“Very good, sir,” said Jeeves.
Bar a weekly wrestle with the Pink ’Un and an occasional dip into the form book I’m not much of a lad for reading, and my sufferings as I tackled The Woman (curse her!) Who Braved All were pretty fearful. But I managed to get through it, and only just in time, as it happened, for I’d hardly reached the bit where their lips met in one long, slow kiss and everything was still but for the gentle sighing of the breeze in the laburnum, when a messenger boy brought a note from old Bittlesham asking me to trickle round to lunch.
I found the old boy in a mood you could only describe as melting. He had a copy of the book on the table beside him and kept turning the pages in the intervals of dealing with things in aspic and whatnot.
“Mr. Wooster,” he said, swallowing a chunk of trout, “I wish to congratulate you. I wish to thank you. You go from strength to strength. I have read All for Love; I have read Only a Factory Girl; I know Madcap Myrtle by heart. But this—this is your bravest and best. It tears the heartstrings.”
“Yes?”
“Indeed yes! I have read it three times since you most kindly sent me the volume—I wish to thank you once more for the charming inscription—and I think I may say that I am a better, sweeter, deeper man. I am full of human charity and kindliness toward my species.”
“No, really?”
“Indeed, indeed I am.”
“Towards the whole species?”
“Towards the whole species.”
“Even young Bingo?” I said, trying him pretty high.
“My nephew? Richard?” He looked a bit thoughtful, but stuck it like a man and refused to hedge. “Yes, even towards Richard. Well … that is to say … perhaps … yes, even towards Richard.”
“That’s good, because I wanted to talk about him. He’s pretty hard up, you know.”
“In straitened circumstances?”
“Stoney. And he could use a bit of the right stuff paid every quarter, if you felt like unbelting.”
He mused awhile and got through a slab of cold guinea hen before replying. He toyed with the book, and it fell open at page two hundred and fifteen. I couldn’t remember what was on page two hundred and fifteen, but it must have been something tolerably zippy, for his expression changed and he gazed up at me with misty eyes, as if he’d taken a shade too much mustard with his last bite of ham.
“Very well, Mr. Wooster,” he said. “Fresh from a perusal of this noble work of yours, I cannot harden my heart. Richard shall have his allowance.”
“Stout fellow!” I said. Then it occurred to me that the expression might strike a chappie who weighed seventeen stone as a bit personal. “Good egg, I mean. That’ll take a weight off his mind. He wants to get married, you know.”
“I did not know. And I am not sure that I altogether approve. Who is the lady?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, she’s a waitress.”
He leaped in his seat.
“You don’t say so, Mr. Wooster! This is remarkable. This is most cheering. I had not given the boy credit for such tenacity of purpose. An excellent trait in him which I had not hitherto suspected. I recollect clearly that, on the occasion when I first had the pleasure of making your acquaintance, nearly eighteen months ago, Richard was desirous of marrying this same waitress.”
I had to break it to him.
“Well, not absolutely this same waitress. In fact, quite a different waitress. Still, a waitress, you know.”
The light of avuncular affection died out of the old boy’s eyes.
“H’m!” he said a bit dubiously. “I had supposed that Richard was displaying the quality of constancy which is so rare in the modern young man. I—I must think it over.”
So we left it at that, and I came away and told Bingo the position of affairs.
“Allowance OK,” I said. “Uncle blessing a trifle wobbly.”
“Doesn’t he seem to want the wedding bells to ring out?”
“I left him thinking it over. If I were a bookie, I should feel justified in offering a hundred to eight against.”
“You can’t have approached him properly. I might have known you would muck it up,” said young Bingo. Which, considering what I had been through for his sake, struck me as a good bit sharper than a serpent’s tooth.
“It’s awkward,” said young Bingo. “It’s infernally awkward. I can’t tell you all the details at the moment, but … yes, it’s awkward.”
He helped himself absently to a handful of my cigars and pushed off.
I didn’t see him again for three days. Early in the afternoon of the third day he blew in with a flower in his buttonhole and a look on his face as if someone had hit him behind the ear with a stuffed eel skin.
“Hallo, Bertie.”
“Hallo, old turnip. Where have you been all this while?”
“Oh, here and there! Ripping weather we’re having, Bertie.”
“Not bad.”
“I see the Bank Rate is down again.”
“No, really?”
“Disturbing news from Lower Silesia, what?”
“Oh, dashed!”
He pottered about the room for a bit, babbling at intervals. The boy seemed cuckoo.
“Oh, I say, Bertie!” he said suddenly, dropping a vase which he had picked off the mantelpiece and was fiddling with. “I know what it was I wanted to tell you. I’m married.”
I stared at him. That flower in his buttonhole. … That dazed look. … Yes, he had all the symptoms; and yet the thing seemed incredible. The fact is, I suppose, I’d seen so many of young Bingo’s love affairs start off with a whoop and a rattle and poof themselves out halfway down the straight that I couldn’t believe he had actually brought it off at last.
“Married!”
“Yes. This morning at a registrar’s in Holburn. I’ve just come from the wedding breakfast.”
I sat up in my chair. Alert. The man of affairs. It seemed to me that this
