The Greatest Works of P. G. Wodehouse. P. G. Wodehouse
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of my frightfulness. To-day, she started in on me with the fish.
“Bertie,” she said—in part and chattily—“it is young men like you who make the person with the future of the race at heart despair!”
“What-ho!” I said.
“Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in selfish idleness a life which might have been made useful, helpful, and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone——” She fixed me with a glittering eye. “Bertie, you must marry!”
“No, dash it all!”
“Yes! You should be breeding children to——”
“No, really, I say, please!” I said, blushing richly. Aunt Agatha belongs to two or three of these women’s clubs, and she keeps forgetting she isn’t in the smoking-room.
“You want somebody strong, self-reliant, and sensible, to counterbalance the deficiencies and weaknesses of your own character. And by great good luck I have found the very girl. She is of excellent family—plenty of money, though that does not matter in your case. She has met you; and, while there is naturally much in you of which she disapproves, she does not dislike you. I know this, for I have sounded her—guardedly, of course—and I am sure that you have only to make the first advances——”
“Who is it?” I would have said it long before, but the shock had made me swallow a bit of roll the wrong way, and I had only just finished turning purple and trying to get a bit of air back into the old windpipe. “Who is it?”
“Sir Roderick Glossop’s daughter, Honoria.”
“No, no!” I cried, paling beneath the tan.
“Don’t be silly, Bertie. She is just the wife for you.”
“Yes, but look here——”
“She will mould you.”
“But I don’t want to be moulded.”
Aunt Agatha gave me the kind of look she used to give me when I was a kid and had been found in the jam cupboard.
“Bertie! I hope you are not going to be troublesome.”
“Well, but I mean——”
“Lady Glossop has very kindly invited you to Ditteredge Hall for a few days. I told her you would be delighted to come down to-morrow.”
“I’m sorry, but I’ve got a dashed important engagement to-morrow.”
“What engagement?”
“Well—er——”
“You have no engagement. And, even if you had, you must put it off. I shall be very seriously annoyed, Bertie, if you do not go to Ditteredge Hall to-morrow.”
“Oh, right-o!” I said.
A MAN may be down, but he is never out. It wasn’t two minutes after I had parted from Aunt Agatha before the old fighting spirit of the Woosters reasserted itself. Ghastly as the peril was which loomed before me, I was conscious of a rummy sort of exhilaration. It was a tight corner, but the tighter the corner, I felt, the more juicily should I score off Jeeves when I got myself out of it without a bit of help from him. Ordinarily, of course, I should have consulted him and trusted to him to solve the difficulty; but after what I had heard him saying in the kitchen, I was dashed if I was going to demean myself. When I got home I addressed the man with light abandon.
“Jeeves,” I said, “I’m in a bit of a difficulty.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”
“Yes, quite a bad hole. In fact, you might say on the brink of a precipice, and faced by an awful doom.”
“If I could be of any assistance, sir——”
“Oh, no. No, no. Thanks very much, but no, no. I won’t trouble you. I’ve no doubt I shall be able to get out of it all right by myself.”
“Very good, sir.”
So that was that. I’m bound to say I’d have welcomed a bit more curiosity from the fellow, but that is Jeeves all over. Cloaks his emotions, if you know what I mean. Wears the mask and what not.
HONORIA was away when I got to Ditteredge on the following afternoon. Her mother told me that she was staying with some people named Braythwayt in the neighbourhood, and would be back next day, bringing the daughter of the house with her for a visit. She said I would find Oswald out in the grounds, and such is a mother’s love that she spoke as if that were a bit of a boost for the grounds and an inducement to go there.
Rather decent, the grounds at Ditteredge. A couple of terraces, a bit of lawn with a cedar on it, a bit of shrubbery, and finally a small but goodish lake with a stone bridge running across it. Directly I’d worked my way round the shrubbery I spotted young Bingo leaning against the bridge smoking a cigarette. Sitting on the stonework, fishing, was a species of kid whom I took to be Oswald the Plague-Spot.
Bingo was both surprised and delighted to see me, and introduced me to the kid. If the latter was surprised and delighted too, he concealed it like a diplomat. He just looked at me, raised his eyebrows slightly, and went on fishing. He was one of those supercilious striplings who give you the impression that you went to the wrong school and that your clothes don’t fit.
“This is Oswald,” said Bingo.
“What,” I replied, cordially, “could be sweeter? How are you?”
“Oh, all right,” said the kid.
“Nice place, this.”
“Oh, all right,” said the kid.
“Having a good time fishing?”
“Oh. all right,” said the kid.
Young Bingo led me off to commune apart.
“Doesn’t jolly old Oswald’s incessant flow of prattle make your head ache sometimes?” I asked.
Bingo sighed.
“It’s a hard job.”
“What’s a hard job?”
“Loving him.”
“Do you love him?” I asked, surprised. I shouldn’t have thought it could be done.
“I try to,” said young Bingo, “for Her sake. She’s coming back to-morrow, Bertie.”
“So I heard.”
“She is coming, my love, my own——”
“Absolutely,” I said. “But touching on young Oswald once more. Do you have to be with him all day? How do you manage to stick it?”
“Oh, he doesn’t give much trouble. When we aren’t working he sits on that bridge all the time, trying to catch tiddlers.”
“Why don’t you shove him in?”
“Shove him in?”
“It seems to me distinctly the thing to do,” I said, regarding the stripling’s back with a good deal of dislike. “It would wake him up a bit, and make him take an interest in things.”
Bingo shook his head a bit wistfully. “Your proposition attracts me,” he said, “but I’m afraid it can’t be done. You see, She would never forgive me. She is devoted to the little brute.”
“Great Scot!” I cried. “I’ve got it!”
I don’t know if you know that feeling when you get an inspiration, and tingle all down your spine from the soft collar as now worn to the very soles of the old Waukeesis? Jeeves, I suppose, feels that way more or less all the time, but it isn’t often it comes to me. But now all Nature seemed to be shouting at me “You’ve clicked!” and I grabbed young Bingo by the arm in a way that must