Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

sir.’
    ‘Thank you, Jeeves.’
    ‘Not at all, sir.’
    ‘You may take this information as coming straight from the mouth of the stable cat. I was present when the deal went through. Behind the sofa, but present.’
    She still seemed at a loss.
    ‘But I don’t understand. Plank has never met Harold.’
    ‘Jeeves brought them together.’
    ‘Did you, Jeeves?’
    ‘Yes, miss.’
    ‘ ‘At-a-boy!’
    ‘Thank you, miss.’
    ‘And he’s really given Harold a vicarage?’
    ‘The vicarage of Hockley-cum-Meston. He’s embodying it in the form of a letter tonight. At the moment there’s a vicar still vicking, but he’s infirm and old and wants to turn it up as soon as they can put on an understudy. The way things look, I should imagine that we shall be able to unleash Stinker on the Hockley-cum-Meston souls in the course of the next few days.’
    My simple words and earnest manner had resolved the last of her doubts. The misgivings she may have had as to whether this was the real ginger vanished. Her eyes shone more like twin stars than anything, and she uttered animal cries and danced a few dance steps. Presently she paused, and put a question.
    ‘What’s Plank like?’
    ‘How do you mean, what’s he like?’
    ‘He hasn’t a beard, has he?’
    ‘No, no beard.’
    ‘That’s good, because I want to kiss him, and if he had a beard, it would give me pause.’
    ‘Dismiss the notion,’ I urged, for Plank’s psychology was an open book to me. The whole trend of that confirmed bachelor’s conversation had left me with the impression that he would find it infinitely preferable to be spiked in the leg with a native dagger than to have popsies covering his upturned face with kisses. ‘He’d have a fit.’
    ‘Well, I must kiss somebody. Shall I kiss you, Jeeves?’
    ‘No, thank you, miss.’
    ‘You, Bertie?’
    Td rather you didn’t.’
    ‘Then I’ve a good mind to go and kiss Uncle Watkyn, louse of the first water though he has recently shown himself.’
    ‘How do you mean, recently?’
    ‘And having kissed him I shall tell him the news and taunt him vigorously with having let a good thing get away from him. I shall tell him that when he declined to avail himself of Harold’s services he was like the Indian.’
    I did not get her drift.
    ‘What Indian?’
    ‘The base one my governesses used to make me read about, the poor simp whose hand … How does it go, Jeeves?’
    ‘Threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe, miss.’
    ‘That’s right. And I shall tell him I hope the vicar he does get will be a weed of a man who has a chronic cold in the head and bleats. Oh, by the way, talking of Uncle Watkyn reminds me. I shan’t have any use for this now.’
    And so speaking she produced the black amber eyesore from the recesses of her costume like a conjuror taking a rabbit out of a hat.

    22
    It was as if she had suddenly exhibited a snake of the lowest order. I gazed at the thing, appalled. It needed but this to put the frosting on the cake.
    ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked in a voice that was low and trembled.
    ‘I pinched it.’
    ‘What on earth did you do that for?’
    ‘Perfectly simple. The idea was to go to Uncle Watkyn and tell him he wouldn’t get it back unless he did the square thing by Harold. Power politics, don’t they call it, Jeeves?’
    ‘Or blackmail, miss.’
    ‘Yes, or blackmail, I suppose. But you can’t be too nice in your methods when you’re dealing with the Uncle Watkyns of this world. But now that Plank has eased the situation and made our paths straight, of course I shan’t need it, and I suppose the shrewd thing is to return it to store before its absence is noted. Go and put it in the collection room, Bertie. Here’s the key.’
    I recoiled as if she had offered me the dog Bartholomew. Priding myself as I do on being a preux chevalier, I like to oblige the delicately nurtured when it’s feasible, but there are moments when only a nolle prosequi will serve, and I recognized this as one of them. The thought of making the perilous passage she was suggesting gave me goose pimples.
    ‘I’m not going near the ruddy collection room. With my luck, I’d find your Uncle Watkyn there, arm in arm with Spode, and it wouldn’t be too easy to explain what I was doing there and how I’d got in. Besides, I can’t go roaming about the place with Plank on the premises.’
    She laughed one of those silvery ones, a practice to which, as I have indicated, she was