Right Ho, Jeeves quotes

All pretty clear so far, what?

We stayed at Cannes about two months, and except for the fact that Aunt Dahlia lost her shirt at baccarat and Angela nearly got inhaled by a shark while aquaplaning, a pleasant time was had by all.

On July the twenty-fifth, looking bronzed and fit, I accompanied aunt and child back to London. At seven p.m. on July the twenty-sixth we alighted at Victoria.

“I don’t suppose he has spoken to a girl for years. What a lesson this is to us, Jeeves, not to shut ourselves up in country houses and stare into glass tanks. You can’t be the dominant male if you do that sort of thing.

In this life, you can choose between two courses. You can either shut yourself up in a country house and stare into tanks, or you can be a dasher with the sex.

You can’t do both.”

You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you.

I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower.

It was like that with this Bassett and me;

I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions.

Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.

As regards the fusing of her soul and mine, therefore, there was nothing doing. But with Gussie, the posish was entirely different. The thing that had stymied me—viz.

He went on with his unpacking. I said no more on the subject.

I had won the victory, and we Woosters do not triumph over a beaten foe.

Presently, having completed my toilet, I bade the man a cheery farewell and in generous mood suggested that, as I was dining out, why didn’t he take the evening off and go to some improving picture or something.

Well, the answer to that, of course, was “perfectly foul.” But we Woosters are men of tact and have a nice sense of the obligations of a host.

We do not tell old friends beneath our rooftree that they are an offence to the eyesight.

I evaded the question.

I saw his point.

There is enough sadness in life without having fellows like Gussie Fink-Nottle going about in sea boots.

“Well, to be absolutely accurate, Bertie, old man, no.”

“Yes, I would, if I were a male newt.”

A slight throbbing about the temples told me that this discussion had reached saturation point.

“Well, anyway,” I said, “coming down to hard facts and cutting out all this visionary stuff about vibrating tails and whatnot, the salient point that emerges is that you are booked to appear at a fancy-dress ball.

“Wake up, Bertie, you old ass!” she cried, in a voice that hit me between the eyebrows and went out at the back of my head.

If Aunt Dahlia has a fault, it is that she is apt to address a vis-à-vis as if he were somebody half a mile away whom she had observed riding over hounds.

A throwback, no doubt, to the time when she counted the day lost that was not spent in chivvying some unfortunate fox over the countryside.

“Greedy young pigs have nothing to do with it,” I said with a touch of hauteur. “

One is not a greedy young pig because one appreciates the cooking of a genius.

”

The wind drops. The ears cease to ring. Birds twitter. Brass bands start playing.

The sun comes up over the horizon with a jerk.

And a moment later all you are conscious of is a great peace.

“

You cannot explain to cabmen, sir.

On endeavouring to do so, he found the fellow sceptical of his bona fides.”

Indeed, for an instant I had half a mind to withdraw from the case and hand it back to Jeeves. But the pride of the Woosters restrained me.

When we Woosters put our hands to the plough, we do not readily sheathe the sword.

Besides, after that business of the mess-jacket, anything resembling weakness would have been fatal.

“Quite.

You see a girl alone for about five minutes a day, and if you want to ask her to be your wife, you’ve got to charge into it as if you were trying to grab the gold ring on a merry-go-round.

”

The relief, as you may well imagine, was stupendous. A great weight seemed to have rolled off my mind. It was as if somebody had been pouring Jeeves’s pick-me-ups into me through a funnel. I sang as I dressed for dinner that night.

At the Drones I was so gay and cheery that there were several complaints.

And when I got home and turned into the old bed, I fell asleep like a little child within five minutes of inserting the person between the sheets. It seemed to me that the whole distressing affair might now be considered definitely closed.

She snorted emotionally.

She looked like an aunt who has just bitten into a bad oyster.

“Worried is right. I haven’t had a peaceful moment since I got back from Cannes.

I must say I saw the girl’s viewpoint.

It’s only about once in a lifetime that anything sensational ever happens to one, and when it does, you don’t want people taking all the colour out of it.

I remember at school having to read that stuff where that chap, Othello, tells the girl what a hell of a time he’d been having among the cannibals and whatnot.

Then, I reflected, better, on the whole, perhaps not. To broadcast the fact that I proposed to take him and Angela and play on them as on a couple of stringed instruments might have been injudicious.

Chaps don’t always like being played on as on a stringed instrument.

“It all depends,” I said. “I may remain. I may push on. My plans are uncertain.”

“No. It is too late.

Remarks have been passed about my tummy which it is impossible to overlook.

”

“I can’t do that. It would be fatal. Bing, instantly, would go my prestige. I know girls.

Grovel, and the best of them get uppish.

” He mused. “The only way to work the thing would be by tipping her off in some indirect way that I am prepared to open negotiations. Should I sigh a bit when we meet, do you think?”

They continued rankling as I shed the form-fitting, and had not ceased to rankle when, clad in the old dressing-gown, I made my way along the corridor to the salle de bain.

It is not too much to say that I was piqued to the tonsils.

I mean to say, one does not court praise. The adulation of the multitude means very little to one.

But after I had been splashing about in the porcelain for a bit, composure began to return.

I have always found that in moments of heart-bowed-downness there is nothing that calms the bruised spirit like a good go at the soap and water.

I don’t say I actually sang in the tub, but there were times when it was a mere spin of the coin whether I would do so or not.

The discovery of a toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind.

What with one thing and another, I hadn’t played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating.

For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn.

Or is it ineptness? I mean this frightful disposition of his to stick straws in his hair and talk like a perfect ass. It was the old, old story, I supposed.

A man’s brain whizzes along for years exceeding the speed limit, and something suddenly goes wrong with the steering-gear and it skids and comes a smeller in the ditch.

“A bit elaborate,” I said, trying to put the thing in as kindly a light as possible. “Your old failing. You can see that it’s a bit elaborate?”

The Bassett was a silent bread crumbler. Angela might have been hewn from the living rock. Tuppy had the air of a condemned murderer refusing to make the usual hearty breakfast before tooling off to the execution shed.

And as for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming him on sight.

This was the first glimpse I had had of Gussie since we parted at my flat, and I must say his demeanour disappointed me. I had been expecting something a great deal more sparkling.

He spoke with a sort of dull despair, and so manifest was his lack of ginger and the spirit that wins to success that for an instant, I confess, I felt a bit stymied.

It seemed hopeless to go on trying to steam up such a human jellyfish.

Then I saw the way. With that extraordinary quickness of mine, I realized exactly what must be done if this Fink-Nottle was to be enabled to push his nose past the judges’ box.

“Certainly.

Half the married men you meet began by talking about the sunset.

”

“Well, after that it’s easy. You say you have something you want to say to her, and then you snap into it. I don’t see how it can fail. If I were you, I should do it in this rose garden.

It is well established that there is no sounder move than to steer the adored object into rose gardens in the gloaming.

And you had better have a couple of quick ones first.”

In these circs., conversation inevitably flagged a bit.

I am never at my best when the situation seems to call for a certain soupiness, and I’ve heard other members of the Drones say the same thing about themselves.

I remember Pongo Twistleton telling me that he was out in a gondola with a girl by moonlight once, and the only time he spoke was to tell her that old story about the chap who was so good at swimming that they made him …

My whole fate hung upon a woman’s word. I mean to say, I couldn’t back out.

If a girl thinks a man is proposing to her, and on that understanding books him up, he can’t explain to her that she has got hold of entirely the wrong end of the stick and that he hadn’t the smallest intention of suggesting anything of the kind.

He must simply let it ride. And the thought of being engaged to a girl who talked openly about fairies being born because stars blew their noses, or whatever it was, frankly appalled me.

Excellent at blocking a punt or walking across an opponent’s face in cleated boots, but not so good when it comes to understanding the highly-strung female temperament.

It simply wouldn’t occur to him that a girl might be prepared to give up her life’s happiness rather than waive her shark.

“Rot! It was just a pretext.”

It seemed to me that she gave me rather a jaundiced look as I hove in sight, but this, having so recently beheld Tuppy in his agony, I attributed to the fact that she, like him, had been going light on the menu.

You can’t expect an empty aunt to beam like a full aunt.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” she said.

“

Another time try acting for the worst. Then we may possibly escape with a mere flesh wound.

”

Their tendency to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation is well known. No doubt the man had put his whole soul into those nonnettes de poulet, and to see them come homing back to him must have gashed him like a knife.

However, spilt milk blows nobody any good, and it is useless to dwell upon it.

The task now confronting Bertram was to put matters right, and I was pacing the lawn, pondering to this end, when I suddenly heard a groan so lost-soulish that I thought it must have proceeded from Uncle Tom, escaped from captivity and come to groan …

No matter how much of a twitter he was in, he should have had sense enough to see that he was throwing a spanner into the works.

No girl, when she has been led to expect that a man is about to pour forth his soul in a fervour of passion, likes to find him suddenly shelving the whole topic in favour of an address on aquatic Salamandridae.

“And how long did this nuisance continue?”

I stood musing. More and more, it was beginning to be borne in upon me what a particularly difficult chap Gussie was to help. He seemed to so marked an extent to lack snap and finish.

With infinite toil, you manoeuvred him into a position where all he had to do was charge ahead, and he didn’t charge ahead, but went off sideways, missing the objective completely.

In happier circs., of course, I would have canvassed his views on the matter. But after what had occurred in connection with that mess-jacket, my lips were sealed.

He waited respectfully for me to unleash the words of wisdom. I must say for Jeeves that—till, as he is so apt to do, he starts shoving his oar in and cavilling and obstructing—he makes a very good audience.

I don’t know if he is actually agog, but he looks agog, and that’s the great thing.

“Suppose you were strolling through the illimitable jungle, Jeeves, and happened to meet a tiger cub.”

His hair was full of twigs, and there was a beetle hanging to the side of his head which would have interested Gussie Fink-Nottle. To this, however, I paid scant attention.

There is a time for studying beetles and a time for not studying beetles.

Now, those who know Bertram Wooster best will tell you that he is always at his shrewdest and most levelheaded in moments of peril.

But I need not labour the point. My record speaks for itself.

Three times pinched, but never once sentenced under the correct label.

Ask anyone at the Drones about this.

“Really?” I said. “I never knew that before.

Rummy how you don’t suspect a man of being Scotch unless he’s Mac-something and says ‘Och, aye’ and things like that.

I wonder,” I went on, feeling that an academic discussion on some neutral topic might ease the tension, “if you can tell me something that has puzzled me a good deal. What exactly is it that they put into haggis? I’ve often wondered about that.”

“I like your crust!” cried Tuppy, vibrating like one of Gussie’s newts during the courting season. “Talking of beetles, when all the time you know you’re a treacherous, sneaking hound.”

It was a debatable point, of course, why treacherous, sneaking hounds should be considered ineligible to talk about beetles, and I dare say a good cross-examining counsel would have made quite a lot of it.

But I let it go.

With every desire to look for the silver lining, I could not but feel that the rift between these two haughty spirits had now reached such impressive proportions that the task of bridging same would be beyond even my powers.

I am a shrewd observer, and there had been something in Tuppy’s manner as he booted that plate of ham sandwiches that seemed to tell me that he would not lightly forgive.

In these circs., I deemed it best to shelve their problem for the nonce and turn the mind to the matter of Gussie, which presented a brighter picture.

“And I should get cold feet if I tried again. It’s no good, Bertie. I’m hopeless, and there’s an end of it.

Fate made me the sort of chap who can’t say ‘bo’ to a goose.

”

But it’s no good. I can’t do it. The whole thing is off. I am not going to risk a repetition of last night’s fiasco. You talk in a light way of taking another whack at her, but you don’t know what it means.

You have not been through the experience of starting to ask the girl you love to marry you and then suddenly finding yourself talking about the plumlike external gills of the newly-born newt. It’s not a thing you can do twice.

No, I accept my destiny. It’s all over. And now, Bertie, like a good chap, shove off. I want to compose my speech. I can’t compose my speech with you mucking around.

“

You are falling into your old error, Jeeves, of thinking that Gussie is a parrot. Fight against this.

I shall add the oz.”

“What-ho, Bertie,” he said. “What-ho, what-ho, what-ho, and again what-ho.

What a beautiful world this is, Bertie. One of the nicest I ever met.

”

“Make it two tigers.

I could chew holes in a steel door.

What an ass you must have thought me out there in the garden. I see now you were laughing in your sleeve.”

And it didn’t. I could see exactly what must have happened.

Insert a liberal dose of mixed spirits in a normally abstemious man, and he becomes a force. He does not stand around, twiddling his fingers and stammering.

He acts. I had no doubt that Gussie must have reached for the Bassett and clasped her to him like a stevedore handling a sack of coals. And one could readily envisage the effect of that sort of thing on a girl of romantic mind.

In this hall the youth of Market Snodsbury had been eating its daily lunch for a matter of five hundred years, and the flavour lingered.

The air was sort of heavy and languorous, if you know what I mean, with the scent of Young England and boiled beef and carrots.

Aunt Dahlia, who was sitting with a bevy of the local nibs in the second row, sighted me as I entered and waved to me to join her, but I was too smart for that.

I wedged myself in among the standees at the back, leaning up against a chap who, from the aroma, might have been a corn chandler or something on that order.

The essence of strategy on these occasions is to be as near the door as possible.

The hall was gaily decorated with flags and coloured paper, and the eye was further refreshed by the spectacle of a mixed drove of boys, parents, and whatnot, the former running a good deal to shiny faces and Eton collars, the latter stressing the black-satin …

He paused, and beamed rather freely, to show that this was comedy. I could have told the man it was no use. Not a ripple. The corn chandler leaned against me and muttered “Whoddidesay?” but that was all.

It’s always a nasty jar to wait for the laugh and find that the gag hasn’t got across.

The bearded bloke was visibly discomposed. At that, however, I think he would have got by, had he not, at this juncture, unfortunately stirred Gussie up again.

I couldn’t quite follow some of it, but anybody could see that it was real ripe stuff, and I was amazed that even the course of treatment he had been taking could have rendered so normally tongue-tied a dumb brick as Gussie capable of it.

It just shows, what any member of Parliament will tell you, that if you want real oratory, the preliminary noggin is essential. Unless pie-eyed, you cannot hope to grip.

“Gentlemen,” said Gussie, “I mean ladies and gentlemen and, of course, boys, what a beautiful world this is. A beautiful world, full of happiness on every side. Let me tell you a little story.

“Why not? I fell in love with her in a couple of minutes.

I worshipped her immediately we met, the popeyed little excrescence.

”

The shot wasn’t on the board. A splendid chap, of course, in many ways—courteous, amiable, and just the fellow to tell you what to do till the doctor came, if you had a sick newt on your hands—but quite obviously not of Mendelssohn’s March timber.

I have no doubt that you could have flung bricks by the hour in England’s most densely populated districts without endangering the safety of a single girl capable of becoming Mrs. Augustus Fink-Nottle without an anaesthetic.

I put this to her, and she was forced to admit the justice of it.

that there was but one thing to do—that is head for the dining-room and take a slash at the cold collation of which Jeeves had spoken. I felt in urgent need of sustenance, for the recent interview had pulled me down a bit.

There is no gainsaying the fact that this naked-emotion stuff reduces a chap’s vitality and puts him in the vein for a good whack at the beef and ham.

To the dining-room, accordingly, I repaired, and had barely crossed the threshold when I perceived Aunt Dahlia at the sideboard, tucking into salmon mayonnaise.

“Nonsense. What was there to be peeved about?

I took the whole thing as a great compliment, proud to feel that any drink from my cellars could have produced such a majestic jag.

It restores one’s faith in postwar whisky. Besides, I couldn’t be peeved at anything tonight. I am like a little child clapping its hands and dancing in the sunshine.

A thing to jar the most phlegmatic. I know I should hate to be lying in bed and have Gussie popping up like that.

A chap’s bedroom⁠—you can’t get away from it⁠—is his castle, and he has every right to look askance if gargoyles come glaring in at him.

While I stood musing thus, Aunt Dahlia, in her practical way, was coming straight to the point:

“I don’t absolutely talk about boils. I merely mentioned that Job had them. Yes, I agree with you, Aunt Dahlia, that things are not looking too oojah-cum-spiff at the moment, but be of good cheer.

A Wooster is seldom baffled for more than the nonce.

”

To the question which had been exercising the mind—viz., can Bertram cope?—I was now able to reply with a confident “Absolutely.”

The great wheeze on these occasions of dirty work at the crossroads is not to lose your head but to keep cool and try to find the ringleaders. Once find the ringleaders, and you know where you are.

The ringleader here was plainly the Bassett.

And at this moment in she came. I might have foreseen that she would be turning up shortly.

I mean to say, hearts may ache, but if they know that there is a cold collation set out in the dining-room, they are pretty sure to come popping in sooner or later.

Her eyes, as she entered the room, were fixed on the salmon mayonnaise, and she would no doubt have made a beeline for it and started getting hers, had I not, in the emotion of seeing her, dropped a glass of the best with which …

The noise caused her to turn, and for an instant embarrassment supervened. A slight flush mantled the cheek, and the eyes popped a bit.

I have always found that there is nothing that helps to ease you over one of these awkward moments like a spot of stage business. Find something to do with your hands, and it’s half the battle.

I grabbed a plate and hastened forward.

I saw what she meant, of course. Gussie had bunged his heart at her feet; she had picked it up, and, almost immediately after doing so, had discovered that he had been stewed to the eyebrows all the time. The shock must have been severe.

No girl likes to feel that a chap has got to be thoroughly plastered before he can ask her to marry him. It wounds the pride.

“But have you considered,” I said, “that you may have got a wrong line on Gussie’s performance this afternoon? Admitted that all the evidence points to a more sinister theory, what price him simply having got a touch of the sun?

… hours and come home with the milk without a tremor, but put me in the garden of a country house after the strength of the company has gone to roost and the place is shut up, and a sort of goose-fleshy feeling steals over me.

The night wind stirs the treetops, twigs crack, bushes rustle, and before I know where I am, the morale has gone phut and I’m expecting the family ghost to come sneaking up behind me, making groaning noises.

Dashed unpleasant, the whole thing, and if you think it improves matters to know that you are shortly about to ring the loudest fire bell in England and start an all-hands-to-the-pumps panic in that quiet, darkened house, you err.

“Dubious is no word for it, Jeeves. I hadn’t a scrap of faith in the idea from the start. When you first mooted it, I said it was rotten, and I was right. I’m not blaming you, Jeeves.

It is not your fault that you have sprained your brain.

But after this—forgive me if I hurt your feelings, Jeeves—I shall know better than to allow you to handle any but the simplest and most elementary problems. It is best to be candid about this, don’t you think? Kindest to be frank and straightforward?”

What he had omitted to mention was that I had invariably been well oiled at the time, and when in that condition a chap is capable of feats at which in cooler moments his reason would rebel.

Stimulated by the juice, I believe, men have even been known to ride alligators.

As I started now to pedal out into the great world, I was icily sober, and the old skill, in consequence, had deserted me entirely.

Oddly enough, I encountered neither. But when you have said that you have said everything, for in every other way the conditions could scarcely have been fouler.

Apart from the ceaseless anxiety of having to keep an eye skinned for elephants, I found myself much depressed by barking dogs, and once I received a most unpleasant shock when, alighting to consult a signpost, I saw sitting on top of it an owl that looked exactly like my Aunt Agatha.

So agitated, indeed, had my frame of mind become by this time that I thought at first it was Aunt Agatha, and only when reason and reflection told me how alien to her habits it would be to climb signposts and sit on them, could …