Jeeves in the Offing

British fox. It sounded like a gas explosion and went through me from stem to stem. I’ve never hunted myself, but I understand that half the battle is being able to make noises like some jungle animal with dyspepsia, and I believe that Aunt Dahlia in her prime could lift fellow-members of the Quorn and Pytchley out of their saddles with a single yip, though separated from them by two ploughed fields and a spinney.
‘Hullo, ugly,’ she said. ‘Turned up again, have you?’
‘Just this moment breasted the tape.’
‘Been to Herne Bay, young Herring tells me.’
‘Yes, to fetch Jeeves. How’s Bonzo?’
‘Spotty but cheerful. What did you want Jeeves for?’
‘Well, as it turns out, his presence isn’t needed, but I only discovered that when I was half-way here. I was bringing him along to meditate … no, it isn’t meditate … to mediate, that’s the word, between Bobbie Wickham and Kipper. You knew they were betrothed?’
‘Yes, she told me.’
‘Did she tell you about shoving that thing in The Times saying she was engaged to me?’
‘I was the first in whom she confided. I got a good laugh out of that.’
‘More than Kipper did, because it hadn’t occurred to the cloth- headed young nitwit to confide in him. When he read the announcement, he reeled and everything went black. It knocked his faith in woman for a loop, and after seething for a while he sat down and wrote her a letter in the Thomas Otway vein.’
‘In the who’s vein?’
‘You are not familiar with Thomas Otway? Seventeenth-century dramatist, celebrated for making bitter cracks about the other sex. Wrote a play called The Orphan, which is full of them.’
‘So you do read something beside the comics?’
‘Well, actually I haven’t steeped myself to any great extent in Thos’s output, but Kipper told me about him. He held the view that women are a mess, and Kipper passed this information on to Bobbie in this letter of which I speak. It was a snorter.’
‘And you never thought of explaining to him, I suppose?’
‘Of course I did. But by that time she’d got the letter.’
‘Why didn’t the idiot tell her not to open it?’
‘It was his first move. “I’ve found a letter from you here, precious,” she said. “On no account open it, angel,” he said. So of course she opened it.’
She pursed the lips, nodded the loaf, and ate a moody piece of crumpet.
‘So that’s why he’s been going about looking like a dead fish. I suppose Roberta broke the engagement?’
‘In a speech lasting five minutes without a pause for breath.’
‘And you brought Jeeves along to mediate?’
‘That was the idea.’
‘But if things have gone as far as that…’
‘You doubt whether even Jeeves can heal the rift?’ I patted her on the top knot. ‘Dry the starting tear, old ancestor, it’s healed. I met her at a pub on the way here, and she told me that almost immediately after she had flipped her lid in the manner described she had a change of heart. She loves him still with a passion that’s more like boiling oil than anything, and when we parted she was tooling off to tell him so. By this time they must be like ham and eggs again. It’s a great burden off my mind, because, having parted brass rags with Kipper, she announced her intention of marrying me.’
‘A bit of luck for you, I should have thought.’
‘Far from it.’
‘Why? You were crazy about the girl once.’ ‘But no longer. The fever has passed, the scales have fallen from my eyes, and we’re just good friends. The snag in this business of falling in love, aged relative, is that the parties of the first part so often get mixed up with the wrong parties of the second part, robbed of their cooler judgment by the parties of the second part’s glamour. Put it like this. The male sex is divided into rabbits and non-rabbits and the female sex into dashers and dormice, and the trouble is that the male rabbit has a way of getting attracted by the female dasher (who would be fine for the male non-rabbit) and realizing too late that he ought to have been concentrating on some mild, gentle dormouse with whom he could settle down peacefully and nibble lettuce.’
‘The whole thing, in short, a bit of a mix-up?’ ‘Exactly. Take me and Bobbie. I yield to no one in my appreciation of her espieglerie, but I’m one of the rabbits and always have been while she is about as pronounced a dasher as ever dashed. What I like is the quiet life, and Roberta Wickham wouldn’t