Jeeves in the Offing

eyelids.
Unparting her lips which were set in a thin line as if she had just been taking a suck at a lemon, she said:
‘I came to get that book of Mrs Cream’s that I was reading, Mrs Travers.’
‘Help yourself, child,’ said the ancestor. ‘The more people in this joint reading her stuff, the better. It all goes to help the composition.’
‘So you got here all right, Bobbie,’ I said. ‘Have you seen Kipper?’
I wouldn’t say she snorted, but she certainly sniffed.
‘Bertie,’ she said in a voice straight from the frigidaire, ‘will you do me a favour?’
‘Of course. What?’
‘Don’t mention that rat’s name in my presence,’ she said, and pushed off, the eyelids still weary.
She left me fogged and groping for the inner meaning, and I could see from Aunt Dahlia’s goggling eyes that the basic idea hadn’t got across with her either. ‘Well!’ she said. ‘What’s all this? I thought you told me she loved young Herring with a passion like boiling oil.’
‘That was her story.’
‘The oil seems to have gone off the boil. Yes, sir, if that was the language of love, I’ll eat my hat,’ said the blood relation, alluding, I took it, to the beastly straw contraption in which she does her gardening, concerning which I can only say that it is almost as foul as Uncle Tom’s Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, which has frightened more crows than any other lid in Worcestershire. ‘They must have had a fight.’
‘It does look like it,’ I agreed, ‘and I don’t understand how it can have happened considering that she left me with the love light in her eyes and can’t have been back here more than about half an hour. What, one asks oneself, in so short a time can have changed a girl full of love and ginger ale into a girl who speaks of the adored object as “that rat” and doesn’t want to hear his name mentioned? These are deep waters. Should I send for Jeeves?’
‘What on earth can Jeeves do?’
‘Well, now you put it that way, I’m bound to admit that I don’t know. It’s just that one drops into the habit of sending for Jeeves whenever things have gone agley, if that’s the word I’m thinking of. Scotch, isn’t it? Agley, I mean. It sounds Scotch to me. However, passing lightly over that, the thing to do when you want the low-down is to go to the fountainhead and get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Kipper can solve this mystery. I’ll pop along and find him.’
I was, however, spared the trouble of popping, for at this moment he entered left centre.
‘Oh, there you are, Bertie,’ he said. ‘I heard you were back. I was looking for you.’
He had spoken in a low, husky sort of way, like a voice from the tomb, and I now saw that he was exhibiting all the earmarks of a man who has recently had a bomb explode in his vicinity. His shoulders sagged and his eyes were glassy. He looked, in short, like the fellow who hadn’t started to take Old Doctor Gordon’s Bile Magnesia, and I snapped into it without preamble. This was no time for being tactful and pretending not to notice.
‘What’s all this strained-relations stuff between you and Bobbie, Kipper?’ I said, and when he said, ‘Oh, nothing,’ rapped the table sharply and told him to cut out the coy stuff and come clean.
‘Yes,’ said Aunt Dahlia. ‘What’s happened, young Herring?’
I think for a moment he was about to draw himself up with hauteur and say he would prefer, if we didn’t mind, not to discuss his private affairs, but when he was half-way up he caught Aunt Dahlia’s eye and returned to position one. Aunt Dahlia’s eye, while not in the same class as that of my Aunt Agatha, who is known to devour her young and conduct human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, has lots of authority. He subsided into a chair and sat there looking filleted.
‘Well, if you must know,’ he said, ‘she’s broken the engagement.’
This didn’t get us any farther. We had assumed as much. You don’t go calling people rats if love still lingers.
‘But it’s only an hour or so,’ I said, ‘since I left her outside a hostelry called the “Fox and Goose”, and she had just been giving you a rave notice. What came unstuck? What did you do to the girl?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘Come, come!’
‘Well, it was this way.’
There was a pause here while he said that he would give a hundred quid for a stiff whisky-and-soda, but as this would have involved all the delay of ringing for Pop Glossop and having it fetched