Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

Spode came in.

    18
    The first thing that impressed itself on the senses was that he had about as spectacular a black eye as you could meet with in a month of Sundays, and I found myself at a momentary loss to decide how it was best to react to it. I mean, some fellows with bunged-up eyes want sympathy, others prefer that you pretend that you’ve noticed nothing unusual in their appearance. I came to the conclusion that it was wisest to greet him with a careless ‘Ah, Spode,’ and I did so, though I suppose, looking back, that ‘Ah, Sidcup’ would have been more suitable, and it was as I spoke that I became aware that he was glaring at me in a sinister manner with the eye that wasn’t closed. I have spoken of these eyes of his as being capable of opening an oyster at sixty paces, and even when only one of them was functioning the impact of his gaze was disquieting. I have known my Aunt Agatha’s gaze to affect me in the same way.
    ‘I was looking for you, Wooster,’ he said.
    He uttered the words in the unpleasant rasping voice which had once kept his followers on the jump. Before succeeding to his new title he had been one of those Dictators who were fairly common at one time in the metropolis, and had gone about with a mob of underlings wearing black shorts and shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’ or words along those general lines. He gave it up when he became Lord Sidcup, but he was still apt to address all and sundry as if he were ticking off some erring member of his entourage whose shorts had got a patch on them.
    ‘Oh, were you?’ I said.
    ‘I was.’ He paused for a moment, continuing to give me the eye, then he said ‘So!’
    ‘So!’ is another of those things, like ‘You!’ and ‘Ha!’, which it’s never easy to find the right answer to. Nothing in the way of a come-back suggested itself to me, so I merely lit a cigarette in what I intended to be a nonchalant manner, though I may have missed it by a considerable margin, and he proceeded.
    ‘So I was right!’
    ‘Eh?’
    ‘In my suspicions.’
    ‘Eh?’ ‘
    ‘They have been confirmed.’
    ‘Eh?’
    ‘Stop saying “Eh?”, you miserable worm, and listen to me.’
    I humoured him. You might have supposed that having so recently seen him knocked base over apex by the Rev. H.P. Pinker and subsequently laid out cold by Emerald Stoker and her basin of beans I would have regarded him with contempt as pretty small-time stuff and rebuked him sharply for calling me a miserable worm, but the idea never so much as crossed my mind. He had suffered reverses, true, but they had left him with his spirit unbroken and the muscles of his brawny arms just as much like iron bands as they had always been, and the way I looked at it was that if he wanted me to go easy on the word ‘Eh?’ he had only to say so.
    Continuing to pierce me with the eye that was still on duty, he said:
    ‘I happened to be passing through the hall just now.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘I heard you talking on the telephone.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘You were speaking to your aunt.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘Don’t keep saying “Oh?”, blast you.’
    Well, these restrictions were making it a bit hard for me to hold up my end of the conversation, but there seemed nothing to be done about it. I maintained a rather dignified silence, and he resumed his remarks.
    ‘Your aunt was urging you to steal Sir Watkyn’s amber statuette.’
    ‘She wasn’t!’
    ‘Pardon me. I thought you would try to deny the charge, so I took the precaution of jotting down your actual words. The statuette was mentioned and you said “It’s going to be pretty hard to get away with it.” She then presumably urged you to spare no effort, for you said “Well, I’ll do my best. I know how much Uncle Tom covets that statuette. Rely on me, Aunt Dahlia.” What the devil are you gargling about?’
    ‘Not gargling,’ I corrected. ‘Laughing lightly. Because you’ve got the whole thing wrong, though I must say the way you’ve managed to record the dialogue does you a good deal of credit. Do you use shorthand?’
    ‘How do you mean I’ve got it wrong?’
    ‘Aunt Dahlia was asking me to try to buy the thing from Sir Watkyn.’
    He snorted and said ‘Ha!’ and I thought it a bit unjust that he should say ‘Ha!’ if I wasn’t allowed to say ‘Eh?’ and ‘Oh?’ There should always be a certain give and take in these matters, or where are you?
    ‘Do you expect me to believe that?’
    ‘Don’t you believe it?’
    ‘No, I