Rather decent, the grounds at Ditteredge. A couple of terraces, a bit of lawn with a cedar on it, a bit of shrubbery, and finally a small but goodish lake with a stone bridge running across it. Directly I’d worked my way round the shrubbery I spotted young Bingo leaning against the bridge smoking a cigarette. Sitting on the stonework, fishing, was a species of kid whom I took to be Oswald the Plague-Spot.
Bingo was both surprised and delighted to see me, and introduced me to the kid. If the latter was surprised and delighted too, he concealed it like a diplomat. He just looked at me, raised his eyebrows slightly, and went on fishing. He was one of those supercilious striplings who give you the impression that you went to the wrong school and that your clothes don’t fit.
“This is Oswald,” said Bingo.
“What,” I replied cordially, “could be sweeter? How are you?”
“Oh, all right,” said the kid.
“Nice place, this.”
“Oh, all right,” said the kid.
“Having a good time fishing?”
“Oh, all right,” said the kid.
Young Bingo led me off to commune apart.
“Doesn’t jolly old Oswald’s incessant flow of prattle make your head ache sometimes?” I asked.
Bingo sighed.
“It’s a hard job.”
“What’s a hard job?”
“Loving him.”
“Do you love him?” I asked, surprised. I shouldn’t have thought it could be done.
“I try to,” said young Bingo, “for Her sake. She’s coming back tomorrow, Bertie.”
“So I heard.”
“She is coming, my love, my own—”
“Absolutely,” I said. “But touching on young Oswald once more. Do you have to be with him all day? How do you manage to stick it?”
“Oh, he doesn’t give much trouble. When we aren’t working he sits on that bridge all the time, trying to catch tiddlers.”
“Why don’t you shove him in?”
“Shove him in?”
“It seems to me distinctly the thing to do,” I said, regarding the stripling’s back with a good deal of dislike. “It would wake him up a bit, and make him take an interest in things.”
Bingo shook his head a bit wistfully.
“Your proposition attracts me,” he said, “but I’m afraid it can’t be done. You see, She would never forgive me. She is devoted to the little brute.”
“Great Scott!” I cried. “I’ve got it!” I don’t know if you know that feeling when you get an inspiration, and tingle all down your spine from the soft collar as now worn to the very soles of the old Waukeesis? Jeeves, I suppose, feels that way more or less all the time, but it isn’t often it comes to me. But now all Nature seemed to be shouting at me “You’ve clicked!” and I grabbed young Bingo by the arm in a way that must have made him feel as if a horse had bitten him. His finely-chiselled features were twisted with agony and whatnot, and he asked me what the dickens I thought I was playing at.
“Bingo,” I said, “what would Jeeves have done?”
“How do you mean, what would Jeeves have done?”
“I mean what would he have advised in a case like yours? I mean you wanting to make a hit with Honoria Glossop and all that. Why, take it from me, laddie, he would have shoved you behind that clump of bushes over there; he would have got me to lure Honoria on to the bridge somehow; then, at the proper time, he would have told me to give the kid a pretty hefty jab in the small of the back, so as to shoot him into the water; and then you would have dived in and hauled him out. How about it?”
“You didn’t think that out by yourself, Bertie?” said young Bingo, in a hushed sort of voice.
“Yes, I did. Jeeves isn’t the only fellow with ideas.”
“But it’s absolutely wonderful.”
“Just a suggestion.”
“The only objection I can see is that it would be so dashed awkward for you. I mean to say, suppose the kid turned round and said you had shoved him in, that would make you frightfully unpopular with Her.”
“I don’t mind risking that.”
The man was deeply moved.
“Bertie, this is noble.”
“No, no.”
He clasped my hand silently, then chuckled like the last drop of water going down the waste-pipe in a bath.
“Now what?” I said.
“I was only thinking,” said young Bingo, “how fearfully wet Oswald will get. Oh, happy day!”
I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but it’s rummy how nothing in this world ever seems to be absolutely perfect. The drawback to this otherwise singularly fruity binge was, of course, the fact that Jeeves wouldn’t be on the spot to watch me in action. Still, apart from that there wasn’t a flaw. The beauty of the thing was, you see, that nothing could possibly go wrong. You know how it is, as a rule, when you want to get Chappie A on Spot B at exactly the same moment when Chappie C is on Spot D. There’s always a chance of a hitch. Take the case of a general, I mean to say, who’s planning out a big movement. He tells one regiment to capture the hill with the windmill on it at the exact moment when another regiment is taking the bridgehead or something down in the valley; and everything gets all messed up. And then, when they’re chatting the thing over in camp that night, the colonel of the first regiment says, “Oh, sorry! Did you say the hill with the windmill? I thought you said the one with the flock of sheep.” And there you are! But in this case, nothing like that could happen, because Oswald and Bingo would be on the spot right along, so that all I had to worry about was getting Honoria there in due season. And I managed that all right, first shot, by asking her if she would come for a stroll in the grounds with me, as I had something particular to say to her.
She had arrived shortly after lunch in the car with the Braythwayt girl. I was introduced to the latter, a
