Jeeves in the Offing

which event, bim would go Uncle Tom’s chance of scooping in a bit of easy money. And ever since I’ve known him failure to get his hooks on any stray cash that’s floating around has always put him out of touch with the blue bird. It isn’t that he’s mercenary. It’s just that he loves the stuff.
Her manner suggested that she was glad I had asked her that.
‘I’ll tell you what makes me think it. He betrays his amateurishness in a hundred ways. This very morning I found him having a long conversation with Wilbert. A real butler would never do that. He would feel it was a liberty.’
I contested this statement.
‘Now there,’ I said, ‘I take issue with you, if taking issue means what I think it means. Many of my happiest hours have been passed chatting with butlers, and it has nearly always happened that it was they who made the first advances. They seek me out and tell me about their rheumatism. Swordfish looks all right to me.’
‘You are not a student of criminology, as I am. I have the trained eye, and my judgment is never wrong. That man is here for no good.’
I could see that all this was making Bobbie chafe, but her better self prevailed and she checked the heated retort. She is very fond of T. Portarlington Travers, who, she tells me, is the living image of a wire-haired terrier now residing with the morning stars but at one time very dear to her, and she remembered that for his sake the Cream had to be deferred to and handled with gloves. When she spoke, it was with the mildness of a cushat dove addressing another cushat dove from whom it was hoping to borrow money.
‘But don’t you think, Mrs Cream, that it may be just your imagination? You have such a wonderful imagination. Bertie was saying only the other day that he didn’t know how you did it. Write all those frightfully imaginative books, I mean. Weren’t you, Bertie?’
‘My very words.’
‘And if you have an imagination, you can’t help imagining. Can you, Bertie?’
‘Dashed difficult.’
Her honeyed words were wasted. The Cream continued to dig her toes in like Balaam’s ass, of whom you have doubtless heard.
‘I’m not imagining that that butler is up to something fishy,’ she said tartly. ‘And I should have thought it was pretty obvious what that something was. You seem to have forgotten that Mr Travers has one of the finest collections of old silver in England.’
This was correct. Owing possibly to some flaw in his mental make-up, Uncle Tom has been collecting old silver since I was so high, and I suppose the contents of the room on the ground floor where he parks the stuff are worth a princely sum. I knew all about that collection of his, not only because I had had to listen to him for hours on the subject of sconces, foliation, ribbon wreaths in high relief and gadroon borders, but because I had what you might call a personal interest in it, once having stolen an eighteenth-century cow-creamer for him. (Long story. No time to go into it now. You will find it elsewhere in the archives.)
‘Mrs Travers was showing it to Willie the other day, and he was thrilled. Willie collects old silver himself.’
With each hour that passed I was finding it more and more difficult to get a toe-hold on the character of W. Cream. An in-and-out performer, if ever there was one. First all that poetry, I mean, and now this. I had always supposed that playboys didn’t give a hoot for anything except blondes and cold bottles. It just showed once again that half the world doesn’t know how the other three-quarters lives.
‘He says there are any number of things in Mr Travers’s collection that he would give his back teeth for. There was an eighteenth-century cow-creamer he particularly coveted. So keep your eye on that butler. I’m certainly going to keep mine. Well,’ said the Cream, rising, ‘I must be getting back to my work. I always like to rough out a new chapter before finishing for the day.’
She legged it, and for a moment silence reigned. Then Bobbie said, ‘Phew!’ and I agreed that ‘Phew!’ was the mot juste.
‘We’d better get Glossop out of here quick,’ I said.
‘How can we? It’s up to your aunt to do that, and she’s away.’
‘Then I’m jolly well going to get out myself. There’s too much impending doom buzzing around these parts for my taste. Brinkley Court, once a peaceful country-house, has become like something sinister out of Edgar Allan Poe, and it makes my feet cold. I’m