Jeeves in the Offing

you think of something worse?’ he said, with the air of one always open to suggestions. ‘Do you know Thomas Otway?’
‘I don’t believe so. Pal of yours?’
‘Seventeenth-century dramatist. Wrote The Orphan. In which play these words occur. “What mighty ills have not been done by Woman? Who was’t betrayed the Capitol? A woman. Who lost Marc Antony the world? A woman. Who was the cause of a long ten years’ war and laid at last old Troy in ashes? Woman. Deceitful, damnable, destructive Woman.” Otway knew what he was talking about He had the right slant. He couldn’t have put it better if he had known Roberta Wickham personally.’
I smiled another subtle smile. I was finding all this extremely diverting.
‘I don’t know if it’s my imagination, Kipper,’ I said, ‘but something gives me the impression that at moment of going to press you aren’t too sold on Bobbie.’
He shrugged a shoulder.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Apart from wishing I could throttle the young twister with my bare hands and jump on the remains with hobnailed boots, I don’t feel much about her one way or the other. She prefers you to me, and there’s nothing more to be said. The great thing is that everything is all right between you and me.’
‘You came all the way here just to make sure of that?’ I said, moved.
‘Well, there may possibly also have been an idea at the back of my mind that I might get invited to dig in at one of those dinners of Anatole’s before going on to book a room at the “Bull and Bush” in Market Snodsbury. How is Anatole’s cooking these days?’
‘Superber than ever.’
‘Continues to melt in the mouth, does it? It’s two years since I bit into his products, but the taste still lingers. What an artist!’
‘Ah!’ I said, and would have bared my head, only I hadn’t a hat on.
‘Would it run to a dinner invitation, do you think?’
‘My dear chap, of course. The needy are never turned from our door.’
‘Splendid. And after the meal I shall propose to Phyllis Mills.’
‘What!’
‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking. She is closely related to Aubrey Upjohn, you are saying to yourself. But surely, Bertie, she can’t help that.’
‘More to be pitied than censured, you think?’
‘Exactly. We mustn’t be narrow-minded. She is a sweet, gentle girl, unlike certain scarlet-headed Delilahs who shall be nameless, and I am very fond of her.’
‘I thought you scarcely knew her.’
‘Oh yes, we saw quite a bit of one another in Switzerland. We’re great buddies.’
It seemed to me that the moment had come to bring the good news from Aix to Ghent, as the expression is.
‘I don’t know that I would propose to Phyllis Mills, Kipper. Bobbie might not like it.’
‘But that’s the whole idea, to show her she isn’t the only onion in the stew and that if she doesn’t want me, there are others who feel differently. What are you grinning about?’
As a matter of fact, I was smiling subtly, but I let it go.
‘Kipper,’ I said, ‘I have an amazing story to relate.’
I don’t know if you happen to take Old Doctor Gordon’s Bile Magnesia, which when the liver is disordered gives instant relief, acting like magic and imparting an inward glow? I don’t myself, my personal liver being always more or less in mid-season form, but I’ve seen the advertisements. They show the sufferer before and after taking, in the first case with drawn face and hollow eyes and the general look of one shortly about to hand in his dinner pail, in the second all beans and buck and what the French call bien etre. Well, what I’m driving at is that my amazing story had exactly the same effect on Kipper as the daily dose for adults … He moved, he stirred, he seemed to feel the rush of life along his keel, and while I don’t suppose he actually put on several pounds in weight as the tale proceeded, one got the distinct illusion that he was swelling like one of those rubber ducks which you fill with air before inserting them in the bath tub.
‘Well, I’ll be blowed!’ he said, when I had placed the facts before him. ‘Well, I’ll be a son of a what not!’
‘I thought you would be.’
‘Bless her ingenious little heart! Not many girls would have got the grey matter working like that.’
‘Very few.’
‘What a helpmeet! Talk about service and co-operation. Have you any idea how the thing is working out?’
‘Rather smoothly, I think. On reading the announcement in The Times, Wickham senior had