‘Oh, that?’ he said, dismissing the incident with an airy wave of the hand. ‘Forget all that, dear old chap. Put it right out of your mind, old fellow. Perhaps I was a little cross on the occasion to which you refer, but no longer.’
‘No?’ I said guardedly.
‘Definitely not. I see now that I owe you a deep debt of gratitude. But for you, I might still be engaged to that pill Florence. Thank you, Bertie, old man.’
Well, I said ‘Not at all’ or ‘Don’t mention it’ or something of that sort, but my head was swimming. What with getting up for breakfast and hearing this Cheesewright allude to Florence as a pill, I felt in a sort of dream.
‘I thought you loved her,’ I said, digging a bewildered fork into my sausage.
He laughed again. Only a beefy mass of heartiness like G. D’Arcy Cheesewright could have been capable of so much merriment at such an hour.
‘Who, me? Good heavens, no! I may have imagined I did once … one of those boyish fancies … but when she said I had a head like a pumpkin, the scales fell from my eyes and I came out of the ether. Pumpkin, forsooth! I don’t mind telling you, Bertie, old chap, that there are others – I mention no names – who have described my head as majestic. Yes, I have it from a reliable source that it makes me look a king among men. That will give you a rough idea of what a silly young geezer that blighted Florence Craye is. It is a profound relief to me that you have enabled me to get her out of my hair.’
He thanked me again, and I said ‘Don’t mention it’, or it may have been ‘Not at all’. I was feeling dizzier than ever.
‘Then you don’t think,’ I said with a quaver in the v., ‘that later on, when the hot blood has cooled, there might be a reconciliation?’
‘Not a hope.’
‘It happened before.’
‘It won’t happen again. I know now what love really is, Bertie. I tell you, when somebody – who shall be nameless – gazes into my eyes and says that the first time she saw me – in spite of the fact that I was wearing a moustache fully as foul as that one of yours – something went over her like an electric shock, I feel as if I had just won the Diamond Sculls at Henley. It’s all washed up between Florence and me. She’s yours, old man. Take her, old chap, take her.’
Well, I said something civil like ‘Oh, thanks’, but he wasn’t listening. A silvery voice had called his name, and pausing but an instant to swallow the last of his ham he shot from the room, his face aglow and his eyes a-sparkle.
He left me with the heart like lead within the bosom and the sausage and bacon turning to ashes in my mouth. This, I could see, was the end. It was plain to the least observant eye that G. D’Arcy Cheesewright had got it properly up his nose. Morehead Preferred were booming, and Craye Ordinaries down in the cellar with no takers.
And I had been so certain that in due season wiser counsels would prevail, causing these two sundered hearts to regret the rift in the lute and decide to have another pop at it, thus saving me from the scaffold once more. But it was not to be. Bertram was for it. He would have to drain the bitter cup, after all.
I was starting on a second instalment of coffee – it tasted like the bitter cup – when L.G. Trotter came in.
The one thing I didn’t want in my enfeebled state was to have to swap ideas with Trotters, but when you’re alone in a dining-room with a fellow, something in the nature of conversation is inevitable, so, as he poured himself out a cup of tea, I said it was a beautiful morning and recommended the sausages and bacon.
He reacted strongly, shuddering from head to foot.
‘Sausages?’ he said. ‘Bacon?’ he said. ‘Don’t talk to me about sausages and bacon,’ he said. ‘My dyspepsia’s worse than ever.’
Well, if he wanted to thresh out the subject of his aching tum, I was prepared to lend a ready ear, but he skipped on to another topic.
‘You married?’ he asked.
I winced a trifle and said I wasn’t actually married yet.
‘And you won’t ever be, if you’ve got a morsel of sense,’ he proceeded, and brooded darkly over his tea for a moment. ‘You know what happens when you get married? You’re bossed. You can’t call your soul your own. You become just a cipher in the home.’
I must say I was a bit surprised to find him so confidential to one who was, after all, a fairly mere stranger, but I put it down to the dyspepsia. No doubt the shooting pains had robbed him of his cool judgment.
‘Have an egg,’ I said, by way of showing him that my heart was in the right place.
He turned green and tied himself into a lovers’ knot.
‘I won’t have an egg! Don’t keep telling me to have things. Do you think I could look at eggs, feeling the way I do? It’s all this infernal French cooking. No digestion can stand up against it. Marriage!’ he said, getting back to the old subject. ‘Don’t talk to me about marriages. You get married, and first thing you know, you have stepsons rung in on you who grow whiskers and don’t do a stroke of honest work. All they do is write poems about sunsets. Pah!’
I’m pretty shrewd, and it flashed upon me at this point that it might quite possibly be his stepson Percy to whom he was guardedly alluding. But before I could verify this suspicion the room had begun to fill up. Round about nine-twenty, which it was now, you generally find the personnel of a country house lining up for the eats. Aunt Dahlia came in and took a fried egg. Mrs. Trotter came in and took a sausage. Percy and Florence came in and took respectively a slice of ham and a portion of haddock. As there were no signs of Uncle Tom, I presumed that he was breakfasting in bed. He generally does when he has guests, rarely feeling equal to facing them till he has fortified himself a bit for the stern ordeal.
Those present had got their heads down and their elbows squared and were busily employed getting theirs, when Seppings appeared with the morning papers, and conversation, not that there had ever been much of it, flagged. It was to a silent gathering that there now entered a newcomer, a man about seven feet in height with a square, powerful face, slightly moustached towards the centre. It was some time since I had set eyes on Roderick Spode, but I had no difficulty in recognizing him. He was one of those distinctive-looking blisters who, once seen, are never forgotten.
He was looking a little pale, I thought, as if he had recently had an attack of vertigo and hit his head on the floor. He said ‘Good morning’ in what for him was rather a weak voice, and Aunt Dahlia glanced up from her Daily Mirror.
‘Why, Lord Sidcup!’ she said. ‘I never expected that you would be able to come to breakfast. Are you sure it’s wise? Do you feel better this morning?’
‘Considerably better, thank you,’ he responded bravely. ‘The swelling has to some extent subsided.’
‘I’m so glad. That’s those cold compresses. I was hoping they would bring home the bacon. Lord Sidcup,’ said Aunt Dahlia, ‘had a nasty fall yesterday evening. We think it must have been a sudden giddiness. Everything went black, didn’t it, Lord Sidcup?’
He nodded, and was plainly sorry next moment that he had done so, for he winced as I have sometimes winced when rashly oscillating the bean after some outstanding night of revelry at the Drones.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was all most extraordinary. I was standing there feeling perfectly well – never better, in fact – when it was as though something hard had hit me on the head, and I remembered no more till I came to in my room, with you smoothing my pillow and your butler mixing me a cooling drink.’
‘That’s life,’ said Aunt Dahlia gravely. ‘Yessir, that’s life all right. Here today and gone tomorrow, I often say – Bertie, you hellhound, take that beastly cigarette of yours outside. It smells like guano.’
I rose, always willing to oblige, and had sauntered about half-way to the french window, when from the lips of Mrs. L.G. Trotter there suddenly proceeded what I can only describe as a screech. I don’t know if you have ever inadvertently trodden on an unseen cat. Much the same sort of thing. Taking a quick look at her, I saw that her face
had become almost as red as Aunt Dahlia’s.
‘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 knee-breeches 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.
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 words ‘Hey, you!’ addressed to him, there was nothing in his manne
r 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.’
‘You 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.