Jeeves in the Offing

another hand over my f.b.
‘Now you seem to be saying “Softening up Mother on his behalf.”’
‘That’s what I am saying. It’s perfectly simple. I’ll put it in words of one syllable for you. I love Reggie. Reggie loves me.’
‘Reggie,’ of course, is two syllables, but I let it go.
‘Reggie who?’
‘Reggie Herring.’
I was amazed.
‘You mean old Kipper?’
‘I wish you wouldn’t call him Kipper.’
‘I always have. Dash it,’ I said with some warmth, ‘if a fellow shows up at a private school on the south coast of England with a name like Herring, what else do you expect his playmates to call him? But how do you mean you love him and he loves you? You’ve never met him.’
‘Of course I’ve met him. We were in the same hotel in Switzerland last Christmas. I taught him to ski,’ she said, a dreamy look coming into her twin starlikes. ‘I shall never forget the day I helped him unscramble himself after he had taken a toss on the beginners’ slope. He had both legs wrapped round his neck. I think that is when love dawned. My heart melted as I sorted him out.’
‘You didn’t laugh?’
‘Of course I didn’t laugh. I was all sympathy and understanding.’
For the first time the thing began to seem plausible to me. Bobbie is a fun-loving girl, and the memory of her reaction when in the garden at Skeldings I had once stepped on the teeth of a rake and had the handle jump up and hit me on the tip of the nose was still laid away among my souvenirs. She had been convulsed with mirth. If, then, she had refrained from guffawing when confronted with the spectacle of Reginald Herring with both legs wrapped round his neck, her emotions must have been very deeply involved.
‘Well, all right,’ I said. ‘I accept your statement that you and Kipper are that way. But why, that being so, did you blazon it forth to the world, if blazoning forth is the expression I want, that you were engaged to me?’
‘I told you. It was to soften Mother up.’
‘Which sounded to me like delirium straight from the sick bed.’
‘You don’t get the subtle strategy?’
‘Not by several parasangs.’
‘Well, you know how you stand with Mother.’
‘Our relations are a bit distant.’
‘She shudders at the mention of your name. So I thought if she thought I was going to marry you and then found I wasn’t, she’d be so thankful for the merciful escape I’d had that she’d be ready to accept anyone as a son-in-law, even someone like Reggie, who, though a wonder man, hasn’t got his name in Debrett and isn’t any too hot financially. Mother’s idea of a mate for me has always been a well-to-do millionaire or a Duke with a large private income. Now do you follow?’
‘Oh yes, I follow all right. You’ve been doing what Jeeves does, studying the psychology of the individual. But do you think it’ll work?’
‘Bound to. Let’s take a parallel case. Suppose your Aunt Dahlia read in the paper one morning that you were going to be shot at sunrise.’
‘I couldn’t be. I’m never up so early.’
‘But suppose she did? She’d be pretty worked up about it, wouldn’t she?’
‘Extremely, one imagines, for she loves me dearly. I’m not saying her manner toward me doesn’t verge at times on the brusque. In childhood days she would occasionally clump me on the side of the head, and since I have grown to riper years she has more than once begged me to tie a brick around my neck and go and drown myself in the pond in the kitchen garden. Nevertheless, she loves her Bertram, and if she heard I was to be shot at sunrise, she would, as you say, be as sore as a gum-boil. But why? What’s that got to do with it?’
‘Well, suppose she then found out it was all a mistake and it wasn’t you but somebody else who was to face the firing squad. That would make her happy, wouldn’t it?’
‘One can picture her dancing all over the place on the tips of her toes.’
‘Exactly. She’d be so all over you that nothing you did would be wrong in her eyes. Whatever you wanted to do would be all right with her. Go to it, she would say. And that’s how Mother will feel when she learns that I’m not marrying you after all. She’ll be so relieved.’
I agreed that the relief would, of course, be stupendous.
‘But you’ll be giving her the inside facts in a day or two?’ I said, for I was anxious to have assurance on this point. A man with an Engagement notice in The Times hanging over him cannot but feel uneasy.
‘Well,