For, just as he was beginning to go nicely and display a bit of eloquence, a knock had sounded on the door. In fact, not so much a knock as a bang—or even a slosh. And there now entered a large, important-looking bird with penetrating eyes, a Roman nose, and high cheekbones. Authoritative. That’s the word I want. I didn’t like his collar, and Jeeves would have had a thing or two to say about the sit of his trousers; but, nevertheless, he was authoritative. There was something compelling about the man. He looked like a traffic-policeman.
“Ah, Sipperley!” he said.
Old Sippy displayed a good deal of agitation. He had leaped from his chair, and was now standing in a constrained attitude, with a sort of pop-eyed expression on his face.
“Pray be seated, Sipperley,” said the cove. He took no notice of me. After one keen glance and a brief waggle of the nose in my direction, he had washed Bertram out of his life. “I have brought you another little offering—ha! Look it over at your leisure, my dear fellow.”
“Yes, sir,” said Sippy.
“I think you will enjoy it. But there is just one thing. I should be glad, Sipperley, if you would give it a leetle better display, a rather more prominent position in the paper than you accorded to my ‘Landmarks of Old Tuscany.’ I am quite aware that in a weekly journal space is a desideratum, but one does not like one’s efforts to be—I can only say pushed away in a back corner among advertisements of bespoke tailors and places of amusement.” He paused, and a nasty gleam came into his eyes. “You will bear this in mind, Sipperley?”
“Yes, sir,” said Sippy.
“I am greatly obliged, my dear fellow,” said the cove, becoming genial again. “You must forgive my mentioning it. I would be the last person to attempt to dictate the—ha!—editorial policy, but—Well, good afternoon, Sipperley. I will call for your decision at three o’clock tomorrow.”
He withdrew, leaving a gap in the atmosphere about ten feet by six. When this had closed in, I sat up.
“What was that?” I said.
I was startled to observe poor old Sippy apparently go off his onion. He raised his hands over his head, clutched his hair, wrenched it about for a while, kicked a table with great violence, and then flung himself into his chair.
“Curse him!” said Sippy. “May he tread on a banana-skin on his way to chapel and sprain both ankles!”
“Who was he?”
“May he get frog-in-the-throat and be unable to deliver the end-of-term sermon!”
“Yes, but who was he?”
“My old head master, Bertie,” said Sippy.
“Yes, but, my dear old soul—”
“Head master of my old school.” He gazed at me in a distraught sort of way. “Good Lord! Can’t you understand the position?”
“Not by a jugful, laddie.”
Sippy sprang from his chair and took a turn or two up and down the carpet.
“How do you feel,” he said, “when you meet the head master of your old school?”
“I never do. He’s dead.”
“Well, I’ll tell you how I feel. I feel as if I were in the Lower Fourth again, and had been sent up by my form-master for creating a disturbance in school. That happened once, Bertie, and the memory still lingers. I can recall as if it were yesterday knocking at old Waterbury’s door and hearing him say, ‘Come in!’ like a lion roaring at an early Christian, and going in and shuffling my feet on the mat and him looking at me and me explaining—and then, after what seemed a lifetime, bending over and receiving six of the juiciest on the old spot with a cane that bit like an adder. And whenever he comes into my office now the old wound begins to trouble me, and I just say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir,’ and feel like a kid of fourteen.”
I began to grasp the posish. The whole trouble with these fellows like Sippy, who go in for writing, is that they develop the artistic temperament, and you never know when it is going to break out.
“He comes in here with his pockets full of articles on ‘The Old School Cloisters’ and ‘Some Little-Known Aspects of Tacitus,’ and muck like that, and I haven’t the nerve to refuse them. And this is supposed to be a paper devoted to the lighter interests of Society.”
“You must be firm, Sippy. Firm, old thing.”
“How can I, when the sight of him makes me feel like a piece of chewed blotting-paper? When he looks at me over that nose, my morale goes blue at the roots and I am back at school again. It’s persecution, Bertie. And the next thing that’ll happen is that my proprietor will spot one of those articles, assume with perfect justice that, if I can print that sort of thing, I must be going off my chump, and fire me.”
I pondered. It was a tough problem.
“How would it be—?” I said.
“That’s no good.”
“Only a suggestion, laddie,” I said.
“Jeeves,” I said, when I got home, “surge round!”
“Sir?”
“Burnish the old bean. I have a case that calls for one of your best efforts. Have you ever heard of a Miss Gwendolen Moon?”
“Authoress of ‘Autumn Leaves,’ ‘ ’Twas on an English June,’ and other works. Yes, sir.”
“Great Scott, Jeeves, you seem to know everything.”
“Thank you very much, sir.”
“Well, Mr. Sipperley is in love with Miss Moon.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But fears to speak.”
“It is often the way, sir.”
“Deeming himself unworthy.”
“Precisely, sir.”
“Right! But that is not all. Tuck that away in a corner of the mind, Jeeves, and absorb the rest of the facts. Mr. Sipperley, as you are aware, is the editor of a weekly paper devoted to the interests of the lighter Society. And now the head master of
