Now, touching this business of old Jeeves--my man, you know--how do
we stand? Lots of people think I'm much too dependent on him. My Aunt
Agatha, in fact, has even gone so far as to call him my keeper. Well,
what I say is: Why not? The man's a genius. From the collar upward he
stands alone, I gave up trying to run my own affairs within a week of
his coming to me. That was about half a dozen years ago, directly after
the rather rummy business of Florence Craye, my Uncle Willoughby's
book, and Edwin, the Boy Scout.
The thing really began when I got back to Easeby, my uncle's place in
Shropshire. I was spending a week or so there, as I generally did in
the summer; and I had had to break my visit to come back to London
to get a new valet. I had found Meadowes, the fellow I had taken to
Easeby with me, sneaking my silk socks, a thing no bloke of spirit
could stick at any price. It transpiring, moreover, that he had looted
a lot of other things here and there about the place, I was reluctantly
compelled to hand the misguided blighter the mitten and go to London
to ask the registry office to dig up another specimen for my approval.
They sent me Jeeves.
I shall always remember the morning he came. It so happened that the
night before I had been present at a rather cheery little supper, and
I was feeling pretty rocky. On top of this I was trying to read a book
Florence Craye had given me. She had been one of the house-party at
Easeby, and two or three days before I left we had got engaged. I was
due back at the end of the week, and I knew she would expect me to
have finished the book by then. You see, she was particularly keen on
boosting me up a bit nearer her own plane of intellect. She was a girl
with a wonderful profile, but steeped to the gills in serious purpose.
I can't give you a better idea of the way things stood than by telling
you that the book she'd given me to read was called _Types of Ethical
Theory_, and that when I opened it at random I struck a page beginning:
The postulate or common understanding involved in speech is
certainly co-extensive, in the obligation it carries, with the
social organism of which language is the instrument, and the ends
of which it is an effort to subserve.
All perfectly true, no doubt; but not the sort of thing to spring on a
lad with a morning head.
I was doing my best to skim through this bright little volume when
the bell rang. I crawled off the sofa and opened the door. A kind of
darkish sort of respectful Johnnie stood without.
'I was sent by the agency, sir,' he said. 'I was given to understand
that you required a valet.'
I'd have preferred an undertaker; but I told him to stagger in, and
he floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr.
That impressed me from the start. Meadowes had had flat feet and used
to clump. This fellow didn't seem to have any feet at all. He just
streamed in. He had a grave, sympathetic face, as if he, too, knew what
it was to sup with the lads.
'Excuse me, sir,' he said gently.
Then he seemed to flicker, and wasn't there any longer. I heard him
moving about in the kitchen, and presently he came back with a glass on
a tray.
'If you would drink this, sir,' he said, with a kind of bedside manner,
rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into the sick prince.
'It is a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcester
Sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The
red pepper gives it its bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it
extremely invigorating after a late evening.'
I would have clutched at anything that looked like a lifeline that
morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody had
touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat
with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all
right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the
tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.
'You're engaged!' I said, as soon as I could say anything.
I perceived clearly that this cove was one of the world's workers, the
sort no home should be without.
'Thank you, sir. My name is Jeeves.'
'You can start in at once?'
'Immediately, sir.'
'Because I'm due down at Easeby, in Shropshire, the day after tomorrow.'
'Very good, sir.' He looked past me at the mantelpiece. 'That is an
excellent likeness of Lady Florence Craye, sir. It is two years since
I saw her ladyship. I was at one time in Lord Worplesdon's employment.
I tendered my resignation because I could not see eye to eye with his
lordship in his desire to dine in dress trousers, a flannel shirt, and
a shooting coat.'
He couldn't tell me anything I didn't know about the old boy's
eccentricity. This Lord Worplesdon was Florence's father. He was the
old buster who, a few years later, came down to breakfast one morning,
lifted the first cover he saw, said 'Eggs! Eggs! Eggs! Damn all eggs!'
in an overwrought sort of voice, and instantly legged it for France,
never to return to the bosom of his family. This, mind you, being a bit
of luck for the bosom of the family, for old Worplesdon had the worst
temper in the county.
I had known the family ever since I was a kid, and from boyhood up this
old boy had put the fear of death into me. Time, the great healer,
could never remove from my memory the occasion when he found me--then
a stripling of fifteen--smoking one of his special cigars in the
stables. He got after me with a hunting-crop just at the moment when I
was beginning to realize that what I wanted most on earth was solitude
and repose, and chased me more than a mile across difficult country.
If there was a flaw, so to speak, in the pure joy of being engaged
to Florence, it was the fact that she rather took after her father,
and one was never certain when she might erupt. She had a wonderful
profile, though.
'Lady Florence and I are engaged, Jeeves,' I said.
'Indeed, sir?'
You know, there was a kind of rummy something about his manner.
Perfectly all right and all that, but not what you'd call chirpy.
It somehow gave me the impression that he wasn't keen on Florence.
Well, of course, it wasn't my business. I supposed that while he had
been valeting old Worplesdon she must have trodden on his toes in
some way. Florence was a dear girl, and, seen sideways, most awfully
good-looking; but if she had a fault it was a tendency to be a bit
imperious with the domestic staff.
At this point in the proceedings there was another ring at the front
door. Jeeves shimmered out and came back with a telegram. I opened it.
It ran:
Return immediately. Extremely urgent. Catch first train. Florence.
'Rum!' I said.
'Sir?'
'Oh, nothing!'
It shows how little I knew Jeeves in those days that I didn't go a
bit deeper into the matter with him. Nowadays I would never dream of
reading a rummy communication without asking him what he thought of
it. And this one was devilish odd. What I mean is, Florence knew I was
going back to Easeby the day after tomorrow, anyway; so why the hurry
call? Something must have happened, of course; but I couldn't see what
on earth it could be.
'Jeeves,' I said, 'we shall be going down to Easeby this afternoon. Can
you manage it?'
'Certainly, sir.'
'You can get your packing done and all that?'
'Without any difficulty, sir. Which suit will you wear for the journey?'
'This one.'
I had on a rather sprightly young check that morning, to which I was a
good deal attached; I fancied it, in fact, more than a little. It was
perhaps rather sudden till you got used to it, but, nevertheless, an
extremely sound effort, which many lads at the club and elsewhere had
admired unrestrainedly.
'Very good, sir.'
Again there was that kind of rummy something in his manner. It was
the way he said it, don't you know. He didn't like the suit. I pulled
myself together to assert myself. Something seemed to tell me that,
unless I was jolly careful and nipped this lad in the bud, he would
be starting to boss me. He had the aspect of a distinctly resolute
blighter.
Well, I wasn't going to have any of that sort of thing, by Jove!
I'd seen so many cases of fellows who had become perfect slaves to
their valets. I remember poor old Aubrey Fothergill telling me--with
absolute tears in his eyes, poor chap!--one night at the club, that
he had been compelled to give up a favourite pair of brown shoes
simply because Meekyn, his man, disapproved of them. You have to
keep these fellows in their place, don't you know. You have to work
the good old iron-hand-in-the-velvet-glove wheeze. If you give them a
what's-its-name, they take a thingummy.
'Don't you like this suit, Jeeves?' I said coldly.
'Oh, yes, sir.'
'Well, what don't you like about it?'
'It is a very nice suit, sir.'
'Well, what's wrong with it? Out with it, dash it!'
'If I might make the suggestion, sir, a simple brown or blue, with a
hint of some quiet twill--'
'What absolute rot!'
'Very good, sir.'
'Perfectly blithering, my dear man!'
'As you say, sir.'
I felt as if I had stepped on the place where the last stair ought to
have been, but wasn't. I felt defiant, if you know what I mean, and
there didn't seem anything to defy.
'All right, then,' I said.
'Yes, sir.'
And then he went away to collect his kit, while I started in again
on _Types of Ethical Theory_ and took a stab at a chapter headed
'Idiopsychological Ethics'.
* * * * *
Most of the way down in the train that afternoon, I was wondering what
could be up at the other end. I simply couldn't see what could have
happened. Easeby wasn't one of those country houses you read about in
the society novels, where young girls are lured on to play baccarat and
then skinned to the bone of their jewellery, and so on. The house-party
I had left had consisted entirely of law-abiding birds like myself.
Besides, my uncle wouldn't have let anything of that kind go on in his
house. He was a rather stiff, precise sort of old boy, who liked a
quiet life. He was just finishing a history of the family or something,
which he had been working on for the last year, and didn't stir much
from the library. He was rather a good instance of what they say about
its being a good scheme for a fellow to sow his wild oats. I'd been
told that in his youth Uncle Willoughby had been a bit of a rounder.
You would never have thought it to look at him now.
When I got to the house, Oakshott, the butler, told me that Florence
was in her room, watching her maid pack. Apparently there was a dance
on at a house about twenty miles away that night, and she was motoring
over with some of the Easeby lot and would be away some nights.
Oakshott said she had told him to tell her the moment I arrived; so I
trickled into the smoking-room and waited, and presently in she came. A
glance showed me that she was perturbed, and even peeved. Her eyes had
a goggly look, and altogether she appeared considerably pipped.
'Darling!' I said, and attempted the good old embrace; but she
side-stepped like a bantam-weight.
'Don't!'
'What's the matter?'
'Everything's the matter! Bertie, you remember asking me, when you
left, to make myself pleasant to your uncle?'
'Yes.'
The idea being, of course, that as at that time I was more or less
dependent on Uncle Willoughby I couldn't very well marry without his
approval. And though I knew he wouldn't have any objection to Florence,
having known her father since they were at Oxford together, I hadn't
wanted to take any chances; so I had told her to make an effort to
fascinate the old boy.
'You told me it would please him particularly if I asked him to read me
some of his history of the family.'
'Wasn't he pleased?'
'He was delighted. He finished writing the thing yesterday afternoon,
and read me nearly all of it last night. I have never had such a shock
in my life. The book is an outrage. It is impossible. It is horrible!'
'But, dash it, the family weren't so bad as all that.'
'It is not a history of the family at all. Your uncle has written his
reminiscences! He calls them "Recollections of a Long Life"!'
I began to understand. As I say, Uncle Willoughby had been somewhat on
the tabasco side as a young man, and it began to look as if he might
have turned out something pretty fruity if he had started recollecting
his long life.
'If half of what he has written is true,' said Florence, 'your uncle's
youth must have been perfectly appalling. The moment we began to read
he plunged straight into a most scandalous story of how he and my
father were thrown out of a music-hall in 1887!'
'Why?'
'I decline to tell you why.'
It must have been something pretty bad. It took a lot to make them
chuck people out of music-halls in 1887.
'Your uncle specifically states that father had drunk a quart and a
half of champagne before beginning the evening,' she went on. 'The
book is full of stories like that. There is a dreadful one about Lord
Emsworth.'
'Lord Emsworth? Not the one we know? Not the one at Blandings?'
A most respectable old Johnnie, don't you know. Doesn't do a thing
nowadays but dig in the garden with a spud.
'The very same. That is what makes the book so unspeakable. It is full
of stories about people one knows who are the essence of propriety
today, but who seem to have behaved, when they were in London in
the eighties, in a manner that would not have been tolerated in
the fo'c'sle of a whaler. Your uncle seems to remember everything
disgraceful that happened to anybody when he was in his early twenties.
There is a story about Sir Stanley Gervase-Gervase at Rosherville
Gardens which is ghastly in its perfection of detail. It seems that
Sir Stanley--but I can't tell you!'
'Have a dash!'
'No!'
'Oh, well, I shouldn't worry. No publisher will print the book if it's
as bad as all that.'
'On the contrary, your uncle told me that all negotiations are settled
with Riggs and Ballinger, and he's sending off the manuscript tomorrow
for immediate publication. They make a special thing of that sort of
book. They published Lady Carnaby's _Memories of Eighty Interesting
Years_.'
'I read 'em!'
'Well, then, when I tell you that Lady Carnaby's Memories are simply
not to be compared with your uncle's Recollections, you will understand
my state of mind. And father appears in nearly every story in the book!
I am horrified at the things he did when he was a young man!'
'What's to be done?'
'The manuscript must be intercepted before it reaches Riggs and
Ballinger, and destroyed!'