Thank You, Jeeves

'Sorry. No butter.'

'There must be butter in your cottage.'

'There isn't. And why? Because there isn't a cottage.'

'I cannot understand you.'

'It's burned down.'

'What?'

'Yes. Brinkley did it.'

'Good God!'

'A nuisance in many ways, I must confess.'

He was silent for a space. Turning the thing over in his mind. Looking at it from this angle and that.

'Your cottage is really burned down?'

'Heap of ashes.'

'Then what is to be done?'

It seemed time to point out the silver lining.

'Be of good cheer,' I said. 'We may not be so well off for cottages, but the butter situation, I am happy to say, is reasonably bright. We can't get any to-night, but it cometh in the morning, so to speak. Jeeves is going to bring me some as soon as the dairyman delivers.'

'But I cannot remain in this condition till morning.'

'Only course to pursue, I'm afraid.'

He brooded. Hard to see in the darkness, but discontentedly, I thought, as if his haughty spirit fretted somewhat. He must have been doing some good, solid thinking, too, because suddenly he came to life with an idea.

'This cottage of yours – had it a garage?'

'Oh, yes.'

'Was that burned down also?'

'No, I fancy it escaped the holocaust. It was well away from the scene of conflagration.'

'Is there petrol in it?'

'Oh, yes. Lots of petrol.'

'Why, then all is well, Mr Wooster. I am convinced that petrol will prove a cleansing agent equally as efficacious as butter.'

'But, dash it, you can't go to my garage.'

'Why not, pray?'

'Well, yes, you could, if you liked, I suppose. Not me, though. For reasons which I am not prepared to divulge, I propose to spend the rest of the night in the summer-house on the main lawn of the Hall.'

'You will not accompany me?'

'Sorry. No.'

'Then good night, Mr Wooster. I will not keep you any longer from your rest. I am greatly obliged to you for the assistance you have accorded me in a trying situation. We must see more of one another. Let us lunch together one of these days. How do I obtain access to this garage of yours?'

'You'll have to bust a window.'

'I will do so.'

He pushed off, full of buck and determination, and I, with a dubious shake of the old onion, trickled along towards the summer-house.

17 BREAKFAST-TIME AT THE HALL

I don't know if you have ever spent the night in a summer-house. If not, avoid making the experiment. It's not a thing I would advise any friend of mine to do. On the subject of sleeping in summer-houses I will speak out fearlessly. As far as I have been able to ascertain, such a binge doesn't present a single attractive feature. Apart from the inevitable discomfort in the fleshy parts, there's the cold, and apart from the cold there's the mental anguish. All the ghost stories you've ever read go flitting through the mind, particularly any you know where fellows are found next morning absolutely dead, without a mark on them but with such a look of horror and fear in their eyes that the search party draw in their breath a bit and gaze at each other as much as to say 'What ho!' Things creak. You fancy you hear stealthy footsteps. You receive the impression that a goodish quota of skinny hands are reaching out for you in the darkness. And, as I say, the cold extremely severe and much discomfort in the fleshy parts. The whole constituting a pretty sticky experience and one to be avoided by the knowledgeable.

And what made the thing so dashed poignant in my case was the thought that if I had only had the nerve to accompany intrepid old Glossop to the garage there would have been no need for me to stay marooned in this smelly structure, listening to the wind howling through the chinks in the woodwork. Once at the garage, I mean to say, I could not only have scoured the face but could have hopped into the old two-seater, which was champing at its bit there, and tooled off to London by road, singing a gipsy song, as it were.

And I simply couldn't muster up the nerve to take a pop at it. The garage, I reflected, was right in the danger zone, well inside the Voules and Dobson belt, and I absolutely could not face the possibility of running into Police Sergeant Voules and being detained and questioned. Those meetings with him the night before had shattered my moral, causing me to look upon this hellhound of the Law as a sleepless prowler who rambled incessantly and was bound to appear out of a trap just at the moment when you could best have done without him.

So I stayed where I was. I hitched myself into position forty-six in the hope that it would be easier on the f.p's than the last forty-five, and had another shot at the dreamless.

The thing that always beats me is how on these occasions one ever gets to sleep at all. Personally, I abandoned all idea of it at an early stage, and no one, accordingly, could have been more surprised than myself when, just as I was endeavouring to give the miss to a leopard which was biting me rather shrewdly in the seat of the trousers, I suddenly awoke to discover that it had been but a dream, that in reality no leopards were to be noticed among those present, that the sun was up and another day had begun, and that on the greensward without the early bird was already breakfasting and making the dickens of a noise about it, too.

I went to the door and looked out. I could hardly believe that it was really morning. But it was, and a dashed good morning, at that. The air was cool and fresh, there were long shadows across the lawn, and everything combined to give the soul such a kick that many fellows in my position would have taken off their socks and done rhythmic dances in the dew. I did not actually do that, but I certainly felt uplifted to no little extent, and you might say that I was simply so much pure spirit, without any material side to me whatsoever, when suddenly it was as if the old turn had come out of a trance with a jerk, and the next moment I was feeling that nothing mattered in this world or the next except about a quart of coffee and all the eggs and b. you could cram on to a dish.

It's a rummy thing about breakfast. When you've only to press a bell to have the domestic staff racing in with everything on the menu from oatmeal to jams, marmalades, and potted meats, you find that all you can look at is a glass of soda water and a rusk. When you can't get it, you feel like a python when the Zoo officials have just started to bang the luncheon gong. Speaking for myself, I have, as a rule, to be more or less lured to the feast. I mean to say, I don't as a general thing become what you might call breakfast-conscious till I've had my morning tea and rather thought things over a bit. And I can give no better indication of the extraordinary change which had come over my viewpoint now than by mentioning that there was a young fowl of sorts not far away engaged in getting outside a large, pink worm, and I could willingly have joined it at the board. In fact, I would have taken pot luck at this juncture with a buzzard.

My watch had stopped, so I couldn't tell what time it was: and another thing I didn't know was when Jeeves was planning to go to the Dower House to keep our tryst. The thought that he might even now be on his way there and that, if he didn't find me, he would give the thing up as a bad job and retire to some impregnable fastness in the back parts of the Hall gave me a very nasty turn. I left the summer-house and, taking to the bushes, began to work my way through them, treading like a Red Indian on the trail and keeping well under cover throughout.

And I was just navigating round the side of the house and making ready for the dash into the open, when through the French window of the morning-room I saw a spectacle which affected me profoundly. In fact, you'd be