“Highly suggestive, sir.”
“And at breakfast this morning, when I was eating a sausage, she told me I shouldn’t, as modern medical science held that a four-inch sausage contained as many germs as a dead rat. The maternal touch, you understand; fussing over my health.”
“I think we may regard that, sir, as practically conclusive!”
I sank into a chair, thoroughly pipped.
“What’s to be done, Jeeves?”
“We must think, sir.”
“You think. I haven’t the machinery.”
“I will most certainly devote my very best attention to the matter, sir, and will endeavour to give satisfaction.”
Well, that was something. But I was ill at ease. Yes, there is no getting away from it. Bertram was ill at ease.
Next morning we visited sixty-three more Cambridge colleges, and after lunch I said I was going to my room to lie down. After staying there for half an hour to give the coast time to clear, I shoved a book and smoking materials in my pocket and, climbing out of window, shinned down a convenient water-pipe into the garden. My objective was the summerhouse, where it seemed to me that a man might put in a quiet hour or so without interruption.
It was extremely jolly in the garden. The sun was shining, the crocuses were all to the mustard, and there wasn’t a sign of Heloise Pringle anywhere. The cat was fooling about on the lawn, so I chirruped to it and it gave a low gargle and came trotting up. I had just got it in my arms and was scratching it under the ear when there was a loud shriek from above, and there was Aunt Jane half out of a window. Dashed disturbing.
“Oh, right-ho,” I said.
I dropped the cat, which galloped off into the bushes, and, dismissing the idea of bunging a brick at the aged relative, went on my way, heading for the shrubbery. Once safely hidden there, I worked round till I got to the summerhouse. And, believe me, I had hardly got my first cigarette nicely under way, when a shadow fell on my book and there was young Sticketh-Closer-Than-A-Brother in person.
“So there you are,” she said.
She seated herself by my side, and with a sort of gruesome playfulness jerked the gasper out of the holder and heaved it out of the door.
“You’re always smoking,” she said, a lot too much like a lovingly chiding young bride for my comfort. “I wish you wouldn’t. It’s so bad for you. And you ought not to be sitting out here without your light overcoat. You want someone to look after you.”
“I’ve got Jeeves.”
She frowned a bit.
“I don’t like him,” she said.
“Eh? Why not?”
“I don’t know. I wish you would get rid of him.”
My flesh absolutely crept. And I’ll tell you why. One of the first things Honoria Glossop had done after we had become engaged was to tell me she didn’t like Jeeves and wanted him shot out. The realization that this girl resembled Honoria not only in body but blackness of soul made me go all faint.
“What are you reading?”
She picked up my book, and frowned again. The thing was one I had brought down from the old flat in London, to glance at in the train—a fairly zippy effort in the detective line called The Trail of Blood. She turned the pages with a nasty sneer.
“I can’t understand you liking nonsense of this—” she stopped suddenly. “Good gracious!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Do you know Bertie Wooster?”
And then I saw that my name was scrawled right across the title-page, and my heart did three back somersaults.
“Oh—er—well—that is to say—well, slightly.”
“He must be a perfect horror. I’m surprised that you can make a friend of him. Apart from anything else, the man is practically an imbecile. He was engaged to my cousin Honoria at one time, and it was broken off because he was next door to insane. You should hear my Uncle Roderick talk about him.”
I wasn’t keen.
“Do you see much of him?”
“A goodish bit.”
“I saw in the paper the other day that he was fined for making a disgraceful disturbance in the street.”
“Yes, I saw that.”
She gazed at me in a fond, motherly way.
“He can’t be a good influence for you,” she said. “I do wish you would drop him. Will you?”
“Well—” I began. And at this point old Cuthbert the cat, having presumably found it a bit slow by himself in the bushes, wandered in with a matey expression on his face and jumped on my lap.
I welcomed him with a good deal of cordiality. Though but a cat, he did make a sort of third at this party; and he afforded a good excuse for changing the conversation.
“Jolly birds, cats,” I said.
She wasn’t having any.
“Will you drop Bertie Wooster?” she said, absolutely ignoring the cat motif.
“It would be so difficult.”
“Nonsense. It only needs a little willpower. The man surely can’t be as interesting a companion as all that. Uncle Roderick says he is an invertebrate waster.”
I could have mentioned a few things that I thought Uncle Roderick was, but my lips were sealed, so to speak.
“You have changed a great deal since we last met,” said the Pringle disease reproachfully. She bent forward and began to scratch the cat under the other ear. “Do you remember, when we were children together, you used to say that you would do anything for me?”
“Did I?”
“I remember once you cried because I was cross and wouldn’t let you kiss me.”
I didn’t believe it at the time, and I don’t believe it now. Sippy is in many ways a good deal of a chump, but surely even at the age of ten he cannot have been such a priceless ass as that. I think the girl was lying, but that didn’t make the position of affairs any better. I edged away a couple of inches, and sat staring before me, the old brow beginning to get slightly bedewed.
And then suddenly—well, you know how it is, I mean. I suppose everyone has had
