Much Obliged, Jeeves

into about the wrongest hands it could have fallen into. I haven’t the heart to say “I told you so” and watch him writhe with shame and confusion. You see, up till now Jeeves has always been right. His agony on finding that he has at last made a floater will be frightful. I shouldn’t wonder if he might not swoon. I can’t face him. You’ll have to tell him.’
    ‘Yes, I’ll do it.’
    ‘Try to break it gently.’
    ‘I will. When you were listening outside, did you get this man Bingley’s address? ‘
    ‘I got it.’
    ‘Then off you go.’
    So off I went.

CHAPTER Eleven

    Considering how shaky was his moral outlook and how marked his tendency to weave low plots at the drop of a hat, you would have expected Bingley’s headquarters to have been one of those sinister underground dens lit by stumps of candles stuck in the mouths of empty beer bottles such as abound, I believe, in places like Whitechapel and Limehouse. But no. Number 5 Ormond Crescent turned out to be quite an expensive looking joint with a nice little bit of garden in front of it well supplied with geraniums, bird baths and terracotta gnomes, the sort of establishment that might have belonged to a blameless retired Colonel or a saintly stockbroker. Evidently his late uncle hadn’t been just an ordinary small town grocer, weighing out potted meats and raisins to a public that had to watch the pennies, but something on a much more impressive scale. I learned later that he had owned a chain of shops, one of them as far afield as Birmingham, and why the ass had gone and left his money to a chap like Bingley is more than I can tell you, though the probability is that Bingley, before bumping him off with some little-known Asiatic poison, had taken the precaution of forging the will.
    On the threshold I paused. I remember in my early days at the private school where I won my Scripture Knowledge prize, Arnold Abney M.A., the headmaster, would sometimes announce that he wished to see Wooster in his study after morning prayers, and I always halted at the study door, a prey to uneasiness and apprehension, not liking the shape of things to come. It was much the same now. I shrank from the impending interview. But whereas in the case of A. Abney my disinclination to get things moving had been due to the fear that the proceedings were going to lead up to six of the best from a cane that stung like an adder, with Bingley it was a natural reluctance to ask a favour of a fellow I couldn’t stand the sight of. I wouldn’t say the Woosters were particularly proud, but we do rather jib at having to grovel to the scum of the earth.
    However, it had to be done, and, as I heard Jeeves say once, if it were done, then ‘twere well ‘twere done quickly. Stiffening the sinews and summoning up the blood, to quote another of his gags, I pressed the bell.
    If I had any doubts as to Bingley now being in the chips, the sight of the butler who opened the door would have dispelled them. In assembling his domestic staff, Bingley had done himself proud, sparing no expense. I don’t say his butler was quite in the class of Jeeves’s Uncle Charlie Silversmith, but he came so near it that the breath was taken. And like Uncle Charlie he believed in pomp and ceremony when buttling. I asked him if I could see Mr. Bingley, and he said coldly that the master was not receiving.
    ‘I think he’ll see me. I’m an old friend of his.’
    ‘I will enquire. Your name, sir?’
    ‘Mr. Wooster.’
    He pushed off, to return some moments later to say that Mr. Bingley would be glad if I would join him in the library. Speaking in what seemed to me a disapproving voice, as though to suggest that, while he was compelled to carry out the master’s orders however eccentric, he would never had admitted a chap like me if it had been left to him.
    ‘If you would step this way, sir,’ he said haughtily. What with one thing and another I had rather got out of touch lately with that If-you-would-step-this-way-sir stuff, and it was in a somewhat rattled frame of mind that I entered the library and found Bingley in an arm chair with his feet up on an occasional table. He greeted me cordially enough, but with that touch of the patronizing so noticeable at our two previous meetings.
    ‘Ah, Wooster, my dear fellow, come in. I told Bastable to tell everyone I was not at home, but of course you’re different. Always glad to see an old pal. And what can I do for you, Wooster?’
    I had to say