THE PRIDE OF THE WOOSTERS IS WOUNDED
If there’s one thing I like, it’s a quiet life. I’m not one of those
fellows who get all restless and depressed if things aren’t happening
to them all the time. You can’t make it too placid for me. Give me
regular meals, a good show with decent music every now and then, and
one or two pals to totter round with, and I ask no more.
That is why the jar, when it came, was such a particularly nasty jar. I
mean, I’d returned from Roville with a sort of feeling that from now on
nothing could occur to upset me. Aunt Agatha, I imagined, would require
at least a year to recover from the Hemmingway affair: and apart from
Aunt Agatha there isn’t anybody who really does much in the way of
harrying me. It seemed to me that the skies were blue, so to speak, and
no clouds in sight.
I little thought.... Well, look here, what happened was this, and I ask
you if it wasn’t enough to rattle anybody.
Once a year Jeeves takes a couple of weeks’ vacation and biffs off to
the sea or somewhere to restore his tissues. Pretty rotten for me, of
course, while he’s away. But it has to be stuck, so I stick it; and
I must admit that he usually manages to get hold of a fairly decent
fellow to look after me in his absence.
Well, the time had come round again, and Jeeves was in the kitchen
giving the understudy a few tips about his duties. I happened to want a
stamp or something, and I toddled down the passage to ask him for it.
The silly ass had left the kitchen door open, and I hadn’t gone two
steps when his voice caught me squarely in the eardrum.
“You will find Mr. Wooster,” he was saying to the substitute chappie,
“an exceedingly pleasant and amiable young gentleman, but not
intelligent. By no means intelligent. Mentally he is negligible--quite
negligible.”
Well, I mean to say, what!
I suppose, strictly speaking, I ought to have charged in and ticked the
blighter off properly in no uncertain voice. But I doubt whether it’s
humanly possible to tick Jeeves off. Personally, I didn’t even have a
dash at it. I merely called for my hat and stick in a marked manner and
legged it. But the memory rankled, if you know what I mean. We Woosters
do not lightly forget. At least, we do--some things--appointments,
and people’s birthdays, and letters to post, and all that--but not an
absolute bally insult like the above. I brooded like the dickens.
I was still brooding when I dropped in at the oyster-bar at Buck’s for
a quick bracer. I needed a bracer rather particularly at the moment,
because I was on my way to lunch with Aunt Agatha. A pretty frightful
ordeal, believe me or believe me not, even though I took it that after
what had happened at Roville she would be in a fairly subdued and
amiable mood. I had just had one quick and another rather slower, and
was feeling about as cheerio as was possible under the circs, when a
muffled voice hailed me from the north-east, and, turning round, I saw
young Bingo Little propped up in a corner, wrapping himself round a
sizable chunk of bread and cheese.
“Hallo-allo-allo!” I said. “Haven’t seen you for ages. You’ve not been
in here lately, have you?”
“No. I’ve been living out in the country.”
“Eh?” I said, for Bingo’s loathing for the country was well known.
“Whereabouts?”
“Down in Hampshire, at a place called Ditteredge.”
“No, really? I know some people who’ve got a house there. The Glossops.
Have you met them?”
“Why, that’s where I’m staying!” said young Bingo. “I’m tutoring the
Glossop kid.”
“What for?” I said. I couldn’t seem to see young Bingo as a tutor.
Though, of course, he did get a degree of sorts at Oxford, and I
suppose you can always fool some of the people some of the time.
“What for? For money, of course! An absolute sitter came unstitched
in the second race at Haydock Park,” said young Bingo, with some
bitterness, “and I dropped my entire month’s allowance. I hadn’t the
nerve to touch my uncle for any more, so it was a case of buzzing round
to the agents and getting a job. I’ve been down there three weeks.”
“I haven’t met the Glossop kid.”
“Don’t!” advised Bingo, briefly.
“The only one of the family I really know is the girl.” I had hardly
spoken these words when the most extraordinary change came over young
Bingo’s face. His eyes bulged, his cheeks flushed, and his Adam’s apple
hopped about like one of those india-rubber balls on the top of the
fountain in a shooting-gallery.
“Oh, Bertie!” he said, in a strangled sort of voice.
I looked at the poor fish anxiously. I knew that he was always falling
in love with someone, but it didn’t seem possible that even he could
have fallen in love with Honoria Glossop. To me the girl was simply
nothing more nor less than a pot of poison. One of those dashed large,
brainy, strenuous, dynamic girls you see so many of these days. She had
been at Girton, where, in addition to enlarging her brain to the most
frightful extent, she had gone in for every kind of sport and developed
the physique of a middle-weight catch-as-catch-can wrestler. I’m not
sure she didn’t box for the ’Varsity while she was up. The effect she
had on me whenever she appeared was to make me want to slide into a
cellar and lie low till they blew the All-Clear.
Yet here was young Bingo obviously all for her. There was no mistaking
it. The love-light was in the blighter’s eyes.
“I worship her, Bertie! I worship the very ground she treads on!”
continued the patient, in a loud, penetrating voice. Fred Thompson and
one or two fellows had come in, and McGarry, the chappie behind the
bar, was listening with his ears flapping. But there’s no reticence
about Bingo. He always reminds me of the hero of a musical comedy who
takes the centre of the stage, gathers the boys round him in a circle,
and tells them all about his love at the top of his voice.
“Have you told her?”
“No. I haven’t had the nerve. But we walk together in the garden most
evenings, and it sometimes seems to me that there is a look in her
eyes.”
“I know that look. Like a sergeant-major.”
“Nothing of the kind! Like a tender goddess.”
“Half a second, old thing,” I said. “Are you sure we’re talking about
the same girl? The one I mean is Honoria. Perhaps there’s a younger
sister or something I’ve not heard of?”
“Her name is Honoria,” bawled Bingo reverently.
“And she strikes you as a tender goddess?”
“She does.”
“God bless you!” I said.
“She walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climes and starry
skies; and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and
her eyes. Another bit of bread and cheese,” he said to the lad behind
the bar.
“You’re keeping your strength up,” I said.
“This is my lunch. I’ve got to meet Oswald at Waterloo at one-fifteen,
to catch the train back. I brought him up to town to see the dentist.”
“Oswald? Is that the kid?”
“Yes. Pestilential to a degree.”
“Pestilential! That reminds me, I’m lunching with my Aunt Agatha. I’ll
have to pop off now, or I’ll be late.”
I hadn’t seen Aunt Agatha since that little affair of the pearls; and,
while I didn’t anticipate any great pleasure from gnawing a bone in her
society, I must say that there was one topic of conversation I felt
pretty confident she wouldn’t touch on, and that was the subject of my
matrimonial future. I mean, when a woman’s made a bloomer like the one
Aunt Agatha made at Roville, you’d naturally think that a decent shame
would keep her off it for, at any rate, a month or two.
But women beat me. I mean to say, as regards nerve. You’ll hardly
credit it, but she actually started in on me with the fish. Absolutely
with the fish, I give you my solemn word. We’d hardly exchanged a word
about the weather, when she let me have it without a blush.
“Bertie,” she said, “I’ve been thinking again about you and how
necessary it is that you should get married. I quite admit that I
was dreadfully mistaken in my opinion of that terrible, hypocritical
girl at Roville, but this time there is no danger of an error. By
great good luck I have found the very wife for you, a girl whom I
have only recently met, but whose family is above suspicion. She has
plenty of money, too, though that does not matter in your case. The
great point is that she is strong, self-reliant and sensible, and will
counterbalance the deficiencies and weaknesses of your character. She
has met you; and, while there is naturally much in you of which she
disapproves, she does not dislike you. I know this, for I have sounded
her--guardedly, of course--and I am sure that you have only to make the
first advances----”
“Who is it?” I would have said it long before, but the shock had made
me swallow a bit of roll the wrong way, and I had only just finished
turning purple and trying to get a bit of air back into the old
windpipe. “Who is it?”
“Sir Roderick Glossop’s daughter, Honoria.”
“No, no!” I cried, paling beneath the tan.
“Don’t be silly, Bertie. She is just the wife for you.”
“Yes, but look here----”
“She will mould you.”
“But I don’t want to be moulded.”
Aunt Agatha gave me the kind of look she used to give me when I was a
kid and had been found in the jam cupboard.
“Bertie! I hope you are not going to be troublesome.”
“Well, but I mean----”
“Lady Glossop has very kindly invited you to Ditteredge Hall for a few
days. I told her you would be delighted to come down to-morrow.”
“I’m sorry, but I’ve got a dashed important engagement to-morrow.”
“What engagement?”
“Well--er----”
“You have no engagement. And, even if you had, you must put it off. I
shall be very seriously annoyed, Bertie, if you do not go to Ditteredge
Hall to-morrow.”
“Oh, right-o!” I said.
It wasn’t two minutes after I had parted from Aunt Agatha before the
old fighting spirit of the Woosters reasserted itself. Ghastly as the
peril was which loomed before me, I was conscious of a rummy sort of
exhilaration. It was a tight corner, but the tighter the corner, I
felt, the more juicily should I score off Jeeves when I got myself out
of it without a bit of help from him. Ordinarily, of course, I should
have consulted him and trusted to him to solve the difficulty; but
after what I had heard him saying in the kitchen, I was dashed if I was
going to demean myself. When I got home I addressed the man with light
abandon.
“Jeeves,” I said, “I’m in a bit of a difficulty.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”
“Yes, quite a bad hole. In fact, you might say on the brink of a
precipice, and faced by an awful doom.”
“If I could be of any assistance, sir----”
“Oh, no. No, no. Thanks very much, but no, no. I won’t trouble you.
I’ve no doubt I shall be able to get out of it all right by myself.”
“Very good, sir.”
So that was that. I’m bound to say I’d have welcomed a bit more
curiosity from the fellow, but that is Jeeves all over. Cloaks his
emotions, if you know what I mean.
Honoria was away when I got to Ditteredge on the following afternoon.
Her mother told me that she was staying with some people named
Braythwayt in the neighbourhood, and would be back next day, bringing
the daughter of the house with her for a visit. She said I would find
Oswald out in the grounds, and such is a mother’s love that she spoke
as if that were a bit of a boost for the grounds and an inducement to
go there.
Rather decent, the grounds at Ditteredge. A couple of terraces, a bit
of lawn with a cedar on it, a bit of shrubbery, and finally a small but
goodish lake with a stone bridge running across it. Directly I’d worked
my way round the shrubbery I spotted young Bingo leaning against the
bridge smoking a cigarette. Sitting on the stonework, fishing, was a
species of kid whom I took to be Oswald the Plague-Spot.
Bingo was both surprised and delighted to see me, and introduced me to
the kid. If the latter was surprised and delighted too, he concealed it
like a diplomat. He just looked at me, raised his eyebrows slightly,
and went on fishing. He was one of those supercilious striplings who
give you the impression that you went to the wrong school and that your
clothes don’t fit.
“This is Oswald,” said Bingo.
“What,” I replied cordially, “could be sweeter? How are you?”
“Oh, all right,” said the kid.
“Nice place, this.”
“Oh, all right,” said the kid.
“Having a good time fishing?”
“Oh, all right,” said the kid.
Young Bingo led me off to commune apart.
“Doesn’t jolly old Oswald’s incessant flow of prattle make your head
ache sometimes?” I asked.
Bingo sighed.
“It’s a hard job.”
“What’s a hard job?”
“Loving him.”
“Do you love him?” I asked, surprised. I shouldn’t have thought it
could be done.
“I try to,” said young Bingo, “for Her sake. She’s coming back
to-morrow, Bertie.”
“So I heard.”
“She is coming, my love, my own----”
“Absolutely,” I said. “But touching on young Oswald once more. Do you
have to be with him all day? How do you manage to stick it?”
“Oh, he doesn’t give much trouble. When we aren’t working he sits on
that bridge all the time, trying to catch tiddlers.”
“Why don’t you shove him in?”
“Shove him in?”
“It seems to me distinctly the thing to do,” I said, regarding the
stripling’s back with a good deal of dislike. “It would wake him up a
bit, and make him take an interest in things.”
Bingo shook his head a bit wistfully.
“Your proposition attracts me,” he said, “but I’m afraid it can’t be
done. You see, She would never forgive me. She is devoted to the little
brute.”
“Great Scott!” I cried. “I’ve got it!” I don’t know if you know
that feeling when you get an inspiration, and tingle all down your
spine from the soft collar as now worn to the very soles of the old
Waukeesis? Jeeves, I suppose, feels that way more or less all the time,
but it isn’t often it comes to me. But now all Nature seemed to be
shouting at me “You’ve clicked!” and I grabbed young Bingo by the arm
in a way that must have made him feel as if a horse had bitten him.
His finely-chiselled features were twisted with agony and what not, and
he asked me what the dickens I thought I was playing at.
“Bingo,” I said, “what would Jeeves have done?”
“How do you mean, what would Jeeves have done?”
“I mean what would he have advised in a case like yours? I mean you
wanting to make a hit with Honoria Glossop and all that. Why, take it
from me, laddie, he would have shoved you behind that clump of bushes
over there; he would have got me to lure Honoria on to the bridge
somehow; then, at the proper time, he would have told me to give the
kid a pretty hefty jab in the small of the back, so as to shoot him
into the water; and then you would have dived in and hauled him out.
How about it?”
“You didn’t think that out by yourself, Bertie?” said young Bingo, in a
hushed sort of voice.
“Yes, I did. Jeeves isn’t the only fellow with ideas.”
“But it’s absolutely wonderful.”
“Just a suggestion.”
“The only objection I can see is that it would be so dashed awkward
for you. I mean to say, suppose the kid turned round and said you had
shoved him in, that would make you frightfully unpopular with Her.”
“I don’t mind risking that.”
The man was deeply moved.
“Bertie, this is noble.”
“No, no.”
He clasped my hand silently, then chuckled like the last drop of water
going down the waste-pipe in a bath.
“Now what?” I said.
“I was only thinking,” said young Bingo, “how fearfully wet Oswald will
get. Oh, happy day!”