Jeeves Stories quotes

She sprang it on me before breakfast. There in seven words you have a complete character sketch of my Aunt Agatha.

I could go on indefinitely about brutality and lack of consideration. I merely say that she routed me out of bed to listen to her painful story somewhere in the small hours.

I should think Queen Elizabeth must have been something like her. She bosses her husband, Spencer Gregson, a battered little chappie on the Stock Exchange. She bosses my cousin, Gussie Mannering-Phipps. She bosses her sister-in-law, Gussie’s mother. And, worst of all, she bosses me.

She has an eye like a man-eating fish, and she has got moral suasion down to a fine point.

I dare say there are fellows in the world—men of blood and iron, don’t you know, and all that sort of thing—whom she couldn’t intimidate;

“Bertie,” she said, “you look a sight. You look perfectly dissipated.”

I was feeling like a badly wrapped brown-paper parcel.

I’m never at my best in the early morning. I said so.

“Early morning! I had breakfast three hours ago, and have been walking in the park ever since, trying to compose my thoughts.”

If I ever breakfasted at half past eight I should walk on the Embankment, trying to end it all in a watery grave.

“I am extremely worried, Bertie. That is why I have come to you.”

“I thought as much. You have no engagements. Very well, then, I want you to start immediately for America.”

Do not lose sight of the fact that all this was taking place on an empty stomach, shortly after the rising of the lark.

“Yes, America. I suppose even you have heard of America?”

… I was old enough to take notice the family had made the best of it, and Aunt Agatha had pulled up her socks and put in a lot of educative work, and with a microscope you couldn’t tell Aunt Julia from a genuine dyed-in-the-wool aristocrat.

Women adapt themselves so quickly!

I have a pal who married Daisy Trimble of the Gaiety, and when I meet her now I feel like walking out of her presence backwards. But there the thing was, and you couldn’t get away from it.

“Very good, sir,” he said; “which suit will you wear?”

New York is a large city conveniently situated on the edge of America, so that you step off the liner right on to it without an effort.

You can’t lose your way. You go out of a barn and down some stairs, and there you are, right in among it.

I can’t express it better than by saying that the thought uppermost in my mind, as I walked about the place they call Times Square, was that there were three thousand miles of deep water between me and my Aunt Agatha.

It’s a funny thing about looking for things. If you hunt for a needle in a haystack you don’t find it. If you don’t give a darn whether you ever see the needle or not it runs into you the first time you lean against the stack.

By the time I had strolled up and down once or twice, seeing the sights and letting the white chappie’s corrective permeate my system, I was feeling that I wouldn’t care if Gussie and I never met again, and I’m dashed if I didn’t suddenly …

… been told by old boys who were lads about town in those days, she was knocking them cold at the Tivoli in a double act called “Fun in a Teashop,” in which she wore tights and sang a song with a chorus that began, “Rumpty-tiddley-umpty-ay.”

There are some things a chappie’s mind absolutely refuses to picture, and Aunt Julia singing “Rumpty-tiddley-umpty-ay” is one of them.

She got straight to the point within five minutes of our meeting.

It was not an easy cable to word, but I managed it.

“No,” I wrote, “stay where you are. Profession overcrowded.”

Jeeves was perfectly right. I looked a cross between a music hall comedian and a cheap bookie. Yet Monty had looked fine in absolutely the same stuff.

These things are just Life’s mysteries, and that’s all there is to it.

But it isn’t only that Jeeves’s judgment about clothes is infallible, though, of course, that’s really the main thing. The man knows everything. There was the matter of that tip on the “Lincolnshire.”

The poor chap gave one of those mirthless laughs.

He was looking anxious and worried, like a man who has done the murder all right but can’t think what the deuce to do with the body.

“We’re so scared, Mr. Wooster,” said the girl. “We were hoping that you might suggest a way of breaking it to him.”

The moment I saw the man standing there, registering respectful attention, a weight seemed to roll off my mind.

I felt like a lost child who spots his father in the offing.

There was something about him that gave me confidence.

I always used to think that publishers had to be devilish intelligent fellows, loaded down with the grey matter; but I’ve got their number now.

All a publisher has to do is to write cheques at intervals, while a lot of deserving and industrious chappies rally round and do the real work.

I know, because I’ve been one myself. I simply sat tight in the old apartment with a fountain-pen, and in due season a topping, shiny book came along.

“Very good, sir,” said Jeeves.

That’s the sort of chap he is. You can’t rattle him.

We found Corky near the door, looking at the picture, with one hand up in a defensive sort of way, as if he thought it might swing on him.

He’ll give me anything I ask for a real winner like this. I’ve got a goldmine. Where’s my hat? I’ve got an income for life! Where’s that confounded hat? Lend me a fiver, Bertie. I want to take a taxi down to Park Row!”

Jeeves smiled paternally. Or, rather, he had a kind of paternal muscular spasm about the mouth, which is the nearest he ever gets to smiling.

“If I might make the suggestion, Mr. Corcoran—for a title of the series which you have in mind—‘The Adventures of Baby Blobbs.’ ”

“Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Of course, I know it’s as bad as being henpecked; but then Jeeves is always right.

You’ve got to consider that, you know. What?

I can’t read before I’ve had my morning tea and a cigarette. I groped for the bell.

Jeeves came in looking as fresh as a dewy violet. It’s a mystery to me how he does it.

He flowed silently out of the room—he always gives you the impression of being some liquid substance when he moves; and I found that Rocky was surging round with his beastly letter again.

There’s a blight on it. It’s got moral delirium tremens. It’s the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this thing pretty soft for me!”

I felt rather like Lot’s friends must have done when they dropped in for a quiet chat and their genial host began to criticise the Cities of the Plain.

I had no idea old Rocky could be so eloquent.

The situation floored me. I’m not denying it.

Hamlet must have felt much as I did when his father’s ghost bobbed up in the fairway.

I’d come to look on Rocky’s aunt as such a permanency at her own home that it didn’t seem possible that she could really be here in New York. I stared at her. Then I looked at Jeeves.

He vanished; and the aunt took the chair which I’d forgotten to offer her. She looked at me in rather a rummy way. It was a nasty look.

It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time.

My own Aunt Agatha, back in England, has looked at me in exactly the same way many a time, and it never fails to make my spine curl.

Somehow it was brought home to me that she didn’t like Englishmen, and that if she had had to meet an Englishman, I was the one she’d have chosen last.

Conversation languished again after that.

Then I tried again. I was becoming more convinced every moment that you can’t make a real lively salon with a couple of people, especially if one of them lets it go a word at a time.

And so the merry party began.

It was one of those jolly, happy, bread-crumbling parties where you cough twice before you speak, and then decide not to say it after all.

After we had had an hour of this wild dissipation, Aunt Isabel said she wanted to go home. In the light of what Rocky had been telling me, this struck me as sinister.

Lots of people think I’m much too dependent on him. My Aunt Agatha, in fact, has even gone so far as to call him my keeper. Well, what I say is: Why not? The man’s a genius.

From the collar upward he stands alone.

I gave up trying to run my own affairs within a week of his coming to me. That was about half a dozen years ago, directly after the rather rummy business of Florence Craye, my Uncle Willoughby’s book, and Edwin, the Boy Scout.

“I was sent by the agency, sir,” he said. “I was given to understand that you required a valet.”

I’d have preferred an undertaker; but I told him to stagger in, and he floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr.

That impressed me from the start. Meadowes had had flat feet and used to clump. This fellow didn’t seem to have any feet at all. He just streamed in.

That impressed me from the start. Meadowes had had flat feet and used to clump. This fellow didn’t seem to have any feet at all. He just streamed in.

He had a grave, sympathetic face, as if he, too, knew what it was to sup with the lads.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said gently.

I would have clutched at anything that looked like a lifeline that morning. I swallowed the stuff.

For a moment I felt as if somebody had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right.

The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the treetops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.

“Perfectly blithering, my dear man!”

I felt as if I had stepped on the place where the last stair ought to have been, but wasn’t.

I felt defiant, if you know what I mean, and there didn’t seem anything to defy.

I happened to be looking at Florence’s profile at the moment, and at this juncture she swung round and gave me a look that went right through me like a knife.

Uncle Willoughby meandered back to the library, and there was a silence that you could have dug bits out of with a spoon.

“I can’t understand it,” I said at last. “I can’t understand it, by Jove!”

“Do you know that Lady Florence has broken off her engagement with me?”

Not a bit of sympathy! I might have been telling him it was a fine day.

“As I am no longer in your employment, sir, I can speak freely without appearing to take a liberty. In my opinion you and Lady Florence were quite unsuitably matched. Her ladyship is of a highly determined and arbitrary temperament, quite opposed to your own.

Maxwell, who is employed in an editorial capacity by one of the reviews—that it was her intention to start you almost immediately upon Nietzsche. You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”

It’s rummy how sleeping on a thing often makes you feel quite different about it.

It’s happened to me over and over again. Somehow or other, when I woke next morning the old heart didn’t feel half so broken as it had done.

“But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.”

“Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.”

“He’s supposed to be one of the best men in London.”

“He’s supposed to be one of the best men in London.”

“I am saying nothing against his moral character, sir.”

I hesitated a bit. I had a feeling that I was passing into this chappie’s clutches, and that if I gave in now I should become just like poor old Aubrey Fothergill, unable to call my soul my own.

“All right, Jeeves,” I said. “You know! Give the bally thing away to somebody!”

He looked down at me like a father gazing tenderly at the wayward child.

“Thank you, sir. I gave it to the under-gardener last night. A little more tea, sir?”

He looked down at me like a father gazing tenderly at the wayward child.

“Thank you, sir. I gave it to the under-gardener last night. A little more tea, sir?”

She had bright, bulging eyes and a lot of yellow hair, and when she spoke she showed about fifty-seven front teeth.

She was one of those women who kind of numb a fellow’s faculties.

She made me feel as if I were ten years old and had been brought into the drawing-room in my Sunday clothes to say how-d’you-do. Altogether by no means the sort of thing a chappie would wish to find in his sitting room before breakfast.

“No, no! Darling Motty is essentially a home bird. Aren’t you, Motty darling?”

Motty, who was sucking the knob of his stick, uncorked himself.

“Yes, mother,” he said, and corked himself up again.

“I can’t help your troubles,” said Motty firmly. “Listen to me, old thing: this is the first time in my life that I’ve had a real chance to yield to the temptations of a great city.

What’s the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don’t yield to them? Makes it so bally discouraging for a great city.

Besides, mother told me to keep my eyes open and collect impressions.”

“His lordship’s bull-terrier, sir. His lordship won him in a raffle, and tied him to the leg of the table. If you will allow me, sir, I will go in and switch on the light.”

There really is nobody like Jeeves.

He walked straight into the sitting room, the biggest feat since Daniel and the lions’ den, without a quiver.

There really is nobody like Jeeves.

He walked straight into the sitting room, the biggest feat since Daniel and the lions’ den, without a quiver.

What’s more, his magnetism or whatever they call it was such that the dashed animal, instead of pinning him by the leg, calmed down as if he had had a bromide, and rolled over on his back with all his paws in the air.

“Do you expect him back to dinner?”

Have you ever trodden on a rake and had the handle jump up and hit you? That’s how I felt then.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good morning,” I said. “So you’ve got back, what?”

There was something sort of bleak about her tone, rather as if she had swallowed an east wind.

This I took to be due to the fact that she probably hadn’t breakfasted. It’s only after a bit of breakfast that I’m able to regard the world with that sunny cheeriness which makes a fellow the universal favourite.

“Won’t you have an egg or something? Or a sausage or something? Or something?”

She spoke as if she belonged to an anti-sausage society or a league for the suppression of eggs.

There was a bit of a silence.

Jeeves had projected himself in from the dining room and materialized on the rug.

Lady Malvern tried to freeze him with a look, but you can’t do that sort of thing to Jeeves. He is look-proof.

“I fancy, your ladyship, that you have misunderstood Mr. Wooster, and that he may have given you the impression that he was in New York when his lordship—was removed. When Mr.

I felt most awfully braced. I felt as if the clouds had rolled away and all was as it used to be.

I felt like one of those chappies in the novels who calls off the fight with his wife in the last chapter and decides to forget and forgive.

I felt I wanted to do all sorts of other things to show Jeeves that I appreciated him.

“Take this, Jeeves,” I said; “fifty isn’t enough. Do you know, Jeeves, you’re—well, you absolutely stand alone!”

“I endeavour to give satisfaction, sir,” said Jeeves.

The thing, you see, is that Jeeves is so dashed competent.

You can spot it even in the way he shoves studs into a shirt.

I rely on him absolutely in every crisis, and he never lets me down. And, what’s more, he can always be counted on to extend himself on behalf of any pal of mine who happens to be to all appearances knee-deep in the bouillon.

This was news to me, that Bicky’s uncle was a duke.

Rum, how little one knows about one’s pals!

I had met Bicky for the first time at a species of beano or jamboree down in Washington Square, not long after my arrival in New York.

… it may sound a pretty good wheeze having a duke for an uncle, but the trouble about old Chiswick was that, though an extremely wealthy old buster, owning half London and about five counties up north, he was notoriously the most prudent spender in England.

He was what American chappies would call a hard-boiled egg.

If Bicky’s people hadn’t left him anything and he depended on what he could prise out of the old duke, he was in a pretty bad way.

“I am open to correction, sir, but is not your dilemma due to the fact that you are at a loss to explain to his grace why you are in New York instead of in Colorado?”

Bicky rocked like a jelly in a high wind.

“How the deuce do you know anything about it?”

“How does he do it, Bertie?” he said. “I’ll tell you what I think it is.

I believe it’s something to do with the shape of his head. Have you ever noticed his head, Bertie, old man? It sort of sticks out at the back!

”

When I got back old Chiswick had gone to bed, but Bicky was there, hunched up in an armchair, brooding pretty tensely, with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth and a more or less glassy stare in his eyes.

He had the aspect of one who had been soaked with what the newspaper chappies call “some blunt instrument.”

“This is a bit thick, old thing—what!” I said.

There was Jeeves, standing behind me, full of zeal. In this matter of shimmering into rooms the chappie is rummy to a degree. You’re sitting in the old armchair, thinking of this and that, and then suddenly you look up, and there he is.

He moves from point to point with as little uproar as a jelly fish.

The thing startled poor old Bicky considerably. He rose from his seat like a rocketing pheasant. I’m used to Jeeves now, but often in the days when he first came to me I’ve bitten my tongue freely on finding him unexpectedly in my midst.

Since we had our recent conversation I fancy I have found what may prove a solution. I do not wish to appear to be taking a liberty, sir, but I think that we have overlooked his grace’s potentialities as a source of revenue.”

Bicky laughed, what I have sometimes seen described as a hollow, mocking laugh, a sort of bitter cackle from the back of the throat, rather like a gargle.

“I do not allude, sir,” explained Jeeves, “to the possibility of inducing his grace to part with money. I am taking the liberty of regarding his grace in the light of an at present—if I may say so—useless property, which is capable of being developed.”

“Do you mean to say that anyone would be mug enough to part with solid cash just to shake hands with my uncle?”

“I have an aunt, sir, who paid five shillings to a young fellow for bringing a moving-picture actor to tea at her house one Sunday. It gave her social standing among the neighbours.”

“If you think it could be done—”

Just right, as usual. Not too hot, not too sweet, not too weak, not too strong, not too much milk, and not a drop spilled in the saucer.

A most amazing cove, Jeeves. So dashed competent in every respect.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I mean to say, take just one small instance. Every other valet I’ve ever had used to barge into my room in the morning while I was still asleep, causing much misery:

“Yes, sir. I sent them back.”

“Yes, sir. They would not have become you.”

Well, I must say I’d thought fairly highly of those shirtings, but I bowed to superior knowledge. Weak? I don’t know. Most fellows, no doubt, are all for having their valets confine their activities to creasing trousers and whatnot without trying to run the home;

The man was goggling. His entire map was suffused with a rich blush.

He looked like the Soul’s Awakening done in pink.

“Hallo, Mabel!” he said, with a sort of gulp.

“Or how about a bit of hot steak-pudding, with a sparkling limado to wash it down?” said Bingo.

You know, the way love can change a fellow is really frightful to contemplate.

This chappie before me, who spoke in that absolutely careless way of macaroons and limado, was the man I had seen in happier days telling the headwaiter at Claridge’s exactly how he wanted the chef to prepare the sole frite au gourmet aux champignons, and …

The fact that less than a week after he had had the bad news I came on young Bingo dancing like an untamed gazelle at Ciro’s helped me to bear up.

A resilient bird, Bingo. He may be down, but he is never out.

While these little love-affairs of his are actually on, nobody could be more earnest and blighted;

“No, really, I say, please!” I said, blushing richly.

Aunt Agatha belongs to two or three of these women’s clubs, and she keeps forgetting she isn’t in the smoking room.

“Bertie,” she resumed, and would no doubt have hauled up her slacks at some length, had we not been interrupted. “Ah, here they are!” she said. “Aline, dear!”

“Oh, Mr. Wooster!” said the girl in a gasping sort of way. “I don’t know how to begin.”

Then I noticed that she appeared considerably rattled, and as for the brother, he looked like a sheep with a secret sorrow.

This made me sit up a bit and take notice. I had supposed that this was just a social call, but apparently something had happened to give them a jolt. Though I couldn’t see why they should come to me about it.

I suppose she and the bandit split it outside. A French hotel manager wouldn’t be likely to let real money wander away from him without counting himself in on the division.

I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.

“I don’t want to rub it in, Aunt Agatha,” I said coldly, “but I should just like to point out before I go that the girl who stole your pearls is the girl you’ve been hounding me on to marry ever since I got here.

I worship the very ground she treads on!” continued the patient, in a loud, penetrating voice. Fred Thompson and one or two fellows had come in, and McGarry, the chappie behind the bar, was listening with his ears flapping. But there’s no reticence about Bingo.

He always reminds me of the hero of a musical comedy who takes the centre of the stage, gathers the boys round him in a circle, and tells them all about his love at the top of his voice.

“No. I haven’t had the nerve. But we walk together in the garden most evenings, and it sometimes seems to me that there is a look in her eyes.”

So that was that. I’m bound to say I’d have welcomed a bit more curiosity from the fellow, but that is Jeeves all over.

Cloaks his emotions, if you know what I mean.

Honoria was away when I got to Ditteredge on the following afternoon. Her mother told me that she was staying with some people named Braythwayt in the neighbourhood, and would be back next day, bringing the daughter of the house with her for a visit.

Bingo was both surprised and delighted to see me, and introduced me to the kid. If the latter was surprised and delighted too, he concealed it like a diplomat. He just looked at me, raised his eyebrows slightly, and went on fishing.

He was one of those supercilious striplings who give you the impression that you went to the wrong school and that your clothes don’t fit.

“This is Oswald,” said Bingo.

She chucked back her head and laughed with considerable vim.

She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.

It didn’t sound over-musical to me, and on the kid Oswald it appeared to jar not a little. He gazed at us with a good deal of dislike.

I don’t know when I have seen anything more grubby and unpleasant than the lake as viewed from the bridge; but the thing apparently had to be done. I chucked off my coat and vaulted over.

It seems rummy that water should be so much wetter when you go into it with your clothes on than when you’re just bathing, but take it from me that it is.

I was only under about three seconds, I suppose, but I came up feeling like the bodies you read of in the paper which “had evidently been in the water several days.” I felt clammy and bloated.

I got what she was driving at now.

Sir Roderick Glossop, Honoria’s father, is always called a nerve specialist, because it sounds better, but everybody knows that he’s really a sort of janitor to the looney-bin.

I mean to say, when your uncle the Duke begins to feel the strain a bit and you find him in the blue drawing-room sticking straws in his hair, old Glossop is the first person you send for.

Paul’s. I suppose he must have taken about a nine or something in hats.

Shows what a rotten thing it is to let your brain develop too much.

“What ho! What ho! What ho!” I said, trying to strike the genial note, and then had a sudden feeling that that was just the sort of thing I had been warned not to say.

A fellow living in a London flat is so handicapped. I mean to say, if I had been the young squire greeting the visitor in the country, I could have said, “Welcome to Meadowsweet Hall!” or something zippy like that.

It sounds silly to say “Welcome to Number 6A, Crichton Mansions, Berkeley Street, W.”

“I am afraid I am a little late,” he said, as we sat down. “I was detained at my club by Lord Alastair Hungerford, the Duke of Ramfurline’s son.

He appeared a trifle reassured, and lowered the umbrella. But just then the most frightful shindy started in the bedroom.

It sounded as though all the cats in London, assisted by delegates from outlying suburbs, had got together to settle their differences once for all.

A sort of augmented orchestra of cats.

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

He lugged them out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of the salad.

You could see he was feeling deeply. Deuced painful and all that, this sort of thing, but a chappie has got to assert himself every now and then. Absolutely.

“And the fat one!” proceeded the chappie. “Don’t miss him. Do you know who that is? That’s Lord Bittlesham! One of the worst.

What has he ever done except eat four square meals a day? His god is his belly, and he sacrifices burnt-offerings to it.

If you opened that man now you would find enough lunch to support ten working-class families for a week.”

“Did you notice a fellow standing on my left in our little troupe yesterday?

Small, shrivelled chap. Looks like a haddock with lung-trouble.

That’s Butt. My rival, dash him. He’s sort of semi-engaged to Charlotte at the moment. Till I came along he was the blue-eyed boy. He’s got a voice like a foghorn, and old Rowbotham thinks a lot of him.

I had forgotten to warn Jeeves about the beard, and it came on him absolutely out of a blue sky. I saw the man’s jaw drop, and he clutched at the table for support. I don’t blame him, mind you.

Few people have ever looked fouler than young Bingo in the fungus.

Jeeves paled a little; then the weakness passed and he was himself again. But I could see that he had been shaken.

It wasn’t that she was exactly bad-looking. In fact, if she had knocked off starchy foods and done Swedish exercises for a bit, she might have been quite tolerable. But there was too much of her. Billowy curves. Well-nourished, perhaps, expresses it best.

And, while she may have had a heart of gold, the thing you noticed about her first was that she had a tooth of gold.

I knew that young Bingo, when in form, could fall in love with practically anything of the other sex; but this time I couldn’t see any excuse for him at all.

The result of this simple greeting was a bit of a shock.

Old Bittlesham quivered from head to foot like a poleaxed blancmange.

His eyes were popping and his face had gone sort of greenish.

“

I suppose what it amounts to, Jeeves, is that, when young Bingo really takes his coat off and starts in, there is no power of God or man that can prevent him making a chump of himself.

”

Considering that she had only about a second and a half to do it in, I must say it was a jolly fine exhibition.

She opened her mouth and eyes pretty wide and let her jaw drop sideways, and managed to look so like a dyspeptic calf that I recognised the symptoms immediately.

“Oh, that’s all right,” I said. “No need to be alarmed. He’s simply in love with you.”

I don’t know when I’ve experienced a more massive silence than the one that followed my reading of this cheery epistle. Young Bingo gulped once or twice, and practically every known emotion came and went on his face.

Jeeves coughed one soft, low, gentle cough like a sheep with a blade of grass stuck in its throat, and then stood gazing serenely at the landscape.

Finally young Bingo spoke.

I could stand having him moaning all over me after dinner, and even after lunch; but at breakfast, no.

We Woosters are amiability itself, but there is a limit.

“Now look here, old friend,” I said. “I know your bally heart is broken and all that, and at some future time I shall be delighted to hear all about it, but—”

“I doubt if it would be worth while to invest, sir,” said Jeeves. “I am told it is a certainty for last year’s winner, Sarah Mills, who will doubtless start an odds-on favourite.”

“They tell me in the village that she carries a beautiful egg, sir.”

“Then there’s the Obstacle Race,” said Bingo. “Risky, in my opinion. Like betting on the Grand National. Fathers’ Hat-Trimming Contest—another speculative event.

“Bit of a snob, what?”

“He is somewhat acutely alive to the existence of class distinctions, sir.”

“You’re absolutely certain he’s such a wonder?” said Bingo. “I mean, it wouldn’t do to plunge unless you’re sure.”

Long before the footman reached the halfway mark, Harold was in the bushes, throwing stones. I came away from the window thrilled to the marrow; and when I met Jeeves on the stairs I was so moved that I nearly grasped his hand.

“Jeeves,” I said, “no discussion! The Wooster shirt goes on this boy!”

“Very good, sir,” said Jeeves.

“

Slight, I should imagine, sir. And in such an event, knowing the boy as intimately as I do, my anxiety would be entirely for the snake.

”

and then, suddenly, a sort of piercing, shrieking squeal that got you right between the eyes and ran all the way down your spine and out at the soles of the feet.

It sounded like about six hundred pigs having their tails twisted simultaneously, but it was simply the kid Harold, who appeared to be having some species of fit.

He was jumping up and down and slapping at the back of his neck. And about every other second he would take a deep breath and give out another of the squeals.

I gave him one look. Not a bit of good, of course.

“And they talk about the Purity of the Turf!” I said. And I meant it to sting, by Jove!

Jeeves received the news bravely, but I think the man was a bit rattled beneath the surface.

His habit of falling in love with every second girl he sees is one of them; and another is his way of letting the world in on the secrets of his heart.

If you want shrinking reticence, don’t go to Bingo, because he’s got about as much of it as a soap-advertisement.

I mean to say—well, here’s the telegram I got from him one evening in November, about a month after I’d got back to town from my visit to Twing Hall:

In other words, he had submitted that frightful rot to the goggling eye of a village postmistress who was probably the main spring of local gossip and would have the place ringing with the news before nightfall.

He couldn’t have given himself away more completely if he had hired the town-crier.

When I was a kid, I used to read stories about knights and vikings and that species of chappie who would get up without a blush in the middle of a crowded banquet and loose off a song about how perfectly priceless they thought their …

Then there hove in sight a small boy, and he shook like a jelly. Finally, like a star whose entrance has been worked up by the personnel of the ensemble, a girl appeared, and his emotion was painful to witness.

His face got so red that, what with his white collar and the fact that the wind had turned his nose blue, he looked more like a French flag than anything else.

He sagged from the waist upwards, as if he had been filleted.

His face got so red that, what with his white collar and the fact that the wind had turned his nose blue, he looked more like a French flag than anything else.

He sagged from the waist upwards, as if he had been filleted.

He was just raising his fingers limply to his cap when he suddenly saw that the girl wasn’t alone. A chappie in clerical costume was also among those present, and the sight of him didn’t seem to do Bingo a bit of good.

inquiries were made and confessions extorted, and Mr. Little—I learn from Brookfield, who happened to be near the door of the drawing-room at the moment—had an extremely unpleasant interview with the young lady, which ended in her desiring him never to speak to her again.”

There’s no getting away from the fact that, if ever a man required watching, it’s Steggles. Machiavelli could have taken his correspondence course.

“It was a put-up job, Jeeves!” I said. “I mean, Steggles worked the whole thing on purpose. It’s his old nobbling game.”

It was no good arguing, of course.

Aunt Agatha always makes me feel as if I had gelatine where my spine ought to be.

She’s one of those forceful females. I should think Queen Elizabeth must have been something like her. When she holds me with her glittering eye and says, “Jump to it, my lad,” or words to that effect, I make it so without further discussion.

“It is nice of you to say that, Bertie, but what I was thinking was, are they safe?”

It seemed such a rummy adjective to apply to the twins, they being about as innocuous as a couple of sprightly young tarantulas.

“Do you think all is well with them?”

He’s a festive old egg who wanders from club to club continually having a couple with other festive old eggs. When he heaves in sight, waiters brace themselves up and the wine steward toys with his corkscrew.

It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

“Your Uncle George was dining with me last night, and he was quite shaken. He declares that, while on his way from the Devonshire Club to Boodle’s he suddenly saw the phantasm of Eustace.”

“This club,” I said, “is the limit.”

“It is the eel’s eyebrows,” agreed young Bingo. “I believe that old boy over by the window has been dead three days, but I don’t like to mention it to anyone.”

“Have you lunched here yet?”

I don’t know that I had expected the man actually to scream with delight, though I had picked the items from my knowledge of his pet dishes, but I had expected him to say something. I looked up, and found that his attention was elsewhere.

He was gazing at the waitress with the look of a dog that’s just remembered where its bone was buried.

She was a tallish girl with sort of soft, soulful brown eyes. Nice figure and all that. Rather decent hands, too. I didn’t remember having seen her about before, and I must say she raised the standard of the place quite a bit.

“Mr. Little is certainly warmhearted, sir.”

“Warmhearted! I should think he has to wear asbestos vests. Well, stand by, Jeeves.”

And sure enough, it wasn’t ten days before in rolled the old ass, bleating for volunteers to step one pace forward and come to the aid of the party.

And of course, dash it, at the end of ten minutes I’d allowed the blighter to talk me round. It’s always the way. Anyone can talk me round.

If I were in a Trappist monastery, the first thing that would happen would be that some smooth performer would lure me into some frightful idiocy against my better judgment by means of the deaf-and-dumb language.

“Well, what do you want me to do?” I said, realising that it was hopeless to struggle.

“You don’t mean to say you think you’re going to lug me into it?”

He looked at me like Lilian Gish coming out of a swoon.

“Is this Bertie Wooster talking?” he said, pained.

It just rounded the whole thing off nicely.

I always say, and I always shall say, that you’ve only got to stand on Jeeves, and fate can’t touch you.

”

And there in a nutshell you have Charles Edward Biffen.

As vague and woolen-headed a blighter as ever bit a sandwich.

Goodness knows—and my Aunt Agatha will bear me out in this—I’m no mastermind myself; but compared with Biffy I’m one of the great thinkers of all time.

Of course, there are probably fellows in the world—tough, hardy blokes with strong chins and glittering eyes—who could get engaged to this Glossop menace and like it; but I knew perfectly well that Biffy was not one of them.

Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.

A beastly thing to have to face over the breakfast table. Brainy, moreover.

I do like getting my money’s-worth.

Elevenpence-ha’penny the thing had cost me, and it would have been cheap at double.

The advertisement on the outside of the box had said that its effects were “indescribably ludicrous,” and I can testify that it was no overstatement. Poor old Biffy leaped three feet in the air and smashed a small table.

The merry laughter froze on my lips. Sir Roderick sort of just waggled an eyebrow in my direction and I saw that it was back to the basket for Bertram.

I never met a man who had such a knack of making a fellow feel like a waste-product.

“Have you yet paid a visit to Wembley, Charles?” he asked. “No? Precisely as I suspected. Well, that is the mission on which I am here this afternoon. Honoria wishes me to take you to Wembley.

… their eye on Biffy, quite a goodish few were looking at me as if they thought I was an important principal in the scene and might be expected at any moment to give of my best in the way of wholesome entertainment for the masses.

Biffy was jumping about like a lamb in the springtime⁠—and, what is more, a feebleminded lamb.

“Bertie! It’s her! It’s she!” He looked about him wildly. “Where the deuce is the stage-door?” he cried. “Where’s the manager? I want to see the house-manager immediately.”

And, before the crowd had time to realize what a wonderful bob’s-worth it was getting in exchange for its entrance-fee, he was inside, engaging the girl in earnest conversation. And at the same moment two large policemen rolled up.

You can’t make policemen take the romantic view.

Not a tear did these two blighters stop to brush away. They were inside the cage and out of it and marching Biffy through the crowd before you had time to blink.

Sippy had described them as England’s premier warts, and it looked to me as if he might be about right.

Professor Pringle was a thinnish, baldish, dyspeptic-lookingish cove with an eye like a haddock, while Mrs. Pringle’s aspect was that of one who had had bad news round about the year 1900 and never really got over it.

And I was just staggering under the impact of these two when I found myself being introduced to a couple of ancient females with shawls all over them.

Her voice put the lid on it. It might have been Honoria herself talking.

Honoria Glossop has a voice like a lion tamer making some authoritative announcement to one of the troupe, and so had this girl.

I backed away convulsively and sprang upwards as my foot stubbed itself against something squashy.

It is all very well, though, to talk airily about avoiding a female’s society; but when you are living in the same house with her and she doesn’t want to avoid you, it takes a bit of doing.

It is a peculiar thing in life that the people you most particularly want to edge away from always seem to cluster round like a poultice.

I hadn’t been twenty-four hours in the place before I perceived that I was going to see a lot of this pestilence.

This afternoon I went to sit in the garden, and she popped up through a trap and was in my midst. This evening she cornered me in the morning-room.

It’s getting so that when I have a bath I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find her nestling in the soap dish.

”

Even at the moment, something about that look had struck me as oddly familiar, and now I suddenly saw why.

It had been the identical look which I had observed in the eye of Honoria Glossop in the days immediately preceding our engagement⁠—the look of a tigress that has marked down its prey.

“Jeeves, do you know what I think?”

“

It may be Nature’s provision for maintaining the balance of the species, sir.

”

“

Hell’s foundations are quivering and the game is up.

”

“

If every young man in England went about hitting policemen in the stomach, it would be a better country to live in.

”

“What you want,” I said, “is to look out for a chance and save her from drowning.”

That was Freddie Bullivant all over. A dear old chap in a thousand ways, but no help to a fellow, if you know what I mean.

He cranked up the piano once more, and I legged it for the open.

“Bertie,” he said, “one moment.

I will stand a good deal, but I will not stand being expected to be grateful.

”

“Exactly,” I said. “Once the blighter has grasped the basic fact that those two words, clearly spoken, result automatically in chocolate nougat, we have got a success.”

I’ve often thought how interesting it must be to be one of those animal-trainer blokes⁠—to stimulate the dawning intelligence and all that.

Well, this was every bit as exciting. Some days success seemed to be staring us in the eyeball, and the kid got out the line as if he had been an old professional. And then he would go all to pieces again.

I could see the man was wounded, and, of course, the whole episode had been extremely jarring and unpleasant; but these things have to be gone through.

Is one a serf or isn’t one? That’s what it all boils down to.

Having made my point, I changed the subject.

Who was that lad they used to try to make me read at Oxford? Ship—Shop—Schopenhauer. That’s the name. A grouch of the most pronounced description.

Well, Uncle Thomas, when his gastric juices have been giving him the elbow, can make Schopenhauer look like Pollyanna.

And the worst of it is, from Aunt Dahlia’s point of view, that on these occasions he always seems to think he’s on the brink of ruin and wants to start to economize.

“I have already done so, sir.”

It’s a rummy thing, but when you come down to it Jeeves is always right.

He had tried to cheer me up at the station by saying that I would not find Harrogate unpleasant, and, by Jove, he was perfectly correct.

“Every night, dash it all,” proceeded Mr. Wooster morosely, “you come in at exactly the same old time with the same old tray and put it on the same old table. I’m fed up, I tell you.

It’s the bally monotony of it that makes it all seem so frightfully bally.

”

However, I had coped successfully with that outbreak, and I was by no means unsanguine that I should eventually be able to bring the present affair to a happy issue.

Employers are like horses. They require managing.

Some gentlemen’s personal gentlemen have the knack of managing them, some have not. I, I am happy to say, have no cause for complaint.

By stationing myself behind a pillar on the porch or veranda which adjoined the room, I was enabled to see and hear all. It was an experience which I should be sorry to have missed. Mr. Wooster, I may say at once, indubitably excelled himself.

Mr. Wooster is a young gentleman with practically every desirable quality except one. I do not mean brains, for in an employer brains are not desirable.

The quality to which I allude is hard to define, but perhaps I might call it the gift of dealing with the Unusual Situation. In the presence of the Unusual, Mr. Wooster is too prone to smile weakly and allow his eyes to protrude.

“Oh, ah, yes,” said Mr. Wooster. “Story? Story?” He appeared completely distraught, poor young gentleman. “I wonder if you’ve heard the one about the stockbroker and the chorus-girl?”

“We will now sing the school song,” said Miss Tomlinson, rising like an iceberg.

I decided not to remain for the singing of the school song. It seemed probable to me that Mr. Wooster would shortly be requiring the car, so I made my way back to the stable-yard, to be in readiness.

Barely sentient, was the way she once described me: and I’m not saying that in a broad, general sense she isn’t right. But there is one department of life in which I am old Lynx-Eye in person.

I can recognize Love’s Young Dream more quickly than any other bloke of my weight and age in the Metropolis.

So many of my pals have copped it in the past few years that now I can spot it a mile off on a foggy day.

“I am greatly obliged, my dear fellow,” said the cove, becoming genial again. “You must forgive my mentioning it. I would be the last person to attempt to dictate the—ha!—editorial policy, but—Well, good afternoon, Sipperley. I will call for your decision at three o’clock tomorrow.”

He withdrew, leaving a gap in the atmosphere about ten feet by six.

When this had closed in, I sat up.

“How can I, when the sight of him makes me feel like a piece of chewed blotting-paper?

When he looks at me over that nose, my morale goes blue at the roots and I am back at school again.

It’s persecution, Bertie. And the next thing that’ll happen is that my proprietor will spot one of those articles, assume with perfect justice that, if I can print that sort of thing, I must be going off my chump, and fire me.”

The first thing you need in matters of this kind, as every general knows, is a thorough knowledge of the terrain.

Not know the terrain, and where are you? Look at Napoleon and that sunken road at Waterloo. Silly ass!

I had a thorough knowledge of the terrain of Sippy’s office, and it ran as follows.

“But, good heavens, Jeeves! If I remember Treasure Island, Flint was the bird who went about hitting people with a cutlass. You don’t think young Thomas would bean Mr. Filmer with a cutlass?”

“Possibly he does not possess a cutlass, sir.”

“We can but wait and see, sir. The tie, if I might suggest it, sir, a shade more tightly knotted. One aims at the perfect butterfly effect. If you will permit me—”

“

There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter.

”

I could see the man was pained, but I did not try to heal the wound. What’s the word I want? Preoccupied.

I was too preoccupied, don’t you know. And distrait. Not to say careworn.

I was still careworn when, next day at half-past two, the revels commenced on the tennis lawn. It was one of those close, baking days, with thunder rumbling just round the corner;

Something slapped against the wall about an inch below my right ankle, and any doubts I may have had about remaining below vanished.

The lad who bore ’mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device “Excelsior!” was the model for Bertram.

“Be careful!” yipped the Right Hon.

Something slapped against the wall about an inch below my right ankle, and any doubts I may have had about remaining below vanished. The lad who bore ’mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device “Excelsior!” was the model for Bertram.

“Be careful!” yipped the Right Hon.

Whoever built the Octagon might have constructed it especially for this sort of crisis.

It was standing below, stretching up a neck like a hosepipe, just where a bit of brick, judiciously bunged, would catch it amidships.

I bunged the brick and scored a bull’s-eye.

The Right Hon. didn’t seem any too well pleased.

“Don’t tease it!” he said.

“It teased me,” I said.

The swan extended another eight feet of neck and gave an imitation of steam escaping from a leaky pipe.

“Within an ace,” replied my companion, gazing down with a look of marked dislike. “I had to make a very rapid spring.”

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say “When!”

and the picture he conjured up, if you know what I mean, was rather pleasing.

“Don’t say ‘Very good.’ Come and help us. Mr. Filmer and I are treed, Jeeves.”

“Don’t keep saying ‘Very good.’ It’s nothing of the kind. The place is alive with swans.”

“I will attend to the matter immediately, sir.”

I turned to the Right Hon. I even went so far as to pat him on the back.

It was like slapping a wet sponge.

“All is well,” I said. “Jeeves is coming.”

He may pursue one course, or he may pursue another. But on one thing you can rely with the utmost confidence—Jeeves will find a way. See, here he comes stealing through the undergrowth, his face shining with the light of pure intelligence.

There are no limits to Jeeves’s brainpower. He virtually lives on fish.

”