“Proceed, Jeeves,” I said. “You interest me strangely. I begin to grasp the idea. You mean—?”
“I mean, sir, that, with this young gentleman on the premises, it might be possible to arrange a denouement of a somewhat similar nature in regard to Mr. Bullivant and Miss Vickers.”
“Aren’t you overlooking the fact that this kid is no relation of Mr. Bullivant or Miss Vickers?”
“Even with that handicap, sir, I fancy that good results might ensue. I think that, if it were possible to bring Mr. Bullivant and Miss Vickers together for a short space of time in the presence of the child, sir, and if the child were to say something of a touching nature—”
“I follow you absolutely, Jeeves,” I cried with enthusiasm. “It’s big. This is the way I see it. We lay the scene in this room. Child, centre. Girl, l.c. Freddie up stage, playing the piano. No, that won’t do. He can only play a little of ‘The Rosary’ with one finger, so we’ll have to cut out the soft music. But the rest’s all right. Look here,” I said. “This inkpot is Miss Vickers. This mug with ‘A Present from Marvis Bay’ on it is the child. This penwiper is Mr. Bullivant. Start with dialogue leading up to child’s line. Child speaks line, let us say, ‘Boofer lady, does ’oo love dadda?’ Business of outstretched hands. Hold picture for a moment. Freddie crosses l. takes girl’s hand. Business of swallowing lump in throat. Then big speech ‘Ah, Elizabeth, has not this misunderstanding of ours gone on too long? See! A little child rebukes us!’ And so on. I’m just giving you the general outline. Freddie must work up his own part. And we must get a good line for the child. ‘Boofer lady, does ’oo love dadda?’ isn’t definite enough. We want something more—”
“If I might make the suggestion, sir—?”
“Yes?”
“I would advocate the words ‘Kiss Freddie!’ It is short, readily memorised, and has what I believe is technically termed the punch.”
“Genius, Jeeves!”
“Thank you very much, sir.”
“ ‘Kiss Freddie!’ it is, then. But, I say, Jeeves, how the deuce are we to get them together in here? Miss Vickers cuts Mr. Bullivant. She wouldn’t come within a mile of him.”
“It is awkward, sir.”
“It doesn’t matter. We shall have to make it an exterior set instead of an interior. We can easily corner her on the beach somewhere, when we’re ready. Meanwhile, we must get the kid word-perfect.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right! First rehearsal for lines and business at eleven sharp tomorrow morning.”
Poor old Freddie was in such a gloomy frame of mind that I decided not to tell him the idea till we had finished coaching the child. He wasn’t in the mood to have a thing like that hanging over him. So we concentrated on Tootles. And pretty early in the proceedings we saw that the only way to get Tootles worked up to the spirit of the thing was to introduce sweets of some sort as a sub-motive so to speak.
“The chief difficulty, sir,” said Jeeves, at the end of the first rehearsal, “is, as I envisage it, to establish in the young gentleman’s mind a connection between the words we desire him to say and the refreshment.”
“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. And time was flying.
“We must hurry up, Jeeves,” I said. “The kid’s uncle may arrive any day now and take him away.”
“Exactly, sir.”
“And we have no understudy.”
“Very true, sir.”
“We must work! I must say this child is a bit discouraging at times. I should have thought a deaf-mute would have learned his part by now.”
I will say this for the kid, though: he was a trier. Failure didn’t damp him. Whenever there was any kind of sweet in sight he had a dash at his line, and kept saying something till he had got what he was after. His chief fault was his uncertainty. Personally, I would have been prepared to risk opening in the act and was ready to start the public performance at the first opportunity, but Jeeves said no.
“I would not advocate undue haste, sir,” he said. “As long as the young gentleman’s memory refuses to act with any certainty, we are running grave risks of failure. Today, if you recollect, sir, he said ‘Kick Freddie!’ That is not a speech to win a young lady’s heart, sir.”
“No. And she might do it, too. You’re right. We must postpone production.”
But, by Jove, we didn’t! The curtain went up the very next afternoon.
It was nobody’s fault—certainly not mine. It was just fate. Jeeves was out, and I was alone in the house with Freddie and the child. Freddie had just settled down at the piano, and I was leading the kid out of the place for a bit of exercise, when, just as we’d got on to the veranda, along came the girl Elizabeth on her way to the beach. And at the sight of her the kid set up a matey yell, and she stopped at the foot of the steps.
“Hallo, baby,” she said. “Good morning,” she said to me. “May I come up?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She just hopped on to the veranda. She seemed to be that sort of girl. She started fussing over the child. And six feet away, mind you, Freddie smiting the piano in the sitting room. It was a dashed disturbing situation, take it from Bertram. At any minute Freddie might take it into his head to come out on the veranda, and I
