"What are you doing out here at this time?"
"I am pursuing Mr. Mulliner, madam."
"Pursuing what?"
The butler, having paused for a moment, as if asking himself if "whom" would not have been more correct, repeated his statement.
"But Mr. Mulliner is not here?"
"Yes, Madam."
"At three o'clock in the morning?"
"Yes, madam. He called shortly before two, and rang the front-door bell. I informed him that you were not at home, and supposed that he had left the premises. Such, however, was not the case. Ten minutes ago he flung a bottle of champagne through my window, and when I looked out expressed a wish that I would throw him a rose from my hair. He then hit me in the left eye with an egg."
It seemed to Augustus that he heard Hermione utter a startled cry, but it was lost in Mrs. Gudgeon's snort of amazement.
"Mr. Mulliner did this?"
"Yes, madam. I gather from Mr. Stoker, with whom I was conversing a short while ago, that his behaviour throughout the evening has been on similar lines. He was a member of the dinner party which Mr. Stoker attended, and Mr. Stoker tells me that he was instrumental in getting himself and friends ejected from three grillrooms and a milk bar. Mr. Stoker attributed his exuberance to youthful high spirits, and advanced the suggestion that such conduct should be excused in the young. I must confess that I am unable to take so liberal a view."
Mrs. Gudgeon was silent for some moments. She appeared to be trying to adjust her mind to these revelations. It is never easy for a woman to realize that she has been nursing in her bosom, which is practically what she had been doing to my nephew Augustus, a viper. But presently the adjusting process seemed to be complete. She spoke grimly.
"Next time Mr. Mulliner calls, Staniforth, I am not at home…What was that?"
"Madam?"
"I thought I heard a moan."
"The breeze sighing in the trees, no doubt, madam."
"Perhaps you are right. The breeze does sigh in trees, frequently. Did you hear it, Hermione?"
"I thought I heard something."
"A moan?"
"A groan, I should have said."
"A moan or groan," said Mrs. Gudgeon, conceding the point. "As if wrenched from the lips of some soul in agony." She broke off as a figure came out of the shadows. "Oswald!"
Oswald Stoker waved a genial hand.
"Hullo there. Hullo, hullo, hullo, hullo."
"What are you doing here?"
"Just winding up the evening. Oh, before I forget, my publisher fell into the pond and is now in the hothouse, drying out. So if you go there and see a nude publisher, pretend not to notice."
"Oswald, you are intoxicated!"
"It is virtually impossible not to be," said Oswald Stoker gravely, "when you have been entertained at dinner by Russell Clutterbuck of Clutterbuck and Winch, publishers of the book beautiful, and your fellow guest is Augustus Mulliner. I'm looking for him, by the way. I want to warn him that there is a herd of purple rhinoceroses down by the pond. Very dangerous things, purple rhinoceroses, especially in the mating season. Bite you in the leg as soon as look at you."
Hermione spoke. Her voice shook.
"Oswald!"
"Hullo?"
"Is this true what Staniforth has been saying about Mr. Mulliner?"
"What did he say?"
"That Mr. Mulliner sang under his window and threw eggs at him?"
"Perfectly correct. I was an eyewitness."
Mrs. Gudgeon swelled formidably.
"I shall write Mr. Mulliner a very strong letter tomorrow. In the third person. He shall never enter this house again…There! I'm sure that was a moan. I wonder if the garden is haunted."
She turned away, and Oswald Stoker regarded her anxiously.
"You aren't going to the hothouse?"
"I am going to my room. Bring me a glass of warm milk there, Staniforth."
"Very good, madam."
She moved off toward the house, followed by the butler and Oswald Stoker, turning to Hermione, was concerned to find her shaking with uncontrollable sobs.
"Hullo!" he said. "Something wrong?"
The girl gulped like a leaky radiator. "You bet your Old Etonian sock suspenders there's something wrong. I have lost the man I love."
"Where did you see him last ?"
"How was I to know," Hermione went on, her voice vibrating with pain, "that - that was the sort of ball of fire Augustus Mulliner really was? I thought him a wet smack and a total loss, and all the time he was a sportsman who throws eggs at butlers and breaks windows with champagne bottles. I never dreamed that there was this deeper side to him. When first we met, I was strangely attracted to him, but as I came to know him, he appeared to have all the earmarks of a Grade A hammerhead. I wrote him off as a bohunkus. Romantically considered, he seemed to me strictly a cigar-store Indian, all wood from the neck up. And now I see that for some reason he was hiding his light beneath a bushel, as father used to say. Oh, what shall I do? I love him, I love him, I love him!"
"Well, he loves you, which makes it all square."
"Yes, but this afternoon he asked me to be his wife, and I turned him down like a bedspread."
"Send him a civil note, saying you have changed your mind."
"Too late. A man as fascinating as that is sure to have been snapped up by some other girl by this time. Oh, what…?"
She would have spoken further, probably adding the words "shall I do?", but at this moment speech was wiped from her lips as if with a wet sponge. From the tree in whose shade she stood a passionate voice had shouted "Hoy!" and looking up she saw the face of my nephew.
"Au-us-us!" she cried. His sudden advent had caused her to bite her tongue rather severely.
"Ah, Mulliner," said Oswald Stoker. "Birds-nesting?"
"I say," bellowed Augustus, "I heard what you were saying. Did you mean it?"
"Yek, yek, a 'ousand 'imes yek!"
"You really love me?"
"Of course I love you."
"You will be my wife ?"
"You couldn't stop me with an injunction."
"Then…just getting it straightened out, if you don't mind...it will be in order if I nip down and cover your upturned face with burning kisses?"
"Perfectly in order."
"Right ho. Be with you in a moment."
As they fell into an embrace which, had it occurred in a motion picture, would have made the Johnston office purse its lips and suggest the cutting of several hundred feet of film, Oswald Stoker heaved a sentimental little sigh. A fiancé himself, he liked to see sundered hearts coming together.
"Well, well!" he said. "So you're getting married, eh? Starting out on the new life, are you, you two young things? Then take this simple toad," said Oswald Stoker, pressing the reptile into Augustus's hand. "A wedding present," he explained. "A poor gift, but one that comes straight from the heart. And, after all, it's the thought behind the gift that counts, don't you think? Good-night. God bless you. I must be getting along and finding how Russell Clutterbuck is making out. Have you ever seen an American publisher sitting in a hothouse with nothing on except horn-rimmed spectacles? It is a sight well worth seeing, but not one that I would recommend to nervous people and invalids."
He passed into the darkness, leaving Augustus looking at the toad a little dubiously. He did not really want it, but it might be ungracious to throw it away.
And idea struck him.
"Darling!"
"Yes, Angel?"
"I wonder, my queen, if you know which is that butler's room?"
"Of course, my king. Why?"
"I thought if you were to put this toad in his bed some night, shortly before he retired to rest….Just a suggestion, of course."
"An admirable suggestion. Come, my dream man," said Hermione, "and let us hunt around and see if we can't find a few frogs, too."
4
Jeeves Makes an Omelette
IN these disturbed days in
which we live, it has probably occurred to all thinking men that something drastic ought to be done about aunts, Speaking for myself, I have long felt that stones should be turned and avenues explored with a view to putting a stopper on the relatives in question. If someone were to come to me and say, "Wooster, would you be interested in joining a society I am starting whose aim will be the suppression of aunts or at least will see to it that they are kept on a short chain and not permitted to roam hither and thither at will, scattering desolation on all sides?", I would reply, "Wilbraham," if his name was Wilbraham, "I am with you heart and soul. Put me down as a foundation member." And my mind would flit to the sinister episode of my Aunt Dahlia and the Fothergill Venus, from which I am making only a slow recovery. Whisper the words "Marsham Manor" in my ear, and I still quiver like a humming-bird.
At the time of its inception, if inception is the word I want, I was, I recall, feeling at the top of my form and without a care in the world. Pleasantly relaxed after thirty-six holes of golf and dinner at the Drones, I was lying on the chez Wooster sofa doing the Telegraph crossword puzzle, when the telephone rang. I could hear Jeeves out in the hail dealing with it, and presently he trickled in.
"Mrs. Travers. sir."
"Aunt Dahlia? What does she want?'
"She did not confide in me, sir. But she appears anxious to establish communication with you."
"To talk to me, do you mean?"
"Precisely, sir."
A bit oddish it seems to me, looking back on it, that as I went to the instrument I should have had no premonition of an impending doom. Not psychic, that's my trouble. Having no inkling of the soup into which I was so shortly to be plunged, I welcomed the opportunity of exchanging ideas with this sister of my late father who, as is widely known, is my good and deserving aunt, not to be confused with Aunt Agatha, the werewolf. What with one thing and another, it was some little time since we had chewed the fat together.
"What ho, old blood relation," I said.
"Hullo, Bertie, you revolting young blot," she responded in her hearty way. "Are you sober?"
"As a judge."
"Then listen attentively. I'm speaking from an undersized hamlet in Hampshire called Marsham-in-the-Vale. I'm staying at Marsham Manor with Cornelia Fothergill, the novelist. Ever heard of her?"
"Vaguely, as it were. She is not on my library list."
"She would be, if you were a woman. She specializes in rich goo for the female trade."
"Ah, yes, like Mrs. Bingo Little. Rosie M. Banks to you."
"That sort of thing, yes, but even goo-ier. Where Rosie M. Banks merely touches the heart strings, Cornelia Fothergill grabs them in both hands and ties them into knots. I'm trying to talk her into letting me have her new novel as a serial for the Boudoir."
I got the gist. She has since sold it, but at the time of which I speak this aunt was the proprietor or proprietress of a weekly paper for the half-witted woman called Milady's Boudoir, to which I once contributed an article - a "piece" we old hands call it - on What The Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing. Like all weekly papers it was in the process of turning the corner, as the expression is, and I could well understand that a serial by a specialist in rich goo would give it a much-needed shot in the arm.
"How's it coming?" I asked. "Any luck?"
"Not so far. She demurs."
"De what's?"
"Murs, you silly ass."
"You mean she meets your pleas with what Jeeves would call a nolle prosequi?"
"Not quite that. She has not closed the door to a peaceful settlement, but, as I say, she de…”
"Murs?"
"Murs is right. She doesn't say No, but she won't say Yes. The trouble is that Tom is doing his Gaspard-the-Miser stuff again."
Her allusion was to my uncle, Thomas Portarlington Travers, who foots the bills for what he always calls Madame's Nightshirt. He is as rich as creosote, as I believe the phrase is, but like so many of our wealthier citizens he hates to give up. Until you have heard Uncle Tom on the subject of income tax and supertax, you haven't heard anything.
"He won't let me go above five hundred pounds, and she wants eight."
"Looks like an impasse."
"It did till this morning."
"What happened this morning?"
"Oh, just a sort of break in the clouds. She said something which gave me the impression that she was weakening and that one more shove would do the trick. Are you still sober?"
"I am."
"Then keep so over this next weekend, because you're coming down here."
"Who, me?"
"You, in person."
"But, why?"
"To help me sway her. You will exercise all your charm…"
"I haven't much."
"Well, exercise what you've got. Give her the old oil. Play on her as on a stringed instrument."
I chewed the lip somewhat. I'm not keen on these blind dates. And if life has taught me one thing, it is that the prudent man keeps away from female novelists. But it might be, of course, that a gay house-party was contemplated. I probed her on this point.
"Will anyone else be there? Is there any bright young society, I mean?"
"I wouldn't call the society young, but it's very bright. There's Cornelia's husband, Everard Fothergill the artist, and his father Edward Fothergill. He's an artist, too, of a sort. You won't have a dull moment. So tell Jeeves to pack your effects, and we shall expect you on Friday. You will continue to haunt the house till Monday."
"Cooped up with a couple of artists and a writer of rich goo? I don't like it,"
"You don't have to like it," the aged relative assured me. "You just do it. Oh, and by the way, when you get here, I've a little something I want you to do for me."
"What sort of a little something?"
"I'll tell you about it when I see you. Just a simple little thing to help Auntie. You'll enjoy it," she said, and with a cordial "Toodle-oo" rang off.
It surprises many people, I believe, that Bertram Wooster, as a general rule a man of iron, is as wax in the hands of his Aunt Dahlia, jumping to obey her lightest behest like a performing seal going after a slice of fish. They do not know that this woman possesses a secret weapon by means of which she can always bend me to her will - viz. the threat that if I give her any of my lip, she will bar me from her dinner table and deprive me of the roasts and boileds of her French chef Anatole, God's gift to the gastric juices. When she says Go, accordingly, I do not demur, I goeth, as the Bible puts it, and so it came about that toward the quiet evenfall of Friday the 22nd inst. I was at the wheel of the old sports model, tooling through Hants with Jeeves at my side and weighed down with a nameless foreboding.
"Jeeves," I said, "I am weighed down with a nameless foreboding."
"Indeed, sir?"
"Yes. What, I ask myself, is cooking?"
"I do not think I quite follow you, sir."
"Then you jolly well ought to. I reported my conversation with Aunt Dahlia to you verbatim, and you should have every word of it tucked away beneath your bowler hat. To refresh your memory, after a certain amount of kidding back and forth she said I've a little something I want you to do for me', and when I enquired what, she fobbed me off…is it fobbed?"
"Yes, sir."
"She fobbed me off with a careless ‘Oh, just a simple little thing to help Auntie'. What construction do you place on those words ?"
"One gathers that there is something Mrs. Travers wishes you to do for her, sir."
"One does, but the point is - what? You recall what has happened in the past when the gentler sex have asked me to do things for them. Especially Aunt Dahlia. You have not forgotten the affair of Sir Watkyn Basset and the silver cow-creamer?"
"No, sir."
"On that occasion, but for you, Bertram Wooster would have done a stretch in the local hoosegow. Who knows that this little something to which she referred will not land me in a similar peril? I wish I could slide out of this binge, Jeeves."
"I can
readily imagine it, sir."
"But I can't, I'm like those Light Brigade fellows. You remember how matters stood with them?"
"Very vividly, sir. Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and. die."
"Exactly. Cannons to right of them, cannons to left of them volleyed and thundered, but they had to keep snapping into it regardless. I know just how they felt," I said, moodily stepping on the accelerator. The brow was furrowed and the spirits low.
Arrival at Marsham Manor did little to smooth the former and raise the latter. Shown into the hall, I found myself in as cosy an interior as one could wish - large log fire, comfortable chairs and a tea-table that gave out an invigorating aroma of buttered toast and muffins, all very pleasant to encounter after a long drive on a chilly winter afternoon - but a single glance at the personnel was enough to tell me that I had struck one of those joints where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.
Three human souls were present when I made my entry, each plainly as outstanding a piece of cheese as Hampshire could provide. One was a small, thin citizen with a beard of the type that causes so much distress - my host, I presumed - and seated near him was another bloke of much the same construction but an earlier model, whom I took to be the father. He, too, was bearded to the gills. The third was a large spreading woman wearing the horn-rimmed spectacles which are always an occupational risk for penpushers of the other sex. They gave her a rather remarkable resemblance to my Aunt Agatha, and I would be deceiving my public were I to say that the heart did not sink to some extent. To play on such a woman as on a stringed instrument wasn't going to be the simple task Aunt Dahlia appeared to think it.
After a brief pause for station identification, she introduced me to the gang, and I was on the point of doing the civil thing by asking Everard Fothergill if he had been painting anything lately, when he stiffened.
"Hark!" he said. "Can you hear a mewing cat?"
"Eh?" I said.
"A mewing cat. I feel sure I hear a mewing cat. Listen!"
While we were listening the door opened and Aunt Dahlia came in. Everard put the 64,000-dollar question squarely up to her.
"Mrs. Travers, did you meet a mewing cat outside?"