‘Why?’
‘Never mind why.’
At this point he seemed to think he heard somebody coming, for he suddenly leaped with incredible agility into a laurel bush. And I toddled along to consult Jeeves about these rummy happenings.
‘Jeeves,’ I said, repairing to the bedroom, where he was unpacking my things, ‘you remember that telegram?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘It was from Mr Little. He’s here, tutoring my young Cousin Thomas.’
‘Indeed, sir?’
‘I can’t understand it. He appears to be a free agent, if you know what I mean; and yet would any man who was a free agent wantonly come to a house which contained my Aunt Agatha?’
‘It seems peculiar, sir.’
‘Moreover, would anybody of his own free-will and as a mere pleasure-seeker tutor my Cousin Thomas, who is notoriously a tough egg and a fiend in human shape?’
‘Most improbable, sir.’
‘These are deep waters, Jeeves.’
‘Precisely, sir.’
‘And the ghastly part of it all is that he seems to consider it necessary, in order to keep his job, to treat me like a long-lost leper. Thus killing my only chance of having anything approaching a decent time in this abode of desolation. For do you realize, Jeeves, that my aunt says I mustn’t smoke while I’m here?’
‘Indeed, sir?’
‘Nor drink.’
‘Why is this, sir?’
‘Because she wants me – for some dark and furtive reason which she will not explain – to impress a fellow named Filmer.’
‘Too bad, sir. However, many doctors, I understand, advocate such abstinence as the secret of health. They say it promotes a freer circulation of the blood and insures the arteries against premature hardening.’
‘Oh, do they? Well, you can tell them next time you see them that they are silly asses.’
‘Very good, sir.’
And so began what, looking back along a fairly eventful career, I think I can confidently say was the scaliest visit I have ever experienced in the course of my life. What with the agony of missing the life-giving cocktail before dinner; the painful necessity of being obliged, every time I wanted a quiet cigarette, to lie on the floor in my bedroom and puff the smoke up the chimney; the constant discomfort of meeting Aunt Agatha round unexpected corners; and the fearful strain on the morale of having to chum with the Right Hon. A. B. Filmer, it was not long before Bertram was up against it to an extent hitherto undreamed of.
I played golf with the Right Hon. every day, and it was only by biting the Wooster lip and clenching the fists till the knuckles stood out white under the strain that I managed to pull through. The Right Hon. punctuated some of the ghastliest golf I have ever seen with a flow of conversation which, as far as I was concerned, went completely over the top; and, all in all, I was beginning to feel pretty sorry for myself when, one night as I was in my room listlessly donning the soup-and-fish in preparation for the evening meal, in trickled young Bingo and took my mind off my own troubles.
For when it is a question of a pal being in the soup, we Woosters no longer think of self; and that poor old Bingo was knee-deep in the bisque was made plain by his mere appearance – which was that of a cat which has just been struck by a half-brick and is expecting another shortly.
‘Bertie,’ said Bingo, having sat down on the bed and diffused silent gloom for a moment, ‘how is Jeeves’s brain these days?’
‘Fairly strong on the wing, I fancy. How is the grey matter, Jeeves? Surging about pretty freely?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Thank Heaven for that,’ said young Bingo, ‘for I require your soundest counsel. Unless right-thinking people take strong steps through the proper channels, my name will be mud.’
‘What’s wrong, old thing?’ I asked, sympathetically.
Bingo plucked at the coverlet.
‘I will tell you,’ he said. ‘I will also now reveal why I am staying in this pest-house, tutoring a kid who requires not education in the Greek and Latin languages but a swift slosh on the base of the skull with a black-jack. I came here, Bertie, because it was the only thing I could do. At the last moment before she sailed to America, Rosie decided that I had better stay behind and look after the Peke. She left me a couple of hundred quid to see me through till her return. This sum, judiciously expended over the period of her absence, would have been enough to keep Peke and self in moderate affluence. But you know how it is.’
‘How what is?’
‘When someone comes slinking up to you in the club and tells you that some cripple of a horse can’t help winning even if it develops lumbago and the botts ten yards from the starting-post. I tell you, I regarded the thing as a cautious and conservative investment.’
‘You mean you planked the entire capital on a horse?’
Bingo laughed bitterly.
‘If you could call the thing a horse. If it hadn’t shown a flash of speed in the straight, it would have got mixed up with the next race. It came in last, putting me in a dashed delicate position. Somehow or other I had to find the funds to keep me going, so that I could win through till Rosie’s return without her knowing what had occurred. Rosie is the dearest girl in the world; but if you were a married man, Bertie, you would be aware that the best of wives is apt to cut up rough if she finds that her husband has dropped six weeks’ housekeeping money on a single race. Isn’t that so, Jeeves?’
‘Yes, sir. Women are odd in that respect.’
‘It was a moment for swift thinking. There was enough left from the wreck to board the Peke out at a comfortable home. I signed him up for six weeks at the Kosy Komfort Kennels at Kingsbridge, Kent, and tottered out, a broken man, to a tutoring job. I landed the kid Thomas. And here I am.’
It was a sad story, of course, but it seemed to me that, awful as it might be to be in constant association with my Aunt Agatha and young Thos, he had got rather well out of a tight place.
‘All you have to do,’ I said, ‘is to carry on here for a few weeks more, and everything will be oojah-cum-spiff.’
Bingo barked bleakly.
‘A few weeks more! I shall be lucky if I stay two days. You remember I told you that your aunt’s faith in me as a guardian of her blighted son was shaken a few days ago by the fact that he was caught smoking. I now find that the person who caught him smoking was the man Filmer. And ten minutes ago young Thomas told me that he was proposing to inflict some hideous revenge on Filmer for having reported him to your aunt. I don’t know what he is going to do, but if he does it, out I inevitably go on my left ear. Your aunt thinks the world of Filmer, and would sack me on the spot. And three weeks before Rosie gets back!’
I saw all.
‘Jeeves,’ I said.
‘Sir?’
‘I see all. Do you see all?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then flock round.’
‘I fear, sir—’
Bingo gave a low moan.
‘Don’t tell me, Jeeves,’ he said, brokenly, ‘that nothing suggests itself.’
‘Nothing at the moment, I regret to say, sir.’
Bingo uttered a stricken woofle like a bull-dog that has been refused cake.
‘Well, then, the only thing I can do, I suppose,’ he said sombrely, ‘is not to let the pie-faced little thug out of my sight for a second.’
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘Ceaseless vigilance, eh, Jeeves?’
‘Precisely, sir.’
‘But meanwhile, Jeeves,’ said Bingo in a low, earnest voice, ‘you will be devoting your best thought to the matter, won’t you?’
‘Most certainly, sir.’
‘Thank you, Jeeves.’
‘Not at all, sir.’
I will say for young Bingo that, once the need for action arrived, he behaved with an energy and determination which compelled respect. I suppose there was not a minute during the next two days when the kid Thos was able to say to himself, ‘Alone at last!’ But on the
evening of the second day Aunt Agatha announced that some people were coming over on the morrow for a spot of tennis, and I feared that the worst must now befall.
Young Bingo, you see, is one of those fellows who, once their fingers close over the handle of a tennis racket, fall into a sort of trance in which nothing outside the radius of the lawn exists for them. If you came up to Bingo in the middle of a set and told him that panthers were devouring his best friend in the kitchen garden, he would look at you and say, ‘Oh, ah?’ or words to that effect. I knew that he would not give a thought to young Thomas and the Right Hon. till the last ball had bounced, and, as I dressed for dinner that night, I was conscious of an impending doom.
‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘have you ever pondered on Life?’
‘From time to time, sir, in my leisure moments.’
‘Grim, isn’t it, what?’
‘Grim, sir?’
‘I mean to say, the difference between things as they look and things as they are.’
‘The trousers perhaps a half-inch higher, sir. A very slight adjustment of the braces will effect the necessary alteration. You were saying, sir?’
‘I mean, here at Woollam Chersey we have apparently a happy, care-free country-house party. But beneath the glittering surface, Jeeves, dark currents are running. One gazes at the Right Hon. wrapping himself round the salmon mayonnaise at lunch, and he seems a man without a care in the world. Yet all the while a dreadful fate is hanging over him, creeping nearer and nearer. What exact steps do you think the kid Thomas intends to take?’
‘In the course of an informal conversation which I had with the young gentleman this afternoon, sir, he informed me that he had been reading a romance entitled Treasure Island, and had been much struck by the character and actions of a certain Captain Flint. I gathered that he was weighing the advisability of modelling his own conduct on that of the Captain.’
‘But, good heavens, Jeeves! If I remember Treasure Island, Flint was the bird who went about hitting people with a cutlass. You don’t think young Thomas would bean Mr Filmer with a cutlass?’
‘Possibly he does not possess a cutlass, sir.’
‘Well, with anything.’
‘We can but wait and see, sir. The tie, if I might suggest it, sir, a shade more tightly knotted. One aims at the perfect butterfly effect. If you will permit me—’
‘What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this? Do you realize that Mr Little’s domestic happiness is hanging in the scale?’
‘There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter.’
I could see the man was pained, but I did not try to heal the wound. What’s the word I want? Preoccupied. I was too preoccupied, don’t you know. And distrait. Not to say careworn.
I was still careworn when, next day at half-past two, the revels commenced on the tennis lawn. It was one of those close, baking days, with thunder rumbling just round the corner; and it seemed to me that there was a brooding menace in the air.
‘Bingo,’ I said, as we pushed forth to do our bit in the first doubles, ‘I wonder what young Thos will be up to this afternoon, with the eye of authority no longer on him?’
‘Eh?’ said Bingo, absently. Already the tennis look had come into his face, and his eye was glazed. He swung his racket and snorted a little.
‘I don’t see him anywhere,’ I said.
‘You don’t what?’
‘See him.’
‘Who?’
‘Young Thos.’
‘What about him?’
I let it go.
The only consolation I had in the black period of the opening of the tourney was the fact that the Right Hon. had taken a seat among the spectators and was wedged in between a couple of females with parasols. Reason told me that even a kid so steeped in sin as young Thomas would hardly perpetrate any outrage on a man in such a strong strategic position. Considerably relieved, I gave myself up to the game; and was in the act of putting it across the local curate with a good deal of vim when there was a roll of thunder and the rain started to come down in buckets.
We all stampeded for the house, and had gathered in the drawing-room for tea, when suddenly Aunt Agatha, looking up from a cucumber-sandwich, said:
‘Has anybody seen Mr Filmer?’
It was one of the nastiest jars I have ever experienced. What with my fast serve zipping sweetly over the net and the man of God utterly unable to cope with my slow bending return down the centre-line, I had for some little time been living, as it were, in another world. I now came down to earth with a bang: and my slice of cake, slipping from my nerveless fingers, fell to the ground and was wolfed by Aunt Agatha’s spaniel, Robert. Once more I seemed to become conscious of an impending doom.
For this man Filmer, you must understand, was not one of those men who are lightly kept from the tea-table. A hearty trencherman, and particularly fond of his five o’clock couple of cups and bite of muffin, he had until this afternoon always been well up among the leaders in the race for the food-trough. If one thing was certain, it was that only the machinations of some enemy could be keeping him from being in the drawing-room now, complete with nose-bag.
‘He must have got caught in the rain and be sheltering somewhere in the grounds,’ said Aunt Agatha. ‘Bertie, go out and find him. Take a raincoat to him.’
‘Right-ho!’ I said. My only desire in life now was to find the Right Hon. And I hoped it wouldn’t be merely his body.
I put on a raincoat and tucked another under my arm, and was sallying forth, when in the hall I ran into Jeeves.
‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘I fear the worst. Mr Filmer is missing.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I am about to scour the grounds in search of him.’
‘I can save you the trouble, sir. Mr Filmer is on the island in the middle of the lake.’
‘In this rain? Why doesn’t the chump row back?’
‘He has no boat, sir.’
‘Then how can he be on the island?’
‘He rowed there, sir. But Master Thomas rowed after him and set his boat adrift. He was informing me of the circumstances a moment ago, sir. It appears that Captain Flint was in the habit of marooning people on islands, and Master Thomas felt that he could pursue no more judicious course than to follow his example.’
‘But, good Lord, Jeeves! The man must be getting soaked.’
‘Yes, sir. Master Thomas commented upon that aspect of the matter.’
It was a time for action.
‘Come with me, Jeeves!’
‘Very good, sir.’
I buzzed for the boathouse.
My Aunt Agatha’s husband, Spenser Gregson, who is on the Stock Exchange, had recently cleaned up to an amazing extent in Sumatra Rubber; and Aunt Agatha, in selecting a country estate, had lashed out on an impressive scale. There were miles of what they call rolling parkland, trees in considerable profusion well provided with doves and what not cooing in no uncertain voice, gardens full of roses, and also stables, outhouses, and messuages, the whole forming a rather fruity tout ensemble. But the feature of the place was the lake.
It stood to the east of the house, beyond the rose garden, and covered several acres. In the middle of it was an island. In the middle of the island was a building known as the Octagon. And in the middle of the Octagon, seated on the roof and spouting water like a public fountain, was the Right Hon. A. B. Filmer. As we drew nearer, striking a fast clip with self at the oars and Jeeves handling the tiller-ropes, we heard cries of gradually increasing volume, if that’s the expression I want; and presently, up aloft, looking from a distance as if he were perched on top of the bushes, I located the Right Hon. It seemed to me that even a Cabinet Minister ought to have had more sense than to stay right out in the open like that when there were trees to shelter under.
‘A little more to the right, Jeeves.’
‘Very good, sir.’
I made a neat landing.
‘Wait here, Jeeves.’
‘Very
good, sir. The head gardener was informing me this morning, sir, that one of the swans had recently nested on this island.’
‘This is no time for natural history gossip, Jeeves,’ I said, a little severely, for the rain was coming down harder than ever and the Wooster trouser-legs were already considerably moistened.
‘Very good, sir.’
I pushed my way through the bushes. The going was sticky and took about eight and elevenpence off the value of my Sure-Grip tennis shoes in the first two yards: but I persevered, and presently came out in the open and found myself in a sort of clearing facing the Octagon.
This building was run up somewhere in the last century, I have been told, to enable the grandfather of the late owner to have some quiet place out of earshot of the house where he could practise the fiddle. From what I know of fiddlers, I should imagine that he had produced some fairly frightful sounds there in his time: but they can have been nothing to the ones that were coming from the roof of the place now. The Right Hon., not having spotted the arrival of the rescue-party, was apparently trying to make his voice carry across the waste of waters to the house; and I’m not saying it was not a good sporting effort. He had one of those highish tenors, and his yowls seemed to screech over my head like shells.
I thought it about time to slip him the glad news that assistance had arrived, before he strained a vocal cord.
‘Hi!’ I shouted, waiting for a lull.
He poked his head over the edge.
‘Hi!’ he bellowed, looking in every direction but the right one, of course.
‘Hi!’
‘Hi!’
‘Hi!’
‘Hi!’
‘Oh!’ he said, spotting me at last.
‘What-ho!’ I replied, sort of clinching the thing. I suppose the conversation can’t be said to have touched a frightfully high level up to this moment; but probably we should have got a good deal brainier very shortly – only just then, at the very instant when I was getting ready to say something good, there was a hissing noise like a tyre bursting in a nest of cobras, and out of the bushes to my left there popped something so large and white and active that, thinking quicker than I have ever done in my puff, I rose like a rocketing pheasant, and, before I knew what I was doing, had begun to climb for life. Something slapped against the wall about an inch below my right ankle, and any doubts I may have had about remaining below vanished. The lad who bore ’mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device ‘Excelsior!’ was the model for Bertram.