Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

beefsteak reduces the swelling.’
    ‘Nor about beefsteaks. Sir Watkyn has told me the awful news about you and Wooster. Is it true you’re going to marry him?’
    ‘Yes, Roderick, it is true.’
    ‘But you can’t love a half-baked, half-witted ass like Wooster,’ said Spode, and I thought the remark extremely offensive. Pick your words more carefully, Spode, I might have said, rising and confronting him. However, for one reason and another I didn’t, but continued to nestle and I heard Madeline sigh, unless it was the draught under the sofa.
    ‘No, Roderick, I do not love him. He does not appeal to the essential me. But I feel it is my duty to make him happy.’
    ‘Tchah!’ said Spode, or something that sounded like that. ‘Why on earth do you want to go about making worms like Wooster happy?’
    ‘He loves me, Roderick. You must have seen that dumb, worshipping look in his eyes as he gazes at me.’
    ‘I’ve something better to do than peer into Wooster’s eyes. Though I can well imagine they look dumb. We’ve got to have this thing out, Madeline.’
    ‘I don’t understand you, Roderick.’
    ‘You will.’
    ‘Ouch!’
    I think on the cue ‘You will’ he must have grabbed her by the wrist, for the word ‘Ouch!’ had come through strong and clear, and this suspicion was confirmed when she said he was hurting her.
    ‘I’m sorry, sorry,’ said Spode. ‘But I refuse to allow you to ruin your life. You can’t marry this man Wooster. I’m the one you’re going to marry.’
    I was with him heart and soul, as the expression is. Nothing would ever make me really fond of Roderick Spode, but I liked the way he was talking. A little more of this, I felt, and Bertram would be released from his honourable obligations. I wished he had thought of taking this firm line earlier.
    ‘I’ve loved you since you were so high.’
    Not being able to see him, I couldn’t ascertain how high that was, but I presumed he must have been holding his hand not far from the floor. A couple of feet, would you say? About that, I suppose.
    Madeline was plainly moved. I heard her gurgle.
    ‘I know, Roderick, I know.’
    ‘You guessed my secret?’
    ‘Yes, Roderick. How sad life is!’
    Spode declined to string along with her in this view.
    ‘Not a bit of it. Life’s fine. At least, it will be if you give this blighter Wooster the push and marry me.’
    ‘I have always been devoted to you, Roderick.’
    ‘Well, then?’
    ‘Give me time to think.’
    ‘Carry on. Take all the time you need.’
    ‘I don’t want to break Bertie’s heart.’
    ‘Why not? Do him good.’
    ‘He loves me so dearly.’
    ‘Nonsense. I don’t suppose he has ever loved anything in his life except a dry martini.’
    ‘How can you say that? Did he not come here because he found it impossible to stay away from me?’
    ‘No, he jolly well didn’t. Don’t let him fool you on that point. He came here to pinch that black amber statuette of your father’s.’
    ‘What!’
    ‘That’s what. In addition to being half-witted, he’s a low thief.’
    ‘It can’t be true!’
    ‘Of course it’s true. His uncle wants the thing for his collection. I heard him plotting with his aunt on the telephone not half an hour ago. “It’s going to be pretty hard to get away with it,” he was saying, “but I’ll do my best. I know how much Uncle Tom covets that statuette.” He’s always stealing things. The very first time I met him, in an antique shop in the Brompton Road, he as near as a toucher got away with your father’s umbrella.’
    A monstrous charge, and one which I can readily refute. He and Pop Bassett and I were, I concede, in the antique shop in the Brompton Road to which he had alluded, but the umbrella sequence was purely one of those laughable misunderstandings. Pop Bassett had left the blunt instrument propped against a seventeenth-century chair, and what caused me to take it up was the primeval instinct which makes a man without an umbrella, as I happened to be that morning, reach out unconsciously for the nearest one in sight, like a flower turning to the sun. The whole thing could have been explained in two words, but they hadn’t let me say even one, and the slur had been allowed to rest on me.
    ‘You shock me, Roderick!’ said Madeline.
    ‘Yes, I thought it would make you sit up.’
    ‘If this is really so, if Bertie is really a thief -‘
    ‘Well?’
    ‘Naturally I will have nothing more to do with him. But I