“Good old Anatole,” I said.
“Amen,” said Aunt Dahlia.
Then the look of holy ecstasy, which is always the result of letting
the mind dwell, however briefly, on Anatole’s cooking, died out of her
face.
“But don’t let me wander from the subject,” she resumed. “I was telling
you of the way hell’s foundations have been quivering since I got home.
First the prize-giving, then Tom, and now, on top of everything else,
this infernal quarrel between Angela and young Glossop.”
I nodded gravely. “I was frightfully sorry to hear of that. Terrible
shock. What was the row about?”
“Sharks.”
“Eh?”
“Sharks. Or, rather, one individual shark. The brute that went for the
poor child when she was aquaplaning at Cannes. You remember Angela’s
shark?”
Certainly I remembered Angela’s shark. A man of sensibility does not
forget about a cousin nearly being chewed by monsters of the deep. The
episode was still green in my memory.
In a nutshell, what had occurred was this: You know how you aquaplane.
A motor-boat nips on ahead, trailing a rope. You stand on a board,
holding the rope, and the boat tows you along. And every now and then
you lose your grip on the rope and plunge into the sea and have to swim
to your board again.
A silly process it has always seemed to me, though many find it
diverting.
Well, on the occasion referred to, Angela had just regained her board
after taking a toss, when a great beastly shark came along and cannoned
into it, flinging her into the salty once more. It took her quite a bit
of time to get on again and make the motor-boat chap realize what was
up and haul her to safety, and during that interval you can readily
picture her embarrassment.
According to Angela, the finny denizen kept snapping at her ankles
virtually without cessation, so that by the time help arrived, she was
feeling more like a salted almond at a public dinner than anything
human. Very shaken the poor child had been, I recall, and had talked of
nothing else for weeks.
“I remember the whole incident vividly,” I said. “But how did that
start the trouble?”
“She was telling him the story last night.”
“Well?”
“Her eyes shining and her little hands clasped in girlish excitement.”
“No doubt.”
“And instead of giving her the understanding and sympathy to which
she was entitled, what do you think this blasted Glossop did? He sat
listening like a lump of dough, as if she had been talking about the
weather, and when she had finished, he took his cigarette holder out of
his mouth and said, ‘I expect it was only a floating log’!”
“He didn’t!”
“He did. And when Angela described how the thing had jumped and snapped
at her, he took his cigarette holder out of his mouth again, and said,
‘Ah! Probably a flatfish. Quite harmless. No doubt it was just trying
to play.’ Well, I mean! What would you have done if you had been
Angela? She has pride, sensibility, all the natural feelings of a good
woman. She told him he was an ass and a fool and an idiot, and didn’t
know what he was talking about.”
I must say I saw the girl’s viewpoint. It’s only about once in a
lifetime that anything sensational ever happens to one, and when it
does, you don’t want people taking all the colour out of it. I remember
at school having to read that stuff where that chap, Othello, tells the
girl what a hell of a time he’d been having among the cannibals and
what not. Well, imagine his feelings if, after he had described some
particularly sticky passage with a cannibal chief and was waiting for
the awestruck “Oh-h! Not really?”, she had said that the whole thing
had no doubt been greatly exaggerated and that the man had probably
really been a prominent local vegetarian.
Yes, I saw Angela’s point of view.
“But don’t tell me that when he saw how shirty she was about it, the
chump didn’t back down?”
“He didn’t. He argued. And one thing led to another until, by easy
stages, they had arrived at the point where she was saying that she
didn’t know if he was aware of it, but if he didn’t knock off starchy
foods and do exercises every morning, he would be getting as fat as
a pig, and he was talking about this modern habit of girls putting
make-up on their faces, of which he had always disapproved. This
continued for a while, and then there was a loud pop and the air was
full of mangled fragments of their engagement. I’m distracted about it.
Thank goodness you’ve come, Bertie.”
“Nothing could have kept me away,” I replied, touched. “I felt you
needed me.”
“Yes.”
“Quite.”
“Or, rather,” she said, “not you, of course, but Jeeves. The minute
all this happened, I thought of him. The situation obviously cries out
for Jeeves. If ever in the whole history of human affairs there was a
moment when that lofty brain was required about the home, this is it.”
I think, if I had been standing up, I would have staggered. In fact,
I’m pretty sure I would. But it isn’t so dashed easy to stagger when
you’re sitting in an arm-chair. Only my face, therefore, showed how
deeply I had been stung by these words.
Until she spoke them, I had been all sweetness and light--the
sympathetic nephew prepared to strain every nerve to do his bit. I now
froze, and the face became hard and set.
“Jeeves!” I said, between clenched teeth.
“Oom beroofen,” said Aunt Dahlia.