I had to pause again here, partly in order to take in a spot of breath, and partly to wrestle with the almost physical torture of saying these frightful things about poor old Tuppy.
“There are some chaps,” I resumed, forcing myself once more to the nauseous task, “who, in spite of looking as if they had slept in their clothes, can get by quite nicely because they are amiable and suave. There are others who, for all that they excite adverse comment by being fat and uncouth, find themselves on the credit side of the ledger owing to their wit and sparkling humour. But this Glossop, I regret to say, falls into neither class. In addition to looking like one of those things that come out of hollow trees, he is universally admitted to be a dumb brick of the first water. No soul. No conversation. In short, any girl who, having been rash enough to get engaged to him, has managed at the eleventh hour to slide out is justly entitled to consider herself dashed lucky.”
I paused once more, and cocked an eye at Angela to see how the treatment was taking. All the while I had been speaking, she had sat gazing silently into the bushes, but it seemed to me incredible that she should not now turn on me like a tigress, according to specifications. It beat me why she hadn’t done it already. It seemed to me that a mere tithe of what I had said, if said to a tigress about a tiger of which she was fond, would have made her—the tigress, I mean—hit the ceiling.
And the next moment you could have knocked me down with a toothpick.
“Yes,” she said, nodding thoughtfully, “you’re quite right.”
“Eh?”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking myself.”
“What!”
“ ‘Dumb brick.’ It just describes him. One of the six silliest asses in England, I should think he must be.”
I did not speak. I was endeavouring to adjust the faculties, which were in urgent need of a bit of first-aid treatment.
I mean to say, all this had come as a complete surprise. In formulating the well-laid plan which I had just been putting into effect, the one contingency I had not budgeted for was that she might adhere to the sentiments which I expressed. I had braced myself for a gush of stormy emotion. I was expecting the tearful ticking off, the girlish recriminations and all the rest of the bag of tricks along those lines.
But this cordial agreement with my remarks I had not foreseen, and it gave me what you might call pause for thought.
She proceeded to develop her theme, speaking in ringing, enthusiastic tones, as if she loved the topic. Jeeves could tell you the word I want. I think it’s “ecstatic,” unless that’s the sort of rash you get on your face and have to use ointment for. But if that is the right word, then that’s what her manner was as she ventilated the subject of poor old Tuppy. If you had been able to go simply by the sound of her voice, she might have been a court poet cutting loose about an Oriental monarch, or Gussie Fink-Nottle describing his last consignment of newts.
“It’s so nice, Bertie, talking to somebody who really takes a sensible view about this man Glossop. Mother says he’s a good chap, which is simply absurd. Anybody can see that he’s absolutely impossible. He’s conceited and opinionative and argues all the time, even when he knows perfectly well that he’s talking through his hat, and he smokes too much and eats too much and drinks too much, and I don’t like the colour of his hair. Not that he’ll have any hair in a year or two, because he’s pretty thin on the top already, and before he knows where he is he’ll be as bald as an egg, and he’s the last man who can afford to go bald. And I think it’s simply disgusting, the way he gorges all the time. Do you know, I found him in the larder at one o’clock this morning, absolutely wallowing in a steak-and-kidney pie? There was hardly any of it left. And you remember what an enormous dinner he had. Quite disgusting, I call it. But I can’t stop out here all night, talking about men who aren’t worth wasting a word on and haven’t even enough sense to tell sharks from flatfish. I’m going in.”
And gathering about her slim shoulders the shawl which she had put on as a protection against the evening dew, she buzzed off, leaving me alone in the silent night.
Well, as a matter of fact, not absolutely alone, because a few moments later there was a sort of upheaval in the bushes in front of me, and Tuppy emerged.
XV
I gave him the eye. The evening had begun to draw in a bit by now and the visibility, in consequence, was not so hot, but there still remained ample light to enable me to see him clearly. And what I saw convinced me that I should be a lot easier in my mind with a stout rustic bench between us. I rose, accordingly, modelling my style on that of a rocketing pheasant, and
