“I don’t want to seem always to be criticizing your methods of
voice production, Jeeves,” I said, “but I must inform you that that
‘Well, sir’ of yours is in many respects fully as unpleasant as your
‘Indeed, sir?’ Like the latter, it seems to be tinged with a definite
scepticism. It suggests a lack of faith in my vision. The impression I
retain after hearing you shoot it at me a couple of times is that you
consider me to be talking through the back of my neck, and that only a
feudal sense of what is fitting restrains you from substituting for it
the words ‘Says you!’”
“Oh, no, sir.”
“Well, that’s what it sounds like. Why don’t you think this scheme will
work?”
“I fear Miss Angela will merely attribute Mr. Glossop’s abstinence to
indigestion, sir.”
I hadn’t thought of that, and I must confess it shook me for a moment.
Then I recovered myself. I saw what was at the bottom of all this.
Mortified by the consciousness of his own ineptness--or ineptitude--the
fellow was simply trying to hamper and obstruct. I decided to knock the
stuffing out of him without further preamble.
“Oh?” I said. “You do, do you? Well, be that as it may, it doesn’t
alter the fact that you’ve put out the wrong coat. Be so good, Jeeves,”
I said, indicating with a gesture the gent’s ordinary dinner jacket or
_smoking_, as we call it on the Côte d’Azur, which was suspended from
the hanger on the knob of the wardrobe, “as to shove that bally black
thing in the cupboard and bring out my white mess-jacket with the brass
buttons.”
He looked at me in a meaning manner. And when I say a meaning manner,
I mean there was a respectful but at the same time uppish glint in his
eye and a sort of muscular spasm flickered across his face which wasn’t
quite a quiet smile and yet wasn’t quite not a quiet smile. Also the
soft cough.
“I regret to say, sir, that I inadvertently omitted to pack the garment
to which you refer.”
The vision of that parcel in the hall seemed to rise before my eyes,
and I exchanged a merry wink with it. I may even have hummed a bar or
two. I’m not quite sure.
“I know you did, Jeeves,” I said, laughing down from lazy eyelids and
nicking a speck of dust from the irreproachable Mechlin lace at my
wrists. “But I didn’t. You will find it on a chair in the hall in a
brown-paper parcel.”
The information that his low manoeuvres had been rendered null and void
and that the thing was on the strength after all, must have been the
nastiest of jars, but there was no play of expression on his finely
chiselled to indicate it. There very seldom is on Jeeves’s f-c. In
moments of discomfort, as I had told Tuppy, he wears a mask, preserving
throughout the quiet stolidity of a stuffed moose.
“You might just slide down and fetch it, will you?”
“Very good, sir.”
“Right ho, Jeeves.”
And presently I was sauntering towards the drawing-room with the good
old j. nestling snugly abaft the shoulder blades.
And Dahlia was in the drawing-room. She glanced up at my entrance.
“Hullo, eyesore,” she said. “What do you think you’re made up as?”