P. Wodehouse: Much obliged, Jeeves

'Awfully good of you to have me, old blood relation.'

'It is, rather.'

'I look forward to seeing you.'

'Who wouldn't?'

'Each minute will seem like an hour till we meet. How's Anatole?'

'Greedy young pig, always thinking of Anatole.'

'Difficult to help it. The taste lingers. How is his art these days?'

'At its peak.'

'That's good.'

'Ginger says his output has been a revelation to him.'

I asked her to repeat this. It had sounded to me just as if she had said 'Ginger says his output has been a revelation to him', and I knew this couldn't be the case. It turned out, however, that it was.

'Ginger?' I said, not abreast.

'Harold Winship. He told me to call him Ginger. He's staying here. He says he's a friend of yours, which he would scarcely admit unless he knew it could be proved against him. You do know him, don't you? He speaks of having been at Oxford with you.'

I uttered a joyful cry, and she said if I did it again, she would sue me, it having nearly cracked her eardrum. A notable instance of the pot calling the kettle black, as the old saying has it, she having been cracking mine since the start of the proceedings.

'Know him?' I said. 'You bet I know him. We were like … Jeeves!'

'Sir?'

'Who were those two fellows?'

'Sir?'

'Greek, if I remember correctly. Always mentioned when the subject of bosom pals comes up.'

'Would you be referring to Damon and Pythias, sir?'

'That's right. We were like Damon and Pythias, old ancestor. But what's he doing chez you? I wasn't aware that you and he had ever met.'

'We hadn't. But his mother was an old school friend of mine.'

'I see.'

'And when I heard he was standing for Parliament in the by– election at Market Snodsbury, I wrote to him and told him to make my house his base. Much more comfortable than dossing at a pub.'

'Oh, you've got a by-election at Market Snodsbury, have you?'

'Under full steam.'

'And Ginger's one of the candidates?'

'The Conservative one. You seem surprised.'

'I am. You might say stunned. I wouldn't have thought it was his dish at all. How's he doing?'

'Difficult to say so far. Anyway, he needs all the help he can get, so I want you to come and canvass for him.'

This made me chew the lower lip for a moment. One has to exercise caution at a time like this, or where is one?

'What does it involve?' I asked guardedly. 'I shan't have to kiss babies, shall I?'

'Of course you won't, you abysmal chump.'

'I've always heard that kissing babies entered largely into these things.'

'Yes, but it's the candidate who does it, poor blighter. All you have to do is go from house to house urging the inmates to vote for Ginger.'

'Then rely on me. Such an assignment should be well within my scope. Old Ginger!' I said, feeling emotional. 'It will warm the what-d'you-call-its of my heart to see him again.'

'Well, you'll have the opportunity of hotting them up this very afternoon. He's gone to London for the day and wants you to lunch with him.'

'Does he, egad! That's fine. What time?'

'One-thirty.'

'At what spot?'

'Barribault's grill-room.'

'I'll be there. Jeeves,' I said, hanging up, 'You remember Ginger Winship, who used to play Damon to my Pythias?'

'Yes, indeed, sir.'

'They've got an election on at Market Snodsbury, and he's standing in the Conservative interest.'

'So I understood Madam to say, sir.'

'Oh, you caught her remarks?'

'With little or no difficulty, sir. Madam has a penetrating voice.'

'It does penetrate, doesn't it,' I said, massaging the ear I had been holding to the receiver. 'Good lung power.'

'Extremely, sir.'

'I wonder whether she ever sang lullabies to me in my cradle. If so, it must have scared me cross-eyed, giving me the illusion that the boiler had exploded. However, that is not germane to the issue, which is that we leave for her abode this afternoon. I shall be lunching with Ginger. In my absence, pack a few socks and toothbrushes, will you.'

'Very good, sir,' he replied, and we did not return to the subject of the club book.

It was with no little gusto and animation that some hours later I set out for the tryst. This Ginger was one of my oldest buddies, not quite so old as Kipper Herring or Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, with whom I had plucked the gowans fine at prep school, public school and University, but definitely ancient. Our rooms at Oxford had been adjacent, and it would not be too much to say that from the moment he looked in to borrow a syphon of soda water we became more like brothers than anything, and this state of things had continued after we had both left the seat of learning.

For quite a while he had been a prominent member of the Drones Club, widely known for his effervescence and vivacity, but all of a sudden he had tendered his resignation and gone to live in the country, oddly enough at Steeple Bumpleigh in Essex, where my Aunt Agatha has her lair. This, somebody told me, was due to the circumstance that he had got engaged to a girl of strong character who disapproved of the Drones Club. You get girls like that every now and then, and in my opinion they are best avoided.

Well, naturally this had parted us. He never came to London, and I of course never went to Steeple Bumpleigh. You don't catch me going anywhere near Aunt Agatha unless I have to. No sense in sticking one's neck out. But I had missed him sorely. Oh for the touch of a vanished hand, is how you might put it.

Arriving at Barribault's, I found him in the lobby where you have the pre-luncheon gargle before proceeding to the grill-room, and after the initial What-ho-ing and What-a-time-since-we-met-ing inevitable when two vanished hands who haven't seen each other for ages re-establish contact, he asked me if I would like one for the tonsils.

'I won't join you,' he said. 'I'm not actually on the waggon, I have a little light wine at dinner now and then, but my fiancee wants me to stay off cocktails. She says they harden the arteries.'

If you are about to ask me if this didn't make me purse the lips a bit, I can assure you that it did. It seemed to point to his having gone and got hitched up with a popsy totally lacking in the proper spirit, and it bore out what I had been told about her being a girl of strong character. No one who wasn't could have dashed the cup from his lips in this manner. She had apparently made him like it, too, for he had spoken of her not with the sullen bitterness of one crushed beneath the iron heel but with devotion in every syllable. Plainly he had got it up his nose and didn't object to being bossed.

How different from me, I reflected, that time when I was engaged to my Uncle Percy's bossy daughter Florence Craye. It didn't last long, because she gave me the heave-ho and got betrothed to a fellow called Gorringe who wrote vers libre, but while it lasted I felt like one of those Ethiopian slaves Cleopatra used to push around, and I chafed more than somewhat. Whereas Ginger obviously hadn't even started to chafe. It isn't difficult to spot when a fellow's chafing, and I could detect none of the symptoms. He seemed to think that putting the presidential veto on cocktails showed what an angel of mercy the girl was, always working with his good at heart.

The Woosters do not like drinking alone, particularly with a critical eye watching them to see if their arteries are hardening, so I declined the proffered snort –reluctantly, for I was athirst – and came straight to the main item on the agenda paper. On my way to Barribault's I had, as you may suppose, pondered deeply on this business of him standing for Parliament, and I wanted to know the motives behind the move. It looked cock-eyed to me.

'Aunt Dahlia tells me you are staying with her in order to be handy to Market Snodsbury while giving the electors there the old oil,' I said.