Pelham Wodehouse - The Return of Jeeves

"Neither his lordship nor myself have had the privilege of meeting Mr. Frobisher, sir,"

Jeeves reminded him courteously.

Captain Biggar stiffened.

"Major Frobisher, damn it."

"I beg your pardon, sir. Major Frobisher. Owing to our never having met him, the Major's technique when performing the Charleston is a sealed book to us."

"Oh?" Captain Biggar refilled his glass. "Well, his technique, as you call it, is vigorous. He does not spare himself. He is what in the old days would have been described as a three-collar man. By the time Tubby Frobisher has finished dancing the Charleston, his partner knows she has been in a fight, all right.

And it was so on this occasion. He hooked on to the wife of the Greek consul and he jumped her up and he jumped her down, he whirled her about and he spun her round, he swung her here and he swung her there, and all of a sudden what do you think happened?"

"The lady had heart failure, sir?"

"No, the lady didn't have heart failure, but what occurred was enough to give it to all present at that gay affair. For, believe me or believe me not, there was a tinkling sound, and from inside her dress there began to descend to the floor silver forks, silver spoons and, Tubby assures me, a complete toilet set in tortoiseshell. It turned out that the female was a confirmed kleptomaniac and had been using the space between her dress and whatever she was wearing under her dress—I'm not a married man myself, so can't go into particulars—as a safe deposit."

"Embarrassing for Major Frobisher, sir."

Captain Biggar stared.

"For Tubby? Why? He hadn't been pinching the things, he was merely the instrument for their recovery.

But don't tell me you've missed the whole point of my story, which is that I am convinced that if Patch Rowcester here were to dance the Charleston with Mrs. Spottsworth with one tithe of Tubby Frobisher's determination and will to win, we'd soon rout that pendant out of its retreat. Tubby would have had it in the open before the band had played a dozen bars. And talking of that, we shall need music.

Ah, I see a gramophone over there in the corner. Excellent. Well? Do you grasp the scheme?"

"Perfectly, sir. His lordship dances with Mrs. Spottsworth, and in due course the pendant droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath."

"Exactly. What do you think of the idea?"

Jeeves referred the question to a higher court.

"What does your lordship think of it?" he asked deferentially.

"Eh?" said Bill. "What?"

Captain Biggar barked sharply.

"You mean you haven't been listening? Well, of all the—"

Jeeves intervened.

"In the circumstances, sir, his lordship may, I think, be excused for being distrait," he said reprovingly. "You can see from his lordship's lack-lustre eye that the native hue of his resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. Captain Biggar's suggestion is, m'lord, that your lordship shall invite Mrs. Spottsworth to join you in performing the dance known as the Charleston. This, if your lordship infuses sufficient vigour into the steps, will result in the pendant becoming dislodged and falling to the ground, whence it can readily be recovered and placed in your lordship's pocket."

It was perhaps a quarter of a minute before the gist of these remarks penetrated to Bill's numbed mind, but when it did, the effect was electric. His eyes brightened, his spine stiffened. It was plain that hope had dawned, and was working away once more at the old stand. As he rose from his chair, jauntily andwiththe air of a man who is ready for anything, he might have been that debonair ancestor of his who in the days of the Restoration had by his dash and gallantry won from the ladies of King Charles the Second's Court the affectionate sobriquet of Tabasco Rowcester.

"Lead me to her!" he said, and his voice rang out clear and resonant. "Lead me to her, that is all I ask, and leave the rest to me."

But it was not necessary, as it turned out, to lead him to Mrs. Spottsworth, for at this moment she came in through the French window with her Pekinese dog Pomona in her arms.

Pomona, on seeing the assembled company, gave vent to a series of piercing shrieks. It sounded as if she were being torn asunder by red-hot pincers, but actually this was her method of expressing joy. In moments of ecstasy she always screamed partly like a lost soul and partly like a scalded cat.

Jill came running out of the library, and Mrs. Spottsworth calmed her fears.

"It's nothing, dear," she said. "She's just excited. But I wish you would put her in my room, if you are going upstairs. Would it be troubling you too much?"

"Not at all," said Jill aloofly.

She went out, carrying Pomona, and Bill advanced on Mrs. Spottsworth.

"Shall we dance?" he said.

Mrs. Spottsworth was surprised.

On the rustic seat just now, especially in the moments following the disappearance of her pendant, she had found her host's mood markedly on the Byronic side. She could not readily adjust herself to this new spirit of gaiety.

"You want to dance?"

"Yes, with you," said Bill, infusing into his manner a wealth of Restoration gallantry.

"It'll be like the old days at Cannes."

Mrs. Spottsworth was a shrewd woman.

She had not failed to observe Captain Biggar lurking in the background, and it seemed to her that an admirable opportunity had presented itself of rousing the fiend that slept in him ... far too soundly, in her opinion. What it was that was slowing up the White Hunter in his capacity of wooer, she did not know: but what she did know was that there is nothing that so lights a fire under a laggard lover as the spectacle of the woman he loves treading the measure in the arms of another man, particularly another man as good-looking as William, Earl of Rowcester.

"Yes, won't it!" she said, all sparkle and enthusiasm. "How well I remember those days!

Lord Rowcester dances so wonderfully," she added, addressing Captain Biggar and imparting to him a piece of first-hand information which, of course, he would have been sorry to have missed. "I love dancing.

The one unpunished rapture left on earth."

"What ho!" said Bill, concurring. "The old Charleston ... do you remember it?"

"You bet I do."

"Put a Charleston record on the gramophone. Jeeves."

"Very good, m'lord."

When Jill returned from depositing Pomona in Mrs. Spottsworth's sleeping quarters, only Jeeves, Bill and Mrs.

Spottsworth were present in the living-room, for at the very outset of the proceedings Captain Biggar, unable to bear the sight before him, had plunged through the French window into the silent night.

The fact that it was he himself who had suggested this distressing exhibition, recalling, as it did in his opinion the worst excesses of the Carmagnole of the French Revolution combined with some of the more risqu`e features of native dances he had seen in Equatorial Africa, did nothing to assuage the darkness of his mood. The frogs on the lawn, which he was now pacing with a black scowl on his face, were beginning to get the illusion that it was raining number eleven boots.

His opinion of the Charleston, as rendered by his host and the woman he loved, was one which Jill found herself sharing. As she stood watching from the doorway, she was conscious of much the same rising feeling of nausea which had affected the White Hunter when listening to the exchanges on the rustic seat.

Possibly there was nothing in the way in which Bill was comporting himself that rendered him actually liable to arrest, but she felt very strongly that some form of action should have been taken by the police. It was her view that there ought to have been a law.

Nothing is more difficult than to describe in words a Charleston danced by, on the one hand, a woman who loves dancing Charlestons and throws herself right into the spirit of them, and, on the other hand, by a man desirous of leaving no stone unturned in order to dislodge from some part of his associate's anatomy a diamond pendant which has lodged there. It will be enough, perhaps, to say that if Major Frobisher had happened to walk into the room at this moment, he would instantly have been reminded of old days in Smyrna or Joppa or Stamboul or possibly Baghdad. Mrs. Spottsworth he would have compared favourably with the wife of the Greek consul, while Bill he would have patted on the back, recognizing his work as fully equal, if not superior, to his own.