Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

hours, but plunge the world in darkness, switch on the soft lights, uncork the champagne and shove a dinner into him, and you’d be surprised.’
    But if I am to sparkle and charm all and sundry, I make one provision - viz. that the company be congenial. And anything less congenial than the Co. on this occasion I have seldom encountered. Sir Watkyn Bassett, who was plainly still much shaken at finding me on the premises, was very far from being the jolly old Squire who makes the party go from the start. Beyond shooting glances at me over his glasses, blinking as if he couldn’t bring himself to believe I was real and looking away with a quick shudder, he contributed little or nothing to what I have heard Jeeves call the feast of reason and the flow of soul. Add Spode, strong and silent, Madeline Bassett, mournful and drooping, Gussie, also apparently mournful, and Stiffy, who seemed to be in a kind of daydream, and you had something resembling a wake of the less rollicking type.
    Sombre, that’s the word I was trying to think of. The atmosphere was sombre. The whole binge might have been a scene from one of those Russian plays my Aunt Agatha sometimes makes me take her son Thos to at the Old Vic in order to improve his mind, which, as is widely known, can do with all the improvement that’s coming to it.
    It was toward the middle of the meal that, feeling that it was about time somebody said something, I drew Pop Bassett’s attention to the table’s centrepiece. In any normal house it would have been a bowl of flowers or something of that order, but this being Totleigh Towers it was a small black figure carved of some material I couldn’t put a name to. It was so gosh-awful in every respect that I presumed it must be something he had collected recently. My Uncle Tom is always coming back from sales with similar eyesores.
    ‘That’s new, isn’t it?’ I said, and he started violently. I suppose he’d just managed to persuade himself that I was merely a mirage and had been brought up with a round turn on discovering that I was there in the flesh.
    ‘That thing in the middle of the table that looks like the end man in a minstrel show. It’s something you got since … er … since I was here last, isn’t it?’
    Tactless of me, I suppose, to remind him of that previous visit of mine, and I oughtn’t to have brought it up, but these things slip out.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, having paused for a moment to shudder. ‘It is the latest addition to my collection.’
    ‘Daddy bought it from a man named Plank who lives not far from here at Hockley-cum-Meston,’ said Madeline.
    ‘Attractive little bijou,’ I said. It hurt me to look at it, but I felt that nothing was to be lost by giving him the old oil. ‘Just the sort of thing Uncle Tom would like to have. By Jove,’ I said, remembering, ‘Aunt Dahlia was speaking to me about it on the phone yesterday, and she told me Uncle Tom would give his eyeteeth to have it in his collection. I’m not surprised. It looks valuable.’
    ‘It’s worth a thousand pounds,’ said Stiffy, coming out of her coma and speaking for the first time.
    ‘As much as that? Golly!’ Amazing, I was thinking, that magistrates could get to be able to afford expenditure on that scale just by persevering through the years fining people and sticking to the money. ‘What is it? Soapstone?’
    I had said the wrong thing.
    ‘Amber,’ Pop Bassett snapped, giving me the sort of look he had given me in heaping measure on the occasion when I had stood in the dock before him at Bosher Street police court. ‘Black amber.’
    ‘Of course, yes. That’s what Aunt Dahlia said, I recall. She spoke very highly of it, let me tell you, extremely highly.’
    ‘Indeed?’
    ‘Oh, absolutely.’
    I had been hoping that this splash of dialogue would have broken the ice, so to speak, and started us off kidding back and forth like the guys and dolls in one of those old-world salons you read about. But no. Silence fell again, and eventually, at long last, the meal came to an end, and two minutes later I was on my way to my room, where I proposed to pass the rest of the evening with an Erie Stanley Gardner I’d brought with me. No sense, as I saw it, in going and mixing with the mob in the drawing-room and having Spode glare at me and Pop Bassett sniff at me and Madeline Bassett as likely as not sing old English folk songs at me till bedtime. I was aware that in executing this quiet sneak I was being