“I say, Jeeves,” I said.
“Sir?”
“Mix me a stiffish brandy and soda.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stiffish, Jeeves. Not too much soda, but splash the brandy about a bit.”
“Very good, sir.”
After imbibing, I felt a shade better.
“Jeeves,” I said.
“Sir?”
“I rather fancy I’m in the soup, Jeeves.”
“Indeed, sir?”
I eyed the man narrowly. Dashed aloof his manner was. Still brooding over the cummerbund.
“Yes. Right up to the hocks,” I said, suppressing the pride of the Woosters and trying to induce him to be a bit matier. “Have you seen a girl popping about here with a parson brother?”
“Miss Hemmingway, sir? Yes, sir.”
“Aunt Agatha wants me to marry her.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Well, what about it?”
“Sir?”
“I mean, have you anything to suggest?”
“No, sir.”
The blighter’s manner was so cold and unchummy that I bit the bullet and had a dash at being airy.
“Oh, well, tra-la-la!” I said.
“Precisely, sir,” said Jeeves.
And that was, so to speak, that.
I remember—it must have been when I was at school because I don’t go in for that sort of thing very largely nowadays—reading a poem or something about something or other in which there was a line which went, if I’ve got it rightly, “Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy.” Well, what I’m driving at is that during the next two weeks that’s exactly how it was with me. I mean to say, I could hear the wedding bells chiming faintly in the distance and getting louder and louder every day, and how the deuce to slide out of it was more than I could think. Jeeves, no doubt, could have dug up a dozen brainy schemes in a couple of minutes, but he was still aloof and chilly and I couldn’t bring myself to ask him point-blank. I mean, he could see easily enough that the young master was in a bad way and, if that wasn’t enough to make him overlook the fact that I was still gleaming brightly about the waistband, well, what it amounted to was that the old feudal spirit was dead in the blighter’s bosom and there was nothing to be done about it.
It really was rummy the way the Hemmingway family had taken to me. I wouldn’t have said offhand that there was anything particularly fascinating about me—in fact, most people look on me as rather an ass; but there was no getting away from the fact that I went like a breeze with this girl and her brother. They didn’t seem happy if they were away from me. I couldn’t move a step, dash it, without one of them popping out from somewhere and freezing on. In fact, I’d got into the habit now of retiring to my room when I wanted to take it easy for a bit. I had managed to get a rather decent suite on the third floor, looking down on to the promenade.
I had gone to earth in my suite one evening and for the first time that day was feeling that life wasn’t so bad after all. Right through the day from lunch time I’d had the Hemmingway girl on my hands, Aunt Agatha having shooed us off together immediately after the midday meal. The result was, as I looked down on the lighted promenade and saw all the people popping happily about on their way to dinner and the Casino and whatnot, a kind of wistful feeling came over me. I couldn’t help thinking how dashed happy I could have contrived to be in this place if only Aunt Agatha and the other blisters had been elsewhere.
I heaved a sigh, and at that moment there was a knock at the door.
“Someone at the door, Jeeves,” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
He opened the door, and in popped Aline Hemmingway and her brother. The last person I had expected. I really had thought that I could be alone for a minute in my own room.
“Oh, hallo!” I said.
“Oh, Mr. Wooster!” said the girl in a gasping sort of way. “I don’t know how to begin.”
Then I noticed that she appeared considerably rattled, and as for the brother, he looked like a sheep with a secret sorrow.
This made me sit up a bit and take notice. I had supposed that this was just a social call, but apparently something had happened to give them a jolt. Though I couldn’t see why they should come to me about it.
“Is anything up?” I said.
“Poor Sidney—it was my fault—I ought never to have let him go there alone,” said the girl. Dashed agitated.
At this point the brother, who after shedding a floppy overcoat and parking his hat on a chair had been standing by wrapped in the silence, gave a little cough, like a sheep caught in the mist on a mountain top.
“The fact is, Mr. Wooster,” he said, “a sad, a most deplorable thing has occurred. This afternoon, while you were so kindly escorting my sist-ah, I found the time hang a little heavy upon my hands and I was tempted to—ah—gamble at the Casino.”
I looked at the man in a kindlier spirit than I had been able to up to date. This evidence that he had sporting blood in his veins made him seem more human, I’m bound to say. If only I’d known earlier that he went in for that sort of thing, I felt that we might have had a better time together.
“Oh!” I said. “Did you click?”
He sighed heavily.
“If you mean was I successful, I must answer in the negative. I rashly persisted in the view that the colour red, having appeared no fewer than seven times in succession, must inevitably at no distant date give place to black. I was in error. I lost my little all, Mr. Wooster.”
“Tough luck,” I said.
“I left the
