Jeeves in the Offing

recognize the quiet life if you brought it to her on a plate with watercress round it. She’s all for not letting the sun go down without having started something calculated to stagger humanity. In a word, she needs the guiding hand, which is a thing I couldn’t supply her with. Whereas from Kipper she will get it in abundance, he being one of those tough non-rabbits for whom it is child’s play to make the little woman draw the line somewhere. That is why the union of these twain has my support and approval and why, when she told me all that in the pub, I felt like doing a buck-and-wing dance. Where is Kipper? I should like to shake him by the hand and pat his back.’
‘He went on a picnic with Wilbert and Phyllis.’
The significance of this did not escape me.
‘Tailing up stuff, eh? Right on the job, is he?’
‘Wilbert is constantly under his eye.’
‘And if ever a man needed to be constantly under an eye, it’s the above kleptomaniac.’
‘The what?’
‘Haven’t you been told? Wilbert’s a pincher.’
‘How do you mean, a pincher?’
‘He pinches things. Everything that isn’t nailed down is grist to his mill.’
‘Don’t be an ass.’
‘I’m not being an ass. He’s got Uncle Tom’s cow-creamer.’
‘I know.’
‘You know?’
‘Of course I know.’
Her … what’s the word? … phlegm, is it? … something beginning with a p… astounded me. I had expected to freeze her young - or, rather, middle-aged -blood and have her perm stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine, and she hadn’t moved a muscle.
‘Beshrew me,’ I said, ‘you take it pretty calmly.’
‘Well, what’s there to get excited about? Tom sold him the thing.’
‘What?’
‘Wilbert got in touch with him at Harrogate and put in his bid, and Tom phoned me to give it to him. Just shows how important that deal must be to Tom. I’d have thought he would rather have parted with his eyeteeth.’
I drew a deep breath, this time fortunately unmixed with gin and tonic. I was profoundly stirred.
‘You mean,’ said, my voice quavering like that of a coloratura soprano, ‘that I went through that soul-shattering experience all for nothing?’
‘Who’s been shattering your soul, if any?’
‘Ma Cream. By popping in while I was searching Wilbert’s room for the loathsome object. Naturally I thought he’d swiped it and hidden it there.’
‘And she caught you?’
‘Not once, but twice.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She recommended me to take treatment from Roddy Glossop, of whose skill in ministering to the mentally afflicted she had heard such good reports. One sees what gave her the idea. I was half-way under the dressing-table at the moment, and no doubt she thought it odd.’
‘Bertie! How absolutely priceless!’
The adjective ‘priceless’ seemed to me an ill-chosen one, and I said so. But my words were lost in the gale of mirth into which she now exploded. I had never heard anyone laugh so heartily, not even Bobbie on the occasion when the rake jumped up and hit me on the tip of the nose.
‘I’d have given fifty quid to have been there,’ she said, when she was able to get the vocal cords working. ‘Half-way under the dressing- table, were you?’ ‘The second time. When we first forgathered, I was sitting on the floor with a chair round my neck.’
‘Like an Elizabethan ruff, as worn by Thomas Botway.’
‘Otway,’ I said stiffly. As I have mentioned, I like to get things right. And I was about to tell her that what I had hoped for from a blood relation was sympathy and condolence rather than this crackling of thorns under a pot, as it is sometimes called, when the door opened and Bobbie came in.
The moment I cast an eye on her, it seemed to me that there was something strange about her aspect. Normally, this beasel presents to the world the appearance of one who is feeling that if it isn’t the best of all possible worlds, it’s quite good enough to be going on with till a better one comes along. Verve, I mean, and animation and all that sort of thing. But now there was a listlessness about her, not the listlessness of the cat Augustus but more that of the female in the picture in the Louvre, of whom Jeeves, on the occasion when he lugged me there to take a dekko at her, said that here was the head upon which all the ends of the world are come. He drew my attention, I remember, to the weariness of the eyelids. I got just the same impression of weariness from Bobbie’s