Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

'Good night, Mr. Wooster. If there is any more of my furniture you wish to break, pray consider yourself at perfect liberty to indulge your peculiar tastes,' he said, and he, too, passed into the night.

Stiffy looked after him with a thoughtful eye.

'I don't believe Uncle Watkyn likes you, Bertie. I noticed the way he kept staring at you at dinner, as if appalled. Well, I don't wonder your arrival hit him hard. It did me. I've never been so surprised in my life as when you suddenly bobbed up like a corpse rising to the surface of a sheet of water. Harold told me he had pleaded with you to come here, but nothing would induce you. What made you change your mind?'

In my previous sojourn at Totleigh Towers circumstances had compelled me to confide in this young prune my position as regarded her cousin Madeline, so I had no hesitation now in giving her the low-down.

'I learned that there was trouble between Madeline and Gussie, due, I have since been informed, to her forcing him to follow in the footsteps of the poet Shelley and become a vegetarian, and I felt that I might accomplish something as a raisonneur?'

'As a whatonneur?'

'I thought that would be a bit above your head. It's a French expression meaning, I believe, though I would have to check with Jeeves, a calm kindly man of the world who intervenes when a rift has occurred between two loving hearts and brings them together again. Very essential in the present crisis.'

'You mean that if Madeline hands Gussie the pink slip, she'll marry you?'

'That, broadly, is about the strength of it. And while I admire and respect Madeline, I'm all against the idea of having her smiling face peeping at me over the coffee pot for the rest of my life. So I came along here to see what I could do.'

'Well, you couldn't have come at a better moment. Now you're here, you can get cracking on that job Harold told you I want you to do for me.'

I saw that the time had come for some prompt in-the-bud-nipping.

'Include me out. I won't touch it. I know you and your jobs.'

'But this is something quite simple. You can do it on your head. And you'll be bringing sunshine and happiness into the life of a poor slob who can do with a bit of both. Were you ever a Boy Scout?'

'Not since early boyhood.'

'Then you've lots of leeway to make up in the way of kind deeds. This'll be a nice start for you. The facts are as follows.'

'I don't want to hear them.'

'You would prefer that I recalled Bartholomew and told him to go on where he left off?'

She had what Jeeves had called a talking point.

'Very well. Tell me all. But briefly.'

'It won't take long, and then you can be off to beddy-bye. You remember that little black statuette thing on the table at dinner.'

'Ah yes, the eyesore.'

'Uncle Watkyn bought it from a man called Plank.'

'So I gathered.'

'Well, do you know what he paid him for it?'

'A thousand quid, didn't you say?'

'No, I didn't. I said it was worth that. But he got it out of this poor blighter Plank for a fiver.'

'You're kidding.'

'No, I'm not. He paid him five pounds. He makes no secret of it. When we were at Brinkley, he was showing the thing to Mr. Travers and telling him all about it... how he happened to see it on Plank's mantelpiece and spotted how valuable it was and told Plank it was worth practically nothing but he would give him five pounds for it because he knew how hard up he was. He gloated over how clever he had been, and Mr. Travers writhed like an egg whisk.'

I could well believe it. If there's one thing that makes a collector spit blood, it's hearing about another collector getting a bargain.

'How do you know Plank was hard up?'

'Well, would he have let the thing go for a fiver if he wasn't?'

'Something in that.'

'You can't say Uncle Watkyn isn't a dirty dog.'

'I would never dream of saying he isn't - and always has been -the dirtiest of dogs. It bears out what I have frequently maintained, that there are no depths to which magistrates won't stoop. I don't wonder you look askance. Your Uncle Watkyn stands revealed as a chiseller of the lowest type. But nothing to be done about it, of course.'

'I don't know so much about that.'

'Why, have you tried doing anything?'

'In a sort of way. I arranged that Harold should preach a very strong sermon on Naboth's Vineyard. Not that I suppose you've ever heard of Naboth's Vineyard.'

I bridled. She had offended my amour propre.

'I doubt if there's a man in London and the home counties who has the facts relating to Naboth's Vineyard more thoroughly at his fingertips than me. The news may not have reached you, but when at school I once won a prize for Scripture Knowledge.'

'I bet you cheated.'

'Not at all. Sheer merit. Did Stinker co-operate?'

'Yes, he thought it was a splendid idea and went about sucking throat pastilles for a week, so as to be in good voice. The set-up was the same as the play in Hamlet. You know. With which to catch the conscience of the king and all that.'

'Yes, I see the strategy all right. How did it all work out?'

'It didn't. Harold lives in the cottage of Mrs. Bootle, the postman's wife, where they only have oil lamps, and the sermon was on a table with a lamp on it, and he bumped into the table and upset the lamp and it burned the sermon and he hadn't time to write it out again, so he had to dig out something on another topic from the old stockpile. He was terribly disappointed.'

I pursed my lips, and was on the point of saying that of all the web-footed muddlers in existence H.P. Pinker took the well-known biscuit, when it occurred to me that it might possibly hurt her feelings, and I desisted. The last thing I wanted was to wound the child, particularly when I remembered that crack of hers about recalling Bartholomew.

'So we've got to handle the thing another way, and that's where you come in.'

I smiled a tolerant smile.

'I can see where you're heading,' I said. 'You want me to go to your Uncle Watkyn and slip a jack under his better self. "Play the game, Bassett," you want me to say, "Let conscience be your guide, Bassett," trying to drive it into his nut how wrong it is to put over a fast one on the widow and the orphan. I am assuming for purposes of argument that Plank is an orphan, though possibly not a widow. But my misguided young shrimp, do you really suppose that Pop Bassett looks on me as a friend and counsellor to whom he is always willing to lend a ready ear? You yourself were stressing only a moment ago how allergic he was to the Wooster charm. It's no good me talking to him.'

'I don't want you to.'

'Then what do you want me to do?'

'I want you to pinch the thing and return it to Plank, who will then sell it to Mr. Travers at a proper price. The idea of Uncle Watkyn only giving him a fiver for it! We can't have him getting away with raw work like that. He needs a sharp lesson.'

I smiled another tolerant smile. The young boll weevil amused me. I was thinking how right I had been in predicting that any job assigned by her to anyone would be unfit for human consumption.

'Well, really, Stiffy!'

The quiet rebuke in my voice ought to have bathed her in shame and remorse, but it didn't. She came back at me strongly.

'I don't know what you're Well-really-ing about. You're always pinching things, aren't you? Policemen's helmets and things like that.'

I inclined the bean. It was true that I had once lived in Arcady.

'There is,' I was obliged to concede, 'a certain substance in what you say. I admit that in my time I may have removed a lid or two from the upper stories of members of the constabulary -'

'Well, then.'

'- but only on Boat Race Night and when the heart was younger than it is as of even date. It was an episode of the sort that first brought me and your Uncle Watkyn together. But you can take it from me that the hot blood has cooled and I'm a reformed character. My answer to your suggestion is No.'