Pelham Wodehouse - Spring Fever

The world was looking very beautiful to Mervyn Spink. He gazed at the blue skies, the fleecy clouds, the fluttering butterflies, the hedgerows bright with wild flowers and the spreading fields of wheat that took on the appearance of velvet rubbed the wrong way as the light breeze played over them, and approved of them all, in the order named. He did not actually sing "tra-la," but it was a very close thing. In the whole of Kent at that moment you could not have found a more cheerio butler.

The sight of Lord Shortlands standing in the road outside the castle gates increased his feeling of bien-etre. He had been looking forward to meeting Lord Shortlands. A nasty knock, he felt correctly, this stamp sequence would be for his rival, and he wished to gloat on his despair. Mervyn Spink was a man who believed in treating rivals rough.

He braked his motorcycle, removed trousers seat from saddle and alighted.

"Ah, Shortlands," he said.

Lord Shortlands started. His face, already mauve, took on a deeper shade, and his eyes seemed to be suspended at the end of stalks, like those of a snail or prawn.

"How dare you address me like that?"

A frown marred the alabaster smoothness of Mervyn Spink's brow.

"We'd better get this settled once and for all, Shortlands," he said coldly. "Want me to call you 'm'lord,' do you? Well, if we were the other side of those gates, I'd call you 'm'lord' till my eyes bubbled. But when I'm off duty and we meet in the public highway, I am no longer your employee."

It was a nice piece of reasoning, well expressed, but Lord Shortlands continued dissatisfied.

"Yes, you are."

"No, I'm not. We're man and man. If you think otherwise, you can complain to her ladyship. It'll mean telling her the whole story and explaining just how matters stand between us, but I don't mind that, if you don't."

The purple flush died out of Lord Shortlands' face. A man with his consistently high blood pressure could not actually blench, but he came reasonably near to doing so. The picture those words had conjured up had made him feel as if his spine had been suddenly removed and the vacancy filled with gelatine. His manner, which had had perhaps almost too much in it of the mediaeval earl dealing with a scurvy knave or varlet, changed, taking on the suggestion of a cushat dove calling to its mate.

"Well, never mind, Spink. Quite all right. The point is—er—immaterial."

"Okey-doke, Shortlands."

"Just a technicality. And now what's all this about that stamp?"

"What about it?"

"My daughter tells me you've claimed it."

"I have."

"Says you say you were given it by this fellow Rossiter. I don't believe it," cried Lord Shortlands, recapturing something of the first fine careless rapture of his original manner. The spirit of his fighting ancestors was once more strong within him, and if he had been Lady Adela Topping herself he could not have been more resolutely determined to stand no nonsense. "It's a bally swindle!"

It seemed for an instant as though Mervyn Spink, in defiance of the first rule laid down by the Butlers Guild for the guidance of its members, was about to laugh. But he managed to check the impulse and to substitute for the guffaw a quiet smile.

"Listen," he said. "I'll tell you something."

Until now we have seen this butler only at his best, a skilful carrier of malted milk and a man whose appearance would have shed lustre on a ducal home; his only fault, as far as we have been able to ascertain, the venial one of liking to have an occasional ten bob on the two-thirty. He now strips the mask from his face and stands revealed as the modern Machiavelli he was. The typewriter falters as it records his words, and even Lord Shortlands, though he had known all along that dirty work was in progress in some form or other, found himself stunned and amazed.

"You're quite right, Shortlands. It is a bally swindle, and what are you going to do about it? Nothing. Because you can't."

He was right, and Lord Shortlands realized it. However bally the swindle, he could make no move to cope with it. His fear of his daughter Adela held him gagged and bound. Tortured by the humiliating sense of impotence, he uttered a wordless sound at the back of his throat. Augustus Robb, in a similar situation, would have said "Coo!" Both would have meant the same thing.

"Young Rossiter didn't give me that album. I've never seen the thing in my life. But I've a nephew on the stage who plays character parts and doesn't stick at much, so long as he knows there's something in it for him. Well, he's going to play another character part tomorrow. I've just been to see him, and we've fixed everything up."

He paused for an instant, his face darkening a little. The only flaw in his contentment was the lurking feeling that a shade more energy on his part during the initial bargaining might have resulted in his nephew closing for fifty quid, instead of sticking out, as he had done, for ten down and a further ninety on the completion of the deal. But a man about to collect fifteen hundred can afford to be spacious, and he had brightened again when he resumed his remarks.

"I'm telling her ladyship that I had the good luck to catch Mr. Rossiter on the eve of his departure for France, and that he'll be delighted to stop off at the castle tomorrow on his way to Dover and substantiate my claim. You'll be seeing him about lunch time. So there you are. All nice and smooth, I call it."

Lord Shortlands did not reply. He turned and started to totter home. Mervyn Spink wheeled his motorcycle beside him.

"Beautiful evening, m'lord," he said deferentially. They had passed through the gates. "Weather keeps up nicely, m'lord."

He contemplated his companion's face with all the pleasure he had known he was going to feel at the sight of it. Lord Shortlands was looking like Stanwood Cobbold on the morning after. Transferring his gaze to the local flora and fauna, Mervyn Spink felt more uplifted than ever. He drew satisfaction from the lilac bush that blossomed to the left and from the bird with the red beak which had settled on a tree to the right. And perhaps the best proof of his exalted frame of mind is that he found something exhilarating even in the appearance of Cosmo Blair, the playwright, who came towards them at the moment, smoking a cigarette. For this gifted man, though the author of half a dozen dramas which had brought him pots of money both in England and in the United States, was in no sense an eyeful. The normal eye, resting upon Cosmo Blair, was apt to blink and turn away.

Successful playwrights as a class are slender. Vertically there may be quite a lot, though not more than their admirers desire, of George S. Kaufman and, in a greater degree, of Robert E. Sherwood, but you can hardly see them sideways. Cosmo Blair struck a new note by being short and tubby. Lord Shortlands had called him a potbellied perisher; and though the fifth earl was prejudiced, his young guest having an annoying habit of addressing him as "My dear Shortlands" and contradicting every second thing he said, it must be admitted that there was something in the charge.

He scanned the pair through a glistening eyeglass.

"Ah, my dear Shortlands."

Lord Shortlands uttered a sound like a cinnamon bear with a bone in its throat.

"Ah, Spink."

"Good evening, sir."

"Been out for a ride?"

"Yes, sir."

"Nice evening."

"Extremely, sir."

"Oh, by the way, Spmk," said Cosmo Blair.

He, too, was feeling serene and contented. There had been crumpets for tea, dripping with butter, as he liked them, and after tea he had read his second act again to Clare. Her outspoken admiration had been very pleasant to him, inducing a sensation of benevolence towards his fellows, and this benevolence had been increased by the beauty of the spring evening. He looked at Mervyn Spink and was glad that it was within his power to do him a kindness.