“I thought you were in America,” I said.
“Well, I’m not.”
“Why not?”
“Never mind why not. I’m not.”
“But why have you taken a tutoring job?”
“Never mind why. I have my reasons. And I want you to get it into your head, Bertie—get it right through the concrete—that you and I must not be seen hobnobbing. Your blighted cousin was caught smoking in the shrubbery the day before yesterday, and that has made my position pretty tottery, because your aunt said that, if I had exercised an adequate surveillance over him, it couldn’t have happened. If, after that, she finds out I’m a friend of yours, nothing can save me from being shot out on my ear. And it is vital that I am not shot out.”
“Why?”
“Never mind why.”
At this point he seemed to think he heard somebody coming, for he suddenly leaped with incredible agility into a laurel bush. And I toddled along to consult Jeeves about these rummy happenings.
“Jeeves,” I said, repairing to the bedroom, where he was unpacking my things, “you remember that telegram?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It was from Mr. Little. He’s here, tutoring my young Cousin Thomas.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“I can’t understand it. He appears to be a free agent, if you know what I mean; and yet would any man who was a free agent wantonly come to a house which contained my Aunt Agatha?”
“It seems peculiar, sir.”
“Moreover, would anybody of his own free will and as a mere pleasure-seeker tutor my Cousin Thomas, who is notoriously a tough egg and a fiend in human shape?”
“Most improbable, sir.”
“These are deep waters, Jeeves.”
“Precisely, sir.”
“And the ghastly part of it all is that he seems to consider it necessary, in order to keep his job, to treat me like a long-lost leper. Thus killing my only chance of having anything approaching a decent time in this abode of desolation. For do you realize, Jeeves, that my aunt says I mustn’t smoke while I’m here?”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Nor drink.”
“Why is this, sir?”
“Because she wants me—for some dark and furtive reason which she will not explain—to impress a fellow named Filmer.”
“Too bad, sir. However, many doctors, I understand, advocate such abstinence as the secret of health. They say it promotes a freer circulation of the blood and insures the arteries against premature hardening.”
“Oh, do they? Well, you can tell them next time you see them that they are silly asses.”
“Very good, sir.”
And so began what, looking back along a fairly eventful career, I think I can confidently say was the scaliest visit I have ever experienced in the course of my life. What with the agony of missing the life-giving cocktail before dinner; the painful necessity of being obliged, every time I wanted a quiet cigarette, to lie on the floor in my bedroom and puff the smoke up the chimney; the constant discomfort of meeting Aunt Agatha round unexpected corners; and the fearful strain on the morale of having to chum with the Right Hon. A. B. Filmer, it was not long before Bertram was up against it to an extent hitherto undreamed of.
I played golf with the Right Hon. every day, and it was only by biting the Wooster lip and clenching the fists till the knuckles stood out white under the strain that I managed to pull through. The Right Hon. punctuated some of the ghastliest golf I have ever seen with a flow of conversation which, as far as I was concerned, went completely over the top; and, all in all, I was beginning to feel pretty sorry for myself when, one night as I was in my room listlessly donning the soup-and-fish in preparation for the evening meal, in trickled young Bingo and took my mind off my own troubles.
For when it is a question of a pal being in the soup, we Woosters no longer think of self; and that poor old Bingo was knee-deep in the bisque was made plain by his mere appearance—which was that of a cat which has just been struck by a half-brick and is expecting another shortly.
“Bertie,” said Bingo, having sat down on the bed and diffused silent gloom for a moment, “how is Jeeves’s brain these days?”
“Fairly strong on the wing, I fancy. How is the grey matter, Jeeves? Surging about pretty freely?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank Heaven for that,” said young Bingo, “for I require your soundest counsel. Unless right-thinking people take strong steps through the proper channels, my name will be mud.”
“What’s wrong, old thing?” I asked, sympathetically.
Bingo plucked at the coverlet.
“I will tell you,” he said. “I will also now reveal why I am staying in this pesthouse, tutoring a kid who requires not education in the Greek and Latin languages but a swift slosh on the base of the skull with a blackjack. I came here, Bertie, because it was the only thing I could do. At the last moment before she sailed to America, Rosie decided that I had better stay behind and look after the Peke. She left me a couple of hundred quid to see me through till her return. This sum, judiciously expended over the period of her absence, would have been enough to keep the Peke and myself in moderate affluence. But you know how it is.”
“How what is?”
“When someone comes slinking up to you in the club and tells you that some cripple of a horse can’t help winning even if it develops lumbago and the botts ten yards from the starting-post. I tell you, I regarded the thing as a cautious and conservative investment.”
“You mean you planked the entire capital on a horse?”
Bingo laughed bitterly.
“If you could call the thing a horse. If it hadn’t shown a flash of speed in the straight, it would have got mixed up with the next race. It came in last, putting me in a dashed delicate position. Somehow or other I had to
