The Greatest Works of P. G. Wodehouse. P. G. Wodehouse
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sir.”
“Spring and all that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“In the spring, Jeeves, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove.”
“So I have been informed, sir.”
“Right ho! Then bring me my whangee, my yellowest shoes, and the old green Homburg. I’m going into the park to do pastoral dances.”
“Very good, sir.”
I don’t know if you know that sort of feeling you get on these days round about the end of April and the beginning of May, when the sky’s a light blue with cotton-wool clouds and there’s a bit of a breeze blowing from the west? Kind of uplifted feeling. Romantic, if you know what I mean. I’m not much of a ladies’ man, but on this particular morning it seemed to me that what I really wanted was some charming girl to buzz up and ask me to save her from assassins or something. So that it was a bit of an anticlimax when I merely ran into young Bingo Little, looking perfectly foul in a mauve satin tie with crimson horseshoes.
“Hullo, Bertie,” said Bingo.
“My God, man!” I gargled. “The cravat! The gents’ neckwear! Why? For what reason?”
“Oh, the tie?” He blushed. “I—er—I was given it.”
He seemed embarrassed, so I dropped the subject. Always the gentleman. We toddled along a bit and sat down on a couple of chairs by the Serpentine. Conversation languished. Bingo was staring straight ahead of him in a glassy sort of manner.
“I say, Bertie,” he said after a pause of about an hour and a quarter.
“Hullo?”
“Do you like the name Mabel?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No!”
“You don’t think there’s a kind of music in the word, like the wind rustling gently through the tree tops?”
“No.”
He seemed disappointed for a moment, then cheered up.
“Of course, you wouldn’t. You always were a fat-headed worm without any soul, weren’t you?”
“Just as you say. Who is she? Tell me all.”
For I realized now that poor old Bingo was going through it once again. Ever since I have known him—and we were at school together—he has been perpetually falling in love with some one, generally in the spring, which seems to act on him like magic. I’ve always thought that Romeo must have been a good deal like Bingo. He has come a bit too late, of course, to get into any of those books on Great Lovers of History, but a hundred years from now any writer who leaves him out will only be touching the fringe of his subject. At school he had the finest collection of actresses’ photographs of anyone of his time; and at Oxford his romantic nature was a byword.
“You’d better come along and meet her at lunch,” he said, looking at his watch.
“A ripe suggestion,” I said. “Where are you meeting her? At the Ritz?”
“Near the Ritz.”
He was geographically accurate. About fifty yards east of the Ritz there is one of those blighted tea-and-bun shops you see dotted about all over London, and into this, if you’ll believe me, young Bingo dived like a homing rabbit; and before I had time to say a word we were wedged in at a table, on the brink of a silent pool of coffee left there by an early luncher.
I’m bound to say I couldn’t quite follow the development of the scenario. Bingo, while not absolutely rolling in the stuff, has always had a fairish amount of the ready. Apart from what he got from his uncle—old Mortimer Little; you’ve probably heard of Little’s Liniment, It Limbers Up The Legs; he ran that till he turned it into a company and retired with a pile—I say, apart from what he got from the above, who gave him a pretty decent allowance, Bingo being his only relative and presumably his heir, I knew that Bingo had finished up the jumping season well on the right side of the ledger, having collected a parcel over the Lincolnshire. Why, then, was he lunching the girl at this godforsaken eatery? It couldn’t be because he was hard up.
Just then the waitress arrived. Rather a pretty girl.
“Aren’t we going to wait?” I started to say to Bingo, thinking it somewhat thick that, in addition to asking a girl to lunch with him in a place like this, he should fling himself on the foodstuffs before she turned up; when I caught sight of his face, and stopped.
The man was goggling. His entire map was suffused with a rich blush. He looked like the Soul’s Awakening done in pink.
The man was goggling
“Hullo, Mabel,” he said, with a sort of gulp.
“Hullo,” said the girl.
“Mabel,” said Bingo, “this is Bertie Wooster, a pal of mine.”
“Pleased to meet you,” she said. “Nice morning.”
“Fine,” I said.
“You see I’m wearing the tie,” said Bingo.
“It suits you beautiful,” said the girl.
Personally, if anyone had told me that a tie like that suited me, I should have risen and struck them in the mazzard, regardless of their age and sex; but poor old Bingo simply got all flustered with gratification and smirked in the most gruesome manner.
“Well, what’s it going to be today?” asked the girl, introducing the business touch into the conversation.
Bingo studied the menu devoutly.
“I’ll have a cup of cocoa, cold veal and ham pie, slice of fruit cake and a macaroon. Same for you, Bertie?”
I gazed at the blighter, revolted. That he would have been a pal of mine all these years and think me capable of insulting the old tum with this sort of stuff cut me to the quick.
“Or how about a bit of hot steak pudding with a sparkling limado to wash it down?” said Bingo.
You know, the way love can change a fellow is really frightful to contemplate. This chappie before me, who spoke in this absolutely careless way of macaroons and limado, was the man I had seen in happier days telling the head waiter at Claridge’s exactly how he wanted the chef to prepare the sole frit au gourmet aux champignons and saying he would jolly well sling it back if it wasn’t just right. Ghastly! Ghastly!
A roll and butter and a small coffee seemed the only things on the list that hadn’t been specially prepared by the nastier-minded members of the Borgia family for people they had a particular grudge against, so I chose them, and Mabel hopped it.
“Well?” said Bingo rapturously.
I took it that he wanted my opinion of the female poisoner who had just left us.
“Very nice,” I said.
He seemed dissatisfied.
“You don’t think she’s the most wonderful girl you ever saw?” he said wistfully.
“Oh, absolutely!” I said, to appease the blighter. “Where did you meet her?”
“At a subscription dance at Camberwell.”
“What on earth were you doing at a subscription dance at Camberwell?”
“Your man Jeeves asked me if I would buy a couple of tickets. It was in aid of some charity or other.”
“Jeeves? I didn’t know he went in for that sort of thing.”
“Well, I suppose he has to relax a bit every now and then. Anyway, he was there, swinging a dashed efficient shoe. I hadn’t meant to go at first, but I turned up for a lark. Oh, Bertie, think what I might have missed!”