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

could practise the fiddle. From what I know of fiddlers, I should imagine that he had produced some fairly frightful sounds there in his time: but they can have been nothing to the ones that were coming from the roof of the place now. The Right Hon., not having spotted the arrival of the rescue-party, was apparently trying to make his voice carry across the waste of waters to the house; and I’m not saying it was not a good sporting effort. He had one of those highish tenors, and his yowls seemed to screech over my head like shells.

I thought it about time to slip him the glad news that assistance had arrived, before he strained a vocal cord.

“Hi!” I shouted, waiting for a lull.

He poked his head over the edge.

“Hi!” he bellowed, looking in every direction but the right one, of course.

“Hi!”

“Hi!”

“Hi!”

“Hi!”

“Oh!” he said, spotting me at last.

“What-ho!” I replied, sort of clinching the thing.

I suppose the conversation can’t be said to have touched a frightfully high level up to this moment; but probably we should have got a good deal brainier very shortly⁠—only just then, at the very instant when I was getting ready to say something good, there was a hissing noise like a tyre bursting in a nest of cobras, and out of the bushes to my left there popped something so large and white and active that, thinking quicker than I have ever done in my puff, I rose like a rocketing pheasant, and, before I knew what I was doing, had begun to climb for life. Something slapped against the wall about an inch below my right ankle, and any doubts I may have had about remaining below vanished. The lad who bore ’mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device “Excelsior!” was the model for Bertram.

“Be careful!” yipped the Right Hon.

I was.

Whoever built the Octagon might have constructed it especially for this sort of crisis. Its walls had grooves at regular intervals which were just right for the hands and feet, and it wasn’t very long before I was parked up on the roof beside the Right Hon., gazing down at one of the largest and shortest-tempered swans I had ever seen. It was standing below, stretching up a neck like a hosepipe, just where a bit of brick, judiciously bunged, would catch it amidships.

I bunged the brick and scored a bull’s-eye.

The Right Hon. didn’t seem any too well pleased.

“Don’t tease it!” he said.

“It teased me,” I said.

The swan extended another eight feet of neck and gave an imitation of steam escaping from a leaky pipe. The rain continued to lash down with what you might call indescribable fury, and I was sorry that in the agitation inseparable from shinning up a stone wall at practically a second’s notice I had dropped the raincoat which I had been bringing with me for my fellow-rooster. For a moment I thought of offering him mine, but wiser counsels prevailed.

“How near did it come to getting you?” I asked.

“Within an ace,” replied my companion, gazing down with a look of marked dislike. “I had to make a very rapid spring.”

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say “When!” and the picture he conjured up, if you know what I mean, was rather pleasing.

“It is no laughing matter,” he said, shifting the look of dislike to me.

“Sorry.”

“I might have been seriously injured.”

“Would you consider bunging another brick at the bird?”

“Do nothing of the sort. It will only annoy him.”

“Well, why not annoy him? He hasn’t shown such a dashed lot of consideration for our feelings.”

The Right Hon. now turned to another aspect of the matter.

“I cannot understand how my boat, which I fastened securely to the stump of a willow-tree, can have drifted away.”

“Dashed mysterious.”

“I begin to suspect that it was deliberately set loose by some mischievous person.”

“Oh, I say, no, hardly likely, that. You’d have seen them doing it.”

“No, Mr. Wooster. For the bushes form an effective screen. Moreover, rendered drowsy by the unusual warmth of the afternoon, I dozed off for some little time almost immediately I reached the island.”

This wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted his mind dwelling on, so I changed the subject.

“Wet, isn’t it, what?” I said.

“I had already observed it,” said the Right Hon. in one of those nasty, bitter voices. “I thank you, however, for drawing the matter to my attention.”

Chitchat about the weather hadn’t gone with much of a bang, I perceived. I had a shot at Bird Life in the Home Counties.

“Have you ever noticed,” I said, “how a swan’s eyebrows sort of meet in the middle?”

“I have had every opportunity of observing all that there is to observe about swans.”

“Gives them a sort of peevish look, what?”

“The look to which you allude has not escaped me.”

“Rummy,” I said, rather warming to my subject, “how bad an effect family life has on a swan’s disposition.”

“I wish you would select some other topic of conversation than swans.”

“No, but, really, it’s rather interesting. I mean to say, our old pal down there is probably a perfect ray of sunshine in normal circumstances. Quite the domestic pet, don’t you know. But purely and simply because the little woman happens to be nesting⁠—”

I paused. You will scarcely believe me, but until this moment, what with all the recent bustle and activity, I had clean forgotten that, while we were treed up on the roof like this, there lurked all the time in the background one whose giant brain, if notified of the emergency and requested to flock round, would probably be able to think up half-a-dozen schemes for solving our little difficulties in a couple of minutes.

“Jeeves!” I shouted.

“Sir?” came a faint respectful voice from the great open spaces.

“My man,” I explained to the Right Hon. “A fellow of infinite resource and sagacity. He’ll have us out of this in a minute. Jeeves!”

“Sir?”

“I’m sitting on the roof.”

“Very