“It becomes as clear as mud!” said Rocky.
“Proceed, old scout,” I said, champing my bread and butter.
“You know how all my life I have longed to visit New York and see for myself the wonderful gay life of which I have read so much. I fear that now it will be impossible for me to fulfil my dream. I am old and worn out. I seem to have no strength left in me.”
“Sad, Jeeves, what?”
“Extremely, sir.”
“Sad nothing!” said Rocky. “It’s sheer laziness. I went to see her last Christmas and she was bursting with health. Her doctor told me himself that there was nothing wrong with her whatever. But she will insist that she’s a hopeless invalid, so he has to agree with her. She’s got a fixed idea that the trip to New York would kill her; so, though it’s been her ambition all her life to come here, she stays where she is.”
“Rather like the chappie whose heart was ‘in the Highlands a-chasing of the deer,’ Jeeves?”
“The cases are in some respects parallel, sir.”
“Carry on, Rocky, dear boy.”
“So I have decided that, if I cannot enjoy all the marvels of the city myself, I can at least enjoy them through you. I suddenly thought of this yesterday after reading a beautiful poem in the Sunday paper about a young man who had longed all his life for a certain thing and won it in the end only when he was too old to enjoy it. It was very sad, and it touched me.”
“A thing,” interpolated Rocky bitterly, “that I’ve not been able to do in ten years.”
“As you know, you will have my money when I am gone; but until now I have never been able to see my way to giving you an allowance. I have now decided to do so—on one condition. I have written to a firm of lawyers in New York, giving them instructions to pay you quite a substantial sum each month. My one condition is that you live in New York and enjoy yourself as I have always wished to do. I want you to be my representative, to spend this money for me as I should do myself. I want you to plunge into the gay, prismatic life of New York. I want you to be the life and soul of brilliant supper parties.
“Above all, I want you—indeed, I insist on this—to write me letters at least once a week giving me a full description of all you are doing and all that is going on in the city, so that I may enjoy at secondhand what my wretched health prevents my enjoying for myself. Remember that I shall expect full details, and that no detail is too trivial to interest.
“What about it?” said Rocky.
“What about it?” I said.
“Yes. What on earth am I going to do?”
It was only then that I really got on to the extremely rummy attitude of the chappie, in view of the fact that a quite unexpected mess of the right stuff had suddenly descended on him from a blue sky. To my mind it was an occasion for the beaming smile and the joyous whoop; yet here the man was, looking and talking as if Fate had swung on his solar plexus. It amazed me.
“Aren’t you bucked?” I said.
“Bucked!”
“If I were in your place I should be frightfully braced. I consider this pretty soft for you.”
He gave a kind of yelp, stared at me for a moment, and then began to talk of New York in a way that reminded me of Jimmy Mundy, the reformer chappie. Jimmy had just come to New York on a hit-the-trail campaign, and I had popped in at the Garden a couple of days before, for half an hour or so, to hear him. He had certainly told New York some pretty straight things about itself, having apparently taken a dislike to the place, but, by Jove, you know, dear old Rocky made him look like a publicity agent for the old metrop!
“Pretty soft!” he cried. “To have to come and live in New York! To have to leave my little cottage and take a stuffy, smelly, overheated hole of an apartment in this Heaven-forsaken, festering Gehenna. To have to mix night after night with a mob who think that life is a sort of St. Vitus’s dance, and imagine that they’re having a good time because they’re making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn’t come near the place if I hadn’t got to see editors occasionally. There’s a blight on it. It’s got moral delirium tremens. It’s the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this thing pretty soft for me!”
I felt rather like Lot’s friends must have done when they dropped in for a quiet chat and their genial host began to criticise the Cities of the Plain. I had no idea old Rocky could be so eloquent.
“It would kill me to have to live in New York,” he went on. “To have to share the air with six million people! To have to wear stiff collars and decent clothes all the time! To—” He started. “Good Lord! I suppose I should have to dress for dinner in the evenings. What a ghastly notion!”
I was shocked, absolutely shocked.
“My dear chap!” I said reproachfully.
“Do you dress for dinner every night, Bertie?”
“Jeeves,” I said coldly. The man was still standing like a statue by the door. “How many suits of evening clothes have I?”
“We have three suits full of evening dress, sir; two dinner jackets—”
“Three.”
“For practical purposes two only, sir. If you remember we cannot wear the third. We have also seven white waistcoats.”
“And shirts?”
“Four dozen, sir.”
“And white ties?”
“The first two shallow shelves in the chest of drawers are completely filled with our
