Pelham Wodehouse - Spring Fever

Augustus Robb came softly in, bearing a tray. Augustus Robb always came into rooms softly. Before getting saved at a revival meeting and taking up valeting as a career, he had been a burglar in a fair way of practice, and coming into rooms softly had grown to be a habit.

Once in, his movements became less stealthy. He deposited the tray on the table with a bang and a rattle and raised the blind noisily.

"Hoy!" he cried in a voice like someone calling the cattle home across the Sands of Dee. He had rather a bad bedside manner.

Stanwood parted company with his shark and returned to the world of living things. Having done so, he clasped his forehead with both hands and said "Oh, God!" He had the illusion that everything, including his personal attendant, had turned yellow.

"Brekfuss," roared Augustus Robb, still apparently under the impression that he was addressing a deaf friend a quarter of a mile away. "Eat it while it's hot, cocky. I've done you a poached egg."

There are certain words which at certain times seem to go straight to the foundations of the soul. "Egg" is one of these, especially when preceded by the participle "poached." A strong shudder passed through Stanwood's sensitive person.

"Take it away," he said in a low, tense voice. "And quit making such a darned noise. I've got a headache."

Augustus Robb adjusted the horn-rimmed spectacles which had made so powerful an appeal to Mr. Cobbold senior, and gazed down at the fishy-eyed ruin before him with something of the air of a shepherd about to chide an unruly lamb. He was a large, spreading man with a bald forehead, small eyes, extensive ears and a pasty face. He sucked a front tooth censoriously, his unpleasant habit when in reproachful mood.

"Got a headache, have you? Well, don't forget you asked for it, chum. I heard you come in this morning. Stumbling all over the place you was and knocking down the furniture. 'Ah,' I says to myself. 'You wait,' I says. 'The day of retribution is at hand,' I says, 'when there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.' And so there is, cocky, so there is. Well, now you're awake, better eat your brekfuss and get up and go out and 'ave a good brisk walk around the park."

The suggestion seemed to strike Stanwood Cobbold like a blow. He drew the bedclothes higher, partly to exclude the light, but principally so that he might avoid seeing his personal attendant. Even when at his most robust he found the sight of the latter disagreeable, for there seemed to him something all wrong about a valet in horn-rimmed spectacles, and at a time like this it was insupportable.

"It's a lovely day, the sun's shining a treat and the little dicky birds are singing fit to bust," said his personal attendant, by way of added inducement. "Upsy-daisy, and I'll have your clobber all ready for you by the time you're out of your tub."

The effort was almost too much for his frail strength, but Stanwood managed to open an eye.

"Get me a highball."

"I won't get you no such thing."

"You're fired!"

"No, I'm not. Don't talk so silly. Fired, indeed! No, cocky, you can't have no highball, but I'll tell you what you can have. I stepped out to the chemist's just now and asked him to recommend something suitable for your condition, and he give me this."

Stanwood, examining the bottle, brightened a little, as if he had met an old friend.

"This is good stuff," he said, shaking up its dark contents. "I've tried it before, and it's always saved my life."

Removing the cork, he took a hearty draft, and after a brief interval, during which his eyeballs revolved in their sockets and his whole aspect became that of one struck by a thunderbolt, seemed to obtain a certain relief. His drawn features relaxed, and he was able to remove the hand which he had placed on top of his head to prevent it coming off.

"Wow!" he said in a self-congratulatory manner.

Augustus Robb was still amused at the idea of his employer dispensing with his services.

"Fired?" he said, chuckling at the quaint conceit. "How can you fire me, when I was specially engaged by your pop to look after you and be your good angel? 'Robb,' he says to me. I can see him now, standing in his office with his weskit unbuttoned and that appealing look in his eyes. 'Robb, my faithful feller,' he says, 'I put my son in your charge. Take the young barstard over to England, cocky, and keep an eye on him and try to make him like what you are,' he says. Meaning by that a bloke of religious principles and a strict teetotaller."

"And a burglar?" said Stanwood with a flicker of spirit.

"Ex-burglar," corrected Augustus Robb coldly. It was a point on which he was touchy. "Seen the light this many a year past, hallelujah, and put all that behind me. And listen," he went on, stirred by a grievance. "Why did you go and tell Mr. Cardinal I'd been a burglar once?"

"I didn't."

"Yes, you did, and you know it. How else could he have found out? I wish I'd never mentioned it now. That's the trouble with you, chum. You're a babbler. You can't keep from spilling the beans. 'So you used to be a burglar used you?' says Mr. Cardinal, day before yesterday it was, when you'd asked me to step over to his apartment and borrow his new Esquire. 'And your name's Robb.' 'What about it?' I says. 'Ha, ha,' he says, laughing a sort of silvery laugh. 'Very suitable name for a burglar,' he says. 'You're the fifty-seventh feller that's told me that,' I says. 'Then you have known fifty-seven brilliantly witty people,' he says. 'I congratulate you.' And he takes a couple of little whatnots off the mantelpiece and locks 'em in a cupboard, as it were ostentatiously. Wounding, that was. I wish you'd be more careful."

"Mike won't tell anyone."

"That's not the point. It's the principle of the thing. A feller that's been saved don't want his sinful past jumping out at him all the time like a ruddy jack-in-the-box. Was he at that do of yours last night?"

"Yes, Mike was along," said Stanwood.

He spoke with a trace of flatness in his voice, for the question had awakened unpleasant memories. It might have been his imagination, but it had seemed to him that during the course of the festivities alluded to his friend Mike Cardinal had paid rather too marked attentions to Miss Stoker and that the latter had not been insensible to his approaches. Of course, the whole thing might have been just a manifestation of the party spirit, but Mike was such an exceptionally good-looking bird that a lover, especially a lover who had no illusions about his own appearance, was inclined to be uneasy.

"And was strictly moderate in his potations, I've no doubt," proceeded Augustus Robb. "Always is. I've seen Mr. Cardinal dine here with you and be perfectly satisfied with his simple half-bot. And him with his spirit on the rack, as you might say, and so with every excuse for getting stinko. Fine feller. You ought to take example by him."

Stanwood found himself mystified.

"How do you mean?"

"How do I mean what?"

"Why is Mike's spirit on the rack?"

"Because he's suffering the torments of frustrated love because he can't get the little bit of fluff to say Yus. That's why his ruddy spirit's on the rack."

"What little bit of fluff?"

"This Lady Teresa Cobbold."

Stanwood was intrigued. Terry Cobbold was an old friend of his.

"You don't say!"

"Yus, I do."

"This is the first I've heard of this."

"The story's only just broke."

"Mike never said a word to me."

"Why would he? Fellers don't go around singing of their love like tenors in a comic opera. Specially if the girl's giving 'em the raspberry and they can't seem to make no 'eadway."

"Well, he told you."

"No, he didn't any such thing. So 'appened that when I was in his apartment day before yesterday there was an envelope lying on the desk addressed to Lady Teresa Cobbold, Beevor Castle, Kent, and beside it a 'alf-finished letter, beginning 'Terry, my wingless angel.' I chanced to glance at it, and it told the 'ole story."