Pelham Wodehouse - Thank You, Jeeves

I WAS a shade perturbed. Nothing to signify, really, but still just a spot concerned. As I sat in the old flat, idly touching the strings of my banjolele, an instrument to which I had become greatly addicted of late, you couldn't have said that the brow was actually furrowed, and yet, on the other hand, you couldn't have stated absolutely that it wasn't. Perhaps the word " pensive " about covers it. It seemed to me that a situation fraught with embarrassing potentialities had arisen. "

Jeeves," I said, " do you know what ? " " No, sir." " Do you know whom I saw last night ? " " No, sir." " J. Washbum Stoker and his daughter, Pauline." " Indeed, sir ? " " They must be over here." " It would seem so, sir."

" Awkward, what ? " " I can conceive that after what occurred in New York it might be distressing for you to encounter Miss Stoker, sir. But I fancy the contingency need scarcely arise." I weighed this. " When you start talking about contingencies arising, Jeeves, the brain seems to flicker and I rather miss the gist. Do you mean that I ought to be able to keep out of her way ? " " Yes, sir." " Avoid her ? " " Yes, sir." I played five bars of " Old Man River " with something of abandon. His pronouncement had eased my mind. I followed his reasoning. After all, London's a large place. Quite simple not to run into people, if you don't want to. " It gave me rather a shock, though." " I can readily imagine so, sir." " Accentuated by the fact that they were accompanied by Sir Roderick Glossop." " Indeed, sir ? " " Yes. It was at the Savoy Grill. They were putting on the nosebag together at a table by the window. And here's rather a rummy thing, Jeeves. The fourth member of the party was Lord Chuffnell's aunt. Myrtle. What would she be doing in that gang ? " *' Possibly her ladyship is an acquaintance either of Mr. Stoker, Miss Stoker, or Sir Roderick, sir." " Yes, that may be so. Yes, that might account for it. But it surprised me, I confess." " Did you enter into conversation with them, sir ? " " Who, me ? No, Jeeves. I was out of the room like a streak. Apart from wishing to dodge the Stokers, can you see me wantonly and deliberately going and chatting with old Glossop ? " " Certainly he has never proved a very congenial companion in the past, sir." " If there is one man in the world I hope never to exchange speech with again, it is that old crumb."

" I forgot to mention, sir, that Sir Roderick called to see you this morning." " What! " " Yes, sir." " He called to see me ? " " Yes, sir."

" After what has passed between us ? " " Yes, sir." " Well, I'm dashed I " " Yes, sir. I informed him that you had not yet risen, and he said that he would return later." " He did, did he ? " I laughed. One of those sardonic ones. " Well, when he does, set the dog on him."

" We have no dog, sir." " Then step down to the flat below and borrow Mrs. Tinkler-Moulke's Pomeranian. Paying social calls after the way he behaved in New York I I never heard of such a thing. Did you ever hear of such a thing, Jeeves ? " " I confess that in the circumstances his advent occasioned me surprise, sir." " I should think it did. Good Lord I Good heavens! Good gosh I The man must have the crust of a rhinoceros." And when I have given you the inside story, I think you will agree with me that my heat was justified. Let me marshal my facts and go to it.

About three months before, noting a certain liveliness in my Aunt Agatha, I had deemed it prudent to pop across to New York for a space to give her time to blow over. And about half-way through my first week there, in the course of a beano of some description at the Sherry-Netherland, I made the acquaintance of Pauline Stoker. She got right in amongst me. Her beauty maddened me like wine. " Jeeves," I recollect saying, on returning to the apartment, " who was the fellow who on looking at something felt like somebody looking at something ? I learned the passage at school, but it has escaped me."

" I fancy the individual you have in mind, sir, is the poet Keats, who compared his emotions on first reading Chapman's Homer to those of stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific." " The Pacific, eh ? " " Yes, sir. And all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien."

" Of course. It all comes back to me. Well, that's how I felt this afternoon on being introduced to Miss Pauline Stoker. Press the trousers with special care to-night, Jeeves. I am dining with her." In New York, I have always found, one gets off the mark quickly in matters of the heart. This, I believe, is due to something in the air. Two weeks later I proposed to Pauline. She /j accepted me. So far, so good.

But mark the sequel. Scarcely forty-eight hours after that a monkey wrench was bunged into the machinery and the whole thing was off. The hand that flung that monkey wrench was the hand of Sir Roderick Glossop.

In these memoirs of mine, as you may recall, I have had occasion to make somewhat frequent mention of this old pot of poison. A bald- •I domed, bushy-browed blighter, ostensibly a nerve specialist, but in reality, as everybody knows, nothing more nor less than a high-priced loony-doctor, he has been cropping up

in my path for years, always with the most momentous results. And it so happened that he was in New York when the announcement of my engagement appeared in the / papers. What brought him there was one of his periodical visits to J. Washbum Stoker's second cousin, George. This George was a man who, after a lifetime of doing down the widow and orphan, had begun to feel the strain a bit. His conversation was odd, and he had a tendency to walk on his hands. He had been a patient of Sir Roderick's for some years, and it was the latter's practice to dash over to New York every once in a while to take a look at him. He arrived on the present occasion just in time to read over the morning coffee and egg the news that Bertram Wooster and Pauline Stoker were planning to do the Wedding Glide. And, as far as I can ascertain, he was at the telephone, ringing up the father of the bride-to-be, without so much as stopping to wipe his mouth. Well, what he told J. Washbum about me I cannot, of course, say: but, at a venture, I imagine, he informed him that I had once been engaged to his daughter, Honoria, and that he had broken off the match because he had decided that I was barmy to the core. He would have touched, no doubt, on the incident of the cats and the fish in my bedroom : possibly, also, on the episode of the stolen hat and my

habit of climbing down waterspouts: winding up, it may be, with a description of the unfortunateaffair of the punctured hot-water bottle at Lady Wickham's. A close friend of J. Washbum's and a man on whose judgment J. W. relied, I take it that he had little difficulty in persuading the latter that I was not the ideal son-in-law. At any rate, as I say, within a mere forty-eight hours of the holy moment I was notified that it would be unnecessary for me to order the new sponge-bag trousers and gardenia, because my nomination had been cancelled. And it was this man who was having the cool what's-the-word to come calling at the Wooster home. I mean, I ask you I I resolved to be pretty terse with him. I was still playing the banjolele when he arrived. Those who know Bertram Wooster best are aware that he is a man of sudden, strong enthusiasms and that, when in the grip of one of these, he becomes a remorseless machine-tense, absorbed, single-minded. It was so in the matter of this banjolele-playing of mine. Since the night at the Alhambra when the supreme virtuosity of Ben Bloom and his Sixteen Baltimore Buddies had fired me to take up the study of the instrument, not a day had passed without its couple of hours' assiduous practice.