Jeeves in the offing

'Does Kipper know of this?' I said, when I had finished coughing.

'Not yet. I'm on my way to tell him.'

I raised a point on which I particularly desired assurance.

'Then what it boils down to is � No wedding bells for me?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'Quite all right. Anything that suits you.'

'I don't want to get jugged for bigamy.'

'No, one sees that. And your selection for the day is Kipper. I don't blame you. The ideal mate.'

'Just the way I look at it. He's terrific, isn't he?'

'Colossal.'

'I wouldn't marry anyone else if they came to me bringing apes, ivory and peacocks. Tell me what he was like as a boy.'

'Oh, much the same as the rest of us.'

'Nonsense!'

'Except, of course, for rescuing people from burning buildings and saving blue-eyed children from getting squashed by runaway horses.'

'He did that a lot?'

'Almost daily.'

'Was he the Pride of the School?'

'Oh, rather.'

'Not that it was much of a school to be the pride of, from what he tells me. A sort of Dotheboys Hall, wasn't it?'

'Conditions under Aubrey Upjohn were fairly tough. One's mind reverts particularly to the sausages on Sunday.'

'Reggie was very funny about those. He said they were made not from contented pigs but from pigs which had expired, regretted by all, of glanders, the botts and tuberculosis.'

'Yes, that would be quite a fair description of them, I suppose. You going?' I said, for she had risen.

'I can't wait for another minute. I want to fling myself into Reggie's arms. If I don't see him soon, I shall pass out.'

'I know how you feel. The chap in the Yeoman's Wedding Song thought along those same lines, only the way he put it was �Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong, I hurry along�. At one time I often used to render the number at village concerts, and there was a nasty Becher's Brook to get over when you got to �For it is my wedding morning,� because you had to stretch out the �mor� for about ten minutes, which tested the lung power severely. I remember the vicar once telling me �'

Here I was interrupted, as I'm so often interrupted when giving my views on the Yeoman's Wedding Song, by her saying that she was dying to hear all about it but would rather wait till she could get it in my autobiography. We went out together, and I saw her off and returned to where Jeeves kept his vigil in the car, all smiles. I was all smiles, I mean, not Jeeves. The best he ever does is to let his mouth twitch slightly on one side, generally the left. I was in rare fettle, and the heart had touched a new high. I don't know anything that braces one up like finding you haven't got to get married after all.

'Sorry to keep you waiting, Jeeves,' I said. 'Hope you weren't bored?'

'Oh no, sir, thank you. I was quite happy with my Spinoza.'

'Eh?'

'The copy of Spinoza's Ethics which you kindly gave me some time ago.'

'Oh, ah, yes, I remember. Good stuff?'

'Extremely, sir.'

'I suppose it turns out in the end that the butler did it. Well, Jeeves, you'll be glad to hear that everything's under control.'

'Indeed, sir?'

'Yes, rift in lute mended and wedding bells liable to ring out at any moment. She's changed her mind.'

'Varium et mutabile semper femina, sir.'

'I shouldn't wonder. And now,' I said, climbing in and taking the wheel, 'I'll unfold the tale of Wilbert and the cow-creamer, and if that doesn't make your knotted locks do a bit of starting from their spheres, I for one shall be greatly surprised.'

12

Arriving at Brinkley in the quiet evenfall and putting the old machine away in the garage, I noticed that Aunt Dahlia's car was there and gathered from this that the aged relative was around and about once more. Nor was I in error. I found her in her boudoir getting outside a dish of tea and a crumpet. She greeted me with one of those piercing view-halloos which she had picked up on the hunting field in the days when she had been an energetic chivvier of the British fox. It sounded like a gas explosion and went through me from stem to stem. I've never hunted myself, but I understand that half the battle is being able to make noises like some jungle animal with dyspepsia, and I believe that Aunt Dahlia in her prime could lift fellow-members of the Quorn and Pytchley out of their saddles with a single yip, though separated from them by two ploughed fields and a spinney.

'Hullo, ugly,' she said. 'Turned up again, have you?'

'Just this moment breasted the tape.'

'Been to Herne Bay, young Herring tells me.'

'Yes, to fetch Jeeves. How's Bonzo?'

'Spotty but cheerful. What did you want Jeeves for?'

'Well, as it turns out, his presence isn't needed, but I only discovered that when I was half-way here. I was bringing him along to meditate � no, it isn't meditate � to mediate, that's the word, between Bobbie Wickham and Kipper. You knew they were betrothed?'

'Yes, she told me.'

'Did she tell you about shoving that thing in The Times saying she was engaged to me?'

'I was the first in whom she confided. I got a good laugh out of that.'

'More than Kipper did, because it hadn't occurred to the cloth� headed young nitwit to confide in him. When he read the announcement, he reeled and everything went black. It knocked his faith in woman for a loop, and after seething for a while he sat down and wrote her a letter in the Thomas Otway vein.'

'In the who's vein?'

'You are not familiar with Thomas Otway? Seventeenth-century dramatist, celebrated for making bitter cracks about the other sex. Wrote a play called The Orphan, which is full of them.'

'So you do read something beside the comics?'

'Well, actually I haven't steeped myself to any great extent in Thos's output, but Kipper told me about him. He held the view that women are a mess, and Kipper passed this information on to Bobbie in this letter of which I speak. It was a snorter.'

'And you never thought of explaining to him, I suppose?'

'Of course I did. But by that time she'd got the letter.'

'Why didn't the idiot tell her not to open it?'

'It was his first move. �I've found a letter from you here, precious,� she said. �On no account open it, angel,� he said. So of course she opened it.'

She pursed the lips, nodded the loaf, and ate a moody piece of crumpet.

'So that's why he's been going about looking like a dead fish. I suppose Roberta broke the engagement?'

'In a speech lasting five minutes without a pause for breath.'

'And you brought Jeeves along to mediate?'

'That was the idea.'

'But if things have gone as far as that�'

'You doubt whether even Jeeves can heal the rift?' I patted her on the top knot. 'Dry the starting tear, old ancestor, it's healed. I met her at a pub on the way here, and she told me that almost immediately after she had flipped her lid in the manner described she had a change of heart. She loves him still with a passion that's more like boiling oil than anything, and when we parted she was tooling off to tell him so. By this time they must be like ham and eggs again. It's a great burden off my mind, because, having parted brass rags with Kipper, she announced her intention of marrying me.'

'A bit of luck for you, I should have thought.'

'Far from it.'

'Why? You were crazy about the girl once.' 'But no longer. The fever has passed, the scales have fallen from my eyes, and we're just good friends. The snag in this business of falling in love, aged relative, is that the parties of the first part so often get mixed up with the wrong parties of the second part, robbed of their cooler judgment by the parties of the second part's glamour. Put it like this. The male sex is divided into rabbits and non-rabbits and the female sex into dashers and dormice, and the trouble is that the male rabbit has a way of getting attracted by the female dasher (who would be fine for the male non-rabbit) and realizing too late that he ought to have been concentrating on some mild, gentle dormouse with whom he could settle down peacefully and nibble lettuce.'