Pelham Wodehouse - The Return of Jeeves

Two minutes later, Captain Biggar came bustling in with a song on his lips. Yoga and communion with the Jivatma or soul seemed to have done him good. His eyes were bright and his manner alert. It is when the time for action has come that you always catch these White Hunters at their best.

"Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, where are you now, where are you now?" sang Captain Biggar. "I ... how does the dashed thing go ...

I sink beneath your spell. La, la, la ...

La, la, la, la. Where are you now? Where are you now? For they're hanging Danny Deever in the morning," he carolled, changing the subject.

He saw Jeeves, and suspended the painful performance.

"Hullo," he said. "Quai hai, my man. How are things?"

"Things are in a reasonably satisfactory state, sir."

"Where's Patch Rowcester?"

"His lordship is in the garden, sir."

"With Mrs. Spottsworth?"

"Yes, sir. Putting his fate to the test, to win or lose it all."

"You thought of something, then?"

"Yes, sir. The spider sequence."

"The how much?"

Captain Biggar listened attentively as Jeeves outlined the spider sequence, and when he had finished paid him a stately compliment.

"You'd do well out East, my boy."

"It is extremely kind of you to say so, sir."

"That is to say if that scheme was your own."

"It was, sir."

"Then you'd be just the sort of fellow we want in Kuala Lumpur. We need chaps like you, chaps who can use their brains. Can't leave brains all to the Dyaks. Makes the blighters get above themselves."

"The Dyaks are exceptionally intelligent, sir?"

"Are they! Let me tell you of something that happened to Tubby Frobisher and me one day when we—" He broke off, and the world was deprived of another excellent story. Bill was coming through the French window.

A striking change had taken place in the ninth Earl in the few minutes since he had gone out through that window, a young man of spirit setting forth on a high adventure. His shoulders, as we have indicated, had then been square. Now they sagged like those of one who bears a heavy weight. His eyes were dull, his brow furrowed. The pride of the Rowcesters appeared to have packed up and withdrawn its support. No longer was there in his bearing any suggestion of that seventeenth-century ancestor who had infused so much of the party spirit into his decapitation on Tower Hill. The ancestor he most closely resembled now was the one who was caught cheating at cards by Charles James Fox at Wattier's in 1782.

"Well?" cried Captain Biggar.

Bill gave him a long, silent mournful look, and turned to Jeeves.

"Jeeves!"

"M'lord?"

"That spider sequence."

"Yes, m'lord?"

"I tried it."

"Yes, m'lord?"

"And things looked good for a moment. I detached the pendant."

"Yes, m'lord?"

"Captain Biggar was right. The clasp was loose. It came off."

Captain Biggar uttered a pleased exclamation in Swahili.

"Gimme," he said.

"I haven't got it. It slipped out of my hand."

"And fell?"

"And fell."

"You mean it's lying in the grass?"

"No," said Bill, with a sombre shake of the head. "It isn't lying in any ruddy grass.

It went down the front of Mrs.

Spottsworth's dress, and is now somewhere in the recesses of her costume."

It is not often that one sees three good men struck all of a heap simultaneously, but anybody who had chanced to stroll into the living-room of Rowcester Abbey at this moment would have been able to observe that spectacle. To say that Bill's bulletin had had a shattering effect on his companions would be, if anything, to understate it. Captain Biggar was expressing his concern by pacing the room with whirling arms, while the fact that two of the hairs of his right eyebrow distinctly quivered showed how deeply Jeeves had been moved. Bill himself, crushed at last by the blows of Fate, appeared formally to have given up the struggle. He had slumped into a chair, and was sitting there looking boneless and despairing. All he needed was a long white beard, and the resemblance to King Lear on one of his bad mornings would have been complete.

Jeeves was the first to speak.

"Most disturbing, m'lord."

"Yes," said Bill dully. "Quite a nuisance, isn't it? You don't happen to have any little-known Asiatic poison on you, do you, Jeeves?"

"No, m'lord."

"A pity," said Bill. "I could have used it."

His young employer's distress pained Jeeves, and as it had always been his view that there was no anodyne for the human spirit, when bruised, like a spot of Marcus Aurelius, he searched in his mind for some suitable quotation from the Emperor's works. And he was just hesitating between "Whatever may befall thee, it was preordained for thee from everlasting" and "Nothing happens to any man which he is not fitted by nature to bear", both excellent, when Captain Biggar, who had been pouring out a rapid fire of ejaculations in some native dialect, suddenly reverted to English.

"Doi wieng lek!" he cried. "I've got it! Fricassee me with stewed mushrooms on the side, I see what you must do."

Bill looked up. His eyes were glazed, his manner listless.

"Do?" he said. "Me?"

"Yes, you."

"I'm sorry," said Bill. "I'm in no condition to do anything except possibly expire, regretted by all."

Captain Biggar snorted, and having snorted uttered a tchah, a pah and a bah.

"Mun py nawn lap lao!" he said impatiently. "You can dance, can't you?"

"Dance?"

"Preferably the Charleston. That's all I'm asking of you, a few simple steps of the Charleston."

Bill stirred slightly, like a corpse moving in its winding sheet. It was an acute spasm of generous indignation that caused him to do so. He was filled with what, in his opinion, was a justifiable resentment. Here he was, in the soup and going down for the third time? and this man came inviting him to dance before him as David danced before Saul. Assuming this to be merely the thin end of the wedge, one received the impression that in next to no time the White Hunter, if encouraged, would be calling for comic songs and conjuring tricks and imitations of footlight favourites who are familiar to you all. What, he asked himself bitterly, did the fellow think this was? The revival of Vaudeville? A village concert in aid of the church organ restoration fund?

Groping for words with which to express these thoughts, he found that the Captain was beginning to tell another of his stories. Like Marcus Aurelius, Kuala Lumpur's favourite son always seemed to have up his sleeve something apposite to the matter in hand, whatever that matter might be. But where the Roman Emperor, a sort of primitive Bob Hope or Groucho Marx, had contented himself with throwing off wisecracks, Captain Biggar preferred the narrative form.

"Yes, the Charleston," said Captain Biggar, "and I'll tell you why. I am thinking of the episode of Tubby Frobisher and the wife of the Greek consul. The recollection of it suddenly flashed upon me like a gleam of light from above."

He paused. A sense of something omitted, something left undone, was nagging at him. Then he saw why this was so. The whisky. He moved to the table and filled his glass.

"Whether it was Smyrna or Joppa or Stamboul where Tubby was stationed at the time of which I speak," he said, draining half the contents of his glass and coming back with the rest, "I'm afraid I can't tell you. As one grows older, one tends to forget these details. It may even have been Baghdad or half a dozen other places.

I admit frankly that I have forgotten. But the point is that he was at some place somewhere and one night he attended a reception or a soir@ee or whatever they call these binges at one of the embassies. You know the sort of thing I mean.

Fair women and brave men, all dolled up and dancing their ruddy heads off. And in due season it came to pass that Tubby found himself doing the Charleston with the wife of the Greek consul as his partner. I don't know if either of you have ever seen Tubby Frobisher dance the Charleston?"