Here I paused, for letter and clipping had given me much food for thought.
Naturally it was with the deepest concern that I pictured the tragic scene of Aunt Dahlia and the champagne cork. Something similar happened to me once during some rout or revelry at the Drones, and I can testify that it calls for all that one has of fortitude. But against this must be set the fact that she had won a substantial chunk of money and would not be faced with the awful necessity of getting into Uncle Tom's ribs in order to keep the budget balanced.
But this aspect of the matter ceased to enchain my interest. What I wanted was to probe to the heart of the mystery that had presented itself. Apparently Cook's Potato Chip had finished first but had been disqualified. Why? Bumping? That's usually what you get disqualified for.
I read on.
The facts will of course be fresh in the minds of our readers. Rounding into the straight, Simla and his rival were neck and neck, far ahead of the field, and it was plain that one of the two must be the ultimate winner. Nearing the finish, Simla took the lead and was a full length ahead, when a cat with black and white markings suddenly ran on to the course, causing him to shy and unseat his jockey.
It was then discovered that the cat was the property of Mr Cook and had actually been brought to the course in his horse's horse box. It was this that decided the judges, who, as we say, yesterday awarded the race to Colonel Briscoe's entrant. Sympathy has been expressed for Mr Cook.
Not by me, I hasten to say. I felt it served the old blighter jolly well right. He ought to have known that you can't go about the place for years making a hellhound of yourself without eventually paying the price. Remember what the fellow said about the mills of the gods.
I was in philosophical mood as I smoked the after-breakfast cigarette. Jeeves came in to clear away the debris, and I told him the news.
'Simla won, Jeeves.'
'Indeed, sir? That is most gratifying.'
'And Aunt Dahlia got hit on the tip of the nose with a champagne cork.'
'Sir?'
'At the subsequent celebrations at the Briscoe home.'
'Ah, yes, sir. A painful experience, but no doubt satisfaction at her financial gains would enable Mrs Travers to bear it with fortitude. Was the tone of her communication cheerful?'
'The letter wasn't from her, it was from Uncle Tom. He enclosed this.'
I handed him the clipping, and I could see how deeply it interested him. One of his eyebrows rose at least a sixteenth of an inch.
'Dramatic, Jeeves.'
'Exceedingly, sir. But I am not sure that I altogether agree with the verdict of the judges.'
'You don't?'
'I should have been inclined to regard the episode as an Act of God.'
'Well, thank goodness the decision wasn't up to you. The imagination boggles at the thought of how Aunt Dahlia would have reacted if it had gone the other way. One pictures her putting hedgehogs in Major Welsh's bed and getting fourteen days without the option for pouring buckets of water out of windows on the heads of Admiral Sharpe and Sir Everard Boot. I should have got nervous prostration in the first couple of days. And it was difficult enough to avoid nervous prostration in Maiden Eggesford as it was, Jeeves,' I said, my philosophical mood now buzzing along on all twelve cylinders. 'Do you ever brood on life?'
'Occasionally, sir, when at leisure.'
'What do you make of it? Pretty odd in spots, don't you think?'
'It might be so described, sir.'
'This business of such-and-such seeming to be so-and-so, when it really isn't so-and-so at all. You follow me?'
'Not entirely, sir.'
'Well, take a simple instance. At first sight Maiden Eggesford had all the indications of being a haven of peace. You agreed with me?'
'Yes, sir.'
'As calm and quiet as you could wish, with honeysuckle-covered cottages and apple-cheeked villagers wherever you looked. Then it tore off its whiskers and revealed itself as an inferno. To obtain calm and quiet we had to come to New York, and there we got it in full measure. Life saunters along on an even keel. Nothing happens. Have we been mugged?'
'No, sir.'
'Or shot by youths?'
'No, sir.'
'No, sir, is right. We are tranquil. And I'll tell you why. There are no aunts here. And in particular we are three thousand miles away from Mrs Dahlia Travers of Brinkley Manor, Market Snodsbury, Worcestershire. Don't get me wrong, Jeeves, I love the old flesh-and-blood. In fact I revere her. Nobody can say she isn't good company. But her moral code is lax. She cannot distinguish between what is according to Hoyle and what is not according to Hoyle. If she wants to do anything, she doesn't ask herself "Would Emily Post approve of this?", she goes ahead and does it, as she did in this matter of the cat. Do you know what is the trouble with aunts as a class?'
'No, sir.'
'They are not gentlemen,' I said gravely.
P. G. Wodehouse
IN ARROW BOOKS
If you have enjoyed Jeeves and Wooster, you'll love Blandings
FROM
Service with a Smile
I
The morning sun shone down on Blandings Castle, and the various inmates of the ancestral home of Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, their breakfasts digested, were occupying themselves in their various ways. One may as well run through the roster just to keep the record straight.
Beach, the butler, was in his pantry reading an Agatha Christie; Voules, the chauffeur, chewing gum in the car outside the front door. The Duke of Dunstable, who had come uninvited for a long visit and showed no signs of ever leaving, sat spelling through The Times on the terrace outside the amber drawing-room, while George, Lord Emsworth's grandson, roamed the grounds with the camera which he had been given on his twelfth birthday. He was photographing – not that the fact is of more than mild general interest – a family of rabbits down by the west wood.
Lord Emsworth's sister, Lady Constance, was in her boudoir writing a letter to her American friend James Schoonmaker. Lord Emsworth's secretary, Lavender Briggs, was out looking for Lord Emsworth. And Lord Emsworth himself, accompanied by Mr Schoonmaker's daughter Myra, was on his way to the headquarters of Empress of Blandings, his pre-eminent sow, three times silver medallist in the Fat Pigs class at the Shropshire Agricultural Show. He had taken the girl with him because it seemed to him that she was a trifle on the low-spirited side these days, and he knew from his own experience that there was nothing like an after-breakfast look at the Empress for bracing one up and bringing the roses back to the cheeks.
'There is her sty,' he said, pointing a reverent finger as they crossed the little meadow dappled with buttercups and daisies. 'And that is my pigman Wellbeloved standing by it.'
Myra Schoonmaker, who had been walking with bowed head, as if pacing behind the coffin of a dear and valued friend, glanced listlessly in the direction indicated. She was a pretty girl of the small, slim, slender type, who would have been prettier if she had been more cheerful. Her brow was furrowed, her lips drawn, and the large brown eyes which rested on George Cyril Wellbeloved had in them something of the sadness one sees in those of a dachshund which, coming to the dinner table to get its ten per cent, is refused a cut off the joint.
'Looks kind of a plug ugly,' she said, having weighed George Cyril in the balance.
'Eh? What? What?' said Lord Emsworth, for the word was new to him.
'I wouldn't trust a guy like that an inch.'
Enlightenment came to Lord Emsworth.
'Ah, you have heard, then, how he left me some time ago and went to my neighbour, Sir Gregory Parsloe. Outrageous and disloyal, of course, but these fellows will do these things. You don't find the old feudal spirit nowadays. But all that is in the past, and I consider myself very fortunate to have got him back. A most capable man.'
'Well, I still say I wouldn't trust him as far as I can throw an elephant.'
At any other moment it would have interested Lord Emsworth to ascertain how far
she could throw an elephant, and he would have been all eager questioning. But with the Empress awaiting him at journey's end he was too preoccupied to go into the matter. As far as he was capable of hastening, he hastened on, his mild eyes gleaming in anticipation of the treat in store.
Propping his back against the rail of the sty, George Cyril Wellbeloved watched him approach, a silent whistle of surprise on his lips.
'Well, strike me pink!' he said to his immortal soul. 'Cor chase my aunt Fanny up a gum tree!'
What had occasioned this astonishment was the fact that his social superior, usually the sloppiest of dressers and generally regarded as one of Shropshire's more prominent eyesores, was now pure Savile Row from head to foot. Not even the Tailor and Cutter's most acid critic could have found a thing to cavil at in the quiet splendour of his appearance. Enough to startle any beholder accustomed to seeing him in baggy flannel trousers, an old shooting coat with holes in the elbows, and a hat which would have been rejected disdainfully by the least fastidious of tramps.
It was no sudden outbreak of foppishness that had wrought this change in the ninth earl's outer crust, turning him into a prismatic sight at which pigmen blinked amazed. As he had explained to Myra Schoonmaker on encountering her mooning about in the hall, he was wearing the beastly things because he was going to London on the ??.?? train, because his sister Connie had ordered him to attend the opening of Parliament. Though why Parliament could not get itself opened without his assistance he was at a loss to understand.
A backwoods peer to end all backwoods peers, Lord Emsworth had a strong dislike for London. He could never see what pleasure his friend Ickenham found in visiting that frightful city. The latter's statement that London brought out all the best in him and was the only place where his soul could expand like a blossoming flower and his generous nature find full expression bewildered him. Himself he wanted nothing but Blandings Castle, even though his sister Constance, his secretary Lavender Briggs and the Duke of Dunstable were there and Connie, overriding his veto, had allowed the Church Lads' Brigade to camp out by the lake. Many people are fond of church lads, but he was not of their number, and he chafed at Connie's highhandedness in letting loose on his grounds and messuages what sometimes seemed to him about five hundred of them, all squealing simultaneously.
But this morning there was no room in his mind for morbid thoughts about these juvenile plug-uglies. He strongly suspected that it was one of them who had knocked his top hat off with a crusty roll at the recent school treat, but with a visit to the Empress in view he had no leisure to brood of past wrongs. One did not think of mundane things when about to fraternize with that wonder-pig.
Arriving at her G.H.Q., he beamed on George Cyril Wellbeloved as if on some spectacle in glorious technicolor. And this was odd, for the O.C. Pigs, as Myra Schoonmaker had hinted, was no feast for the eye, having a sinister squint, a broken nose acquired during a political discussion at the Goose and Gander in Market Blandings, and a good deal of mud all over him. He also smelt rather strongly. But what enchanted Lord Emsworth, gazing on this son of the soil, was not his looks or the bouquet he diffused but his mere presence. It thrilled him to feel that this prince of pigmen was back again, tending the Empress once more. George Cyril might rather closely resemble someone for whom the police were spreading a drag-net in the expectation of making an arrest shortly, but nobody could deny his great gifts. He knew his pigs.
So Lord Emsworth beamed, and when he spoke did so with what, when statesmen meet for conferences, is known as the utmost cordiality.
'Morning, Wellbeloved.'
'Morning, m'lord.'
'Empress all right?'
'In the pink, m'lord.'
'Eating well?'
'Like a streak, m'lord.'
'Splendid. It is so important,' Lord Emsworth explained to Myra Schoonmaker, who was regarding the noble animal with a dull eye, 'that her appetite should remain good. You have of course read your Wolff-Lehmann and will remember that, according to the Wolff-Lehmann feeding standards, a pig, to enjoy health, must consume daily nourishment amounting to fifty-seven thousand eight hundred calories, these to consist of proteids four pounds five ounces, carbohydrates twenty-five pounds.'
'Oh?' said Myra.
'Linseed meal is the secret. That and potato peelings.'
'Oh?' said Myra.
'I knew you would be interested,' said Lord Emsworth. 'And of course skimmed milk. I've got to go to London for a couple of nights, Wellbeloved. I leave the Empress in your charge.'
'Her welfare shall be my constant concern, m'lord.'
'Capital, capital, capital,' said Lord Emsworth, and would probably have gone on doing so for some little time, for he was a man who, when he started saying 'Capital', found it hard to stop, but at this moment a new arrival joined their little group, a tall, haughty young woman who gazed on the world through harlequin glasses of a peculiarly intimidating kind. She regarded the ninth earl with the cold eye of a governess of strict views who has found her young charge playing hooky.
'Pahdon me,' she said.
Her voice was as cold as her eye. Lavender Briggs disapproved of Lord Emsworth, as she did of all those who employed her, particularly Lord Tilbury of the Mammoth Publishing Company, who had been Lord Emsworth's predecessor. When holding a secretarial post, she performed her duties faithfully, but it irked her to be a wage slave. What she wanted was to go into business for herself as the proprietress of a typewriting bureau. It was the seeming impossibility of ever obtaining the capital for this venture that interfered with her sleep at night and in the daytime made her manner more than a little forbidding. Like George Cyril Wellbeloved, whose views were strongly communistic, which was how he got that broken nose, she eyed the more wealthy of her circle askance. Idle rich, she sometimes called them.
Lord Emsworth, who had been scratching the Empress's back with the ferrule of his stick, an attention greatly appreciated by the silver medallist, turned with a start, much as the Lady of Shalott must have turned when the curse came upon her. There was always something about his secretary's voice, when it addressed him unexpectedly, that gave him the feeling that he was a small boy again and had been caught by the authorities stealing jam.
'Eh, what? Oh, hullo, Miss Briggs. Lovely morning.'
'Quate. Lady Constance desiah-ed me to tell you that you should be getting ready to start, Lord Emsworth.'
'What? What? I've plenty of time.'
'Lady Constance thinks othahwise.'
'I'm all packed, aren't I?'
'Quate.'
'Well, then.'
'The car is at the door, and Lady Constance desiah-ed me to tell you –'
'Oh, all right, all right,' said Lord Emsworth peevishly, adding a third 'All right' for good measure. 'Always something, always something,' he muttered, and told himself once again that, of all the secretarial assistants he had had, none, not even the Efficient Baxter of evil memory, could compare in the art of taking the joy out of life with this repellent female whom Connie in her arbitrary way had insisted on engaging against his strongly expressed wishes. Always after him, always harrying him, always popping up out of a trap and wanting him to do things. What with Lavender Briggs, Connie, the Duke and those beastly boys screaming and yelling beside the lake, life at Blandings Castle was becoming insupportable.
Gloomily he took one last, lingering look at the Empress and pottered off, thinking, as so many others had thought before him, that the ideal way of opening Parliament would be to put a bomb under it and press the button.
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