‘I remember Oliver,’ said Exhibit A. She heaved a sigh. ‘He was such a pretty child. What a pity! What a pity!’
Tactful, of course, and calculated to put the guest completely at his ease.
‘I remember Oliver,’ said Exhibit B, looking at me in much the same way as the Bosher Street beak had looked at Sippy before putting on the black cap. ‘Nasty little boy! He teased my cat.’
‘Aunt Jane’s memory is wonderful, considering that she will be eighty-seven next birthday,’ whispered Mrs Pringle with mournful pride.
‘What did you say?’ asked the Exhibit suspiciously.
‘I said your memory was wonderful.’
‘Ah!’ The dear old creature gave me another glare. I could see that no beautiful friendship was to be looked for by Bertram in this quarter. ‘He chased my Tibby all over the garden, shooting arrows at her from a bow.’
At this moment a cat strolled out from under the sofa and made for me with its tail up. Cats always do take to me, which made it all the sadder that I should be saddled with Sippy’s criminal record. I stooped to tickle it under the ear, such being my invariable policy, and the Exhibit uttered a piercing cry.
‘Stop him! Stop him!’
She leaped forward, moving uncommonly well for one of her years, and having scooped up the cat, stood eyeing me with bitter defiance, as if daring me to start anything. Most unpleasant.
‘I like cats,’ I said feebly.
It didn’t go. The sympathy of the audience was not with me. And conversation was at what you might call a low ebb, when the door opened and a girl came in.
‘My daughter Heloise,’ said the prof moodily, as if he hated to admit it.
I turned to mitt the female, and stood there with my hand out, gaping. I can’t remember when I’ve had such a nasty shock.
I suppose everybody has had the experience of suddenly meeting somebody who reminded them frightfully of some fearful person. I mean to say, by way of an example, once when I was golfing in Scotland I saw a woman come into the hotel who was the living image of my Aunt Agatha. Probably a very decent sort, if I had only waited to see, but I didn’t wait. I legged it that evening, utterly unable to stand the spectacle. And on another occasion I was driven out of a thoroughly festive night club because the head waiter reminded me of my Uncle Percy.
Well, Heloise Pringle, in the most ghastly way, resembled Honoria Glossop.
I think I may have told you before about this Glossop scourge. She was the daughter of Sir Roderick Glossop, the loony doctor, and I had been engaged to her for about three weeks, much against my wishes, when the old boy most fortunately got the idea that I was off my rocker and put the bee on the proceedings. Since then the mere thought of her had been enough to make me start out of my sleep with a loud cry. And this girl was exactly like her.
‘Er – how are you?’ I said.
‘How do you do?’
Her voice put the lid on it. It might have been Honoria herself talking. Honoria Glossop has a voice like a lion tamer making some authoritative announcement to one of the troupe, and so had this girl. I backed away convulsively and sprang into the air as my foot stubbed itself against something squashy. A sharp yowl rent the air, followed by an indignant cry, and I turned to see Aunt Jane, on all fours, trying to put things right with the cat, which had gone to earth under the sofa. She gave me a look, and I could see that her worst fears had been realised.
At this juncture dinner was announced – not before I was ready for it.
‘Jeeves,’ I said, when I got him alone that night ‘I am no faint-heart, but I am inclined to think that this binge is going to prove a shade above the odds.’
‘You are not enjoying your visit, sir?’
‘I am not, Jeeves. Have you seen Miss Pringle?’
‘Yes, sir, from a distance.’
‘The best way to see her. Did you observe her keenly?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Did she remind you of anybody?’
‘She appeared to me to bear a remarkable likeness to her cousin, Miss Glossop, sir.’
‘Her cousin! You don’t mean to say she’s Honoria Glossop’s cousin!’
‘Yes, sir. Mrs Pringle was a Miss Blatherwick – the younger of two sisters, the elder of whom married Sir Roderick Glossop.’
‘Great Scott! That accounts for the resemblance.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And what a resemblance, Jeeves! She even talks like Miss Glossop.’
‘Indeed, sir? I have not yet heard Miss Pringle speak.’
‘You have missed little. And what it amounts to, Jeeves, is that, though nothing will induce me to let old Sippy down, I can see that this visit is going to try me high. At a pinch, I could stand the prof and wife. I could even make the effort of a lifetime and bear up against Aunt Jane. But to expect a man to mix daily with the girl Heloise – and to do it, what is more, on lemonade, which is all there was to drink at dinner – is to ask too much of him. What shall I do, Jeeves?’
‘I think that you should avoid Miss Pringle’s society as much as possible.’
‘The same great thought had occurred to me,’ I said.
It is all very well, though, to talk airily about avoiding a female’s society; but when you are living in the same house with her, and she doesn’t want to avoid you, it takes a bit of doing. It is a peculiar thing in life that the people you most particularly want to edge away from always seem to cluster round like a poultice. I hadn’t been twenty-four hours in the place before I perceived that I was going to see a lot of this pestilence.
She was one of those girls you’re always meeting on the stairs and in passages. I couldn’t go into a room without seeing her drift in a minute later. And if I walked in the garden she was sure to leap out at me from a laurel bush or the onion bed or something. By about the tenth day I had begun to feel absolutely haunted.
‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘I have begun to feel absolutely haunted.’
‘Sir?’
‘This woman dogs me. I never seem to get a moment to myself. Old Sippy was supposed to come here to make a study of the Cambridge colleges, and she took me round about fifty-seven this morning. This afternoon I went to sit in the garden, and she popped up through a trap and was in my midst. This evening she cornered me in the morning-room. It’s getting so that, when I have a bath, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find her nestling in the soap dish.’
‘Extremely trying, sir.’
‘Dashed so. Have you any remedy to suggest?’
‘Not at the moment, sir. Miss Pringle does appear to be distinctly interested in you, sir. She was asking me questions this morning respecting your mode of life in London.’
‘What?’
‘Yes, sir.’
I stared at the man in horror. A ghastly thought had struck me. I quivered like an aspen.
At lunch that day a curious thing had happened. We had just finished mangling the cutlets and I was sitting back in my chair, taking a bit of an easy before being allotted my slab of boiled pudding, when, happening to look up, I caught the girl Heloise’s eye fixed on me in what seemed to me a rather rummy manner. I didn’t think much about it at the time, because boiled pudding is a thing you have to give your undivided attention to if you want to do yourself justice; but now, recalling the episode in the light of Jeeves’s words, the full sinister meaning of the thing seemed to come home to me.
Even at the moment, something about that look had struck me as oddly familiar, and now I suddenly saw why. It had been the identical look which I had observed in the eye of Honoria Glossop in the days immediately preceding our engagement – the look of a tigress that has marked down its prey.
‘Jeeves, do you know what I think?’
‘Sir?’
I gulped slightly.
‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘listen attentively. I don’t want to give the impression that I consider myself one of those deadly coves who exercise an irresistible fascination over one and all and can’t meet a girl without wreck
ing her peace of mind in the first half-minute. As a matter of fact, it’s rather the other way with me, for girls on entering my presence are mostly inclined to give me the raised eyebrow and the twitching upper lip. Nobody, therefore, can say that I am a man who’s likely to take alarm unnecessarily. You admit that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Nevertheless, Jeeves, it is a known scientific fact that there is a particular style of female that does seem strangely attracted to the sort of fellow I am.’
‘Very true, sir.’
‘I mean to say, I know perfectly well that I’ve got, roughly speaking, half the amount of brain a normal bloke ought to possess. And when a girl comes along who has about twice the regular allowance, she too often makes a bee line for me with the love light in her eyes. I don’t know how to account for it, but it is so.’
‘It may be Nature’s provision for maintaining the balance of the species, sir.’
‘Very possibly. Anyway, it has happened to me over and over again. It was what happened in the case of Honoria Glossop. She was notoriously one of the brainiest women of her year at Girton, and she just gathered me in like a bull pup swallowing a piece of steak.’
‘Miss Pringle, I am informed, sir, was an even more brilliant scholar than Miss Glossop.’
‘Well, there you are! Jeeves, she looks at me.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘I keep meeting her on the stairs and in passages.’
‘Indeed, sir?’
‘She recommends me books to read, to improve my mind.’
‘Highly suggestive, sir.’
‘And at breakfast this morning, when I was eating a sausage, she told me I shouldn’t, as modern medical science held that a four-inch sausage contained as many germs as a dead rat. The maternal touch, you understand; fussing over my health.’
‘I think we may regard that, sir, as practically conclusive.’
I sank into a chair, thoroughly pipped.
‘What’s to be done, Jeeves?’
‘We must think, sir.’
‘You think. I haven’t the machinery.’
‘I will most certainly devote my very best attention to the matter, sir, and will endeavour to give satisfaction.’
Well, that was something. But I was ill at ease. Yes, there is no getting away from it, Bertram was ill at ease.
Next morning we visited sixty-three more Cambridge colleges, and after lunch I said I was going to my room to lie down. After staying there for half an hour to give the coast time to clear, I shoved a book and smoking materials in my pocket, and climbing out of a window, shinned down a convenient water-pipe into the garden. My objective was the summer-house, where it seemed to me that a man might put in a quiet hour or so without interruption.
It was extremely jolly in the garden. The sun was shining, the crocuses were all to the mustard and there wasn’t a sign of Heloise Pringle anywhere. The cat was fooling about on the lawn, so I chirruped to it and it gave a low gargle and came trotting up. I had just got it in my arms and was scratching it under the ear when there was a loud shriek from above, and there was Aunt Jane half out of the window. Dashed disturbing.
‘Oh, right ho,’ I said.
I dropped the cat, which galloped off into the bushes, and dismissing the idea of bunging a brick at the aged relative, went on my way, heading for the shrubbery. Once safely hidden there, I worked round till I got to the summer-house. And, believe me, I had hardly got my first cigarette nicely under way when a shadow fell on my book and there was young Sticketh-Closer-Than-a-Brother in person.
‘So there you are,’ she said.
She seated herself by my side, and with a sort of gruesome playfulness jerked the gasper out of the holder and heaved it through the door.
‘You’re always smoking,’ she said, a lot too much like a lovingly chiding young bride for my comfort. ‘I wish you wouldn’t. It’s so bad for you. And you ought not to be sitting out here without your light overcoat. You want someone to look after you.’
‘I’ve got Jeeves.’
She frowned a bit.
‘I don’t like him,’ she said.
‘Eh? Why not?’
‘I don’t know. I wish you would get rid of him.’
My flesh absolutely crept. And I’ll tell you why. One of the first things Honoria Glossop had done after we had become engaged was to tell me she didn’t like Jeeves and wanted him shot out. The realisation that this girl resembled Honoria not only in body but in blackness of soul made me go all faint.
‘What are you reading?’
She picked up my book and frowned again. The thing was one I had brought down from the old flat in London, to glance at in the train – a fairly zippy effort in the detective line called ‘The Trail of Blood.’ She turned the pages with a nasty sneer.
‘I can’t understand you liking nonsense of this—’ She stopped suddenly. ‘Good gracious!’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Do you know Bertie Wooster?’
And then I saw that my name was scrawled right across the title page, and my heart did three back somersaults.
‘Oh – er – well – that is to say – well, slightly.’
‘He must be a perfect horror. I’m surprised that you can make a friend of him. Apart from anything else, the man is practically an imbecile. He was engaged to my Cousin Honoria at one time, and it was broken off because he was next door to insane. You should hear my Uncle Roderick talk about him!’
I wasn’t keen.
‘Do you see much of him?’
‘A goodish bit.’
‘I saw in the paper the other day that he was fined for making a disgraceful disturbance in the street.’
‘Yes, I saw that.’
She gazed at me in a foul, motherly way.
‘He can’t be a good influence for you,’ she said. ‘I do wish you would drop him. Will you?’
‘Well—’ I began. And at this point old Cuthbert, the cat, having presumably found it a bit slow by himself in the bushes, wandered in with a matey expression on his face and jumped on my lap. I welcomed him with a good deal of cordiality. Though but a cat, he did make a sort of third at this party; and he afforded a good excuse for changing the conversation.
‘Jolly birds, cats,’ I said.
She wasn’t having any.
‘Will you drop Bertie Wooster?’ she said, absolutely ignoring the cat motif.
‘It would be so difficult.’
‘Nonsense! It only needs a little will power. The man surely can’t be so interesting a companion as all that. Uncle Roderick says he is an invertebrate waster.’
I could have mentioned a few things that I thought Uncle Roderick was, but my lips were sealed, so to speak.
‘You have changed a great deal since we last met,’ said the Pringle disease reproachfully. She bent forward and began to scratch the cat under the other ear. ‘Do you remember, when we were children together, you used to say that you would do anything for me?’
‘Did I?’
‘I remember once you cried because I was cross and wouldn’t let you kiss me.’
I didn’t believe it at the time, and I don’t believe it now. Sippy is in many ways a good deal of a chump, but surely even at the age of ten he cannot have been such a priceless ass as that. I think the girl was lying, but that didn’t make the position of affairs any better. I edged away a couple of inches and sat staring before me, the old brow beginning to get slightly bedewed.
And then suddenly – well, you know how it is, I mean. I suppose everyone has had that ghastly feeling at one time or another of being urged by some overwhelming force to do some absolutely blithering act. You get it every now and then when you’re in a crowded theatre, and something seems to be egging you on to shout ‘Fire!’ and see what happens. Or you’re talking to someone and all at once you feel, ‘Now, suppose I suddenly biffed this bird in the eye!’
Well, what I’m driving at is this, at this juncture, with her shou
lder squashing against mine and her back hair tickling my nose, a perfectly loony impulse came sweeping over me to kiss her.
‘No, really?’ I croaked.
‘Have you forgotten?’
She lifted the old onion and her eyes looked straight into mine. I could feel myself skidding. I shut my eyes. And then from the doorway there spoke the most beautiful voice I had ever heard in my life:
‘Give me that cat!’
I opened my eyes. There was good old Aunt Jane, that queen of her sex, standing before me, glaring at me as if I were a vivisectionist and she had surprised me in the middle of an experiment. How this pearl among women had tracked me down I don’t know, but there she stood, bless her dear, intelligent old soul, like the rescue party in the last reel of a motion picture.
I didn’t wait. The spell was broken and I legged it. As I went, I heard that lovely voice again.
‘He shot arrows at my Tibby from a bow,’ said this most deserving and excellent octogenarian.
For the next few days all was peace. I saw comparatively little of Heloise. I found the strategic value of that water-pipe outside my window beyond praise. I seldom left the house now by any other route. It seemed to me that, if only the luck held like this, I might after all be able to stick this visit out for the full term of the sentence.
But meanwhile, as they say in the movies—
The whole family appeared to be present and correct as I came down to the drawing-room a couple of nights later. The Prof, Mrs Prof, the two Exhibits and the girl Heloise were scattered about at intervals. The cat slept on the rug, the canary in its cage. There was nothing, in short, to indicate that this was not just one of our ordinary evenings.
‘Well, well, well!’ I said cheerily. ‘Hullo-ullo-ullo!’
I always like to make something in the nature of an entrance speech, it seeming to me to lend a chummy tone to the proceedings.
The girl Heloise looked at me reproachfully.
‘Where have you been all day?’ she asked.
‘I went to my room after lunch.’
‘You weren’t there at five.’
‘No. After putting in a spell of work on the good old colleges I went for a stroll. Fellow must have exercise if he means to keep fit.’