'Well!' she ejaculated.
She was staring at The Times, which was what she had drawn in the distribution of the morning journals, in much the same manner as a resident of India would have stared at a cobra, had he found it nestling in his bath tub.
'Of all the –' she said, and then words failed her.
L. G. Trotter gave her the sort of look the cobra might have given the resident of India who had barged in on its morning bath. I could understand how he felt. A man with dyspepsia, already out of harmony with his wife, does not like to hear that wife screaming her head off in the middle of breakfast.
'What on earth's the matter?' he said testily.
Her bosom heaved like a stage sea.
'I'll tell you what's the matter. They've gone and knighted Robert Blenkinsop!'
'They have?' said L. G. Trotter. 'Gosh!'
The stricken woman seemed to think 'Gosh!' inadequate.
'Is that all you can say?'
It wasn't. He now said 'Ba goom!' She continued to erupt like one of those volcanoes which spill over from time to time and make the neighbouring householders think a bit.
'Robert Blenkinsop! Robert Berlenkinsop! Of all the iniquitous pieces of idiocy! I don't know what things are coming to nowadays. I never heard of such a... May I ask why you are laughing?'
L. G. Trotter curled up beneath her eye like a sheet of carbon paper.
'Not laughing,' he said meekly. 'Just smiling. I was thinking of Bobby Blenkinsop walking backwards with satin kneebreeches on.'
'Oh?' said Ma Trotter, and her voice rang through the room like that of a costermonger indicating to his public that he has brussels sprouts and blood oranges for sale. 'Well, let me tell you that that is never going to happen to you. If ever you are offered a knighthood, Lemuel, you will refuse it. Do you understand? I won't have you cheapening yourself
There was a crash. It was Aunt Dahlia dropping her coffee cup, and I could appreciate her emotion. She was feeling precisely as I had felt on learning from Percy that the Wooster Darts Sweep ticket had changed hands, leaving Stilton free to attack me with tooth and claw. There is nothing that makes a woman sicker than the sudden realization that somebody she thought she was holding in the hollow of her hand isn't in the hollow of her hand by a jugful. So far from being in the hollow of her hand, L. G. Trotter was stepping high, wide and handsome with his hat on the side of his head, and I wasn't surprised that the thing had shaken her to her foundation garments.
In the silence which followed L. G. Trotter's response to this wifely ultimatum – it was, if I remember correctly, 'Okay' – Seppings appeared in the doorway.
He was carrying a silver salver, and on this salver lay a pearl necklace.
CHAPTER 21
It is pretty generally recognized in the circles in which he moves that Bertram Wooster is not a man who lightly throws in the towel and admits defeat. Beneath the thingummies of what-d'you-call-it his head, wind and weather permitting, is as a rule bloody but unbowed, and if the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune want to crush his proud spirit, they have to pull their socks up and make a special effort.
Nevertheless, I must confess that when, already weakened by having come down to breakfast, I beheld the spectacle which I have described, I definitely quailed. The heart sank, and, as had happened in the case of Spode, everything went black. Through a murky mist I seemed to be watching a negro butler presenting an inky salver to a Ma Trotter who looked like the end man in a minstrel show.
The floor heaved beneath my feet as if an earthquake had set in with unusual severity. My eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, met Aunt Dahlia's, and I saw hers was rolling, too.
Still, she did her best, as always.
' 'At-a-boy Seppings!' she said heartily. 'We were all wondering where that necklace could have got to. It is yours, isn't it, Mrs Trotter?'
Ma Trotter was scrutinizing the salver through a lorgnette.
'It's mine, all right,' she said. 'But what I'd like to know is how it came into this man's possession.'
Aunt Dahlia continued to do her best.
'You found it on the floor of the hall, I suppose, Seppings, where Lord Sidcup dropped it when he had his seizure?'
A dashed good suggestion, I thought, and it might quite easily have clicked, had not Spode, the silly ass, shoved his oar in.
'I fail to see how that could be so, Mrs Travers,' he said in that supercilious way of his which has got him so disliked on all sides. 'The necklace I was holding when my senses left me was yours. Mrs Trotter's was presumably in the safe.'
'Yes,' said Ma Trotter, 'and pearl necklaces don't jump out of safes. I think I'll step to the telephone and have a word with the police.'
Aunt Dahlia raised her eyebrows. It must have taken a bit of doing, but she did it.
'I don't understand you, Mrs Trotter,' she said, very much the grande dame. 'Do you suppose that my butler would break into the safe and steal your necklace?'
Spode horned in again. He was one of those unpleasant men who never know when to keep their big mouths shut.
'Why break?' he said. 'It would not have been necessary to break into the safe. The door was already open.'
'Ho!' cried Ma Trotter, reckless of the fact that the copyright of the word was Stilton's. 'So that's how it was. All he had to do was reach in and help himself. The telephone is in the hall, I think?'
Seppings made his first contribution to the feast of reason and flow of soul.
'If I might explain, madam.'
He spoke austerely. The rules of their guild do not permit butlers to give employers' guests dirty looks, but while stopping short of the dirty look he was not affectionate. Her loose talk about police and telephones had caused him to take umbrage, and it was pretty clear that whoever he might select as a companion on his next long walking tour, it would not be Ma Trotter.
'It was not I who found the necklace, madam. Acting upon instructions from Mr Travers, I instituted a search through the rooms of the staff and discovered the object in the bedchamber of Mr Wooster's personal attendant, Mr Jeeves. Upon my drawing this to Mr Jeeves's attention, he informed me that he had picked it up in the hall.'
'Is that so? Well, tell this man Jeeves to come here at once.'
'Very good, madam.'
Seppings withdrew, and I would have given a good deal to have been able to withdraw myself, for in about another two ticks, I saw, it would be necessary for Bertram Wooster to come clean and reveal all, blazoning forth to the world Aunt Dahlia's recent activities, if blazoning forth to the world is the expression I want, and bathing the unfortunate old egg in shame and confusion. Feudal fidelity would no doubt make Jeeves seal his lips, but you can't let fellows go sealing their lips if it means rendering themselves liable to an exemplary sentence, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench. Come what might, the dirt would have to be dished. The code of the Woosters is rigid on points like this.
Looking at Aunt Dahlia, I could see that her mind was working along the same lines, and she wasn't liking it by any means. With a face as red as hers she couldn't turn pale, but her lips were tightly set and her hand, as it lathered a slice of toast with marmalade, plainly shook. The look on her dial was the look of a woman who didn't need a fortune-teller and a crystal ball to apprise her of the fact that it would not be long before the balloon went up.
I was gazing at her so intently that it was only when a soft cough broke the silence that I realized that Jeeves had joined the gang. He was standing on the outskirts looking quietly respectful.
'Madam?' he said.
'Hey, you!' said Ma Trotter.
He continued to look quietly respectful. If he resented having the 'Hey, you!' addressed to him, there was nothing in his manner to show it.
'This necklace,' said Ma Trotter, giving him a double whammy through the lorgnette. 'The butler says he found it in your room.'
'Yes, madam. I was planning after breakfast to make inquiries as to its ownership.'
'Y
ou were, were you?'
'I presumed that it was some trinket belonging to one of the housemaids.'
'It was... what?'
He coughed again, that deferential cough of his which sounds like a well-bred sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountain-top.
'I perceived at once that it was merely an inexpensive imitation made from cultured pearls, madam,' he said.
I don't know if you happen to know the expression 'a stunned silence'. I've come across it in books when one of the characters has unloaded a hot one on the assembled company, and I have always thought it a neat way of describing that sort of stilly hush that pops up on these occasions. The silence that fell on the Brinkley Court breakfast table as Jeeves uttered these words was as stunned as the dickens.
L. G. Trotter was the first to break it.
'What's that? Inexpensive imitation? I paid five thousand pounds for that necklace.'
'Of course you did,' said Ma Trotter with a petulant waggle of the bean. 'The man's intoxicated.'
I felt compelled to intervene in the debate and dispel the miasma of suspicion which had arisen, or whatever it is that miasmas do.
'Intoxicated?' I said. 'At ten in the morning? A laughable theory. But the matter can readily be put to the test. Jeeves, say "Theodore Oswaldtwistle, the thistle sifter, sifting a sack of thistles thrust three thorns through the thick of his thumb".'
He did so with an intonation as clear as a bell, if not clearer.
'You see,' I said, and rested my case.
Aunt Dahlia, who had blossomed like a flower revived with a couple of fluid ounces of the right stuff from a watering-can, chipped in with a helpful word.
'You can bank on Jeeves,' she said. 'If he thinks it's a dud, it is a dud. He knows all about jewellery.'
'Precisely,' I added. 'He has the full facts. He studied under an aunt of his in the profession.'
'Cousin, sir.'
'Of course, yes, cousin. Sorry, Jeeves.'
'Not at all, sir.'
Spode came butting in again.
'Let me see that necklace,' he said authoritatively.
Jeeves drew the salver to his attention.
'You will, I think, support my view, my lord.'
Spode took the contents, glanced at them, sniffed and delivered judgement.
'Perfectly correct. An imitation, and not a very good one.'
'You can't be sure,' said Percy, and got withered by a look.
'Can't be sure?' Spode bristled like a hornet whose feelings have been wounded by a tactless remark. 'Can't be sure?'
'Of course he's sure,' I said, not actually slapping him on the back but giving him a back-slapping look designed to show him he had got Bertram Wooster in his corner. 'He knows, as everybody knows, that cultured pearls have a core. You spotted the core in a second, didn't you, Spode, old man, or rather Lord Sidcup, old man?'
I was going on to speak of the practice of introducing a foreign substance into the oyster in order to kid it along and induce it to cover this f.s. with layers of nacre – which I still think is a dirty trick to play on a shellfish which simply wants to be left alone with its thoughts – but Spode had risen. There was dudgeon in his manner.
'All this sort of thing at breakfast!' he said, and I saw what he meant. At home, no doubt, he wrapped himself around the morning egg in cosy seclusion, his daily paper propped up against the coffee-pot and none of this business of naked passions buzzing all over the place. He wiped his mouth, and left via the french window, wincing with a hand to his head as L. G. Trotter spoke in a voice that nearly cracked his tea-cup.
'Emily! Explain this!'
Ma Trotter got the lorgnette working on him, but for all the good it did she might as well have used a monocle. He stared right back at her, and I imagine – couldn't be certain, of course, because his back was to me – that there was in his gaze a steely hardness that turned her bones to water. At any rate, when she spoke, it was like what I have heard Jeeves describe as the earliest pipe of half-awakened birds.
'I can't explain it,' she...yes, quavered. I was going to say 'murmured', but quavered hits it off better.
L.G. Trotter barked like a seal.
'I can,' he said. 'You've been giving money on the sly again to that brother of yours.'
This was the first I had heard of any brother of Ma Trotter's, but I wasn't surprised. My experience is that all wives of prosperous business men have shady brothers in the background to whom they slip a bit from time to time.
'I haven't!'
'Don't lie to me!'
'Oh!' cried the shrinking woman, shrinking a bit more, and the spectacle was too much for Percy. All this while he had been sitting tensely where he sat, giving the impression of something stuffed by a good taxidermist, but now, moved by a mother's distress, he rose rather in the manner of one about to reply to the toast of The Ladies. He was looking a little like a cat in a strange alley which is momentarily expecting a half-brick in the short ribs, but his voice, though low, was firm.
'I can explain everything. Moth-aw is innocent. She wanted her necklace cleaned. She entrusted it to me to take to the jeweller's, and I pawned it and had an imitation made. I needed money urgently.'
Aunt Dahlia well-I'll-be-blowed!
'What an extraordinary thing to do!' she said. 'Did you ever hear of anybody doing anything like that, Bertie?'
'New to me, I must confess.'
Amazing, eh?'
'Bizarre, you might call it.'
'Still, that's how it goes.'
'Yes, that's how it goes.'
'I needed a thousand pounds to put into the play,' said Percy.
L. G. Trotter, who was in good voice this morning, uttered a howl that set the silverware rattling. It was fortunate for Spode that he had removed himself from earshot, for it would certainly have done that head of his no good. Even I, though a strong man, leaped about six inches.
'You put a thousand pounds into a play ?'
'Into the play,' said Percy. 'Florence's and mine. My dramatization of her novel, Spindrift. One of our backers had failed us, and rather than disappoint the woman I loved –'
Florence was staring at him, wide-eyed. If you remember, I described her aspect on first glimpsing my moustache as having had in it a touch of the Soul's Awakening. The S.A. was now even more pronounced. It stuck out a mile.
'Percy! You did that for me?'
'And I'd do it again,' said Percy.
L. G. Trotter began to speak. As to whether he opened his remarks with the words 'Ba goom!' I cannot be positive, but there was a 'Ba goom!' implicit in every syllable. The man was what is called beside himself, and one felt a gentle pity for Ma Trotter, little as one liked her. Her reign was over. She had had it. From now on it was plain who was going to be the Führer of the Trotter home. The worm of yesterday – or you might say the worm of ten minutes ago – had become a worm in tiger's clothing.
'This settles it!' he vociferated, I'm pretty sure it's vociferated. 'There won't be any more loafing about London for you, young man. We leave this house this morning –'
'What!' yipped Aunt Dahlia.
'– and the moment we get back to Liverpool you start in at the bottom of the business, as you ought to have done two years ago if I hadn't let myself be persuaded against my better judgement. Five thousand pounds I paid for that necklace, and you...'
Emotion overcame him, and he paused.
'But, Mr Trotter!' There was anguish in Aunt Dahlia's voice. 'You aren't leaving this morning!'
'Yes, I am. Think I'm going to go through another of that French cook's lunches?'
'But I was hoping you would not be going away before we had settled this matter of buying the Boudoir. If you could give me a few moments in the library?'
'No time for that. I'm going to drive into Market Snodsbury and see a doctor. Just a chance he may be able to do something to relieve the pain. It's about here that it seems to catch me,' said L. G. Trotter, indicating the fourth button of his waistc
oat.
'Tut-tut,' said Aunt Dahlia, and I tut-tutted, too, but nobody else expressed the sympathy the writhing man had a right to expect. Florence was still drinking in Percy with every eye at her disposal, and Percy was bending solicitously over Ma Trotter, who was sitting looking like a survivor of a bomb explosion.
'Come, Moth-aw,' said Percy, hoiking her up from where she roosted. 'I will bathe your temples with eau-de-Cologne.'
With a reproachful look at L. G. Trotter he led her gently from the room. A mother's best friend is her boy.
Aunt Dahlia was still looking aghast, and I knew what was in her mind. Once let this Trotter get away to Liverpool and she would be dished. Delicate negotiations like selling a weekly paper for the gentler sex to a customer full of sales resistance can't be conducted successfully by mail. You have to have men like L. G. Trotter on the spot, kneading their arms and generally giving them the old personality.
'Jeeves!' I cried. I don't know why, because I couldn't see what he could do to help.
He sprang respectfully to life. During the late give-and-take he had been standing in the background with that detached, stuffed-frog look on his face which it always wears when he is present at a free-for-all in which his sense of what is fitting does not allow him to take part. And the spirits rose as I saw from his eye that he was going to rally round.
'If I might make a suggestion, sir.'
'Yes, Jeeves?'
'It occurs to me that one of those morning mixtures of mine would bring relief to Mr Trotter.'
I gargled. I got his meaning.
'You mean those pick-me-ups you occasionally prepare for me when the state of the old head seems to call for it?'
'Precisely, sir.'
'Would they hit the trot with Mr Spotter, or rather the other way round?'
'Oh, yes, sir. They act directly on the internal organs.'
It was enough. I saw that, as always, he had tetigisti-ed the rem. I turned to L. G. Trotter.
'You heard?'
'No, I didn't. How do you expect me to hear things – ?'
I checked him with one of my gestures.
'Well, listen now,' I said. 'Be of good cheer, L. G. Trotter, for the United States Marines have arrived. No need for any doctors. Go along with Jeeves, and he will fix you a mixture which will put the old turn in mid season form before you can say "Lemuel Gengulphus".'