Jeeves Stories, P. G. Wodehouse [best ereader for epub .TXT] 📗

find the funds to keep me going, so that I could win through till Rosie’s return without her knowing what had occurred. Rosie is the dearest girl in the world; but if you were a married man, Bertie, you would be aware that the best of wives is apt to cut up rough if she finds that her husband has dropped six weeks’ housekeeping money on a single race. Isn’t that so, Jeeves?”

“Yes, sir. Women are odd in that respect.”

“It was a moment for swift thinking. There was enough left from the wreck to board the Peke out at a comfortable home. I signed him up for six weeks as the Kosy Komfort Kennels at Kingsbridge, Kent, and tottered out, a broken man, to get a tutoring job. I landed the kid Thomas. And here I am.”

It was a sad story, of course, but it seemed to me that, awful as it might be to be in constant association with my Aunt Agatha and young Thos, he had got rather well out of a tight place.

“All you have to do,” I said, “is to carry on here for a few weeks more, and everything will be oojah-cum-spiff.”

Bingo barked bleakly.

“A few weeks more! I shall be lucky if I stay two days. You remember I told you that your aunt’s faith in me as a guardian of her blighted son was shaken a few days ago by the fact that he was caught smoking. I now find that the person who caught him smoking was the man Filmer. And ten minutes ago young Thomas told me that he was proposing to inflict some hideous revenge on Filmer for having reported him to your aunt. I don’t know what he is going to do, but if he does it, out I inevitably go on my left ear. Your aunt thinks the world of Filmer, and would sack me on the spot. And three weeks before Rosie gets back!”

I saw all.

“Jeeves,” I said.

“Sir?”

“I see all. Do you see all?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then flock round.”

“I fear, sir⁠—”

Bingo gave a low moan.

“Don’t tell me, Jeeves,” he said, brokenly, “that nothing suggests itself.”

“Nothing at the moment, I regret to say, sir.”

Bingo uttered a stricken woofle like a bulldog that has been refused cake.

“Well, then, the only thing I can do, I suppose,” he said sombrely, “is not to let the pie-faced little thug out of my sight for a second.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Ceaseless vigilance, eh, Jeeves?”

“Precisely, sir.”

“But, meanwhile, Jeeves,” said Bingo in a low, earnest voice, “you will be devoting your best thought to the matter, won’t you?”

“Most certainly, sir.”

“Thank you, Jeeves.”

“Not at all, sir.”

I will say for young Bingo that, once the need for action arrived, he behaved with an energy and determination which compelled respect. I suppose there was not a minute during the next two days when the kid Thos was able to say to himself, “Alone at last!” But on the evening of the second day Aunt Agatha announced that some people were coming over on the morrow for a spot of tennis, and I feared that the worst must now befall.

Young Bingo, you see, is one of those fellows who, once their fingers close over the handle of a tennis racket, fall into a sort of trance in which nothing outside the radius of the lawn exists for them. If you came up to Bingo in the middle of a set and told him that panthers were devouring his best friend in the kitchen garden, he would look at you and say, “Oh, ah?” or words to that effect. I knew that he would not give a thought to young Thomas and the Right Hon. till the last ball had bounced, and, as I dressed for dinner that night, I was conscious of an impending doom.

“Jeeves,” I said, “have you ever pondered on Life?”

“From time to time, sir, in my leisure moments.”

“Grim, isn’t it, what?”

“Grim, sir?”

“I mean to say, the difference between things as they look and things as they are.”

“The trousers perhaps a half-inch higher, sir. A very slight adjustment of the braces will effect the necessary alteration. You were saying, sir?”

“I mean, here at Woollam Chersey we have apparently a happy, carefree country-house party. But beneath the glittering surface, Jeeves, dark currents are running. One gazes at the Right Hon. wrapping himself round the salmon mayonnaise at lunch, and he seems a man without a care in the world. Yet all the while a dreadful fate is hanging over him, creeping nearer and nearer. What exact steps do you think the kid Thomas intends to take?”

“In the course of an informal conversation which I had with the young gentleman this afternoon, sir, he informed me that he had been reading a romance entitled Treasure Island, and had been much struck by the character and actions of a certain Captain Flint. I gathered that he was weighing the advisability of modelling his own conduct on that of the Captain.”

“But, good heavens, Jeeves! If I remember Treasure Island, Flint was the bird who went about hitting people with a cutlass. You don’t think young Thomas would bean Mr. Filmer with a cutlass?”

“Possibly he does not possess a cutlass, sir.”

“Well, with anything.”

“We can but wait and see, sir. The tie, if I might suggest it, sir, a shade more tightly knotted. One aims at the perfect butterfly effect. If you will permit me⁠—”

“What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this? Do you realize that Mr. Little’s domestic happiness is hanging in the scale?”

“There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter.”

I could see the man was pained, but I did not try to heal the wound. What’s the word I want? Preoccupied. I was too preoccupied, don’t you know. And distrait. Not to say careworn.

I was still careworn when, next day at half-past two, the revels commenced on the tennis lawn. It was one of those close, baking days, with thunder rumbling just round the corner; and it seemed to me that