelching
back from Moscow, we encountered Aunt Dahlia, who, wearing that hat of
hers that looks like one of those baskets you carry fish in, was
messing about in the herbaceous border by the tennis lawn. She gaped at
us dumbly for perhaps five seconds, then uttered an ejaculation, far
from suitable to mixed company, which she had no doubt picked up from
fellow-Nimrods in her hunting days. Having got this off the chest, she
said:
'What's been going on in this joint? Wilbert Cream came by here just
now, soaked to the eyebrows, and now you two appear, leaking at every
seam. Have you all been playing water polo with your clothes on?'
'Not so much water polo, more that seaside bathing belles stuff,' I
said. 'But it's a long story, and one feels that the cagey thing for
Kipper and me to do now is to nip along and get into some dry things,
not to linger conferring with you, much,' I added courteously, 'as we
always enjoy your conversation.'
'The extraordinary thing is that I saw Upjohn not long ago, and he
was as dry as a bone. How was that? Couldn't you get him to play with
you?'
'He had to go and talk to his lawyer on the phone,' I said, and
leaving Bobbie to place the facts before her, we resumed our
squelching. And I was in my room, having shed the moistened outer crust
and substituted something a bit more sec in pale flannel, when there
was a knock on the door. I flung wide the gates and found Bobbie and
Kipper on the threshold.
The first thing I noticed about their demeanour was the strange
absence of gloom, despondency and what not. I mean, considering that it
was little more than a quarter of an hour since all our hopes and
dreams had taken the knock, one would have expected their hearts to be
bowed down with weight of woe, but their whole aspect was one of buck
and optimism. It occurred to me as a possible solution that with that
bulldog spirit of never admitting defeat which has made Englishmen -
and, of course, Englishwomen - what they are they had decided to have
another go along the same lines at some future date, and I asked if
this was the case.
The answer was in the negative. Kipper said No, there was no
likelihood of getting Upjohn down to the lake again, and Bobbie said
that even if they did, it wouldn't be any good, because I would be sure
to mess things up once more.
This stung me, I confess.
'How do you mean, mess things up?'
'You'd be bound to trip over your flat feet and fall in, as you did
today.'
'Pardon me,' I said, preserving with an effort the polished suavity
demanded from an English gentleman when chewing the rag with one of the
other sex, 'you're talking through the back of your fatheaded little
neck. I did not trip over my flat feet. I was hurled into the depths by
an Act of God, to wit, a totally unexpected dachshund getting between
my legs. If you're going to blame anyone blame the goof Phyllis for
bringing Augustus there and calling him in his hearing a sweet
pussykins. Naturally it made him sore and disinclined to stand any lip
from barking dogs.'
'Yes,' said Kipper, always the staunch pal. 'It wasn't Bertie's
fault, angel. Say what you will of dachshunds, their peculiar shape
makes them the easiest breed of dog to trip over in existence. I feel
that Bertie emerges without a stain on his character.'
'I don't,' said Bobbie. 'Still, it doesn't matter.'
'No, it doesn't really matter,' said Kipper, 'because your aunt has
suggested a scheme that's just as good as the Lanchester-Simmons thing,
if not better. She was telling Bobbie about the time when Boko
Fittleworth was trying to ingratiate himself with your Uncle Percy, and
you very sportingly offered to go and call your Uncle Percy a lot of
offensive names, so that Boko, hovering outside the door, could come in
and stick up for him, thus putting himself in solid with him. You
probably remember the incident?'
I quivered. I remembered the incident all right.
'She thinks the same treatment would work with Upjohn, and I'm sure
she's right. You know how you feel when you suddenly discover you've a
real friend, a fellow who thinks you're terrific and won't hear a word
said against you. It touches you. If you had anything in the nature of
a prejudice against the chap, you change your opinion of him. You feel
you can't do anything to injure such a sterling bloke. And that's how
Upjohn is going to feel about me, Bertie, when I come in and lend him
my sympathy and support as you stand there calling him all the names
you can think of. You must have picked up dozens from your aunt. She
used to hunt, and if you hunt, you have to know all the names there are
because people are always riding over hounds and all that. Ask her to
jot down a few of the best on a half-sheet of notepaper.'
'He won't need that,' said Bobbie. 'He's probably got them all
tucked away in his mind.'
'Of course. Learned them at her knee as a child. Well, that's the
set-up, Bertie. You wait your opportunity and corner Upjohn somewhere
and tower over him-'
'As he crouches in his chair.'
' - and shake your finger in his face and abuse him roundly. And
when he's quailing beneath your scorn and wishing some friend in need
would intervene and save him from this terrible ordeal, I come in,
having heard all. Bobbie suggests that I knock you down, but I don't
think I could do that. The recollection of our ancient friendship would
make me pull my punch. I shall simply rebuke you. "Wooster," I shall
say, "I am shocked. Shocked and astounded. I cannot understand how you
can talk like that to a man I have always respected and looked up to, a
man in whose preparatory school I spent the happiest years of my life.
You strangely forget yourself, Wooster." Upon which, you slink out,
bathed in shame and confusion, and Upjohn thanks me brokenly and says
if there is anything he can do for me, I have only to name it.'
'I still think you ought to knock him down.'
'Having endeared myself to him thus -'
'Much more box-office.'
'Having endeared myself to him thus, I lead the conversation round
to the libel suit.'
'One good punch in the eye would do it.'
'I say that I have seen the current issue of the Thursday Review,
and I can quite understand him wanting to mulct the journal in
substantial damages, but "Don't forget, Mr Upjohn," I say, "that when a
weekly paper loses a chunk of money, it has to retrench, and the way it
retrenches is by getting rid of the more junior members of its staff.
You wouldn't want me to lose my job, would you, Mr Upjohn?" He starts.
"Are you on the staff of the Thursday Review?" he says. "For the time
being, yes," I say. "But if you bring that suit, I shall be selling
pencils in the street." This is the crucial moment. Looking into his
eyes, I can see that he is thinking of that five thousand quid, and for
an instant quite naturally he hesitates. Then his better self prevails.
His eyes soften. They fill with tears. He clasps my hand. He tells me
he could use five thousand quid as well as the next man, but no money
in the world would make him dream of doing an injury to the fellow who
championed him so stoutly against the louse Wooster, and the scene ends
with our going off together to Swordfish's pantry for a drop of port,
probably with our arms round each other's waists, and that night he
writes a letter to his lawyer telling him to call the suit off. Any
questions?'
'Not from me. It isn't as if he could find out that it was you who
wrote that review. It wasn't signed.'
'No, thank heaven for the editorial austerity that prevented that.'
'I can't see a flaw in the scenario. He'll have to withdraw the
suit.'
'In common decency, one would think. The only thing that remains is
to choose a time and place for Bertie to operate.'
'No time like the present.'
'But how do we locate Upjohn?'
'He's in Mr Travers's study. I saw him through the french window.'
'Excellent. Then, Bertie, if you're ready...'
It will probably have been noticed that during these exchanges I had
taken no part in the conversation. This was because I was fully
occupied with envisaging the horror that lay before me. I knew that it
did lie before me, of course, for where the ordinary man would have met
the suggestion they had made with a firm nolle prosequi, I was barred
from doing this by the code of the Woosters, which, as is pretty
generally known, renders it impossible for me to let a pal down. If the
only way of saving a boyhood friend from having to sell pencils in the
street - though I should have thought that blood oranges would have
been a far more lucrative line - was by wagging my finger in the face
of Aubrey Upjohn and calling him names, that finger would have to be
wagged and those names called. The ordeal would whiten my hair from the
roots up and leave me a mere shell of my former self, but it was one
that I must go through. Mine not to reason why, as the fellow said.
So I uttered a rather husky 'Right-ho' and tried not to think of how
the Upjohn face looked without its moustache. For what chilled the feet
most was the mental picture of that bare upper lip which he had so
often twitched at me in what are called days of yore. Dimly, as we
started off for the arena, I could hear Bobbie saying 'My hero!' and
Kipper asking anxiously if I was in good voice, but it would have taken
a fat lot more than my-hero-ing and solicitude about my vocal cords to
restore tone to Bertram's nervous system. I was, in short, feeling like
an inexperienced novice going up against the heavyweight champion when
in due course I drew up at the study door, opened it and tottered in. I
could not forget that an Aubrey Upjohn who for years had been looking
strong parents in the eye and making them wilt, and whose toughness was
a byword in Bramley-on-Sea, was not a man lightly to wag a finger in
the face of.
Uncle Tom's study was a place I seldom entered during my visits to
Brinkley Court, because when I did go there he always grabbed me and
started to talk about old silver, whereas if he caught me in the open
he often touched on other topics, and the way I looked at it was that
there was no sense in sticking one's neck out. It was more than a year
since I had been inside this sanctum, and I had forgotten how
extraordinarily like its interior was to that of Aubrey Upjohn's lair
at Malvern House. Discovering this now and seeing Aubrey Upjohn seated
at the desk as I had so often seen him sit on the occasions when he had
sent for me to discuss some recent departure of mine from the straight
and narrow path, I found what little was left of my sang froid expiring
with a pop. And at the same time I spotted the flaw in this scheme I
had undertaken to sit in on - viz. that you can't just charge into a
room and start calling someone names - out of a blue sky, as it were -
you have to lead up to the thing. Pourparlers, in short, are of the
essence.
So I said 'Oh, hullo,' which seemed to me about as good a pourparler
as you could have by way of an opener. I should imagine that those
statesmen of whom I was speaking always edge into their conferences
conducted in an atmosphere of the utmost cordiality in some such
manner.
'Reading?' I said.
He lowered his book - one of Ma Cream's, I noticed -and flashed an
upper lip at me.
'Your powers of observation have not led you astray, Wooster. I am
reading.'
'Interesting book?'
'Very. I am counting the minutes until I can resume its perusal
undisturbed.'
I'm pretty quick, and I at once spotted that the atmosphere was not
of the utmost cordiality. He hadn't spoken matily, and he wasn't eyeing
me matily. His whole manner seemed to suggest that he felt that I was
taking up space in the room which could have been better employed for
other purposes.
However, I persevered.
'I see you've shaved off your moustache.'
'I have. You do not feel, I hope, that I pursued a mistaken course?'
'Oh no, rather not. I grew a moustache myself last year, but had to
get rid of it.'
'Indeed?'
'Public sentiment was against it.'
'I see. Well, I should be delighted to hear more of your
reminiscences, Wooster, but at the moment I am expecting a telephone
call from my lawyer.'
'I thought you'd had one.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'When you were down by the lake, didn't you go off to talk to him?'
'I did. But when I reached the telephone, he had grown tired of
waiting and had rung off. I should never have allowed Miss Wickham to
take me away from the house.'
'She wanted you to see the big fish.'
'So I understood her to say.'
'Talking of fish, you must have been surprised to find Kipper here.'
'Kipper?'
'Herring.'
'Oh, Herring,' he said, and one spotted the almost total lack of
animation in his voice. And conversation had started to flag, when the
door flew open and the goof Phyllis bounded in, full of girlish
excitement.
'Oh, Daddy,' she burbled, 'are you busy?'
'No, my dear.'
'Can I speak to you about something?'
'Certainly. Goodbye, Wooster.'
I saw what this meant. He didn't want me around. There was nothing
for it but to ooze out through the french window, so I oozed, and had
hardly got outside when Bobbie sprang at me like a leopardess.
'What on earth are you fooling about for like this, Bertie?' she
stage-whispered. 'All that rot about moustaches. I thought you'd be
well into it by this time.'
I pointed out that as yet Aubrey Upjohn had not given me a cue.
'You and your cues!'
'All right, me and my cues. But I've got to sort of lead the
conversation in the right direction, haven't I?'
'I see what Bertie means, darling,' said Kipper. 'He wants -'
'A point d'appui.'
'A what?' said Bobbie.
'Sort of jumping-off place.'
The beasel snorted.
'If you ask me, he's lost his nerve. I knew this would happen. The
worm has got cold feet.'
I could have crushed her by drawing her attention to the fact that
worms don't have feet, cold or piping hot, but I had no wish to bandy
words.
'I must ask you, Kipper,' I said with frigid dignity, 'to request
your girl friend to preserve the decencies of debate. My feet are not
cold. I am as intrepid as a lion and only too anxious to get down to
brass tacks, but just as I was working round to the res, Phyllis came
in. She said she had something she wanted to speak to him about.'
Bobbie snorted again, this time in a despairing sort of way.
'She'll be there for hours. It's no good waiting.'
'No,' said Kipper. 'May as well call it off for the moment. We'll
let you know time and place of next fixture, Bertie.'
'Oh, thanks,' I said, and they drifted away.
And about a couple of minutes later, as I stood there brooding on
Kipper's sad case, Aunt Dahlia came along. I was glad to see her. I
thought she might possibly come across with aid and comfort, for
though, like the female in the poem I was mentioning, she sometimes
inclined to be a toughish egg in hours of ease, she could generally be
relied on to be there with the soothing solace when one had anything
wrong with one's brow.
As she approached, I got the impression that her own brow had for
some reason taken it on the chin. Quite a good deal of that upon-which-
all-the-ends-of-the-earth-are-come stuff, it seemed to me.
Nor was I mistaken.
'Bertie,' she said, heaving to beside me and waving a trowel in an
overwrought manner, 'do you know what?'
'No, what?'
'I'll tell you what,' said the aged relative, rapping out a sharp
monosyllable such as she might have uttered in her Quorn and Pytchley
days on observing a unit of the pack of hounds chasing a rabbit. 'That
ass Phyllis has gone and got engaged to Wilbert Cream!'


    17


Her words gave me quite a wallop. I don't say I reeled, and
everything didn't actually go black, but I was shaken, as what nephew
would not have been. When a loved aunt has sweated herself to the bone
trying to save her god-child from the clutches of a New York playboy
and learns that all her well-meant efforts have gone blue on her, it's
only natural for her late brother's son to shudder in sympathy.
'You don't mean that?' I said. 'Who told you?'
'She did.'
'In person?'
'In the flesh. She came skipping to me just now, clapping her little
hands and bleating about how very, very happy she was, dear Mrs
Travers. The silly young geezer. I nearly conked her one with my
trowel. I'd always thought her half-baked, but now I think they didn't
even put her in the oven.'
'But how did it happen?'
'Apparently that dog of hers joined you in the water.'
'Yes, that's right, he took his dip with the rest of us. But what's
that got to do with it?'
'Wilbert Cream dived in and saved him.'
'He could have got ashore perfectly well under his own steam. In
fact, he was already on his way, doing what looked like an Australian
crawl.'
'That wouldn't occur to a pinhead like Phyllis. To her Wilbert Cream
is the man who rescued her dachshund from a watery grave. So she's
going to marry him.'
'But you don't marry fellows because they rescue dachshunds.'
'You do, if you've a mentality like hers.'
'Seems odd.'
'And is. But that's how it goes. Girls like Phyllis Mills are an
open book to me. For four years I was, if you remember, the proprietor
and editress of a weekly paper for women.' She was alluding to the
periodical entitled Milady's Boudoir, to the Husbands and Brothers page
of which I once contributed an article or 'piece' on What The Well-
Dressed Man Is Wearing. It had recently been sold to a mug up Liverpool
way, and I have never seen Uncle Tom look chirpier than when the deal
went through, he for those four years having had to foot the bills.
'I don't suppose,' she continued, 'that you were a regular reader,
so for your information there appeared in each issue a short story, and
in seventy per cent of those short stories the hero won the heroine's
heart by saving her dog or her cat or her canary or whatever foul
animal she happened to possess. Well, Phyllis didn't write all those
stories, but she easily might have done, for that's the way her mind
works. When I say mind,' said the blood relation, 'I refer to the
quarter-teaspoonful of brain which you might possibly find in her head
if you sank an artesian well. Poor Jane!'
'Poor who?'
'Her mother. Jane Mills.'
'Oh, ah, yes. She was a pal of yours, you told me.'
'The best I ever had, and she was always saying to me "Dahlia, old
girl, if I pop off before you, for heaven's sake look after Phyllis and
see that she doesn't marry some ghastly outsider. She's sure to want
to. Girls always do, goodness knows why," she said, and I knew she was
thinking of her first husband, who was a heel to end all heels and a
constant pain in the neck to her till one night he most fortunately
walked into the River Thames while under the influence of the sauce and
didn't come up for days. "Do stop her," she said, and I said "Jane, you
can rely on me." And now this happens.'
I endeavoured to soothe.
'You can't blame yourself.'
'Yes, I can.'
'It isn't your fault.'
'I invited Wilbert Cream here.'
'Merely from a wifely desire to do Uncle Tom a bit of good.'
'And I let Upjohn stick around, always at her elbow egging her on.'
'Yes, Upjohn's the bird I blame.'
'Me, too.'
'But for his - undue influence, do they call it? - Phyllis would
have remained a bachelor or spinster or whatever it is. "Thou art the
man, Upjohn!" seems to me the way to sum it up. He ought to be ashamed
of himself.'
'And am I going to tell him so! I'd give a tenner to have Aubrey
Upjohn here at this moment.'
'You can get him for nothing. He's in Uncle Tom's study.'
Her face lit up.
'He is?' She threw her head back and inflated the lungs. 'UPJOHN!'
she boomed, rather like someone calling the cattle home across the
sands of Dee, and I issued a kindly word of warning.
'Watch that blood pressure, old ancestor.'
'Never you mind my blood pressure. You let it alone, and it'll leave
you alone. UPJOHN!'
He appeared in the french window, looking cold and severe, as I had
so often seen him look when hobnobbing with him in his study at Malvern
House, self not there as a willing guest but because I'd been sent for.
('I should like to see Wooster in my study immediately after morning
prayers' was the formula.)
'Who is making that abominable noise? Oh, it's you, Dahlia.'
'Yes, it's me.'
'You wished to see me?'
'Yes, but not the way you're looking now. I'd have preferred you to
have fractured your spine or at least to have broken a couple of ankles
and got a touch of leprosy.'
'My dear Dahlia!'
'I'm not your dear Dahlia. I'm a seething volcano. Have you seen
Phyllis?'
'She has just left me.'
'Did she tell you?'
'That she was engaged to Wilbert Cream? Certainly.'
'And I suppose you're delighted?'
'Of course I am.'
'Yes, of course you are! I can well imagine that it's your dearest
wish to see that unfortunate muttonheaded girl become the wife of a man
who lets off stink bombs in night clubs and pinches the spoons and has
had three divorces already and who, if the authorities play their cards
right, will end up cracking rocks in Sing-Sing. That is unless the
loony-bin gets its bid in first. Just a Prince Charming, you might
say.'
'I don't understand you.'
'Then you're an ass.'
'Well, really!' said Aubrey Upjohn, and there was a dangerous note
in his voice. I could see that the relative's manner, which was not
affectionate, and her words, which lacked cordiality, were peeving him.
It looked like an odds-on shot that in about another two ticks he would
be giving her the Collect for the Day to write out ten times or even
instructing her to bend over while he fetched his whangee. You can push
these preparatory schoolmasters just so far.
'A fine way for Jane's daughter to end up. Mrs Broadway Willie!'
'Broadway Willie?'
'That's what he's called in the circles in which he moves, into
which he will now introduce Phyllis. "Meet the moll," he'll say, and
then he'll teach her in twelve easy lessons how to make stink bombs,
and the children, if and when, will be trained to pick people's pockets
as they dandle them on their knee. And you'll be responsible, Aubrey
Upjohn!'
I didn't like the way things were trending. Admittedly the aged
relative was putting up a great show and it was a pleasure to listen to
her, but I had seen Upjohn's lip twitch and that look of smug
satisfaction come into his face which I had so often seen when he had
been counsel for the prosecution in some case in which I was involved
and had spotted a damaging flaw in my testimony. The occasion when I
was on trial for having broken the drawing-room window with a cricket
ball springs to the mind. It was plain to an eye as discerning as mine
that he was about to put it across the old flesh-and-blood properly,
making her wish she hadn't spoken. I couldn't see how, but the symptoms
were all there.
I was right. That twitching lip had not misled me.
'If I might be allowed to make a remark, my dear Dahlia,' he said,
'I think we are talking at cross purposes. You appear to be under the
impression that Phyllis is marrying Wilbert's younger brother Wilfred,
the notorious playboy whose escapades have caused the family so much
distress and who, as you are correct in saying, is known to his
disreputable friends as Broadway Willie. Wilfred, I agree, would make -
and on three successive occasions has made - a most undesirable
husband, but no one to my knowledge has ever spoken a derogatory word
of Wilbert. I know few young men who are more generally respected. He
is a member of the faculty of one of the greatest American
universities, over in this country on his sabbatical. He teaches
romance languages.'
Stop me if I've told you this before, I rather fancy I have, but
once when I was up at Oxford and chatting on the river bank with a girl
called something that's slipped my mind there was a sound of barking
and a great hefty dog of the Hound of the Baskervilles type came
galloping at me, obviously intent on mayhem, its whole aspect that of a
dog that has no use for Woosters. And I was just commending my soul to
God and thinking that this was where my new flannel trousers got about
thirty bobs' worth of value bitten out of them, when the girl, waiting
till she saw the whites of its eyes, with extraordinary presence of
mind opened a coloured Japanese umbrella in the animal's face. Upon
which, with a startled exclamation it did three back somersaults and
retired into private life.
And the reason I bring this up now is that, barring the somersaults,
Aunt Dahlia's reaction to this communique was precisely that of the
above hound to the Japanese umbrella. The same visible taken-abackness.
She has since told me that her emotions were identical with those she
had experienced when she was out with the Pytchley and riding over a
ploughed field in rainy weather, and the horse of a sports-lover in
front of her suddenly kicked three pounds of wet mud into her face.
She gulped like a bulldog trying to swallow a sirloin steak many
sizes too large for its thoracic cavity.
'You mean there are two of them?'
'Exactly.'
'And Wilbert isn't the one I thought he was?'
'You have grasped the position of affairs to a nicety. You will
appreciate now, my dear Dahlia,' said Upjohn, speaking with the same
unction, if that's the word, with which he had spoken when unmasking
his batteries and presenting unshakable proof that yours was the hand,
Wooster, which propelled this cricket ball, 'that your concern, though
doing you the greatest credit, has been needless. I could wish Phyllis
no better husband. Wilbert has looks, brains, character ... and
excellent prospects,' he added, rolling the words round his tongue like
vintage port. 'His father, I should imagine, would be worth at least
twenty million dollars, and Wilbert is the elder son. Yes, most
satisfactory, most...'
As he spoke, the telephone rang, and with a quick 'Ha!' he shot back
into the study like a homing rabbit.


    18


For perhaps a quarter of a minute after he had passed from the scene
the aged relative stood struggling for utterance. At the end of this
period she found speech.
'Of all the damn silly fatheaded things!' she vociferated, if that's
the word. 'With a million ruddy names to choose from, these ruddy
Creams call one ruddy son Wilbert and the other ruddy son Wilfred, and
both these ruddy sons are known as Willie. Just going out of their way
to mislead the innocent bystander. You'd think people would have more
consideration.'
Again I begged her to keep an eye on her blood pressure and not get
so worked up, and once more she brushed me off, this time with a curt
request that I would go and boil my head.
'You'd be worked up if you had just been scored off by Aubrey
Upjohn, with that loathsome self-satisfied look on his face as if he'd
been rebuking a pimply pupil at his beastly school for shuffling his
feet in church.'
'Odd, that,' I said, struck by the coincidence. 'He once rebuked me
for that very reason. And I had pimples.'
'Pompous ass!'
'Shows what a small world it is.'
'What's he doing here anyway? I didn't invite him.'
'Bung him out. I took this point up with you before, if you
remember. Cast him into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and
gnashing of teeth.'
'I will, if he gives me any more of his lip.'
'I can see you're in a dangerous mood.'
'You bet I'm in a dangerous ... My God! He's with us again!'
And A. Upjohn was indeed filtering through the french window. But he
had lost the look of which the ancestor had complained, the one he was
wearing now seeming to suggest that since last heard from something had
occurred to wake the fiend that slept in him.
'Dahlia!' he ... yes better make it vociferated once more, I'm
pretty sure it's the word I want.
The fiend that slept in Aunt Dahlia was also up on its toes. She
gave him a look which, if directed at an erring member of the personnel
of the Quorn or Pytchley hound ensemble, would have had that member
sticking his tail between his legs and resolving for the future to lead
a better life.
'Now what?'
Just as Aunt Dahlia had done, Aubrey Upjohn struggled for utterance.
Quite a bit of utterance-struggling there had been around these parts
this summer afternoon.
'I have just been speaking to my lawyer on the telephone,' he said,
getting going after a short stage wait. 'I had asked him to make
inquiries and ascertain the name of the author of that libellous attack
on me in the columns of the Thursday Review. He did so, and has now
informed me that it was the work of my former pupil, Reginald Herring.'
He paused at this point, to let us chew it over, and the heart
sank. Mine, I mean. Aunt Dahlia's seemed to be carrying on much as
usual. She scratched her chin with her trowel, and said:
'Oh, yes?'
Upjohn blinked, as if he had been expecting something better than
this in the way of sympathy and concern.
'Is that all you can say?'
That's the lot.'
'Oh? Well, I am suing the paper for heavy damages, and furthermore,
I refuse to remain in the same house with Reginald Herring. Either he
goes, or I go.'
There was the sort of silence which I believe cyclones drop into for
a second or two before getting down to it and starting to give the
populace the works. Throbbing? Yes, throbbing wouldn't be a bad word to
describe it. Nor would electric, for the matter of that, and if you
care to call it ominous, it will be all right with me. It was a silence
of the type that makes the toes curl and sends a shiver down the spinal
cord as you stand waiting for the bang. I could see Aunt Dahlia
swelling slowly like a chunk of bubble gum, and a less prudent man than
Bertram Wooster would have warned her again about her blood pressure.
'I beg your pardon?' she said.
He repeated the key words.
'Oh?' said the relative, and went off with a pop. I could have told
Upjohn he was asking for it. Normally as genial a soul as ever broke
biscuit, this aunt, when stirred, can become the haughtiest of grandes
dames before whose wrath the stoutest quail, and she doesn't, like
some, have to use a lorgnette to reduce the citizenry to pulp, she does
it all with the naked eye. 'Oh?' she said. 'So you have decided to
revise my guest list for me? You have the nerve, the - the -'
I saw she needed helping out.
'Audacity,' I said, throwing her the line.
'The audacity to dictate to me who I shall have in my house.'
It should have been 'whom', but I let it go.
'You have the -'
'Crust.'
'- the immortal rind,' she amended, and I had to admit it was
stronger, 'to tell me whom' - she got it right that time - 'I may
entertain at Brinkley Court and who' - wrong again - 'I may not. Very
well, if you feel unable to breathe the same air as my friends, you
must please yourself. I believe the "Bull and Bush" in Market Snodsbury
is quite comfortable.'
'Well spoken of in the Automobile Guide,' I said.
'I shall go there,' said Upjohn. 'I shall go there as soon as my
things are packed. Perhaps you will be good enough to tell your butler
to pack them.'
He strode off, and she went into Uncle Tom's study, me following,
she still snorting. She rang the bell.
Jeeves appeared.
'Jeeves?' said the relative, surprised. 'I was ringing for-'
'It is Sir Roderick's afternoon off, madam.'
'Oh? Well, would you mind packing Mr Upjohn's things, Jeeves? He is
leaving us.'
'Very good, madam.'
'And you can drive him to Market Snodsbury, Bertie.'
'Right-ho,' I said, not much liking the assignment, but liking less
the idea of endeavouring to thwart this incandescent aunt in her
current frame of mind.
Safety first, is the Wooster slogan.


    19


It isn't much of a run from Brinkley Court to Market Snodsbury and I
deposited Upjohn at the 'Bull and Bush' and started m.-p.-h.-ing
homeward in what you might call a trice. We parted, of course, on
rather distant terms, but the great thing when you've got an Upjohn on
your books is to part and not be fussy about how it's done, and had it
not been for all this worry about Kipper, for whom I was now mourning
in spirit more than ever, I should have been feeling fine.
I could see no happy issue for him from the soup in which he was
immersed. No words had been exchanged between Upjohn and self on the
journey out, but the glimpses I had caught of his face from the corner
of the eyes had told me that he was grim and resolute, his supply of
the milk of human kindness plainly short by several gallons. No hope,
it seemed to me, of turning him from his fell purpose.
I garaged the car and went to Aunt Dahlia's sanctum to ascertain
whether she had cooled off at all since I had left her, for I was still
anxious about that blood pressure of hers. One doesn't want aunts going
up in a sheet of flame all over the place.
She wasn't there, having, I learned later, withdrawn to her room to
bathe her temples with eau de Cologne and do Yogi deep-breathing, but
Bobbie was, and not only Bobbie but Jeeves. He was handing her
something in an envelope, and she was saying 'Oh, Jeeves, you've saved
a human life,' and he was saying 'Not at all, miss.' The gist, of
course, escaped me, but I had no leisure to probe into gists.
'Where's Kipper?' I asked, and was surprised to note that Bobbie was
dancing round the room on the tips of her toes uttering animal cries,
apparently ecstatic in their nature.
'Reggie?' she said, suspending the farmyard imitations for a moment.
'He went for a walk.'
'Does he know that Upjohn's found out he wrote that thing?'
'Yes, your aunt told him.'
'Then we ought to be in conference.'
'About Upjohn's libel action? It's all right about that. Jeeves has
pinched his speech.'
I could make nothing of this. It seemed to me that the beasel spoke
in riddles.
'Have you an impediment in your speech, Jeeves?'
'No, sir.'
'Then what, if anything, does the young prune mean?'
'Miss Wickham's allusion is to the typescript of the speech which Mr
Upjohn is to deliver tomorrow to the scholars of Market Snodsbury
Grammar School, sir.'
'She said you'd pinched it.'
'Precisely, sir.'
I started.
'You don't mean -'
'Yes, he does,' said Bobbie, resuming the Ballet Russe movements.
'Your aunt told him to pack Upjohn's bags, and the first thing he saw
when he smacked into it was the speech. He trousered it and brought it
along to me.'
I raised an eyebrow.
'Well, really, Jeeves!'
'I deemed it best, sir.'
'And did you deem right!' said Bobbie, executing a Nijinsky what-
ever-it's-called. 'Either Upjohn agrees to drop that libel suit or he
doesn't get these notes, as he calls them, and without them he won't be