Much Obliged, Jeeves

day in what is known as the quiet evenfall. I remember Jeeves saying something to me once about the heavy and the weary weight of this unintelligible world… not his own, I gathered, but from the works of somebody called Wordsworth, if I caught the name correctly… and it seemed to me rather a good way of describing the depressing feeling you get when the soup is about to close over you and no life-belt in sight. I was conscious of this heavy and weary weight some years ago, that time when my cousins Eustace and Claude without notifying me inserted twenty-three cats in my bedroom, and I had it again, in spades, at the present juncture.
    Consider the facts. I had gone up to London to wrestle in solitude with the following problems:
    (a) How am I to get out of marrying Madeline Bassett?
    (b) How am I to restore the porringer to L. P. Runkle before the constabulary come piling on the back of my neck?
    (c) How is the ancestor to extract that money from Runkle?
    (d) How is Ginger to marry Magnolia Glendennon while betrothed to Florence?
    and I was returning with all four still in status quo.
    For a night and day I had been giving them the cream of the Wooster brain, and for all I had accomplished I might have been the aged relative trying to solve the Observer crossword puzzle. Arriving at journey’s end, I steered the car into the drive. About half way along it there was a tricky right-hand turn, and I had slowed down to negotiate this, when a dim figure appeared before me, a voice said ‘Hoy!’, and I saw that it was Ginger.
    He seemed annoyed about something. His ‘Hoy I ‘ had had a note of reproach in it, as far as it is possible to get the note of reproach into a ‘Hoyl ‘, and as he drew near and shoved his torso through the window I received the distinct impression that he was displeased.
    His opening words confirmed this.
    ‘Bertie, you abysmal louse, what’s kept you all this time? When I lent you my car, I didn’t expect you’d come back at two o’clock in the morning.’
    ‘It’s only half past seven.’ He seemed amazed. ‘Is that all? I thought it was later. So much has been happening.
    ‘ ‘What has been happening?’
    ‘No time to tell you now. I’m in a hurry.’
    It was at this point that I noticed something in his appearance which I had overlooked. A trifle, but I’m rather observant.
    ‘You’ve got egg in your hair,’ I said.
    ‘Of course I’ve got egg in my hair,’ he said, his manner betraying impatience. ‘What did you expect me to have in my hair, Chanel Number Five?’
    ‘Did somebody throw an egg at you?’
    ‘Everybody threw eggs at everybody. Correction. Some of them threw turnips and potatoes.’
    ‘You mean the meeting broke up in disorder, as the expression is?’
    ‘I don’t suppose any meeting in the history of English politics has ever broken up in more disorder. Eggs flew hither and thither. The air was dark with vegetables of every description. Sidcup got a black eye. Somebody plugged him with a potato.’
    I found myself in two minds. On the one hand I felt a pang of regret for having missed what had all the earmarks of having been a political meeting of the most rewarding kind: on the other, it was like rare and refreshing fruit to hear that Spode had got hit in the eye with a potato. I was conscious of an awed respect for the marksman who had accomplished this feat. A potato, being so nobbly in shape, can be aimed accurately only by a master hand.
    ‘Tell me more,’ I said, well pleased.
    ‘Tell you more be blowed. I’ve got to get up to London. We want to be there bright and early tomorrow in order to inspect registrars and choose the best one.’
    This didn’t sound like Florence, who, if she ever gets through an engagement without breaking it, is sure to insist on a wedding with bishops, bridesmaids, full choral effects, and a reception afterwards. A sudden thought struck me, and I think I may have gasped. Somebody made a noise like a dying soda-water syphon and it was presumably me.
    ‘When you say “we”, do you mean you and M. Glendennon?’
    ‘Who else?’
    ‘But how?’
    ‘Never mind how.’
    ‘But I do mind how. You were Problem (d) on my list, and I want to know how you have been solved. I gather that Florence has remitted your sentence -‘
    ‘She has, in words of unmistakeable clarity. Get out of that car.’
    ‘But why?’
    ‘Because if you aren’t out of it in two seconds, I’m going to pull you out.’
    ‘I mean why