Pelham Wodehouse - The Return of Jeeves

"I don't get your drift."

"I will continue snowing. Ever since Mrs.

Spottsworth arrived, you've been doing nothing but point out Rowcester Abbey's defects. Be constructive."

"In what way, my queen?"

"Well, draw her attention to some of the good things there are in the place."

Rory nodded dutifully, but dubiously.

"I'll do my best," he said. "But I shall have very little raw material to work with. And now, old girl, I imagine that Spaniard will have blown over by this time, so let us rejoin the Derby diners.

For some reason or other—why, one cannot tell—

I've got a liking for a beast called Oratory."

Mrs. Spottsworth had left the ruined chapel. After a vigil of some twenty-five minutes she had wearied of waiting for Lady Agatha to manifest herself. Like many very rich women, she tended to be impatient and to demand quick service. When in the mood for spectres, she wanted them hot off the griddle. Returning to the garden, she had found a rustic seat and was sitting there smoking a cigarette and enjoying the beauty of the night.

It was one of those lovely nights which occur from time to time in an English June, mitigating the rigours of the island summer and causing manufacturers of raincoats and umbrellas to wonder uneasily if they have been mistaken in supposing England to be an earthly Paradise for men of their profession.

A silver moon was riding in the sky, and a gentle breeze blew from the west, bringing with it the heart-stirring scent of stock and tobacco plant.

Shy creatures of the night rustled in the bushes at her side and, to top the whole thing off, somewhere in the woods beyond the river a nightingale had begun to sing with the full-throated zest of a bird conscious of having had a rave notice from the poet Keats and only a couple of nights ago a star spot on the programme of the B.b.c.

It was a night made for romance, and Mrs.

Spottsworth recognized it as such. Although in her vers libre days in Greenwich Village she had gone in almost exclusively for starkness and squalor, even then she had been at heart a sentimentalist. Left to herself, she would have turned out stuff full of moons, Junes, loves, doves, blisses and kisses. It was simply that the editors of the poetry magazines seemed to prefer rat-ridden tenements, the smell of cooking cabbage, and despair, and a girl had to eat.

Fixed now as solidly financially as any woman in America and freed from the necessity of truckling to the tastes of editors, she was able to take the wraps off her romantic self, and as she sat on the rustic seat, looking at the moon and listening to the nightingale, a stylist like the late Gustave Flaubert, tireless in his quest of the mot juste, would have had no hesitation in describing her mood as mushy.

To this mushiness Captain Biggar's conversation at dinner had contributed largely. We have given some indication of its trend, showing it ranging freely from cannibal chiefs to dart-blowing head-hunters, from head-hunters to alligators, and its effect on Mrs. Spottsworth had been very similar to that of Othello's reminiscences on Desdemona. In short, long before the last strawberry had been eaten, the final nut consumed, she was convinced that this was the mate for her and resolved to spare no effort in pushing the thing along. In the matter of marrying again, both A. B. Spottsworth and Clifton Bessemer had given her the green light, and there was consequently no obstacle in her path.

There appeared, however, to be one in the path leading to the rustic seat, for at this moment there floated to her through the silent night the sound of a strong man tripping over a flower-pot. It was followed by some pungent remarks in Swahili, and Captain Biggar limped up, rubbing his shin.

Mrs. Spottsworth was all womanly sympathy.

"Oh, dear. Have you hurt yourself, Captain?"

"A mere scratch, dear lady," he assured her.

He spoke bluffly, and only somebody like Sherlock Holmes or Monsieur Poirot could have divined that at the sound of her voice his soul had turned a double somersault leaving him quivering with an almost Bill Rowcester-like intensity.

His telephone conversation concluded, the White Hunter had prudently decided to avoid the living-room and head straight for the great open spaces, where he could be alone. To join the ladies, he had reasoned, would be to subject himself to the searing torture of having to sit and gaze at the woman he worshipped, a process which would simply rub in the fact of how unattainable she was. He recognized himself as being in the unfortunate position of the moth in Shelley's well-known poem that allowed itself to become attracted by a star, and it seemed to him that the smartest move a level-headed moth could make would be to minimize the anguish by shunning the adored object's society. It was, he felt, what Shelley would have advised.

And here he was, alone with her in the night, a night complete with moonlight, nightingales, gentle breezes and the scent of stock and tobacco plant.

It was a taut, tense Captain Biggar, a Captain Biggar telling himself he must be strong, who accepted his companion's invitation to join her on the rustic seat. The voices of Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar seemed to ring in his ears. "Chin up, old boy," said Tubby in his right ear. "Remember the code," said the Subahdar in his left.

He braced himself for the coming t@ete-@a-t@ete.

Mrs. Spottsworth, a capital conversationalist, began it by saying what a beautiful night it was, to which the Captain replied "Top hole". "The moon", said Mrs.

Spottsworth, indicating it and adding that she always thought a night when there was a full moon was so much nicer than a night when there was not a full moon.

"Oh, rather," said the Captain. Then, after Mrs.

Spottsworth had speculated as to whether the breeze was murmuring lullabies to the sleeping flowers and the Captain had regretted his inability to inform her on this point, he being a stranger in these parts, there was a silence.

It was broken by Mrs. Spottsworth, who gave a little cry of concern. "Oh, dear!"

"What's the matter?"

"I've dropped my pendant. The clasp is so loose."

Captain Biggar appreciated her emotion.

"Bad show," he agreed. "It must be on the ground somewhere. I'll have a look-see."

"I wish you would. It's not valuable—I don't suppose it cost more than ten thousand dollars—but it has a sentimental interest. One of my husbands gave it to me, I never can remember which. Oh, have you found it? Thank you ever so much. Will you put it on for me?"

As Captain Biggar did so, his fingers, spine and stomach muscles trembled. It is almost impossible to clasp a pendant round its owner's neck without touching that neck in spots, and he touched his companion's in several. And every time he touched it, something seemed to go through him like a knife.

It was as though the moon, the nightingale, the breeze, the stock and the tobacco plant were calling to him to cover this neck with burning kisses.

Only Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar, forming a solid bloc in opposition, restrained him.

"Straight bat, old boy!" said Tubby Frobisher.

"Remember you're a white man," said the Subahdar.

He clenched his fists and was himself again.

"It must be jolly," he said, recovering his bluffness, "to be rich enough to think ten thousand dollars isn't anything to write home about."

Mrs. Spottsworth felt like an actor receiving a cue.

"Do you think that rich women are happy, Captain Biggar?"

The Captain said that all those he had met—and in his capacity of White Hunter he had met quite a number—had seemed pretty bobbish.

"They wore the mask."

"Eh?"

"They smiled to hide the ache in their hearts," explained Mrs. Spottsworth.

The Captain said he remembered one of them, a large blonde of the name of Fish, dancing the can-can one night in her step-ins, and Mrs.