“I must ask you to treat this as entirely confidential, Glossop, but
I may as well inform you that it is not twenty-four hours since she
turned me down.”
“Turned you down?”
“Like a bedspread. In this very garden.”
“Twenty-four hours?”
“Call it twenty-five. So you will readily see that I can’t be the chap,
if any, who stole Angela from you at Cannes.”
And I was on the brink of adding that I wouldn’t touch Angela with a
barge pole, when I remembered I had said it already and it hadn’t gone
frightfully well. I desisted, therefore.
My manly frankness seemed to be producing good results. The homicidal
glare was dying out of Tuppy’s eyes. He had the aspect of a hired
assassin who had paused to think things over.
“I see,” he said, at length. “All right, then. Sorry you were troubled.”
“Don’t mention it, old man,” I responded courteously.
For the first time since the bushes had begun to pour forth Glossops,
Bertram Wooster could be said to have breathed freely. I don’t say
I actually came out from behind the bench, but I did let go of it,
and with something of the relief which those three chaps in the Old
Testament must have experienced after sliding out of the burning fiery
furnace, I even groped tentatively for my cigarette case.
The next moment a sudden snort made me take my fingers off it as if it
had bitten me. I was distressed to note in the old friend a return of
the recent frenzy.
“What the hell did you mean by telling her that I used to be covered
with ink when I was a kid?”
“My dear Tuppy----”
“I was almost finickingly careful about my personal cleanliness as a
boy. You could have eaten your dinner off me.”
“Quite. But----”
“And all that stuff about having no soul. I’m crawling with soul. And
being looked on as an outsider at the Drones----”
“But, my dear old chap, I explained that. It was all part of my ruse or
scheme.”
“It was, was it? Well, in future do me a favour and leave me out of
your foul ruses.”
“Just as you say, old boy.”
“All right, then. That’s understood.”
He relapsed into silence, standing with folded arms, staring before
him rather like a strong, silent man in a novel when he’s just been
given the bird by the girl and is thinking of looking in at the Rocky
Mountains and bumping off a few bears. His manifest pippedness excited
my compash, and I ventured a kindly word.
“I don’t suppose you know what _au pied de la lettre_ means, Tuppy, but
that’s how I don’t think you ought to take all that stuff Angela was
saying just now too much.”
He seemed interested.
“What the devil,” he asked, “are you talking about?”