Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

and the home counties who has the facts relating to Naboth’s Vineyard more thoroughly at his fingertips than me. The news may not have reached you, but when at school I once won a prize for Scripture Knowledge.’
    ‘I bet you cheated.’
    ‘Not at all. Sheer merit. Did Stinker co-operate?’
    ‘Yes, he thought it was a splendid idea and went about sucking throat pastilles for a week, so as to be in good voice. The set-up was the same as the play in Hamlet. You know. With which to catch the conscience of the king and all that.’
    ‘Yes, I see the strategy all right. How did it all work out?’
    ‘It didn’t. Harold lives in the cottage of Mrs. Bootle, the postman’s wife, where they only have oil lamps, and the sermon was on a table with a lamp on it, and he bumped into the table and upset the lamp and it burned the sermon and he hadn’t time to write it out again, so he had to dig out something on another topic from the old stockpile. He was terribly disappointed.’
    I pursed my lips, and was on the point of saying that of all the web-footed muddlers in existence H.P. Pinker took the well-known biscuit, when it occurred to me that it might possibly hurt her feelings, and I desisted. The last thing I wanted was to wound the child, particularly when I remembered that crack of hers about recalling Bartholomew.
    ‘So we’ve got to handle the thing another way, and that’s where you come in.’
    I smiled a tolerant smile.
    ‘I can see where you’re heading,’ I said. ‘You want me to go to your Uncle Watkyn and slip a jack under his better self. “Play the game, Bassett,” you want me to say, “Let conscience be your guide, Bassett,” trying to drive it into his nut how wrong it is to put over a fast one on the widow and the orphan. I am assuming for purposes of argument that Plank is an orphan, though possibly not a widow. But my misguided young shrimp, do you really suppose that Pop Bassett looks on me as a friend and counsellor to whom he is always willing to lend a ready ear? You yourself were stressing only a moment ago how allergic he was to the Wooster charm. It’s no good me talking to him.’
    ‘I don’t want you to.’
    ‘Then what do you want me to do?’
    ‘I want you to pinch the thing and return it to Plank, who will then sell it to Mr. Travers at a proper price. The idea of Uncle Watkyn only giving him a fiver for it! We can’t have him getting away with raw work like that. He needs a sharp lesson.’
    I smiled another tolerant smile. The young boll weevil amused me. I was thinking how right I had been in predicting that any job assigned by her to anyone would be unfit for human consumption.
    ‘Well, really, Stiffy!’
    The quiet rebuke in my voice ought to have bathed her in shame and remorse, but it didn’t. She came back at me strongly.
    ‘I don’t know what you’re Well-really-ing about. You’re always pinching things, aren’t you? Policemen’s helmets and things like that.’
    I inclined the bean. It was true that I had once lived in Arcady.
    ‘There is,’ I was obliged to concede, ‘a certain substance in what you say. I admit that in my time I may have removed a lid or two from the upper stories of members of the constabulary -‘
    ‘Well, then.’
    ‘- but only on Boat Race Night and when the heart was younger than it is as of even date. It was an episode of the sort that first brought me and your Uncle Watkyn together. But you can take it from me that the hot blood has cooled and I’m a reformed character. My answer to your suggestion is No.’
    ‘No?’
    ‘N-ruddy-o,’ I said, making it clear to the meanest intelligence. ‘Why don’t you pinch the thing yourself?’
    ‘It wouldn’t be any good. I couldn’t take it to Plank. I’m confined to barracks. Bartholomew bit the butler, and the sins of the Scottie are visited upon its owner. I do think you might reconsider, Bertie.’
    ‘Not a hope.’
    ‘You’re a blighter!’
    ‘But a blighter who knows his own mind and is not to be shaken by argument or plea, however specious.’
    She was silent for a space. Then she gave a little sigh.
    ‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘And I did hope I wouldn’t have to tell Madeline about Gussie.’
    I gave another of those visible starts of mine. I’ve seldom heard words I liked the sound of less. Fraught with sinister significance they seemed to me.
    ‘Do you know what happened tonight, Bertie? I was roused from sleep about an hour ago, and what do you think