Pelham Wodehouse - Spring Fever

"Augustus!" cried Mike.

"Mr. Robb!" cried Terry.

"Did you get it?" cried Lord Shortlands.

"'Ullo, cocky. 'Ullo, ducky. Yus, chum, I got it," said Augustus Robb, replying to them in rotation. "But—"

An unforeseen interruption forced him to leave the sentence uncompleted. "Ah!" said a voice, and they turned to see Lady Adela in the doorway.

Lady Adela was wearing gardening gloves and carrying the shears which had so intimidated Mike at their first meeting. Her eyes, as they rested upon Lord Shortlands, had in them the stern gleam that is seen in those of a tigress which prepares to leap upon the goat which it has marked down for the evening meal. Her righteous indignation, denied expression by his craven flight to London, had been banking up within her since half-past nine that morning, and it was plain that she welcomed the imminent bursting of the dam.

"Ah!" she said. "I would like to speak to you, Father." She looked at the assembled company, and added the word "Alone." What she had to say was not for the ears of others.

Augustus Robb was always the gentleman. His social sense was perfect. Besides, he intended to listen at the door.

"Want us to shift, ducky?" he said agreeably. "Right ho."

Lady Adela, who had never been called "ducky" before and did not like the new experience, raised her eyebrows haughtily. It began to seem as if Augustus Robb was going to get his before Lord Shortlands.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"Name of Robb, dearie. Augustus Robb."

"He's Stanwood's valet," said Terry.

"Oh?" said Lady Adela, and left unspoken the words that had been trembling on her lips. Vassals and retainers of Stanwood Cobbold were immune from her wrath. Later on, perhaps, she would suggest to the dear boy that his personal attendant was a little lacking in the polish which one likes to see in personal attendants, but for the moment this chummy servitor must be spared. All she did, accordingly, was to catch his eye.

It was enough. Blinking, as if he had been struck by lightning, Augustus Robb withdrew, followed by Mike and Terry, and Lady Adela turned to Lord Shortlands.

"Father!" she said.

"Well?" said Lord Shortlands.

In the word "Well?", as inscribed on the printed page, there is little to cause the startled stare and the quick catch of the breath. It seems a mild and innocuous word. But hear it spoken in a loud, rasping, defiant voice by a man with his chin protruding and his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, and the effect is vastly different. Proceeding like a bullet from Lord Shortlands' lips, it left Lady Adela silent and gaping, her feelings closely resembling those which would have come to the above-mentioned tigress had the goat on the bill of fare suddenly turned and bitten it in the leg.

Of all moral tonics there is none that so braces a chronically impecunious earl as the knowledge that he is fifteen hundred pounds on the right side of the ledger. Lord Shortlands had Augustus Robb's assurance that that stamp, for which he had gone through so much, was now as good as in his pocket, and the thought lent him a rare courage. Ancestors of his had been tough nuts on the field of Hastings and devils of fellows among the paynim, and their spirit had descended upon him. He seemed to be clad in mail and brandishing a battle-ax.

"Well? What is it? It's no good you trying to come bullying me, Adela," he said, though perhaps Flaubert would have preferred the word "thundered." "I've put up with that sort of thing long enough."

Lady Adela was a woman of mettle. She tried hard to shake off the illusion that somebody had hit her between the eyes with a wet fish.

"Father!"

Lord Shortlands snorted. One of the main planks in the platform of those ancestors, whose spirit had descended upon him, had always been a rugged disinclination to take any lip from their womenfolk.

"Don't stand there saying 'Father!' No sense in it. I tell you I'm not going to put up with it any longer. I may mention that I have very much disliked your manner on several occasions. In my young days daughters were respectful to their fathers."

This would, of course, have been a good opportunity for Lady Adela to say that they had probably had a different kind of father, but that strange, sandbagged sensation held her dumb, and Lord Shortlands proceeded with his remarks.

"I've decided to leave this bally castle," he said. "Leave it immediately. I have been able to lay my hands on a large sum of money, and there's nothing to keep me. I'm sick and tired of seeing that damned moat and that blasted wing built in 1259 and all the rest of the frightful place. If it interests you to hear my plans, I'm going to buy a public house."

"Father!"

"Will you stop saying 'Father!' Are you a parrot?"

Lady Adela's mind was now so disordered that she could scarcely have said what she was. Whatever it might be, it was something with a swimming head. The only point on which she was actually clear was that she had been swept into the vortex of an upheaval of the same nature as, but on rather bigger lines than, the French Revolution.

"Oh, and by the way," added Lord Shortlands, "I'm going to marry Mrs. Punter."

It is proof of the chaotic condition to which Lady Adela's faculties had been reduced that for an instant the name suggested nothing to her. Mrs. Punter? she was asking herself dazedly. Did she know a Mrs. Punter? A member of the Dorsetshire Punters, would it be? Or perhaps one of the Essex lot?

"Punter?" she whispered.

"Yes, Punter, Punter, Punter. You know perfectly well who Mrs. Punter is. The cook."

"The cook?" screamed Lady Adela.

"Yes, the cook," said Lord Shortlands. "And don't shout like that."

When she spoke again, Lady Adela did not shout. Horror made her words come out in a dry whisper, preceded by an odd, crackling sound which it would have taken a very sharp-eared medical man to distinguish from a death rattle.

"You can't marry the cook, Father!"

"Can't I?" said Lord Shortlands, thrusting his thumbs deeper into the armholes of his waistcoat and waggling his fingers. "Watch me!"

It seemed to Lady Adela, for it was evident that nothing was to be gained by arguing with this unbridled man, that the only course open to her was to fly to Mrs. Punter, whom she had always found a reasonable woman, and appeal to her sense of what was fitting. She proceeded to put this plan into action with such promptness that she was gone before Lord Shortlands realized that she had started. One quick leap, a whizzing sound, and she had vanished. And a moment later Augustus Robb re-entered, wearing the unmistakable air of a man who has had his ear to the keyhole.

"Coo, m'lord," said Augustus Robb admiringly. "That was telling her!"

"Ha!" said Lord Shortlands, still very much above himself. He strode masterfully about the room, waggling his fingers.

"And I've got something to tell you, chum," said Augustus Robb. "It's like this."

He broke off, for Mike and Terry had come in. Terry seemed a little agitated, and Mike was patting her hand.

"Your daughter Teresa," he said, "has been suffering a good deal of filial agony on your behalf, my dear Shorty. She was offering me eight to one that we should find you chewed into fragments, and I must say I was anticipating that I should have to dig down for the price of a wreath and a bunch of lilies. But at a hasty glance you appear to be still in one piece."

Lord Shortlands said that he was quite all right, never better, and Augustus Robb endorsed the statement.

"He put it all over her. Ticked her off, he did. Proper."

Terry was amazed.

"Shorty! Did you?"

"Certainly," said Lord Shortlands, and if there was in his manner a touch of pomposity, this was only to be expected after so notable a victory. Wellington was probably a little pompous after Waterloo. "I have been too lenient with Adela in the past, far too lenient, and she has taken advantage of my good nature. It was high time that I asserted myself. As Mr. Robb so nghtly says, I—ah—ticked her off proper. She's gone away with a flea in her ear, I can assure you. Ha! You should have seen her face when I said I was going to marry Alice Punter."