Jeeves in the Offing

abuse him roundly. And when he’s quailing beneath your scorn and wishing some friend in need would intervene and save him from this terrible ordeal, I come in, having heard all. Bobbie suggests that I knock you down, but I don’t think I could do that. The recollection of our ancient friendship would make me pull my punch. I shall simply rebuke you. “Wooster,” I shall say, “I am shocked. Shocked and astounded. I cannot understand how you can talk like that to a man I have always respected and looked up to, a man in whose preparatory school I spent the happiest years of my life. You strangely forget yourself, Wooster.” Upon which, you slink out, bathed in shame and confusion, and Upjohn thanks me brokenly and says if there is anything he can do for me, I have only to name it.’
‘I still think you ought to knock him down.’
‘Having endeared myself to him thus -‘
‘Much more box-office.’
‘Having endeared myself to him thus, I lead the conversation round to the libel suit.’
‘One good punch in the eye would do it.’
‘I say that I have seen the current issue of the Thursday Review, and I can quite understand him wanting to mulct the journal in substantial damages, but “Don’t forget, Mr Upjohn,” I say, “that when a weekly paper loses a chunk of money, it has to retrench, and the way it retrenches is by getting rid of the more junior members of its staff. You wouldn’t want me to lose my job, would you, Mr Upjohn?” He starts. “Are you on the staff of the Thursday Review?” he says. “For the time being, yes,” I say. “But if you bring that suit, I shall be selling pencils in the street.” This is the crucial moment. Looking into his eyes, I can see that he is thinking of that five thousand quid, and for an instant quite naturally he hesitates. Then his better self prevails. His eyes soften. They fill with tears. He clasps my hand. He tells me he could use five thousand quid as well as the next man, but no money in the world would make him dream of doing an injury to the fellow who championed him so stoutly against the louse Wooster, and the scene ends with our going off together to Swordfish’s pantry for a drop of port, probably with our arms round each other’s waists, and that night he writes a letter to his lawyer telling him to call the suit off. Any questions?’
‘Not from me. It isn’t as if he could find out that it was you who wrote that review. It wasn’t signed.’
‘No, thank heaven for the editorial austerity that prevented that.’
‘I can’t see a flaw in the scenario. He’ll have to withdraw the suit.’
‘In common decency, one would think. The only thing that remains is to choose a time and place for Bertie to operate.’
‘No time like the present.’
‘But how do we locate Upjohn?’
‘He’s in Mr Travers’s study. I saw him through the french window.’
‘Excellent. Then, Bertie, if you’re ready…’
It will probably have been noticed that during these exchanges I had taken no part in the conversation. This was because I was fully occupied with envisaging the horror that lay before me. I knew that it did lie before me, of course, for where the ordinary man would have met the suggestion they had made with a firm nolle prosequi, I was barred from doing this by the code of the Woosters, which, as is pretty generally known, renders it impossible for me to let a pal down. If the only way of saving a boyhood friend from having to sell pencils in the street - though I should have thought that blood oranges would have been a far more lucrative line - was by wagging my finger in the face of Aubrey Upjohn and calling him names, that finger would have to be wagged and those names called. The ordeal would whiten my hair from the roots up and leave me a mere shell of my former self, but it was one that I must go through. Mine not to reason why, as the fellow said.
So I uttered a rather husky ‘Right-ho’ and tried not to think of how the Upjohn face looked without its moustache. For what chilled the feet most was the mental picture of that bare upper lip which he had so often twitched at me in what are called days of yore. Dimly, as we started off for the arena, I could hear Bobbie saying ‘My hero!’ and Kipper asking anxiously if I was in good voice, but it would have taken a fat lot more than my-hero-ing and solicitude about my vocal cords to restore tone to Bertram’s nervous system. I was, in short, feeling like an inexperienced novice