Now that it's all over, I may as well admit that there was a time
during the affair of Rockmetteller Todd when I thought that Jeeves was
going to let me down. Silly of me, of course, knowing him as I do, but
that is what I thought. It seemed to me that the man had the appearance
of being baffled.
The Rocky Todd business broke loose early one morning in spring. I
was in bed, restoring the physique with my usual nine hours of the
dreamless, when the door flew open and somebody prodded me in the lower
ribs and began to shake the bedclothes in an unpleasant manner. And
after blinking a bit and generally pulling myself together, I located
Rocky, and my first impression was that it must be some horrid dream.
Rocky, you see, lived down on Long Island somewhere, miles away from
New York; and not only that, but he had told me himself more than
once that he never got up before twelve, and seldom earlier than one.
Constitutionally the laziest young devil in America, he had hit on a
walk in life which enabled him to go the limit in that direction. He
was a poet. At least, he wrote poems when he did anything; but most of
his time, as far as I could make out, he spent in a sort of trance.
He told me once that he could sit on a fence, watching a worm and
wondering what on earth it was up to for hours at a stretch.
He had his scheme of life worked out to a fine point. About once a
month he would take three days writing a few poems; the other three
hundred and twenty-nine days of the year he rested. I didn't know there
was enough money in poetry to support a chappie, even in the way in
which Rocky lived; but it seems that, if you stick to exhortations to
young men to lead the strenuous life and don't shove in any rhymes,
American editors fight for the stuff. Rocky showed me one of his things
once. It began:
Be!
Be!
The past is dead,
Tomorrow is not born.
Be today!
Today!
Be with every nerve,
With every fibre,
With every drop of your red blood!
Be!
Be!
There were three more verses, and the thing was printed opposite the
frontispiece of a magazine with a sort of scroll round it, and a
picture in the middle of a fairly nude chappie with bulging muscles
giving the rising sun the glad eye. Rocky said they gave him a hundred
dollars for it, and he stayed in bed till four in the afternoon for
over a month.
As regarded the future he was pretty solid, owing to the fact that he
had a moneyed aunt tucked away somewhere in Illinois. It's a curious
thing how many of my pals seem to have aunts and uncles who are their
main source of supply. There is Bicky for one, with his uncle the Duke
of Chiswick; Corky, who, until things went wrong, looked to Alexander
Worple, the bird specialist, for sustenance. And I shall be telling
you a story shortly of a dear old friend of mine, Oliver Sipperley,
who had an aunt in Yorkshire. These things cannot be mere coincidence.
They must be meant. What I'm driving at is that Providence seems to
look after the chumps of this world; and, personally, I'm all for it. I
suppose the fact is that, having been snootered from infancy upwards by
my own aunts, I like to see that it is possible for these relatives to
have a better and a softer side.
However, this is more or less of a side-track. Coming back to Rocky,
what I was saying was that he had this aunt in Illinois; and, as he had
been named Rockmetteller after her (which in itself, you might say,
entitled him to substantial compensation) and was her only nephew, his
position looked pretty sound. He told me that when he did come into the
money he meant to do no work at all, except perhaps an occasional poem
recommending the young man with life opening out before him with all
its splendid possibilities to light a pipe and shove his feet up on the
mantelpiece.
And this was the man who was prodding me in the ribs in the grey dawn!
'Read this, Bertie!' babbled old Rocky.
I could just see that he was waving a letter or something equally foul
in my face. 'Wake up and read this!'
I can't read before I've had my morning tea and a cigarette. I groped
for the bell.
Jeeves came in, looking as fresh as a dewy violet. It's a mystery to me
how he does it.
'Tea, Jeeves.'
'Very good, sir.'