Jeeves in the Offing

from the lowest bin, Aunt Dahlia would have none of it. In lieu of the desired refreshment she offered him a cold crumpet, which he declined, and told him to get on with it.
‘Where I went wrong,’ he said, still speaking in that low, husky voice as if he had been a ghost suffering from catarrh, ‘was in getting engaged to Phyllis Mills.’
‘What?’ I cried.
‘What?’ cried Aunt Dahlia.
‘Egad!’ I said.
‘What on earth did you do that for?’ said Aunt Dahlia.
He shifted uneasily in his chair, like a man troubled with ants in the pants. ‘It seemed a good idea at the time,’ he said. ‘Bobbie had told me on the telephone that she never wanted to speak to me again in this world or the next, and Phyllis had been telling me that, while she shrank from Wilbert Cream because of his murky past, she found him so magnetic that she knew she wouldn’t be able to refuse him if he proposed, and I had been commissioned to stop him proposing, so I thought the simplest thing to do was to get engaged to her myself. So we talked it over, and having reached a thorough understanding that it was simply a ruse and nothing binding on either side, we announced it to Cream.’
‘Very shrewd,’ said Aunt Dahlia. ‘How did he take it?’
‘He reeled.’
‘Lot of reeling there’s been in this business,’ I said. ‘You reeled, if you recollect, when you remembered you’d written that letter to Bobbie.’
‘And I reeled again when she suddenly appeared from nowhere just as I was kissing Phyllis.’
I pursed the lips. Getting a bit French, this sequence, it seemed to me.
‘There was no need for you to do that.’
‘No need, perhaps, but I wanted to make it look natural to Cream.’
‘Oh, I see. Driving it home, as it were?’
‘That was the idea. Of course I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known that Bobbie had changed her mind and wanted things to be as they were before that telephone conversation. But I didn’t know. It’s just one of life’s little ironies. You get the same sort of thing in Thomas Hardy.’
I knew nothing of this T. Hardy of whom he spoke, but I saw what he meant. It was like what’s always happening in the novels of suspense, where the girl goes around saying, ‘Had I but known.’
‘Didn’t you explain?’
He gave me a pitying look.
‘Have you ever tried explaining something to a red-haired girl who’s madder than a wet hen?’
I took his point.
‘What happened then?’
‘Oh, she was very lady-like. Talked amiably of this and that till Phyllis had left us. Then she started in. She said she had raced here with a heart overflowing with love, longing to be in my arms, and a jolly surprise it was to find those arms squeezing the stuffing out of another and … Oh, well, a lot more along those lines. The trouble is, she’s always been a bit squiggle-eyed about Phyllis, because in Switzerland she held the view that we were a shade too matey. Nothing in it, of course.’
‘Just good friends?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, if you want to know what I think,’ said Aunt Dahlia.
But we never did get around to knowing what she thought, for at this moment Phyllis came in.

13
Giving the wench the once-over as she entered, I found myself well able to understand why Bobbie on observing her entangled with Kipper had exploded with so loud a report. I’m not myself, of course, an idealistic girl in love with a member of the staff of the Thursday Review and never have been, but if I were I know I’d get the megrims somewhat severely if I caught him in a clinch with anyone as personable as this stepdaughter of Aubrey Upjohn, for though shaky on the IQ, physically she was a pipterino of the first water. Her eyes were considerably bluer than the skies above, she was wearing a simple summer dress which accentuated rather than hid the graceful outlines of her figure, if you know what I mean, and it was not surprising that Wilbert Cream, seeing her, should have lost no time in reaching for the book of poetry and making a bee line with her to the nearest leafy glade.
‘Oh, Mrs Travers,’ she said, spotting Aunt Dahlia, ‘I’ve just been talking to Daddy on the telephone.’
This took the old ancestor’s mind right off the tangled affairs of the Kipper-Bobbie axis, to which a moment before she had been according her best attention, and I didn’t wonder. With the prize-giving at Market Snodsbury Grammar School, a function at which all that was bravest and fairest in the neighbourhood would be present,