My Man Jeeves

LEAVE IT TO JEEVES

Jeeves—my man, you know—is really a most extraordinary chap. So
capable. Honestly, I shouldn’t know what to do without him. On broader
lines he’s like those chappies who sit peering sadly over the marble
battlements at the Pennsylvania Station in the place marked
“Inquiries.” You know the Johnnies I mean. You go up to them and
say: “When’s the next train for Melonsquashville, Tennessee?”
and they reply, without stopping to think, “Two-forty-three, track ten,
change at San Francisco.” And they’re right every time. Well,
Jeeves gives you just the same impression of omniscience.

As an instance of what I mean, I remember meeting Monty Byng in Bond Street one
morning, looking the last word in a grey check suit, and I felt I should never
be happy till I had one like it. I dug the address of the tailors out of him,
and had them working on the thing inside the hour.

“Jeeves,” I said that evening. “I’m getting a check
suit like that one of Mr. Byng’s.”

“Injudicious, sir,” he said firmly. “It will not become
you.”

“What absolute rot! It’s the soundest thing I’ve struck for
years.”

“Unsuitable for you, sir.”

Well, the long and the short of it was that the confounded thing came home, and
I put it on, and when I caught sight of myself in the glass I nearly swooned.
Jeeves was perfectly right. I looked a cross between a music-hall comedian and
a cheap bookie. Yet Monty had looked fine in absolutely the same stuff. These
things are just Life’s mysteries, and that’s all there is to it.

But it isn’t only that Jeeves’s judgment about clothes is
infallible, though, of course, that’s really the main thing. The man
knows everything. There was the matter of that tip on the
“Lincolnshire.” I forget now how I got it, but it had the aspect of
being the real, red-hot tabasco.

“Jeeves,” I said, for I’m fond of the man, and like to do him
a good turn when I can, “if you want to make a bit of money have
something on Wonderchild for the ‘Lincolnshire.’”

He shook his head.

“I’d rather not, sir.”

“But it’s the straight goods. I’m going to put my shirt on
him.”

“I do not recommend it, sir. The animal is not intended to win. Second
place is what the stable is after.”

Perfect piffle, I thought, of course. How the deuce could Jeeves know anything
about it? Still, you know what happened. Wonderchild led till he was breathing
on the wire, and then Banana Fritter came along and nosed him out. I went
straight home and rang for Jeeves.

“After this,” I said, “not another step for me without your
advice. From now on consider yourself the brains of the establishment.”

“Very good, sir. I shall endeavour to give satisfaction.”

And he has, by Jove! I’m a bit short on brain myself; the old bean would
appear to have been constructed more for ornament than for use, don’t you
know; but give me five minutes to talk the thing over with Jeeves, and
I’m game to advise any one about anything. And that’s why, when
Bruce Corcoran came to me with his troubles, my first act was to ring the bell
and put it up to the lad with the bulging forehead.

“Leave it to Jeeves,” I said.

I first got to know Corky when I came to New York. He was a pal of my cousin
Gussie, who was in with a lot of people down Washington Square way. I
don’t know if I ever told you about it, but the reason why I left England
was because I was sent over by my Aunt Agatha to try to stop young Gussie
marrying a girl on the vaudeville stage, and I got the whole thing so mixed up
that I decided that it would be a sound scheme for me to stop on in America for
a bit instead of going back and having long cosy chats about the thing with
aunt. So I sent Jeeves out to find a decent apartment, and settled down for a
bit of exile. I’m bound to say that New York’s a topping place to
be exiled in. Everybody was awfully good to me, and there seemed to be plenty
of things going on, and I’m a wealthy bird, so everything was fine.
Chappies introduced me to other chappies, and so on and so forth, and it
wasn’t long before I knew squads of the right sort, some who rolled in
dollars in houses up by the Park, and others who lived with the gas turned down
mostly around Washington Square—artists and writers and so forth. Brainy
coves.

Corky was one of the artists. A portrait-painter, he called himself, but he
hadn’t painted any portraits. He was sitting on the side-lines with a
blanket over his shoulders, waiting for a chance to get into the game. You see,
the catch about portrait-painting—I’ve looked into the thing a
bit—is that you can’t start painting portraits till people come
along and ask you to, and they won’t come and ask you to until
you’ve painted a lot first. This makes it kind of difficult for a
chappie. Corky managed to get along by drawing an occasional picture for the
comic papers—he had rather a gift for funny stuff when he got a good
idea—and doing bedsteads and chairs and things for the advertisements.
His principal source of income, however, was derived from biting the ear of a
rich uncle—one Alexander Worple, who was in the jute business. I’m
a bit foggy as to what jute is, but it’s apparently something the
populace is pretty keen on, for Mr. Worple had made quite an indecently large
stack out of it.

Now, a great many fellows think that having a rich uncle is a pretty soft snap:
but, according to Corky, such is not the case. Corky’s uncle was a robust
sort of cove, who looked like living for ever. He was fifty-one, and it seemed
as if he might go to par. It was not this, however, that distressed poor old
Corky, for he was not bigoted and had no objection to the man going on living.
What Corky kicked at was the way the above Worple used to harry him.

Corky’s uncle, you see, didn’t want him to be an artist. He
didn’t think he had any talent in that direction. He was always urging
him to chuck Art and go into the jute business and start at the bottom and work
his way up. Jute had apparently become a sort of obsession with him. He seemed
to attach almost a spiritual importance to it. And what Corky said was that,
while he didn’t know what they did at the bottom of the jute business,
instinct told him that it was something too beastly for words. Corky, moreover,
believed in his future as an artist. Some day, he said, he was going to make a
hit. Meanwhile, by using the utmost tact and persuasiveness, he was inducing
his uncle to cough up very grudgingly a small quarterly allowance.

He wouldn’t have got this if his uncle hadn’t had a hobby. Mr.
Worple was peculiar in this respect. As a rule, from what I’ve observed,
the American captain of industry doesn’t do anything out of business
hours. When he has put the cat out and locked up the office for the night, he
just relapses into a state of coma from which he emerges only to start being a
captain of industry again. But Mr. Worple in his spare time was what is known
as an ornithologist. He had written a book called American Birds, and
was writing another, to be called More American Birds. When he had
finished that, the presumption was that he would begin a third, and keep on
till the supply of American birds gave out. Corky used to go to him about once
every three months and let him talk about American birds. Apparently you could
do what you liked with old Worple if you gave him his head first on his pet
subject, so these little chats used to make Corky’s allowance all right
for the time being. But it was pretty rotten for the poor chap. There was the
frightful suspense, you see, and, apart from that, birds, except when broiled
and in the society of a cold bottle, bored him stiff.

To complete the character-study of Mr. Worple, he was a man of extremely
uncertain temper, and his general tendency was to think that Corky was a poor
chump and that whatever step he took in any direction on his own account, was
just another proof of his innate idiocy. I should imagine Jeeves feels very
much the same about me.

So when Corky trickled into my apartment one afternoon, shooing a girl in front
of him, and said, “Bertie, I want you to meet my fiancée, Miss
Singer,” the aspect of the matter which hit me first was precisely the
one which he had come to consult me about. The very first words I spoke were,
“Corky, how about your uncle?”

The poor chap gave one of those mirthless laughs. He was looking anxious and
worried, like a man who has done the murder all right but can’t think
what the deuce to do with the body.

“We’re so scared, Mr. Wooster,” said the girl. “We were
hoping that you might suggest a way of breaking it to him.”

Muriel Singer was one of those very quiet, appealing girls who have a way of
looking at you with their big eyes as if they thought you were the greatest
thing on earth and wondered that you hadn’t got on to it yet yourself.
She sat there in a sort of shrinking way, looking at me as if she were saying
to herself, “Oh, I do hope this great strong man isn’t going to
hurt me.” She gave a fellow a protective kind of feeling, made him want
to stroke her hand and say, “There, there, little one!” or words to
that effect. She made me feel that there was nothing I wouldn’t do for
her. She was rather like one of those innocent-tasting American drinks which
creep imperceptibly into your system so that, before you know what you’re
doing, you’re starting out to reform the world by force if necessary and
pausing on your way to tell the large man in the corner that, if he looks at
you like that, you will knock his head off. What I mean is, she made me feel
alert and dashing, like a jolly old knight-errant or something of that kind. I
felt that I was with her in this thing to the limit.

“I don’t see why your uncle shouldn’t be most awfully
bucked,” I said to Corky. “He will think Miss Singer the ideal wife
for you.”

Corky declined to cheer up.

“You don’t know him. Even if he did like Muriel he wouldn’t
admit it. That’s the sort of pig-headed guy he is. It would be a matter
of principle with him to kick. All he would consider would be that I had gone
and taken an important step without asking his advice, and he would raise Cain
automatically. He’s always done it.”

I strained the old bean to meet this emergency.

“You want to work it so that he makes Miss Singer’s acquaintance
without knowing that you know her. Then you come along——”

“But how can I work it that way?”

I saw his point. That was the catch.

“There’s only one thing to do,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Leave it to Jeeves.”

And I rang the bell.

“Sir?” said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy
things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see
him come into a room. He’s like one of those weird chappies in India who
dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of
disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them.
I’ve got a cousin who’s what they call a Theosophist, and he says
he’s often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn’t quite
bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of
animals slain in anger and pie.

The moment I saw the man standing there, registering respectful attention, a
weight seemed to roll off my mind. I felt like a lost child who spots his
father in the offing. There was something about him that gave me confidence.

Jeeves is a tallish man, with one of those dark, shrewd faces. His eye gleams
with the light of pure intelligence.

“Jeeves, we want your advice.”

“Very good, sir.”

I boiled down Corky’s painful case into a few well-chosen words.

“So you see what it amount to, Jeeves. We want you to suggest some way by
which Mr. Worple can make Miss Singer’s acquaintance without getting on
to the fact that Mr. Corcoran already knows her. Understand?”

“Perfectly, sir.”

“Well, try to think of something.”

“I have thought of something already, sir.”

“You have!”

“The scheme I would suggest cannot fail of success, but it has what may
seem to you a drawback, sir, in that it requires a certain financial
outlay.”

“He means,” I translated to Corky, “that he has got a pippin
of an idea, but it’s going to cost a bit.”

Naturally the poor chap’s face dropped, for this seemed to dish the whole
thing. But I was still under the influence of the girl’s melting gaze,
and I saw that this was where I started in as a knight-errant.

“You can count on me for all that sort of thing, Corky,” I said.
“Only too glad. Carry on, Jeeves.”

“I would suggest, sir, that Mr. Corcoran take advantage of Mr.
Worple’s attachment to ornithology.”

“How on earth did you know that he was fond of birds?”

“It is the way these New York apartments are constructed, sir. Quite
unlike our London houses. The partitions between the rooms are of the flimsiest
nature. With no wish to overhear, I have sometimes heard Mr. Corcoran
expressing himself with a generous strength on the subject I have
mentioned.”

“Oh! Well?”

“Why should not the young lady write a small volume, to be
entitled—let us say—The Children’s Book of American
Birds, and dedicate it to Mr. Worple! A limited edition could be published
at your expense, sir, and a great deal of the book would, of course, be given
over to eulogistic remarks concerning Mr. Worple’s own larger treatise on
the same subject. I should recommend the dispatching of a presentation copy to
Mr. Worple, immediately on publication, accompanied by a letter in which the
young lady asks to be allowed to make the acquaintance of one to whom she owes
so much. This would, I fancy, produce the desired result, but as I say, the
expense involved would be considerable.”

I felt like the proprietor of a performing dog on the vaudeville stage when the
tyke has just pulled off his trick without a hitch. I had betted on Jeeves all
along, and I had known that he wouldn’t let me down. It beats me
sometimes why a man with his genius is satisfied to hang around pressing my
clothes and what-not. If I had half Jeeves’s brain, I should have a stab
at being Prime Minister or something.

“Jeeves,” I said, “that is absolutely ripping! One of your
very best efforts.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The girl made an objection.

“But I’m sure I couldn’t write a book about anything. I
can’t even write good letters.”

“Muriel’s talents,” said Corky, with a little cough
“lie more in the direction of the drama, Bertie. I didn’t mention
it before, but one of our reasons for being a trifle nervous as to how Uncle
Alexander will receive the news is that Muriel is in the chorus of that show
Choose your Exit at the Manhattan. It’s absurdly unreasonable, but
we both feel that that fact might increase Uncle Alexander’s natural
tendency to kick like a steer.”

I saw what he meant. Goodness knows there was fuss enough in our family when I
tried to marry into musical comedy a few years ago. And the recollection of my
Aunt Agatha’s attitude in the matter of Gussie and the vaudeville girl
was still fresh in my mind. I don’t know why it is—one of these
psychology sharps could explain it, I suppose—but uncles and aunts, as a
class, are always dead against the drama, legitimate or otherwise. They
don’t seem able to stick it at any price.

But Jeeves had a solution, of course.

“I fancy it would be a simple matter, sir, to find some impecunious
author who would be glad to do the actual composition of the volume for a small
fee. It is only necessary that the young lady’s name should appear on the
title page.”

“That’s true,” said Corky. “Sam Patterson would do it
for a hundred dollars. He writes a novelette, three short stories, and ten
thousand words of a serial for one of the all-fiction magazines under different
names every month. A little thing like this would be nothing to him. I’ll
get after him right away.”

“Fine!”

“Will that be all, sir?” said Jeeves. “Very good, sir. Thank
you, sir.”

I always used to think that publishers had to be devilish intelligent fellows,
loaded down with the grey matter; but I’ve got their number now. All a
publisher has to do is to write cheques at intervals, while a lot of deserving
and industrious chappies rally round and do the real work. I know, because
I’ve been one myself. I simply sat tight in the old apartment with a
fountain-pen, and in due season a topping, shiny book came along.

I happened to be down at Corky’s place when the first copies of The
Children’s Book of American Birds bobbed up. Muriel Singer was there,
and we were talking of things in general when there was a bang at the door and
the parcel was delivered.

It was certainly some book. It had a red cover with a fowl of some species on
it, and underneath the girl’s name in gold letters. I opened a copy at
random.

“Often of a spring morning,” it said at the top of page twenty-one,
“as you wander through the fields, you will hear the sweet-toned,
carelessly flowing warble of the purple finch linnet. When you are older you
must read all about him in Mr. Alexander Worple’s wonderful
book—American Birds.”

You see. A boost for the uncle right away. And only a few pages later there he
was in the limelight again in connection with the yellow-billed cuckoo. It was
great stuff. The more I read, the more I admired the chap who had written it
and Jeeves’s genius in putting us on to the wheeze. I didn’t see
how the uncle could fail to drop. You can’t call a chap the world’s
greatest authority on the yellow-billed cuckoo without rousing a certain
disposition towards chumminess in him.

“It’s a cert!” I said.

“An absolute cinch!” said Corky.

And a day or two later he meandered up the Avenue to my apartment to tell me
that all was well. The uncle had written Muriel a letter so dripping with the
milk of human kindness that if he hadn’t known Mr. Worple’s
handwriting Corky would have refused to believe him the author of it. Any time
it suited Miss Singer to call, said the uncle, he would be delighted to make
her acquaintance.

Shortly after this I had to go out of town. Divers sound sportsmen had invited
me to pay visits to their country places, and it wasn’t for several
months that I settled down in the city again. I had been wondering a lot, of
course, about Corky, whether it all turned out right, and so forth, and my
first evening in New York, happening to pop into a quiet sort of little
restaurant which I go to when I don’t feel inclined for the bright
lights, I found Muriel Singer there, sitting by herself at a table near the
door. Corky, I took it, was out telephoning. I went up and passed the time of
day.

“Well, well, well, what?” I said.

“Why, Mr. Wooster! How do you do?”

“Corky around?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re waiting for Corky, aren’t you?”

“Oh, I didn’t understand. No, I’m not waiting for him.”

It seemed to me that there was a sort of something in her voice, a kind of
thingummy, you know.

“I say, you haven’t had a row with Corky, have you?”

“A row?”

“A spat, don’t you know—little misunderstanding—faults
on both sides—er—and all that sort of thing.”

“Why, whatever makes you think that?”

“Oh, well, as it were, what? What I mean is—I thought you usually
dined with him before you went to the theatre.”

“I’ve left the stage now.”

Suddenly the whole thing dawned on me. I had forgotten what a long time I had
been away.

“Why, of course, I see now! You’re married!”

“Yes.”

“How perfectly topping! I wish you all kinds of happiness.”

“Thank you, so much. Oh Alexander,” she said, looking past me,
“this is a friend of mine—Mr. Wooster.”

I spun round. A chappie with a lot of stiff grey hair and a red sort of healthy
face was standing there. Rather a formidable Johnnie, he looked, though quite
peaceful at the moment.

“I want you to meet my husband, Mr. Wooster. Mr. Wooster is a friend of
Bruce’s, Alexander.”

The old boy grasped my hand warmly, and that was all that kept me from hitting
the floor in a heap. The place was rocking. Absolutely.

“So you know my nephew, Mr. Wooster,” I heard him say. “I
wish you would try to knock a little sense into him and make him quit this
playing at painting. But I have an idea that he is steadying down. I noticed it
first that night he came to dinner with us, my dear, to be introduced to you.
He seemed altogether quieter and more serious. Something seemed to have sobered
him. Perhaps you will give us the pleasure of your company at dinner to-night,
Mr. Wooster? Or have you dined?”

I said I had. What I needed then was air, not dinner. I felt that I wanted to
get into the open and think this thing out.

When I reached my apartment I heard Jeeves moving about in his lair. I called
him.

“Jeeves,” I said, “now is the time for all good men to come
to the aid of the party. A stiff b.-and-s. first of all, and then I’ve a
bit of news for you.”

He came back with a tray and a long glass.

“Better have one yourself, Jeeves. You’ll need it.”

“Later on, perhaps, thank you, sir.”

“All right. Please yourself. But you’re going to get a shock. You
remember my friend, Mr. Corcoran?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the girl who was to slide gracefully into his uncle’s esteem
by writing the book on birds?”

“Perfectly, sir.”

“Well, she’s slid. She’s married the uncle.”

He took it without blinking. You can’t rattle Jeeves.

“That was always a development to be feared, sir.”

“You don’t mean to tell me that you were expecting it?”

“It crossed my mind as a possibility.”

“Did it, by Jove! Well, I think, you might have warned us!”

“I hardly liked to take the liberty, sir.”

Of course, as I saw after I had had a bite to eat and was in a calmer frame of
mind, what had happened wasn’t my fault, if you come down to it. I
couldn’t be expected to foresee that the scheme, in itself a
cracker-jack, would skid into the ditch as it had done; but all the same
I’m bound to admit that I didn’t relish the idea of meeting Corky
again until time, the great healer, had been able to get in a bit of soothing
work. I cut Washington Square out absolutely for the next few months. I gave it
the complete miss-in-baulk. And then, just when I was beginning to think I
might safely pop down in that direction and gather up the dropped threads, so
to speak, time, instead of working the healing wheeze, went and pulled the most
awful bone and put the lid on it. Opening the paper one morning, I read that
Mrs. Alexander Worple had presented her husband with a son and heir.

I was so darned sorry for poor old Corky that I hadn’t the heart to touch
my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself. I was bowled over. Absolutely.
It was the limit.

I hardly knew what to do. I wanted, of course, to rush down to Washington
Square and grip the poor blighter silently by the hand; and then, thinking it
over, I hadn’t the nerve. Absent treatment seemed the touch. I gave it
him in waves.

But after a month or so I began to hesitate again. It struck me that it was
playing it a bit low-down on the poor chap, avoiding him like this just when he
probably wanted his pals to surge round him most. I pictured him sitting in his
lonely studio with no company but his bitter thoughts, and the pathos of it got
me to such an extent that I bounded straight into a taxi and told the driver to
go all out for the studio.

I rushed in, and there was Corky, hunched up at the easel, painting away, while
on the model throne sat a severe-looking female of middle age, holding a baby.

A fellow has to be ready for that sort of thing.

“Oh, ah!” I said, and started to back out.

Corky looked over his shoulder.

“Halloa, Bertie. Don’t go. We’re just finishing for the day.
That will be all this afternoon,” he said to the nurse, who got up with
the baby and decanted it into a perambulator which was standing in the fairway.

“At the same hour to-morrow, Mr. Corcoran?”

“Yes, please.”

“Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon.”

Corky stood there, looking at the door, and then he turned to me and began to
get it off his chest. Fortunately, he seemed to take it for granted that I knew
all about what had happened, so it wasn’t as awkward as it might have
been.

“It’s my uncle’s idea,” he said. “Muriel
doesn’t know about it yet. The portrait’s to be a surprise for her
on her birthday. The nurse takes the kid out ostensibly to get a breather, and
they beat it down here. If you want an instance of the irony of fate, Bertie,
get acquainted with this. Here’s the first commission I have ever had to
paint a portrait, and the sitter is that human poached egg that has butted in
and bounced me out of my inheritance. Can you beat it! I call it rubbing the
thing in to expect me to spend my afternoons gazing into the ugly face of a
little brat who to all intents and purposes has hit me behind the ear with a
blackjack and swiped all I possess. I can’t refuse to paint the portrait
because if I did my uncle would stop my allowance; yet every time I look up and
catch that kid’s vacant eye, I suffer agonies. I tell you, Bertie,
sometimes when he gives me a patronizing glance and then turns away and is
sick, as if it revolted him to look at me, I come within an ace of occupying
the entire front page of the evening papers as the latest murder sensation.
There are moments when I can almost see the headlines: ‘Promising Young
Artist Beans Baby With Axe.’”

I patted his shoulder silently. My sympathy for the poor old scout was too deep
for words.

I kept away from the studio for some time after that, because it didn’t
seem right to me to intrude on the poor chappie’s sorrow. Besides,
I’m bound to say that nurse intimidated me. She reminded me so infernally
of Aunt Agatha. She was the same gimlet-eyed type.

But one afternoon Corky called me on the ’phone.

“Bertie.”

“Halloa?”

“Are you doing anything this afternoon?”

“Nothing special.”

“You couldn’t come down here, could you?”

“What’s the trouble? Anything up?”

“I’ve finished the portrait.”

“Good boy! Stout work!”

“Yes.” His voice sounded rather doubtful. “The fact is,
Bertie, it doesn’t look quite right to me. There’s something about
it—My uncle’s coming in half an hour to inspect it, and—I
don’t know why it is, but I kind of feel I’d like your moral
support!”

I began to see that I was letting myself in for something. The sympathetic
co-operation of Jeeves seemed to me to be indicated.

“You think he’ll cut up rough?”

“He may.”

I threw my mind back to the red-faced chappie I had met at the restaurant, and
tried to picture him cutting up rough. It was only too easy. I spoke to Corky
firmly on the telephone.

“I’ll come,” I said.

“Good!”

“But only if I may bring Jeeves!”

“Why Jeeves? What’s Jeeves got to do with it? Who wants Jeeves?
Jeeves is the fool who suggested the scheme that has led——”

“Listen, Corky, old top! If you think I am going to face that uncle of
yours without Jeeves’s support, you’re mistaken. I’d sooner
go into a den of wild beasts and bite a lion on the back of the neck.”

“Oh, all right,” said Corky. Not cordially, but he said it; so I
rang for Jeeves, and explained the situation.

“Very good, sir,” said Jeeves.

That’s the sort of chap he is. You can’t rattle him.

We found Corky near the door, looking at the picture, with one hand up in a
defensive sort of way, as if he thought it might swing on him.

“Stand right where you are, Bertie,” he said, without moving.
“Now, tell me honestly, how does it strike you?”

The light from the big window fell right on the picture. I took a good look at
it. Then I shifted a bit nearer and took another look. Then I went back to
where I had been at first, because it hadn’t seemed quite so bad from
there.

“Well?” said Corky, anxiously.

I hesitated a bit.

“Of course, old man, I only saw the kid once, and then only for a moment,
but—but it was an ugly sort of kid, wasn’t it, if I remember
rightly?”

“As ugly as that?”

I looked again, and honesty compelled me to be frank.

“I don’t see how it could have been, old chap.”

Poor old Corky ran his fingers through his hair in a temperamental sort of way.
He groaned.

“You’re right quite, Bertie. Something’s gone wrong with the
darned thing. My private impression is that, without knowing it, I’ve
worked that stunt that Sargent and those fellows pull—painting the soul
of the sitter. I’ve got through the mere outward appearance, and have put
the child’s soul on canvas.”

“But could a child of that age have a soul like that? I don’t see
how he could have managed it in the time. What do you think, Jeeves?”

“I doubt it, sir.”

“It—it sorts of leers at you, doesn’t it?”

“You’ve noticed that, too?” said Corky.

“I don’t see how one could help noticing.”

“All I tried to do was to give the little brute a cheerful expression.
But, as it worked out, he looks positively dissipated.”

“Just what I was going to suggest, old man. He looks as if he were in the
middle of a colossal spree, and enjoying every minute of it. Don’t you
think so, Jeeves?”

“He has a decidedly inebriated air, sir.”

Corky was starting to say something when the door opened, and the uncle came
in.

For about three seconds all was joy, jollity, and goodwill. The old boy shook
hands with me, slapped Corky on the back, said that he didn’t think he
had ever seen such a fine day, and whacked his leg with his stick. Jeeves had
projected himself into the background, and he didn’t notice him.

“Well, Bruce, my boy; so the portrait is really finished, is
it—really finished? Well, bring it out. Let’s have a look at it.
This will be a wonderful surprise for your aunt. Where is it?
Let’s——”

And then he got it—suddenly, when he wasn’t set for the punch; and
he rocked back on his heels.

“Oosh!” he exclaimed. And for perhaps a minute there was one of the
scaliest silences I’ve ever run up against.

“Is this a practical joke?” he said at last, in a way that set
about sixteen draughts cutting through the room at once.

I thought it was up to me to rally round old Corky.

“You want to stand a bit farther away from it,” I said.

“You’re perfectly right!” he snorted. “I do! I want to
stand so far away from it that I can’t see the thing with a
telescope!” He turned on Corky like an untamed tiger of the jungle who
has just located a chunk of meat. “And this—this—is what you
have been wasting your time and my money for all these years! A painter! I
wouldn’t let you paint a house of mine! I gave you this commission,
thinking that you were a competent worker, and this—this—this
extract from a comic coloured supplement is the result!” He swung towards
the door, lashing his tail and growling to himself. “This ends it! If you
wish to continue this foolery of pretending to be an artist because you want an
excuse for idleness, please yourself. But let me tell you this. Unless you
report at my office on Monday morning, prepared to abandon all this idiocy and
start in at the bottom of the business to work your way up, as you should have
done half a dozen years ago, not another cent—not another cent—not
another—Boosh!”

Then the door closed, and he was no longer with us. And I crawled out of the
bombproof shelter.

“Corky, old top!” I whispered faintly.

Corky was standing staring at the picture. His face was set. There was a hunted
look in his eye.

“Well, that finishes it!” he muttered brokenly.

“What are you going to do?”

“Do? What can I do? I can’t stick on here if he cuts off supplies.
You heard what he said. I shall have to go to the office on Monday.”

I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I knew exactly how he felt about the
office. I don’t know when I’ve been so infernally uncomfortable. It
was like hanging round trying to make conversation to a pal who’s just
been sentenced to twenty years in quod.

And then a soothing voice broke the silence.

“If I might make a suggestion, sir!”

It was Jeeves. He had slid from the shadows and was gazing gravely at the
picture. Upon my word, I can’t give you a better idea of the shattering
effect of Corky’s uncle Alexander when in action than by saying that he
had absolutely made me forget for the moment that Jeeves was there.

“I wonder if I have ever happened to mention to you, sir, a Mr. Digby
Thistleton, with whom I was once in service? Perhaps you have met him? He was a
financier. He is now Lord Bridgnorth. It was a favourite saying of his that
there is always a way. The first time I heard him use the expression was after
the failure of a patent depilatory which he promoted.”

“Jeeves,” I said, “what on earth are you talking
about?”

“I mentioned Mr. Thistleton, sir, because his was in some respects a
parallel case to the present one. His depilatory failed, but he did not
despair. He put it on the market again under the name of Hair-o, guaranteed to
produce a full crop of hair in a few months. It was advertised, if you
remember, sir, by a humorous picture of a billiard-ball, before and after
taking, and made such a substantial fortune that Mr. Thistleton was soon
afterwards elevated to the peerage for services to his Party. It seems to me
that, if Mr. Corcoran looks into the matter, he will find, like Mr. Thistleton,
that there is always a way. Mr. Worple himself suggested the solution of the
difficulty. In the heat of the moment he compared the portrait to an extract
from a coloured comic supplement. I consider the suggestion a very valuable
one, sir. Mr. Corcoran’s portrait may not have pleased Mr. Worple as a
likeness of his only child, but I have no doubt that editors would gladly
consider it as a foundation for a series of humorous drawings. If Mr. Corcoran
will allow me to make the suggestion, his talent has always been for the
humorous. There is something about this picture—something bold and
vigorous, which arrests the attention. I feel sure it would be highly
popular.”

Corky was glaring at the picture, and making a sort of dry, sucking noise with
his mouth. He seemed completely overwrought.

And then suddenly he began to laugh in a wild way.

“Corky, old man!” I said, massaging him tenderly. I feared the poor
blighter was hysterical.

He began to stagger about all over the floor.

“He’s right! The man’s absolutely right! Jeeves, you’re
a life-saver! You’ve hit on the greatest idea of the age! Report at the
office on Monday! Start at the bottom of the business! I’ll buy the
business if I feel like it. I know the man who runs the comic section of the
Sunday Star. He’ll eat this thing. He was telling me only the
other day how hard it was to get a good new series. He’ll give me
anything I ask for a real winner like this. I’ve got a gold-mine.
Where’s my hat? I’ve got an income for life! Where’s that
confounded hat? Lend me a fiver, Bertie. I want to take a taxi down to Park
Row!”

Jeeves smiled paternally. Or, rather, he had a kind of paternal muscular spasm
about the mouth, which is the nearest he ever gets to smiling.

“If I might make the suggestion, Mr. Corcoran—for a title of the
series which you have in mind—‘The Adventures of Baby
Blobbs.’”

Corky and I looked at the picture, then at each other in an awed way. Jeeves
was right. There could be no other title.

“Jeeves,” I said. It was a few weeks later, and I had just finished
looking at the comic section of the Sunday Star. “I’m an
optimist. I always have been. The older I get, the more I agree with
Shakespeare and those poet Johnnies about it always being darkest before the
dawn and there’s a silver lining and what you lose on the swings you make
up on the roundabouts. Look at Mr. Corcoran, for instance. There was a fellow,
one would have said, clear up to the eyebrows in the soup. To all appearances
he had got it right in the neck. Yet look at him now. Have you seen these
pictures?”

“I took the liberty of glancing at them before bringing them to you, sir.
Extremely diverting.”

“They have made a big hit, you know.”

“I anticipated it, sir.”

I leaned back against the pillows.

“You know, Jeeves, you’re a genius. You ought to be drawing a
commission on these things.”

“I have nothing to complain of in that respect, sir. Mr. Corcoran has
been most generous. I am putting out the brown suit, sir.”

“No, I think I’ll wear the blue with the faint red stripe.”

“Not the blue with the faint red stripe, sir.”

“But I rather fancy myself in it.”

“Not the blue with the faint red stripe, sir.”

“Oh, all right, have it your own way.”

“Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Of course, I know it’s as bad as being henpecked; but then Jeeves is
always right. You’ve got to consider that, you know. What?

JEEVES AND THE UNBIDDEN GUEST

I’m not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it’s
Shakespeare—or, if not, it’s some equally brainy lad—who says
that it’s always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole,
and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind
him with a bit of lead piping. There’s no doubt the man’s right.
It’s absolutely that way with me. Take, for instance, the fairly rummy
matter of Lady Malvern and her son Wilmot. A moment before they turned up, I
was just thinking how thoroughly all right everything was.

It was one of those topping mornings, and I had just climbed out from under the
cold shower, feeling like a two-year-old. As a matter of fact, I was especially
bucked just then because the day before I had asserted myself with
Jeeves—absolutely asserted myself, don’t you know. You see, the way
things had been going on I was rapidly becoming a dashed serf. The man had
jolly well oppressed me. I didn’t so much mind when he made me give up
one of my new suits, because Jeeves’s judgment about suits is sound. But
I as near as a toucher rebelled when he wouldn’t let me wear a pair of
cloth-topped boots which I loved like a couple of brothers. And when he tried
to tread on me like a worm in the matter of a hat, I jolly well put my foot
down and showed him who was who. It’s a long story, and I haven’t
time to tell you now, but the point is that he wanted me to wear the
Longacre—as worn by John Drew—when I had set my heart on the
Country Gentleman—as worn by another famous actor chappie—and the
end of the matter was that, after a rather painful scene, I bought the Country
Gentleman. So that’s how things stood on this particular morning, and I
was feeling kind of manly and independent.

Well, I was in the bathroom, wondering what there was going to be for breakfast
while I massaged the good old spine with a rough towel and sang slightly, when
there was a tap at the door. I stopped singing and opened the door an inch.

“What ho without there!”

“Lady Malvern wishes to see you, sir,” said Jeeves.

“Eh?”

“Lady Malvern, sir. She is waiting in the sitting-room.”

“Pull yourself together, Jeeves, my man,” I said, rather severely,
for I bar practical jokes before breakfast. “You know perfectly well
there’s no one waiting for me in the sitting-room. How could there be
when it’s barely ten o’clock yet?”

“I gathered from her ladyship, sir, that she had landed from an ocean
liner at an early hour this morning.”

This made the thing a bit more plausible. I remembered that when I had arrived
in America about a year before, the proceedings had begun at some ghastly hour
like six, and that I had been shot out on to a foreign shore considerably
before eight.

“Who the deuce is Lady Malvern, Jeeves?”

“Her ladyship did not confide in me, sir.”

“Is she alone?”

“Her ladyship is accompanied by a Lord Pershore, sir. I fancy that his
lordship would be her ladyship’s son.”

“Oh, well, put out rich raiment of sorts, and I’ll be
dressing.”

“Our heather-mixture lounge is in readiness, sir.”

“Then lead me to it.”

While I was dressing I kept trying to think who on earth Lady Malvern could be.
It wasn’t till I had climbed through the top of my shirt and was reaching
out for the studs that I remembered.

“I’ve placed her, Jeeves. She’s a pal of my Aunt
Agatha.”

“Indeed, sir?”

“Yes. I met her at lunch one Sunday before I left London. A very vicious
specimen. Writes books. She wrote a book on social conditions in India when she
came back from the Durbar.”

“Yes, sir? Pardon me, sir, but not that tie!”

“Eh?”

“Not that tie with the heather-mixture lounge, sir!”

It was a shock to me. I thought I had quelled the fellow. It was rather a
solemn moment. What I mean is, if I weakened now, all my good work the night
before would be thrown away. I braced myself.

“What’s wrong with this tie? I’ve seen you give it a nasty
look before. Speak out like a man! What’s the matter with it?”

“Too ornate, sir.”

“Nonsense! A cheerful pink. Nothing more.”

“Unsuitable, sir.”

“Jeeves, this is the tie I wear!”

“Very good, sir.”

Dashed unpleasant. I could see that the man was wounded. But I was firm. I tied
the tie, got into the coat and waistcoat, and went into the sitting-room.

“Halloa! Halloa! Halloa!” I said. “What?”

“Ah! How do you do, Mr. Wooster? You have never met my son, Wilmot, I
think? Motty, darling, this is Mr. Wooster.”

Lady Malvern was a hearty, happy, healthy, overpowering sort of dashed female,
not so very tall but making up for it by measuring about six feet from the O.P.
to the Prompt Side. She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been
built round her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about
the hips that season. She had bright, bulging eyes and a lot of yellow hair,
and when she spoke she showed about fifty-seven front teeth. She was one of
those women who kind of numb a fellow’s faculties. She made me feel as if
I were ten years old and had been brought into the drawing-room in my Sunday
clothes to say how-d’you-do. Altogether by no means the sort of thing a
chappie would wish to find in his sitting-room before breakfast.

Motty, the son, was about twenty-three, tall and thin and meek-looking. He had
the same yellow hair as his mother, but he wore it plastered down and parted in
the middle. His eyes bulged, too, but they weren’t bright. They were a
dull grey with pink rims. His chin gave up the struggle about half-way down,
and he didn’t appear to have any eyelashes. A mild, furtive, sheepish
sort of blighter, in short.

“Awfully glad to see you,” I said. “So you’ve popped
over, eh? Making a long stay in America?”

“About a month. Your aunt gave me your address and told me to be sure and
call on you.”

I was glad to hear this, as it showed that Aunt Agatha was beginning to come
round a bit. There had been some unpleasantness a year before, when she had
sent me over to New York to disentangle my Cousin Gussie from the clutches of a
girl on the music-hall stage. When I tell you that by the time I had finished
my operations, Gussie had not only married the girl but had gone on the stage
himself, and was doing well, you’ll understand that Aunt Agatha was upset
to no small extent. I simply hadn’t dared go back and face her, and it
was a relief to find that time had healed the wound and all that sort of thing
enough to make her tell her pals to look me up. What I mean is, much as I liked
America, I didn’t want to have England barred to me for the rest of my
natural; and, believe me, England is a jolly sight too small for anyone to live
in with Aunt Agatha, if she’s really on the warpath. So I braced on
hearing these kind words and smiled genially on the assemblage.

“Your aunt said that you would do anything that was in your power to be
of assistance to us.”

“Rather? Oh, rather! Absolutely!”

“Thank you so much. I want you to put dear Motty up for a little
while.”

I didn’t get this for a moment.

“Put him up? For my clubs?”

“No, no! Darling Motty is essentially a home bird. Aren’t you,
Motty darling?”

Motty, who was sucking the knob of his stick, uncorked himself.

“Yes, mother,” he said, and corked himself up again.

“I should not like him to belong to clubs. I mean put him up here. Have
him to live with you while I am away.”

These frightful words trickled out of her like honey. The woman simply
didn’t seem to understand the ghastly nature of her proposal. I gave
Motty the swift east-to-west. He was sitting with his mouth nuzzling the stick,
blinking at the wall. The thought of having this planted on me for an
indefinite period appalled me. Absolutely appalled me, don’t you know. I
was just starting to say that the shot wasn’t on the board at any price,
and that the first sign Motty gave of trying to nestle into my little home I
would yell for the police, when she went on, rolling placidly over me, as it
were.

There was something about this woman that sapped a chappie’s will-power.

“I am leaving New York by the midday train, as I have to pay a visit to
Sing-Sing prison. I am extremely interested in prison conditions in America.
After that I work my way gradually across to the coast, visiting the points of
interest on the journey. You see, Mr. Wooster, I am in America principally on
business. No doubt you read my book, India and the Indians? My
publishers are anxious for me to write a companion volume on the United States.
I shall not be able to spend more than a month in the country, as I have to get
back for the season, but a month should be ample. I was less than a month in
India, and my dear friend Sir Roger Cremorne wrote his America from
Within after a stay of only two weeks. I should love to take dear Motty
with me, but the poor boy gets so sick when he travels by train. I shall have
to pick him up on my return.”

From where I sat I could see Jeeves in the dining-room, laying the
breakfast-table. I wished I could have had a minute with him alone. I felt
certain that he would have been able to think of some way of putting a stop to
this woman.

“It will be such a relief to know that Motty is safe with you, Mr.
Wooster. I know what the temptations of a great city are. Hitherto dear Motty
has been sheltered from them. He has lived quietly with me in the country. I
know that you will look after him carefully, Mr. Wooster. He will give very
little trouble.” She talked about the poor blighter as if he wasn’t
there. Not that Motty seemed to mind. He had stopped chewing his walking-stick
and was sitting there with his mouth open. “He is a vegetarian and a
teetotaller and is devoted to reading. Give him a nice book and he will be
quite contented.” She got up. “Thank you so much, Mr. Wooster! I
don’t know what I should have done without your help. Come, Motty! We
have just time to see a few of the sights before my train goes. But I shall
have to rely on you for most of my information about New York, darling. Be sure
to keep your eyes open and take notes of your impressions! It will be such a
help. Good-bye, Mr. Wooster. I will send Motty back early in the
afternoon.”

They went out, and I howled for Jeeves.

“Jeeves! What about it?”

“Sir?”

“What’s to be done? You heard it all, didn’t you? You were in
the dining-room most of the time. That pill is coming to stay here.”

“Pill, sir?”

“The excrescence.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

I looked at Jeeves sharply. This sort of thing wasn’t like him. It was as
if he were deliberately trying to give me the pip. Then I understood. The man
was really upset about that tie. He was trying to get his own back.

“Lord Pershore will be staying here from to-night, Jeeves,” I said
coldly.

“Very good, sir. Breakfast is ready, sir.”

I could have sobbed into the bacon and eggs. That there wasn’t any
sympathy to be got out of Jeeves was what put the lid on it. For a moment I
almost weakened and told him to destroy the hat and tie if he didn’t like
them, but I pulled myself together again. I was dashed if I was going to let
Jeeves treat me like a bally one-man chain-gang!

But, what with brooding on Jeeves and brooding on Motty, I was in a pretty
reduced sort of state. The more I examined the situation, the more blighted it
became. There was nothing I could do. If I slung Motty out, he would report to
his mother, and she would pass it on to Aunt Agatha, and I didn’t like to
think what would happen then. Sooner or later, I should be wanting to go back
to England, and I didn’t want to get there and find Aunt Agatha waiting
on the quay for me with a stuffed eelskin. There was absolutely nothing for it
but to put the fellow up and make the best of it.

About midday Motty’s luggage arrived, and soon afterward a large parcel
of what I took to be nice books. I brightened up a little when I saw it. It was
one of those massive parcels and looked as if it had enough in it to keep the
chappie busy for a year. I felt a trifle more cheerful, and I got my Country
Gentleman hat and stuck it on my head, and gave the pink tie a twist, and
reeled out to take a bite of lunch with one or two of the lads at a
neighbouring hostelry; and what with excellent browsing and sluicing and cheery
conversation and what-not, the afternoon passed quite happily. By dinner-time I
had almost forgotten blighted Motty’s existence.

I dined at the club and looked in at a show afterward, and it wasn’t till
fairly late that I got back to the flat. There were no signs of Motty, and I
took it that he had gone to bed.

It seemed rummy to me, though, that the parcel of nice books was still there
with the string and paper on it. It looked as if Motty, after seeing mother off
at the station, had decided to call it a day.

Jeeves came in with the nightly whisky-and-soda. I could tell by the
chappie’s manner that he was still upset.

“Lord Pershore gone to bed, Jeeves?” I asked, with reserved hauteur
and what-not.

“No, sir. His lordship has not yet returned.”

“Not returned? What do you mean?”

“His lordship came in shortly after six-thirty, and, having dressed, went
out again.”

At this moment there was a noise outside the front door, a sort of scrabbling
noise, as if somebody were trying to paw his way through the woodwork. Then a
sort of thud.

“Better go and see what that is, Jeeves.”

“Very good, sir.”

He went out and came back again.

“If you would not mind stepping this way, sir, I think we might be able
to carry him in.”

“Carry him in?”

“His lordship is lying on the mat, sir.”

I went to the front door. The man was right. There was Motty huddled up outside
on the floor. He was moaning a bit.

“He’s had some sort of dashed fit,” I said. I took another
look. “Jeeves! Someone’s been feeding him meat!”

“Sir?”

“He’s a vegetarian, you know. He must have been digging into a
steak or something. Call up a doctor!”

“I hardly think it will be necessary, sir. If you would take his
lordship’s legs, while I——”

“Great Scot, Jeeves! You don’t think—he can’t
be——”

“I am inclined to think so, sir.”

And, by Jove, he was right! Once on the right track, you couldn’t mistake
it. Motty was under the surface.

It was the deuce of a shock.

“You never can tell, Jeeves!”

“Very seldom, sir.”

“Remove the eye of authority and where are you?”

“Precisely, sir.”

“Where is my wandering boy to-night and all that sort of thing,
what?”

“It would seem so, sir.”

“Well, we had better bring him in, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

So we lugged him in, and Jeeves put him to bed, and I lit a cigarette and sat
down to think the thing over. I had a kind of foreboding. It seemed to me that
I had let myself in for something pretty rocky.

Next morning, after I had sucked down a thoughtful cup of tea, I went into
Motty’s room to investigate. I expected to find the fellow a wreck, but
there he was, sitting up in bed, quite chirpy, reading Gingery stories.

“What ho!” I said.

“What ho!” said Motty.

“What ho! What ho!”

“What ho! What ho! What ho!”

After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.

“How are you feeling this morning?” I asked.

“Topping!” replied Motty, blithely and with abandon. “I say,
you know, that fellow of yours—Jeeves, you know—is a corker. I had
a most frightful headache when I woke up, and he brought me a sort of rummy
dark drink, and it put me right again at once. Said it was his own invention. I
must see more of that lad. He seems to me distinctly one of the ones!”

I couldn’t believe that this was the same blighter who had sat and sucked
his stick the day before.

“You ate something that disagreed with you last night, didn’t
you?” I said, by way of giving him a chance to slide out of it if he
wanted to. But he wouldn’t have it, at any price.

“No!” he replied firmly. “I didn’t do anything of the
kind. I drank too much! Much too much. Lots and lots too much! And,
what’s more, I’m going to do it again! I’m going to do it
every night. If ever you see me sober, old top,” he said, with a kind of
holy exaltation, “tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Tut! Tut!’
and I’ll apologize and remedy the defect.”

“But I say, you know, what about me?”

“What about you?”

“Well, I’m, so to speak, as it were, kind of responsible for you.
What I mean to say is, if you go doing this sort of thing I’m apt to get
in the soup somewhat.”

“I can’t help your troubles,” said Motty firmly.
“Listen to me, old thing: this is the first time in my life that
I’ve had a real chance to yield to the temptations of a great city.
What’s the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don’t
yield to them? Makes it so bally discouraging for a great city. Besides, mother
told me to keep my eyes open and collect impressions.”

I sat on the edge of the bed. I felt dizzy.

“I know just how you feel, old dear,” said Motty consolingly.
“And, if my principles would permit it, I would simmer down for your
sake. But duty first! This is the first time I’ve been let out alone, and
I mean to make the most of it. We’re only young once. Why interfere with
life’s morning? Young man, rejoice in thy youth! Tra-la! What ho!”

Put like that, it did seem reasonable.

“All my bally life, dear boy,” Motty went on, “I’ve
been cooped up in the ancestral home at Much Middlefold, in Shropshire, and
till you’ve been cooped up in Much Middlefold you don’t know what
cooping is! The only time we get any excitement is when one of the choir-boys
is caught sucking chocolate during the sermon. When that happens, we talk about
it for days. I’ve got about a month of New York, and I mean to store up a
few happy memories for the long winter evenings. This is my only chance to
collect a past, and I’m going to do it. Now tell me, old sport, as man to
man, how does one get in touch with that very decent chappie Jeeves? Does one
ring a bell or shout a bit? I should like to discuss the subject of a good
stiff b.-and-s. with him!”

I had had a sort of vague idea, don’t you know, that if I stuck close to
Motty and went about the place with him, I might act as a bit of a damper on
the gaiety. What I mean is, I thought that if, when he was being the life and
soul of the party, he were to catch my reproving eye he might ease up a trifle
on the revelry. So the next night I took him along to supper with me. It was
the last time. I’m a quiet, peaceful sort of chappie who has lived all
his life in London, and I can’t stand the pace these swift sportsmen from
the rural districts set. What I mean to say is this, I’m all for rational
enjoyment and so forth, but I think a chappie makes himself conspicuous when he
throws soft-boiled eggs at the electric fan. And decent mirth and all that sort
of thing are all right, but I do bar dancing on tables and having to dash all
over the place dodging waiters, managers, and chuckers-out, just when you want
to sit still and digest.

Directly I managed to tear myself away that night and get home, I made up my
mind that this was jolly well the last time that I went about with Motty. The
only time I met him late at night after that was once when I passed the door of
a fairly low-down sort of restaurant and had to step aside to dodge him as he
sailed through the air en route for the opposite pavement, with a
muscular sort of looking chappie peering out after him with a kind of gloomy
satisfaction.

In a way, I couldn’t help sympathizing with the fellow. He had about four
weeks to have the good time that ought to have been spread over about ten
years, and I didn’t wonder at his wanting to be pretty busy. I should
have been just the same in his place. Still, there was no denying that it was a
bit thick. If it hadn’t been for the thought of Lady Malvern and Aunt
Agatha in the background, I should have regarded Motty’s rapid work with
an indulgent smile. But I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that, sooner or
later, I was the lad who was scheduled to get it behind the ear. And what with
brooding on this prospect, and sitting up in the old flat waiting for the
familiar footstep, and putting it to bed when it got there, and stealing into
the sick-chamber next morning to contemplate the wreckage, I was beginning to
lose weight. Absolutely becoming the good old shadow, I give you my honest
word. Starting at sudden noises and what-not.

And no sympathy from Jeeves. That was what cut me to the quick. The man was
still thoroughly pipped about the hat and tie, and simply wouldn’t rally
round. One morning I wanted comforting so much that I sank the pride of the
Woosters and appealed to the fellow direct.

“Jeeves,” I said, “this is getting a bit thick!”

“Sir?” Business and cold respectfulness.

“You know what I mean. This lad seems to have chucked all the principles
of a well-spent boyhood. He has got it up his nose!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I shall get blamed, don’t you know. You know what my Aunt
Agatha is!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well, then.”

I waited a moment, but he wouldn’t unbend.

“Jeeves,” I said, “haven’t you any scheme up your
sleeve for coping with this blighter?”

“No, sir.”

And he shimmered off to his lair. Obstinate devil! So dashed absurd,
don’t you know. It wasn’t as if there was anything wrong with that
Country Gentleman hat. It was a remarkably priceless effort, and much admired
by the lads. But, just because he preferred the Longacre, he left me flat.

It was shortly after this that young Motty got the idea of bringing pals back
in the small hours to continue the gay revels in the home. This was where I
began to crack under the strain. You see, the part of town where I was living
wasn’t the right place for that sort of thing. I knew lots of chappies
down Washington Square way who started the evening at about 2
a.m.—artists and writers and what-not, who frolicked considerably till
checked by the arrival of the morning milk. That was all right. They like that
sort of thing down there. The neighbours can’t get to sleep unless
there’s someone dancing Hawaiian dances over their heads. But on
Fifty-seventh Street the atmosphere wasn’t right, and when Motty turned
up at three in the morning with a collection of hearty lads, who only stopped
singing their college song when they started singing “The Old Oaken
Bucket,” there was a marked peevishness among the old settlers in the
flats. The management was extremely terse over the telephone at breakfast-time,
and took a lot of soothing.

The next night I came home early, after a lonely dinner at a place which
I’d chosen because there didn’t seem any chance of meeting Motty
there. The sitting-room was quite dark, and I was just moving to switch on the
light, when there was a sort of explosion and something collared hold of my
trouser-leg. Living with Motty had reduced me to such an extent that I was
simply unable to cope with this thing. I jumped backward with a loud yell of
anguish, and tumbled out into the hall just as Jeeves came out of his den to
see what the matter was.

“Did you call, sir?”

“Jeeves! There’s something in there that grabs you by the
leg!”

“That would be Rollo, sir.”

“Eh?”

“I would have warned you of his presence, but I did not hear you come in.
His temper is a little uncertain at present, as he has not yet settled
down.”

“Who the deuce is Rollo?”

“His lordship’s bull-terrier, sir. His lordship won him in a
raffle, and tied him to the leg of the table. If you will allow me, sir, I will
go in and switch on the light.”

There really is nobody like Jeeves. He walked straight into the sitting-room,
the biggest feat since Daniel and the lions’ den, without a quiver.
What’s more, his magnetism or whatever they call it was such that the
dashed animal, instead of pinning him by the leg, calmed down as if he had had
a bromide, and rolled over on his back with all his paws in the air. If Jeeves
had been his rich uncle he couldn’t have been more chummy. Yet directly
he caught sight of me again, he got all worked up and seemed to have only one
idea in life—to start chewing me where he had left off.

“Rollo is not used to you yet, sir,” said Jeeves, regarding the
bally quadruped in an admiring sort of way. “He is an excellent
watchdog.”

“I don’t want a watchdog to keep me out of my rooms.”

“No, sir.”

“Well, what am I to do?”

“No doubt in time the animal will learn to discriminate, sir. He will
learn to distinguish your peculiar scent.”

“What do you mean—my peculiar scent? Correct the impression that I
intend to hang about in the hall while life slips by, in the hope that one of
these days that dashed animal will decide that I smell all right.” I
thought for a bit. “Jeeves!”

“Sir?”

“I’m going away—to-morrow morning by the first train. I shall
go and stop with Mr. Todd in the country.”

“Do you wish me to accompany you, sir?”

“No.”

“Very good, sir.”

“I don’t know when I shall be back. Forward my letters.”

“Yes, sir.”

As a matter of fact, I was back within the week. Rocky Todd, the pal I went to
stay with, is a rummy sort of a chap who lives all alone in the wilds of Long
Island, and likes it; but a little of that sort of thing goes a long way with
me. Dear old Rocky is one of the best, but after a few days in his cottage in
the woods, miles away from anywhere, New York, even with Motty on the premises,
began to look pretty good to me. The days down on Long Island have forty-eight
hours in them; you can’t get to sleep at night because of the bellowing
of the crickets; and you have to walk two miles for a drink and six for an
evening paper. I thanked Rocky for his kind hospitality, and caught the only
train they have down in those parts. It landed me in New York about
dinner-time. I went straight to the old flat. Jeeves came out of his lair. I
looked round cautiously for Rollo.

“Where’s that dog, Jeeves? Have you got him tied up?”

“The animal is no longer here, sir. His lordship gave him to the porter,
who sold him. His lordship took a prejudice against the animal on account of
being bitten by him in the calf of the leg.”

I don’t think I’ve ever been so bucked by a bit of news. I felt I
had misjudged Rollo. Evidently, when you got to know him better, he had a lot
of intelligence in him.

“Ripping!” I said. “Is Lord Pershore in, Jeeves?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you expect him back to dinner?”

“No, sir.”

“Where is he?”

“In prison, sir.”

Have you ever trodden on a rake and had the handle jump up and hit you?
That’s how I felt then.

“In prison!”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t mean—in prison?”

“Yes, sir.”

I lowered myself into a chair.

“Why?” I said.

“He assaulted a constable, sir.”

“Lord Pershore assaulted a constable!”

“Yes, sir.”

I digested this.

“But, Jeeves, I say! This is frightful!”

“Sir?”

“What will Lady Malvern say when she finds out?”

“I do not fancy that her ladyship will find out, sir.”

“But she’ll come back and want to know where he is.”

“I rather fancy, sir, that his lordship’s bit of time will have run
out by then.”

“But supposing it hasn’t?”

“In that event, sir, it may be judicious to prevaricate a little.”

“How?”

“If I might make the suggestion, sir, I should inform her ladyship that
his lordship has left for a short visit to Boston.”

“Why Boston?”

“Very interesting and respectable centre, sir.”

“Jeeves, I believe you’ve hit it.”

“I fancy so, sir.”

“Why, this is really the best thing that could have happened. If this
hadn’t turned up to prevent him, young Motty would have been in a
sanatorium by the time Lady Malvern got back.”

“Exactly, sir.”

The more I looked at it in that way, the sounder this prison wheeze seemed to
me. There was no doubt in the world that prison was just what the doctor
ordered for Motty. It was the only thing that could have pulled him up. I was
sorry for the poor blighter, but, after all, I reflected, a chappie who had
lived all his life with Lady Malvern, in a small village in the interior of
Shropshire, wouldn’t have much to kick at in a prison. Altogether, I
began to feel absolutely braced again. Life became like what the poet Johnnie
says—one grand, sweet song. Things went on so comfortably and peacefully
for a couple of weeks that I give you my word that I’d almost forgotten
such a person as Motty existed. The only flaw in the scheme of things was that
Jeeves was still pained and distant. It wasn’t anything he said or did,
mind you, but there was a rummy something about him all the time. Once when I
was tying the pink tie I caught sight of him in the looking-glass. There was a
kind of grieved look in his eye.

And then Lady Malvern came back, a good bit ahead of schedule. I hadn’t
been expecting her for days. I’d forgotten how time had been slipping
along. She turned up one morning while I was still in bed sipping tea and
thinking of this and that. Jeeves flowed in with the announcement that he had
just loosed her into the sitting-room. I draped a few garments round me and
went in.

There she was, sitting in the same arm-chair, looking as massive as ever. The
only difference was that she didn’t uncover the teeth, as she had done
the first time.

“Good morning,” I said. “So you’ve got back,
what?”

“I have got back.”

There was something sort of bleak about her tone, rather as if she had
swallowed an east wind. This I took to be due to the fact that she probably
hadn’t breakfasted. It’s only after a bit of breakfast that
I’m able to regard the world with that sunny cheeriness which makes a
fellow the universal favourite. I’m never much of a lad till I’ve
engulfed an egg or two and a beaker of coffee.

“I suppose you haven’t breakfasted?”

“I have not yet breakfasted.”

“Won’t you have an egg or something? Or a sausage or something? Or
something?”

“No, thank you.”

She spoke as if she belonged to an anti-sausage society or a league for the
suppression of eggs. There was a bit of a silence.

“I called on you last night,” she said, “but you were
out.”

“Awfully sorry! Had a pleasant trip?”

“Extremely, thank you.”

“See everything? Niag’ra Falls, Yellowstone Park, and the jolly old
Grand Canyon, and what-not?”

“I saw a great deal.”

There was another slightly frappé silence. Jeeves floated silently into
the dining-room and began to lay the breakfast-table.

“I hope Wilmot was not in your way, Mr. Wooster?”

I had been wondering when she was going to mention Motty.

“Rather not! Great pals! Hit it off splendidly.”

“You were his constant companion, then?”

“Absolutely! We were always together. Saw all the sights, don’t you
know. We’d take in the Museum of Art in the morning, and have a bit of
lunch at some good vegetarian place, and then toddle along to a sacred concert
in the afternoon, and home to an early dinner. We usually played dominoes after
dinner. And then the early bed and the refreshing sleep. We had a great time. I
was awfully sorry when he went away to Boston.”

“Oh! Wilmot is in Boston?”

“Yes. I ought to have let you know, but of course we didn’t know
where you were. You were dodging all over the place like a snipe—I mean,
don’t you know, dodging all over the place, and we couldn’t get at
you. Yes, Motty went off to Boston.”

“You’re sure he went to Boston?”

“Oh, absolutely.” I called out to Jeeves, who was now messing about
in the next room with forks and so forth: “Jeeves, Lord Pershore
didn’t change his mind about going to Boston, did he?”

“No, sir.”

“I thought I was right. Yes, Motty went to Boston.”

“Then how do you account, Mr. Wooster, for the fact that when I went
yesterday afternoon to Blackwell’s Island prison, to secure material for
my book, I saw poor, dear Wilmot there, dressed in a striped suit, seated
beside a pile of stones with a hammer in his hands?”

I tried to think of something to say, but nothing came. A chappie has to be a
lot broader about the forehead than I am to handle a jolt like this. I strained
the old bean till it creaked, but between the collar and the hair parting
nothing stirred. I was dumb. Which was lucky, because I wouldn’t have had
a chance to get any persiflage out of my system. Lady Malvern collared the
conversation. She had been bottling it up, and now it came out with a rush:

“So this is how you have looked after my poor, dear boy, Mr. Wooster! So
this is how you have abused my trust! I left him in your charge, thinking that
I could rely on you to shield him from evil. He came to you innocent, unversed
in the ways of the world, confiding, unused to the temptations of a large city,
and you led him astray!”

I hadn’t any remarks to make. All I could think of was the picture of
Aunt Agatha drinking all this in and reaching out to sharpen the hatchet
against my return.

“You deliberately——”

Far away in the misty distance a soft voice spoke:

“If I might explain, your ladyship.”

Jeeves had projected himself in from the dining-room and materialized on the
rug. Lady Malvern tried to freeze him with a look, but you can’t do that
sort of thing to Jeeves. He is look-proof.

“I fancy, your ladyship, that you have misunderstood Mr. Wooster, and
that he may have given you the impression that he was in New York when his
lordship—was removed. When Mr. Wooster informed your ladyship that his
lordship had gone to Boston, he was relying on the version I had given him of
his lordship’s movements. Mr. Wooster was away, visiting a friend in the
country, at the time, and knew nothing of the matter till your ladyship
informed him.”

Lady Malvern gave a kind of grunt. It didn’t rattle Jeeves.

“I feared Mr. Wooster might be disturbed if he knew the truth, as he is
so attached to his lordship and has taken such pains to look after him, so I
took the liberty of telling him that his lordship had gone away for a visit. It
might have been hard for Mr. Wooster to believe that his lordship had gone to
prison voluntarily and from the best motives, but your ladyship, knowing him
better, will readily understand.”

“What!” Lady Malvern goggled at him. “Did you say that Lord
Pershore went to prison voluntarily?”

“If I might explain, your ladyship. I think that your ladyship’s
parting words made a deep impression on his lordship. I have frequently heard
him speak to Mr. Wooster of his desire to do something to follow your
ladyship’s instructions and collect material for your ladyship’s
book on America. Mr. Wooster will bear me out when I say that his lordship was
frequently extremely depressed at the thought that he was doing so little to
help.”

“Absolutely, by Jove! Quite pipped about it!” I said.

“The idea of making a personal examination into the prison system of the
country—from within—occurred to his lordship very suddenly one
night. He embraced it eagerly. There was no restraining him.”

Lady Malvern looked at Jeeves, then at me, then at Jeeves again. I could see
her struggling with the thing.

“Surely, your ladyship,” said Jeeves, “it is more reasonable
to suppose that a gentleman of his lordship’s character went to prison of
his own volition than that he committed some breach of the law which
necessitated his arrest?”

Lady Malvern blinked. Then she got up.

“Mr. Wooster,” she said, “I apologize. I have done you an
injustice. I should have known Wilmot better. I should have had more faith in
his pure, fine spirit.”

“Absolutely!” I said.

“Your breakfast is ready, sir,” said Jeeves.

I sat down and dallied in a dazed sort of way with a poached egg.

“Jeeves,” I said, “you are certainly a life-saver!”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Nothing would have convinced my Aunt Agatha that I hadn’t lured
that blighter into riotous living.”

“I fancy you are right, sir.”

I champed my egg for a bit. I was most awfully moved, don’t you know, by
the way Jeeves had rallied round. Something seemed to tell me that this was an
occasion that called for rich rewards. For a moment I hesitated. Then I made up
my mind.

“Jeeves!”

“Sir?”

“That pink tie!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Burn it!”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And, Jeeves!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Take a taxi and get me that Longacre hat, as worn by John Drew!”

“Thank you very much, sir.”

I felt most awfully braced. I felt as if the clouds had rolled away and all was
as it used to be. I felt like one of those chappies in the novels who calls off
the fight with his wife in the last chapter and decides to forget and forgive.
I felt I wanted to do all sorts of other things to show Jeeves that I
appreciated him.

“Jeeves,” I said, “it isn’t enough. Is there anything
else you would like?”

“Yes, sir. If I may make the suggestion—fifty dollars.”

“Fifty dollars?”

“It will enable me to pay a debt of honour, sir. I owe it to his
lordship.”

“You owe Lord Pershore fifty dollars?”

“Yes, sir. I happened to meet him in the street the night his lordship
was arrested. I had been thinking a good deal about the most suitable method of
inducing him to abandon his mode of living, sir. His lordship was a little
over-excited at the time and I fancy that he mistook me for a friend of his. At
any rate when I took the liberty of wagering him fifty dollars that he would
not punch a passing policeman in the eye, he accepted the bet very cordially
and won it.”

I produced my pocket-book and counted out a hundred.

“Take this, Jeeves,” I said; “fifty isn’t enough. Do
you know, Jeeves, you’re—well, you absolutely stand alone!”

“I endeavour to give satisfaction, sir,” said Jeeves.

JEEVES AND THE HARD-BOILED EGG

Sometimes of a morning, as I’ve sat in bed sucking down the early cup of
tea and watched my man Jeeves flitting about the room and putting out the
raiment for the day, I’ve wondered what the deuce I should do if the
fellow ever took it into his head to leave me. It’s not so bad now
I’m in New York, but in London the anxiety was frightful. There used to
be all sorts of attempts on the part of low blighters to sneak him away from
me. Young Reggie Foljambe to my certain knowledge offered him double what I was
giving him, and Alistair Bingham-Reeves, who’s got a valet who had been
known to press his trousers sideways, used to look at him, when he came to see
me, with a kind of glittering hungry eye which disturbed me deucedly. Bally
pirates!

The thing, you see, is that Jeeves is so dashed competent. You can spot it even
in the way he shoves studs into a shirt.

I rely on him absolutely in every crisis, and he never lets me down. And,
what’s more, he can always be counted on to extend himself on behalf of
any pal of mine who happens to be to all appearances knee-deep in the bouillon.
Take the rather rummy case, for instance, of dear old Bicky and his uncle, the
hard-boiled egg.

It happened after I had been in America for a few months. I got back to the
flat latish one night, and when Jeeves brought me the final drink he said:

“Mr. Bickersteth called to see you this evening, sir, while you were
out.”

“Oh?” I said.

“Twice, sir. He appeared a trifle agitated.”

“What, pipped?”

“He gave that impression, sir.”

I sipped the whisky. I was sorry if Bicky was in trouble, but, as a matter of
fact, I was rather glad to have something I could discuss freely with Jeeves
just then, because things had been a bit strained between us for some time, and
it had been rather difficult to hit on anything to talk about that wasn’t
apt to take a personal turn. You see, I had decided—rightly or
wrongly—to grow a moustache and this had cut Jeeves to the quick. He
couldn’t stick the thing at any price, and I had been living ever since
in an atmosphere of bally disapproval till I was getting jolly well fed up with
it. What I mean is, while there’s no doubt that in certain matters of
dress Jeeves’s judgment is absolutely sound and should be followed, it
seemed to me that it was getting a bit too thick if he was going to edit my
face as well as my costume. No one can call me an unreasonable chappie, and
many’s the time I’ve given in like a lamb when Jeeves has voted
against one of my pet suits or ties; but when it comes to a valet’s
staking out a claim on your upper lip you’ve simply got to have a bit of
the good old bulldog pluck and defy the blighter.

“He said that he would call again later, sir.”

“Something must be up, Jeeves.”

“Yes, sir.”

I gave the moustache a thoughtful twirl. It seemed to hurt Jeeves a good deal,
so I chucked it.

“I see by the paper, sir, that Mr. Bickersteth’s uncle is arriving
on the Carmantic.”

“Yes?”

“His Grace the Duke of Chiswick, sir.”

This was news to me, that Bicky’s uncle was a duke. Rum, how little one
knows about one’s pals! I had met Bicky for the first time at a species
of beano or jamboree down in Washington Square, not long after my arrival in
New York. I suppose I was a bit homesick at the time, and I rather took to
Bicky when I found that he was an Englishman and had, in fact, been up at
Oxford with me. Besides, he was a frightful chump, so we naturally drifted
together; and while we were taking a quiet snort in a corner that wasn’t
all cluttered up with artists and sculptors and what-not, he furthermore
endeared himself to me by a most extraordinarily gifted imitation of a
bull-terrier chasing a cat up a tree. But, though we had subsequently become
extremely pally, all I really knew about him was that he was generally hard up,
and had an uncle who relieved the strain a bit from time to time by sending him
monthly remittances.

“If the Duke of Chiswick is his uncle,” I said, “why
hasn’t he a title? Why isn’t he Lord What-Not?”

“Mr. Bickersteth is the son of his grace’s late sister, sir, who
married Captain Rollo Bickersteth of the Coldstream Guards.”

Jeeves knows everything.

“Is Mr. Bickersteth’s father dead, too?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Leave any money?”

“No, sir.”

I began to understand why poor old Bicky was always more or less on the rocks.
To the casual and irreflective observer, if you know what I mean, it may sound
a pretty good wheeze having a duke for an uncle, but the trouble about old
Chiswick was that, though an extremely wealthy old buster, owning half London
and about five counties up north, he was notoriously the most prudent spender
in England. He was what American chappies would call a hard-boiled egg. If
Bicky’s people hadn’t left him anything and he depended on what he
could prise out of the old duke, he was in a pretty bad way. Not that that
explained why he was hunting me like this, because he was a chap who never
borrowed money. He said he wanted to keep his pals, so never bit any
one’s ear on principle.

At this juncture the door bell rang. Jeeves floated out to answer it.

“Yes, sir. Mr. Wooster has just returned,” I heard him say. And
Bicky came trickling in, looking pretty sorry for himself.

“Halloa, Bicky!” I said. “Jeeves told me you had been trying
to get me. Jeeves, bring another glass, and let the revels commence.
What’s the trouble, Bicky?”

“I’m in a hole, Bertie. I want your advice.”

“Say on, old lad!”

“My uncle’s turning up to-morrow, Bertie.”

“So Jeeves told me.”

“The Duke of Chiswick, you know.”

“So Jeeves told me.”

Bicky seemed a bit surprised.

“Jeeves seems to know everything.”

“Rather rummily, that’s exactly what I was thinking just now
myself.”

“Well, I wish,” said Bicky gloomily, “that he knew a way to
get me out of the hole I’m in.”

Jeeves shimmered in with the glass, and stuck it competently on the table.

“Mr. Bickersteth is in a bit of a hole, Jeeves,” I said, “and
wants you to rally round.”

“Very good, sir.”

Bicky looked a bit doubtful.

“Well, of course, you know, Bertie, this thing is by way of being a bit
private and all that.”

“I shouldn’t worry about that, old top. I bet Jeeves knows all
about it already. Don’t you, Jeeves?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Eh!” said Bicky, rattled.

“I am open to correction, sir, but is not your dilemma due to the fact
that you are at a loss to explain to his grace why you are in New York instead
of in Colorado?”

Bicky rocked like a jelly in a high wind.

“How the deuce do you know anything about it?”

“I chanced to meet his grace’s butler before we left England. He
informed me that he happened to overhear his grace speaking to you on the
matter, sir, as he passed the library door.”

Bicky gave a hollow sort of laugh.

“Well, as everybody seems to know all about it, there’s no need to
try to keep it dark. The old boy turfed me out, Bertie, because he said I was a
brainless nincompoop. The idea was that he would give me a remittance on
condition that I dashed out to some blighted locality of the name of Colorado
and learned farming or ranching, or whatever they call it, at some bally ranch
or farm or whatever it’s called. I didn’t fancy the idea a bit. I
should have had to ride horses and pursue cows, and so forth. I hate horses.
They bite at you. I was all against the scheme. At the same time, don’t
you know, I had to have that remittance.”

“I get you absolutely, dear boy.”

“Well, when I got to New York it looked a decent sort of place to me, so
I thought it would be a pretty sound notion to stop here. So I cabled to my
uncle telling him that I had dropped into a good business wheeze in the city
and wanted to chuck the ranch idea. He wrote back that it was all right, and
here I’ve been ever since. He thinks I’m doing well at something or
other over here. I never dreamed, don’t you know, that he would ever come
out here. What on earth am I to do?”

“Jeeves,” I said, “what on earth is Mr. Bickersteth to
do?”

“You see,” said Bicky, “I had a wireless from him to say that
he was coming to stay with me—to save hotel bills, I suppose. I’ve
always given him the impression that I was living in pretty good style. I
can’t have him to stay at my boarding-house.”

“Thought of anything, Jeeves?” I said.

“To what extent, sir, if the question is not a delicate one, are you
prepared to assist Mr. Bickersteth?”

“I’ll do anything I can for you, of course, Bicky, old man.”

“Then, if I might make the suggestion, sir, you might lend Mr.
Bickersteth——”

“No, by Jove!” said Bicky firmly. “I never have touched you,
Bertie, and I’m not going to start now. I may be a chump, but it’s
my boast that I don’t owe a penny to a single soul—not counting
tradesmen, of course.”

“I was about to suggest, sir, that you might lend Mr. Bickersteth this
flat. Mr. Bickersteth could give his grace the impression that he was the owner
of it. With your permission I could convey the notion that I was in Mr.
Bickersteth’s employment, and not in yours. You would be residing here
temporarily as Mr. Bickersteth’s guest. His grace would occupy the second
spare bedroom. I fancy that you would find this answer satisfactorily,
sir.”

Bicky had stopped rocking himself and was staring at Jeeves in an awed sort of
way.

“I would advocate the dispatching of a wireless message to his grace on
board the vessel, notifying him of the change of address. Mr. Bickersteth could
meet his grace at the dock and proceed directly here. Will that meet the
situation, sir?”

“Absolutely.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Bicky followed him with his eye till the door closed.

“How does he do it, Bertie?” he said. “I’ll tell you
what I think it is. I believe it’s something to do with the shape of his
head. Have you ever noticed his head, Bertie, old man? It sort of sticks out at
the back!”

I hopped out of bed early next morning, so as to be among those present when
the old boy should arrive. I knew from experience that these ocean liners fetch
up at the dock at a deucedly ungodly hour. It wasn’t much after nine by
the time I’d dressed and had my morning tea and was leaning out of the
window, watching the street for Bicky and his uncle. It was one of those jolly,
peaceful mornings that make a chappie wish he’d got a soul or something,
and I was just brooding on life in general when I became aware of the dickens
of a spate in progress down below. A taxi had driven up, and an old boy in a
top hat had got out and was kicking up a frightful row about the fare. As far
as I could make out, he was trying to get the cab chappie to switch from New
York to London prices, and the cab chappie had apparently never heard of London
before, and didn’t seem to think a lot of it now. The old boy said that
in London the trip would have set him back eightpence; and the cabby said he
should worry. I called to Jeeves.

“The duke has arrived, Jeeves.”

“Yes, sir?”

“That’ll be him at the door now.”

Jeeves made a long arm and opened the front door, and the old boy crawled in,
looking licked to a splinter.

“How do you do, sir?” I said, bustling up and being the ray of
sunshine. “Your nephew went down to the dock to meet you, but you must
have missed him. My name’s Wooster, don’t you know. Great pal of
Bicky’s, and all that sort of thing. I’m staying with him, you
know. Would you like a cup of tea? Jeeves, bring a cup of tea.”

Old Chiswick had sunk into an arm-chair and was looking about the room.

“Does this luxurious flat belong to my nephew Francis?”

“Absolutely.”

“It must be terribly expensive.”

“Pretty well, of course. Everything costs a lot over here, you
know.”

He moaned. Jeeves filtered in with the tea. Old Chiswick took a stab at it to
restore his tissues, and nodded.

“A terrible country, Mr. Wooster! A terrible country! Nearly eight
shillings for a short cab-drive! Iniquitous!” He took another look round
the room. It seemed to fascinate him. “Have you any idea how much my
nephew pays for this flat, Mr. Wooster?”

“About two hundred dollars a month, I believe.”

“What! Forty pounds a month!”

I began to see that, unless I made the thing a bit more plausible, the scheme
might turn out a frost. I could guess what the old boy was thinking. He was
trying to square all this prosperity with what he knew of poor old Bicky. And
one had to admit that it took a lot of squaring, for dear old Bicky, though a
stout fellow and absolutely unrivalled as an imitator of bull-terriers and
cats, was in many ways one of the most pronounced fatheads that ever pulled on
a suit of gent’s underwear.

“I suppose it seems rummy to you,” I said, “but the fact is
New York often bucks chappies up and makes them show a flash of speed that you
wouldn’t have imagined them capable of. It sort of develops them.
Something in the air, don’t you know. I imagine that Bicky in the past,
when you knew him, may have been something of a chump, but it’s quite
different now. Devilish efficient sort of chappie, and looked on in commercial
circles as quite the nib!”

“I am amazed! What is the nature of my nephew’s business, Mr.
Wooster?”

“Oh, just business, don’t you know. The same sort of thing Carnegie
and Rockefeller and all these coves do, you know.” I slid for the door.
“Awfully sorry to leave you, but I’ve got to meet some of the lads
elsewhere.”

Coming out of the lift I met Bicky bustling in from the street.

“Halloa, Bertie! I missed him. Has he turned up?”

“He’s upstairs now, having some tea.”

“What does he think of it all?”

“He’s absolutely rattled.”

“Ripping! I’ll be toddling up, then. Toodle-oo, Bertie, old man.
See you later.”

“Pip-pip, Bicky, dear boy.”

He trotted off, full of merriment and good cheer, and I went off to the club to
sit in the window and watch the traffic coming up one way and going down the
other.

It was latish in the evening when I looked in at the flat to dress for dinner.

“Where’s everybody, Jeeves?” I said, finding no little feet
pattering about the place. “Gone out?”

“His grace desired to see some of the sights of the city, sir. Mr.
Bickersteth is acting as his escort. I fancy their immediate objective was
Grant’s Tomb.”

“I suppose Mr. Bickersteth is a bit braced at the way things are
going—what?”

“Sir?”

“I say, I take it that Mr. Bickersteth is tolerably full of beans.”

“Not altogether, sir.”

“What’s his trouble now?”

“The scheme which I took the liberty of suggesting to Mr. Bickersteth and
yourself has, unfortunately, not answered entirely satisfactorily, sir.”

“Surely the duke believes that Mr. Bickersteth is doing well in business,
and all that sort of thing?”

“Exactly, sir. With the result that he has decided to cancel Mr.
Bickersteth’s monthly allowance, on the ground that, as Mr. Bickersteth
is doing so well on his own account, he no longer requires pecuniary
assistance.”

“Great Scot, Jeeves! This is awful.”

“Somewhat disturbing, sir.”

“I never expected anything like this!”

“I confess I scarcely anticipated the contingency myself, sir.”

“I suppose it bowled the poor blighter over absolutely?”

“Mr. Bickersteth appeared somewhat taken aback, sir.”

My heart bled for Bicky.

“We must do something, Jeeves.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you think of anything?”

“Not at the moment, sir.”

“There must be something we can do.”

“It was a maxim of one of my former employers, sir—as I believe I
mentioned to you once before—the present Lord Bridgnorth, that there is
always a way. I remember his lordship using the expression on the
occasion—he was then a business gentleman and had not yet received his
title—when a patent hair-restorer which he chanced to be promoting failed
to attract the public. He put it on the market under another name as a
depilatory, and amassed a substantial fortune. I have generally found his
lordship’s aphorism based on sound foundations. No doubt we shall be able
to discover some solution of Mr. Bickersteth’s difficulty, sir.”

“Well, have a stab at it, Jeeves!”

“I will spare no pains, sir.”

I went and dressed sadly. It will show you pretty well how pipped I was when I
tell you that I near as a toucher put on a white tie with a dinner-jacket. I
sallied out for a bit of food more to pass the time than because I wanted it.
It seemed brutal to be wading into the bill of fare with poor old Bicky headed
for the breadline.

When I got back old Chiswick had gone to bed, but Bicky was there, hunched up
in an arm-chair, brooding pretty tensely, with a cigarette hanging out of the
corner of his mouth and a more or less glassy stare in his eyes. He had the
aspect of one who had been soaked with what the newspaper chappies call
“some blunt instrument.”

“This is a bit thick, old thing—what!” I said.

He picked up his glass and drained it feverishly, overlooking the fact that it
hadn’t anything in it.

“I’m done, Bertie!” he said.

He had another go at the glass. It didn’t seem to do him any good.

“If only this had happened a week later, Bertie! My next month’s
money was due to roll in on Saturday. I could have worked a wheeze I’ve
been reading about in the magazine advertisements. It seems that you can make a
dashed amount of money if you can only collect a few dollars and start a
chicken-farm. Jolly sound scheme, Bertie! Say you buy a hen—call it one
hen for the sake of argument. It lays an egg every day of the week. You sell
the eggs seven for twenty-five cents. Keep of hen costs nothing. Profit
practically twenty-five cents on every seven eggs. Or look at it another way:
Suppose you have a dozen hens. Each of the hens has a dozen chickens. The
chickens grow up and have more chickens. Why, in no time you’d have the
place covered knee-deep in hens, all laying eggs, at twenty-five cents for
every seven. You’d make a fortune. Jolly life, too, keeping hens!”
He had begun to get quite worked up at the thought of it, but he slopped back
in his chair at this juncture with a good deal of gloom. “But, of course,
it’s no good,” he said, “because I haven’t the
cash.”

“You’ve only to say the word, you know, Bicky, old top.”

“Thanks awfully, Bertie, but I’m not going to sponge on you.”

That’s always the way in this world. The chappies you’d like to
lend money to won’t let you, whereas the chappies you don’t want to
lend it to will do everything except actually stand you on your head and lift
the specie out of your pockets. As a lad who has always rolled tolerably free
in the right stuff, I’ve had lots of experience of the second class.
Many’s the time, back in London, I’ve hurried along Piccadilly and
felt the hot breath of the toucher on the back of my neck and heard his sharp,
excited yapping as he closed in on me. I’ve simply spent my life
scattering largesse to blighters I didn’t care a hang for; yet here was I
now, dripping doubloons and pieces of eight and longing to hand them over, and
Bicky, poor fish, absolutely on his uppers, not taking any at any price.

“Well, there’s only one hope, then.”

“What’s that?”

“Jeeves.”

“Sir?”

There was Jeeves, standing behind me, full of zeal. In this matter of
shimmering into rooms the chappie is rummy to a degree. You’re sitting in
the old arm-chair, thinking of this and that, and then suddenly you look up,
and there he is. He moves from point to point with as little uproar as a jelly
fish. The thing startled poor old Bicky considerably. He rose from his seat
like a rocketing pheasant. I’m used to Jeeves now, but often in the days
when he first came to me I’ve bitten my tongue freely on finding him
unexpectedly in my midst.

“Did you call, sir?”

“Oh, there you are, Jeeves!”

“Precisely, sir.”

“Jeeves, Mr. Bickersteth is still up the pole. Any ideas?”

“Why, yes, sir. Since we had our recent conversation I fancy I have found
what may prove a solution. I do not wish to appear to be taking a liberty, sir,
but I think that we have overlooked his grace’s potentialities as a
source of revenue.”

Bicky laughed, what I have sometimes seen described as a hollow, mocking laugh,
a sort of bitter cackle from the back of the throat, rather like a gargle.

“I do not allude, sir,” explained Jeeves, “to the possibility
of inducing his grace to part with money. I am taking the liberty of regarding
his grace in the light of an at present—if I may say so—useless
property, which is capable of being developed.”

Bicky looked at me in a helpless kind of way. I’m bound to say I
didn’t get it myself.

“Couldn’t you make it a bit easier, Jeeves!”

“In a nutshell, sir, what I mean is this: His grace is, in a sense, a
prominent personage. The inhabitants of this country, as no doubt you are
aware, sir, are peculiarly addicted to shaking hands with prominent personages.
It occurred to me that Mr. Bickersteth or yourself might know of persons who
would be willing to pay a small fee—let us say two dollars or
three—for the privilege of an introduction, including handshake, to his
grace.”

Bicky didn’t seem to think much of it.

“Do you mean to say that anyone would be mug enough to part with solid
cash just to shake hands with my uncle?”

“I have an aunt, sir, who paid five shillings to a young fellow for
bringing a moving-picture actor to tea at her house one Sunday. It gave her
social standing among the neighbours.”

Bicky wavered.

“If you think it could be done——”

“I feel convinced of it, sir.”

“What do you think, Bertie?”

“I’m for it, old boy, absolutely. A very brainy wheeze.”

“Thank you, sir. Will there be anything further? Good night, sir.”

And he floated out, leaving us to discuss details.

Until we started this business of floating old Chiswick as a money-making
proposition I had never realized what a perfectly foul time those Stock
Exchange chappies must have when the public isn’t biting freely. Nowadays
I read that bit they put in the financial reports about “The market
opened quietly” with a sympathetic eye, for, by Jove, it certainly opened
quietly for us! You’d hardly believe how difficult it was to interest the
public and make them take a flutter on the old boy. By the end of the week the
only name we had on our list was a delicatessen-store keeper down in
Bicky’s part of the town, and as he wanted us to take it out in sliced
ham instead of cash that didn’t help much. There was a gleam of light
when the brother of Bicky’s pawnbroker offered ten dollars, money down,
for an introduction to old Chiswick, but the deal fell through, owing to its
turning out that the chap was an anarchist and intended to kick the old boy
instead of shaking hands with him. At that, it took me the deuce of a time to
persuade Bicky not to grab the cash and let things take their course. He seemed
to regard the pawnbroker’s brother rather as a sportsman and benefactor
of his species than otherwise.

The whole thing, I’m inclined to think, would have been off if it
hadn’t been for Jeeves. There is no doubt that Jeeves is in a class of
his own. In the matter of brain and resource I don’t think I have ever
met a chappie so supremely like mother made. He trickled into my room one
morning with a good old cup of tea, and intimated that there was something
doing.

“Might I speak to you with regard to that matter of his grace,
sir?”

“It’s all off. We’ve decided to chuck it.”

“Sir?”

“It won’t work. We can’t get anybody to come.”

“I fancy I can arrange that aspect of the matter, sir.”

“Do you mean to say you’ve managed to get anybody?”

“Yes, sir. Eighty-seven gentlemen from Birdsburg, sir.”

I sat up in bed and spilt the tea.

“Birdsburg?”

“Birdsburg, Missouri, sir.”

“How did you get them?”

“I happened last night, sir, as you had intimated that you would be
absent from home, to attend a theatrical performance, and entered into
conversation between the acts with the occupant of the adjoining seat. I had
observed that he was wearing a somewhat ornate decoration in his buttonhole,
sir—a large blue button with the words ‘Boost for Birdsburg’
upon it in red letters, scarcely a judicious addition to a gentleman’s
evening costume. To my surprise I noticed that the auditorium was full of
persons similarly decorated. I ventured to inquire the explanation, and was
informed that these gentlemen, forming a party of eighty-seven, are a
convention from a town of the name of Birdsburg, in the State of Missouri.
Their visit, I gathered, was purely of a social and pleasurable nature, and my
informant spoke at some length of the entertainments arranged for their stay in
the city. It was when he related with a considerable amount of satisfaction and
pride, that a deputation of their number had been introduced to and had shaken
hands with a well-known prizefighter, that it occurred to me to broach the
subject of his grace. To make a long story short, sir, I have arranged, subject
to your approval, that the entire convention shall be presented to his grace
to-morrow afternoon.”

I was amazed. This chappie was a Napoleon.

“Eighty-seven, Jeeves. At how much a head?”

“I was obliged to agree to a reduction for quantity, sir. The terms
finally arrived at were one hundred and fifty dollars for the party.”

I thought a bit.

“Payable in advance?”

“No, sir. I endeavoured to obtain payment in advance, but was not
successful.”

“Well, any way, when we get it I’ll make it up to five hundred.
Bicky’ll never know. Do you suspect Mr. Bickersteth would suspect
anything, Jeeves, if I made it up to five hundred?”

“I fancy not, sir. Mr. Bickersteth is an agreeable gentleman, but not
bright.”

“All right, then. After breakfast run down to the bank and get me some
money.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know, you’re a bit of a marvel, Jeeves.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Right-o!”

“Very good, sir.”

When I took dear old Bicky aside in the course of the morning and told him what
had happened he nearly broke down. He tottered into the sitting-room and
buttonholed old Chiswick, who was reading the comic section of the morning
paper with a kind of grim resolution.

“Uncle,” he said, “are you doing anything special to-morrow
afternoon? I mean to say, I’ve asked a few of my pals in to meet you,
don’t you know.”

The old boy cocked a speculative eye at him.

“There will be no reporters among them?”

“Reporters? Rather not! Why?”

“I refuse to be badgered by reporters. There were a number of adhesive
young men who endeavoured to elicit from me my views on America while the boat
was approaching the dock. I will not be subjected to this persecution
again.”

“That’ll be absolutely all right, uncle. There won’t be a
newspaper-man in the place.”

“In that case I shall be glad to make the acquaintance of your
friends.”

“You’ll shake hands with them and so forth?”

“I shall naturally order my behaviour according to the accepted rules of
civilized intercourse.”

Bicky thanked him heartily and came off to lunch with me at the club, where he
babbled freely of hens, incubators, and other rotten things.

After mature consideration we had decided to unleash the Birdsburg contingent
on the old boy ten at a time. Jeeves brought his theatre pal round to see us,
and we arranged the whole thing with him. A very decent chappie, but rather
inclined to collar the conversation and turn it in the direction of his
home-town’s new water-supply system. We settled that, as an hour was
about all he would be likely to stand, each gang should consider itself
entitled to seven minutes of the duke’s society by Jeeves’s
stop-watch, and that when their time was up Jeeves should slide into the room
and cough meaningly. Then we parted with what I believe are called mutual
expressions of goodwill, the Birdsburg chappie extending a cordial invitation
to us all to pop out some day and take a look at the new water-supply system,
for which we thanked him.

Next day the deputation rolled in. The first shift consisted of the cove we had
met and nine others almost exactly like him in every respect. They all looked
deuced keen and businesslike, as if from youth up they had been working in the
office and catching the boss’s eye and what-not. They shook hands with
the old boy with a good deal of apparent satisfaction—all except one
chappie, who seemed to be brooding about something—and then they stood
off and became chatty.

“What message have you for Birdsburg, Duke?” asked our pal.

The old boy seemed a bit rattled.

“I have never been to Birdsburg.”

The chappie seemed pained.

“You should pay it a visit,” he said. “The most
rapidly-growing city in the country. Boost for Birdsburg!”

“Boost for Birdsburg!” said the other chappies reverently.

The chappie who had been brooding suddenly gave tongue.

“Say!”

He was a stout sort of well-fed cove with one of those determined chins and a
cold eye.

The assemblage looked at him.

“As a matter of business,” said the chappie—“mind you,
I’m not questioning anybody’s good faith, but, as a matter of
strict business—I think this gentleman here ought to put himself on
record before witnesses as stating that he really is a duke.”

“What do you mean, sir?” cried the old boy, getting purple.

“No offence, simply business. I’m not saying anything, mind you,
but there’s one thing that seems kind of funny to me. This gentleman here
says his name’s Mr. Bickersteth, as I understand it. Well, if
you’re the Duke of Chiswick, why isn’t he Lord Percy Something?
I’ve read English novels, and I know all about it.”

“This is monstrous!”

“Now don’t get hot under the collar. I’m only asking.
I’ve a right to know. You’re going to take our money, so it’s
only fair that we should see that we get our money’s worth.”

The water-supply cove chipped in:

“You’re quite right, Simms. I overlooked that when making the
agreement. You see, gentlemen, as business men we’ve a right to
reasonable guarantees of good faith. We are paying Mr. Bickersteth here a
hundred and fifty dollars for this reception, and we naturally want to
know——”

Old Chiswick gave Bicky a searching look; then he turned to the water-supply
chappie. He was frightfully calm.

“I can assure you that I know nothing of this,” he said, quite
politely. “I should be grateful if you would explain.”

“Well, we arranged with Mr. Bickersteth that eighty-seven citizens of
Birdsburg should have the privilege of meeting and shaking hands with you for a
financial consideration mutually arranged, and what my friend Simms here
means—and I’m with him—is that we have only Mr.
Bickersteth’s word for it—and he is a stranger to us—that you
are the Duke of Chiswick at all.”

Old Chiswick gulped.

“Allow me to assure you, sir,” he said, in a rummy kind of voice,
“that I am the Duke of Chiswick.”

“Then that’s all right,” said the chappie heartily.
“That was all we wanted to know. Let the thing go on.”

“I am sorry to say,” said old Chiswick, “that it cannot go
on. I am feeling a little tired. I fear I must ask to be excused.”

“But there are seventy-seven of the boys waiting round the corner at this
moment, Duke, to be introduced to you.”

“I fear I must disappoint them.”

“But in that case the deal would have to be off.”

“That is a matter for you and my nephew to discuss.”

The chappie seemed troubled.

“You really won’t meet the rest of them?”

“No!”

“Well, then, I guess we’ll be going.”

They went out, and there was a pretty solid silence. Then old Chiswick turned
to Bicky:

“Well?”

Bicky didn’t seem to have anything to say.

“Was it true what that man said?”

“Yes, uncle.”

“What do you mean by playing this trick?”

Bicky seemed pretty well knocked out, so I put in a word.

“I think you’d better explain the whole thing, Bicky, old
top.”

Bicky’s Adam’s-apple jumped about a bit; then he started:

“You see, you had cut off my allowance, uncle, and I wanted a bit of
money to start a chicken farm. I mean to say it’s an absolute cert if you
once get a bit of capital. You buy a hen, and it lays an egg every day of the
week, and you sell the eggs, say, seven for twenty-five cents.

“Keep of hens cost nothing. Profit practically——”

“What is all this nonsense about hens? You led me to suppose you were a
substantial business man.”

“Old Bicky rather exaggerated, sir,” I said, helping the chappie
out. “The fact is, the poor old lad is absolutely dependent on that
remittance of yours, and when you cut it off, don’t you know, he was
pretty solidly in the soup, and had to think of some way of closing in on a bit
of the ready pretty quick. That’s why we thought of this handshaking
scheme.”

Old Chiswick foamed at the mouth.

“So you have lied to me! You have deliberately deceived me as to your
financial status!”

“Poor old Bicky didn’t want to go to that ranch,” I
explained. “He doesn’t like cows and horses, but he rather thinks
he would be hot stuff among the hens. All he wants is a bit of capital.
Don’t you think it would be rather a wheeze if you were
to——”

“After what has happened? After this—this deceit and foolery? Not a
penny!”

“But——”

“Not a penny!”

There was a respectful cough in the background.

“If I might make a suggestion, sir?”

Jeeves was standing on the horizon, looking devilish brainy.

“Go ahead, Jeeves!” I said.

“I would merely suggest, sir, that if Mr. Bickersteth is in need of a
little ready money, and is at a loss to obtain it elsewhere, he might secure
the sum he requires by describing the occurrences of this afternoon for the
Sunday issue of one of the more spirited and enterprising newspapers.”

“By Jove!” I said.

“By George!” said Bicky.

“Great heavens!” said old Chiswick.

“Very good, sir,” said Jeeves.

Bicky turned to old Chiswick with a gleaming eye.

“Jeeves is right. I’ll do it! The Chronicle would jump at
it. They eat that sort of stuff.”

Old Chiswick gave a kind of moaning howl.

“I absolutely forbid you, Francis, to do this thing!”

“That’s all very well,” said Bicky, wonderfully braced,
“but if I can’t get the money any other way——”

“Wait! Er—wait, my boy! You are so impetuous! We might arrange
something.”

“I won’t go to that bally ranch.”

“No, no! No, no, my boy! I would not suggest it. I would not for a moment
suggest it. I—I think——”

He seemed to have a bit of a struggle with himself. “I—I think
that, on the whole, it would be best if you returned with me to England.
I—I might—in fact, I think I see my way to doing—to—I
might be able to utilize your services in some secretarial position.”

“I shouldn’t mind that.”

“I should not be able to offer you a salary, but, as you know, in English
political life the unpaid secretary is a recognized figure——”

“The only figure I’ll recognize,” said Bicky firmly,
“is five hundred quid a year, paid quarterly.”

“My dear boy!”

“Absolutely!”

“But your recompense, my dear Francis, would consist in the unrivalled
opportunities you would have, as my secretary, to gain experience, to accustom
yourself to the intricacies of political life, to—in fact, you would be
in an exceedingly advantageous position.”

“Five hundred a year!” said Bicky, rolling it round his tongue.
“Why, that would be nothing to what I could make if I started a chicken
farm. It stands to reason. Suppose you have a dozen hens. Each of the hens has
a dozen chickens. After a bit the chickens grow up and have a dozen chickens
each themselves, and then they all start laying eggs! There’s a fortune
in it. You can get anything you like for eggs in America. Chappies keep them on
ice for years and years, and don’t sell them till they fetch about a
dollar a whirl. You don’t think I’m going to chuck a future like
this for anything under five hundred o’ goblins a year—what?”

A look of anguish passed over old Chiswick’s face, then he seemed to be
resigned to it. “Very well, my boy,” he said.

“What-o!” said Bicky. “All right, then.”

“Jeeves,” I said. Bicky had taken the old boy off to dinner to
celebrate, and we were alone. “Jeeves, this has been one of your best
efforts.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“It beats me how you do it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The only trouble is you haven’t got much out of
it—what!”

“I fancy Mr. Bickersteth intends—I judge from his remarks—to
signify his appreciation of anything I have been fortunate enough to do to
assist him, at some later date when he is in a more favourable position to do
so.”

“It isn’t enough, Jeeves!”

“Sir?”

It was a wrench, but I felt it was the only possible thing to be done.

“Bring my shaving things.”

A gleam of hope shone in the chappie’s eye, mixed with doubt.

“You mean, sir?”

“And shave off my moustache.”

There was a moment’s silence. I could see the fellow was deeply moved.

“Thank you very much indeed, sir,” he said, in a low voice, and
popped off.

ABSENT TREATMENT

I want to tell you all about dear old Bobbie Cardew. It’s a most
interesting story. I can’t put in any literary style and all that; but I
don’t have to, don’t you know, because it goes on its Moral Lesson.
If you’re a man you mustn’t miss it, because it’ll be a
warning to you; and if you’re a woman you won’t want to, because
it’s all about how a girl made a man feel pretty well fed up with things.

If you’re a recent acquaintance of Bobbie’s, you’ll probably
be surprised to hear that there was a time when he was more remarkable for the
weakness of his memory than anything else. Dozens of fellows, who have only met
Bobbie since the change took place, have been surprised when I told them that.
Yet it’s true. Believe me.

In the days when I first knew him Bobbie Cardew was about the most pronounced
young rotter inside the four-mile radius. People have called me a silly ass,
but I was never in the same class with Bobbie. When it came to being a silly
ass, he was a plus-four man, while my handicap was about six. Why, if I wanted
him to dine with me, I used to post him a letter at the beginning of the week,
and then the day before send him a telegram and a phone-call on the day itself,
and—half an hour before the time we’d fixed—a messenger in a
taxi, whose business it was to see that he got in and that the chauffeur had
the address all correct. By doing this I generally managed to get him, unless
he had left town before my messenger arrived.

The funny thing was that he wasn’t altogether a fool in other ways. Deep
down in him there was a kind of stratum of sense. I had known him, once or
twice, show an almost human intelligence. But to reach that stratum, mind you,
you needed dynamite.

At least, that’s what I thought. But there was another way which
hadn’t occurred to me. Marriage, I mean. Marriage, the dynamite of the
soul; that was what hit Bobbie. He married. Have you ever seen a bull-pup
chasing a bee? The pup sees the bee. It looks good to him. But he still
doesn’t know what’s at the end of it till he gets there. It was
like that with Bobbie. He fell in love, got married—with a sort of whoop,
as if it were the greatest fun in the world—and then began to find out
things.

She wasn’t the sort of girl you would have expected Bobbie to rave about.
And yet, I don’t know. What I mean is, she worked for her living; and to
a fellow who has never done a hand’s turn in his life there’s
undoubtedly a sort of fascination, a kind of romance, about a girl who works
for her living.

Her name was Anthony. Mary Anthony. She was about five feet six; she had a ton
and a half of red-gold hair, grey eyes, and one of those determined chins. She
was a hospital nurse. When Bobbie smashed himself up at polo, she was told off
by the authorities to smooth his brow and rally round with cooling unguents and
all that; and the old boy hadn’t been up and about again for more than a
week before they popped off to the registrar’s and fixed it up. Quite the
romance.

Bobbie broke the news to me at the club one evening, and next day he introduced
me to her. I admired her. I’ve never worked myself—my name’s
Pepper, by the way. Almost forgot to mention it. Reggie Pepper. My uncle Edward
was Pepper, Wells, and Co., the Colliery people. He left me a sizable chunk of
bullion—I say I’ve never worked myself, but I admire any one who
earns a living under difficulties, especially a girl. And this girl had had a
rather unusually tough time of it, being an orphan and all that, and having had
to do everything off her own bat for years.

Mary and I got along together splendidly. We don’t now, but we’ll
come to that later. I’m speaking of the past. She seemed to think Bobbie
the greatest thing on earth, judging by the way she looked at him when she
thought I wasn’t noticing. And Bobbie seemed to think the same about her.
So that I came to the conclusion that, if only dear old Bobbie didn’t
forget to go to the wedding, they had a sporting chance of being quite happy.

Well, let’s brisk up a bit here, and jump a year. The story doesn’t
really start till then.

They took a flat and settled down. I was in and out of the place quite a good
deal. I kept my eyes open, and everything seemed to me to be running along as
smoothly as you could want. If this was marriage, I thought, I couldn’t
see why fellows were so frightened of it. There were a lot of worse things that
could happen to a man.

But we now come to the incident of the quiet Dinner, and it’s just here
that love’s young dream hits a snag, and things begin to occur.

I happened to meet Bobbie in Piccadilly, and he asked me to come back to dinner
at the flat. And, like a fool, instead of bolting and putting myself under
police protection, I went.

When we got to the flat, there was Mrs. Bobbie looking—well, I tell you,
it staggered me. Her gold hair was all piled up in waves and crinkles and
things, with a what-d’-you-call-it of diamonds in it. And she was wearing
the most perfectly ripping dress. I couldn’t begin to describe it. I can
only say it was the limit. It struck me that if this was how she was in the
habit of looking every night when they were dining quietly at home together, it
was no wonder that Bobbie liked domesticity.

“Here’s old Reggie, dear,” said Bobbie. “I’ve
brought him home to have a bit of dinner. I’ll phone down to the kitchen
and ask them to send it up now—what?”

She stared at him as if she had never seen him before. Then she turned scarlet.
Then she turned as white as a sheet. Then she gave a little laugh. It was most
interesting to watch. Made me wish I was up a tree about eight hundred miles
away. Then she recovered herself.

“I am so glad you were able to come, Mr. Pepper,” she said, smiling
at me.

And after that she was all right. At least, you would have said so. She talked
a lot at dinner, and chaffed Bobbie, and played us ragtime on the piano
afterwards, as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Quite a jolly little
party it was—not. I’m no lynx-eyed sleuth, and all that sort of
thing, but I had seen her face at the beginning, and I knew that she was
working the whole time and working hard, to keep herself in hand, and that she
would have given that diamond what’s-its-name in her hair and everything
else she possessed to have one good scream—just one. I’ve sat
through some pretty thick evenings in my time, but that one had the rest beaten
in a canter. At the very earliest moment I grabbed my hat and got away.

Having seen what I did, I wasn’t particularly surprised to meet Bobbie at
the club next day looking about as merry and bright as a lonely gum-drop at an
Eskimo tea-party.

He started in straightway. He seemed glad to have someone to talk to about it.

“Do you know how long I’ve been married?” he said.

I didn’t exactly.

“About a year, isn’t it?”

“Not about a year,” he said sadly. “Exactly a
year—yesterday!”

Then I understood. I saw light—a regular flash of light.

“Yesterday was——?”

“The anniversary of the wedding. I’d arranged to take Mary to the
Savoy, and on to Covent Garden. She particularly wanted to hear Caruso. I had
the ticket for the box in my pocket. Do you know, all through dinner I had a
kind of rummy idea that there was something I’d forgotten, but I
couldn’t think what?”

“Till your wife mentioned it?”

He nodded——

“She—mentioned it,” he said thoughtfully.

I didn’t ask for details. Women with hair and chins like Mary’s may
be angels most of the time, but, when they take off their wings for a bit, they
aren’t half-hearted about it.

“To be absolutely frank, old top,” said poor old Bobbie, in a
broken sort of way, “my stock’s pretty low at home.”

There didn’t seem much to be done. I just lit a cigarette and sat there.
He didn’t want to talk. Presently he went out. I stood at the window of
our upper smoking-room, which looks out on to Piccadilly, and watched him. He
walked slowly along for a few yards, stopped, then walked on again, and finally
turned into a jeweller’s. Which was an instance of what I meant when I
said that deep down in him there was a certain stratum of sense.

It was from now on that I began to be really interested in this problem of
Bobbie’s married life. Of course, one’s always mildly interested in
one’s friends’ marriages, hoping they’ll turn out well and
all that; but this was different. The average man isn’t like Bobbie, and
the average girl isn’t like Mary. It was that old business of the
immovable mass and the irresistible force. There was Bobbie, ambling gently
through life, a dear old chap in a hundred ways, but undoubtedly a chump of the
first water.

And there was Mary, determined that he shouldn’t be a chump. And Nature,
mind you, on Bobbie’s side. When Nature makes a chump like dear old
Bobbie, she’s proud of him, and doesn’t want her handiwork
disturbed. She gives him a sort of natural armour to protect him against
outside interference. And that armour is shortness of memory. Shortness of
memory keeps a man a chump, when, but for it, he might cease to be one. Take my
case, for instance. I’m a chump. Well, if I had remembered half the
things people have tried to teach me during my life, my size in hats would be
about number nine. But I didn’t. I forgot them. And it was just the same
with Bobbie.

For about a week, perhaps a bit more, the recollection of that quiet little
domestic evening bucked him up like a tonic. Elephants, I read somewhere, are
champions at the memory business, but they were fools to Bobbie during that
week. But, bless you, the shock wasn’t nearly big enough. It had dinted
the armour, but it hadn’t made a hole in it. Pretty soon he was back at
the old game.

It was pathetic, don’t you know. The poor girl loved him, and she was
frightened. It was the thin edge of the wedge, you see, and she knew it. A man
who forgets what day he was married, when he’s been married one year,
will forget, at about the end of the fourth, that he’s married at all. If
she meant to get him in hand at all, she had got to do it now, before he began
to drift away.

I saw that clearly enough, and I tried to make Bobbie see it, when he was by
way of pouring out his troubles to me one afternoon. I can’t remember
what it was that he had forgotten the day before, but it was something she had
asked him to bring home for her—it may have been a book.

“It’s such a little thing to make a fuss about,” said Bobbie.
“And she knows that it’s simply because I’ve got such an
infernal memory about everything. I can’t remember anything. Never
could.”

He talked on for a while, and, just as he was going, he pulled out a couple of
sovereigns.

“Oh, by the way,” he said.

“What’s this for?” I asked, though I knew.

“I owe it you.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“Why, that bet on Tuesday. In the billiard-room. Murray and Brown were
playing a hundred up, and I gave you two to one that Brown would win, and
Murray beat him by twenty odd.”

“So you do remember some things?” I said.

He got quite excited. Said that if I thought he was the sort of rotter who
forgot to pay when he lost a bet, it was pretty rotten of me after knowing him
all these years, and a lot more like that.

“Subside, laddie,” I said.

Then I spoke to him like a father.

“What you’ve got to do, my old college chum,” I said,
“is to pull yourself together, and jolly quick, too. As things are
shaping, you’re due for a nasty knock before you know what’s hit
you. You’ve got to make an effort. Don’t say you can’t. This
two quid business shows that, even if your memory is rocky, you can remember
some things. What you’ve got to do is to see that wedding anniversaries
and so on are included in the list. It may be a brainstrain, but you
can’t get out of it.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Bobbie. “But it beats me
why she thinks such a lot of these rotten little dates. What’s it matter
if I forgot what day we were married on or what day she was born on or what day
the cat had the measles? She knows I love her just as much as if I were a
memorizing freak at the halls.”

“That’s not enough for a woman,” I said. “They want to
be shown. Bear that in mind, and you’re all right. Forget it, and
there’ll be trouble.”

He chewed the knob of his stick.

“Women are frightfully rummy,” he said gloomily.

“You should have thought of that before you married one,” I said.

I don’t see that I could have done any more. I had put the whole thing in
a nutshell for him. You would have thought he’d have seen the point, and
that it would have made him brace up and get a hold on himself. But no. Off he
went again in the same old way. I gave up arguing with him. I had a good deal
of time on my hands, but not enough to amount to anything when it was a
question of reforming dear old Bobbie by argument. If you see a man asking for
trouble, and insisting on getting it, the only thing to do is to stand by and
wait till it comes to him. After that you may get a chance. But till then
there’s nothing to be done. But I thought a lot about him.

Bobbie didn’t get into the soup all at once. Weeks went by, and months,
and still nothing happened. Now and then he’d come into the club with a
kind of cloud on his shining morning face, and I’d know that there had
been doings in the home; but it wasn’t till well on in the spring that he
got the thunderbolt just where he had been asking for it—in the thorax.

I was smoking a quiet cigarette one morning in the window looking out over
Piccadilly, and watching the buses and motors going up one way and down the
other—most interesting it is; I often do it—when in rushed Bobbie,
with his eyes bulging and his face the colour of an oyster, waving a piece of
paper in his hand.

“Reggie,” he said. “Reggie, old top, she’s gone!”

“Gone!” I said. “Who?”

“Mary, of course! Gone! Left me! Gone!”

“Where?” I said.

Silly question? Perhaps you’re right. Anyhow, dear old Bobbie nearly
foamed at the mouth.

“Where? How should I know where? Here, read this.”

He pushed the paper into my hand. It was a letter.

“Go on,” said Bobbie. “Read it.”

So I did. It certainly was quite a letter. There was not much of it, but it was
all to the point. This is what it said:

“MY DEAR BOBBIE,—I am going away.
When you care enough about me to remember to wish me many happy returns on my
birthday, I will come back. My address will be Box 341, London Morning
News.”

I read it twice, then I said, “Well, why don’t you?”

“Why don’t I what?”

“Why don’t you wish her many happy returns? It doesn’t seem
much to ask.”

“But she says on her birthday.”

“Well, when is her birthday?”

“Can’t you understand?” said Bobbie. “I’ve
forgotten.”

“Forgotten!” I said.

“Yes,” said Bobbie. “Forgotten.”

“How do you mean, forgotten?” I said. “Forgotten whether
it’s the twentieth or the twenty-first, or what? How near do you get to
it?”

“I know it came somewhere between the first of January and the
thirty-first of December. That’s how near I get to it.”

“Think.”

“Think? What’s the use of saying ‘Think’? Think I
haven’t thought? I’ve been knocking sparks out of my brain ever
since I opened that letter.”

“And you can’t remember?”

“No.”

I rang the bell and ordered restoratives.

“Well, Bobbie,” I said, “it’s a pretty hard case to
spring on an untrained amateur like me. Suppose someone had come to Sherlock
Holmes and said, ‘Mr. Holmes, here’s a case for you. When is my
wife’s birthday?’ Wouldn’t that have given Sherlock a jolt?
However, I know enough about the game to understand that a fellow can’t
shoot off his deductive theories unless you start him with a clue, so rouse
yourself out of that pop-eyed trance and come across with two or three. For
instance, can’t you remember the last time she had a birthday? What sort
of weather was it? That might fix the month.”

Bobbie shook his head.

“It was just ordinary weather, as near as I can recollect.”

“Warm?”

“Warmish.”

“Or cold?”

“Well, fairly cold, perhaps. I can’t remember.”

I ordered two more of the same. They seemed indicated in the Young
Detective’s Manual. “You’re a great help, Bobbie,” I
said. “An invaluable assistant. One of those indispensable adjuncts
without which no home is complete.”

Bobbie seemed to be thinking.

“I’ve got it,” he said suddenly. “Look here. I gave her
a present on her last birthday. All we have to do is to go to the shop, hunt up
the date when it was bought, and the thing’s done.”

“Absolutely. What did you give her?”

He sagged.

“I can’t remember,” he said.

Getting ideas is like golf. Some days you’re right off, others it’s
as easy as falling off a log. I don’t suppose dear old Bobbie had ever
had two ideas in the same morning before in his life; but now he did it without
an effort. He just loosed another dry Martini into the undergrowth, and before
you could turn round it had flushed quite a brain-wave.

Do you know those little books called When were you Born? There’s
one for each month. They tell you your character, your talents, your strong
points, and your weak points at fourpence halfpenny a go. Bobbie’s idea
was to buy the whole twelve, and go through them till we found out which month
hit off Mary’s character. That would give us the month, and narrow it
down a whole lot.

A pretty hot idea for a non-thinker like dear old Bobbie. We sallied out at
once. He took half and I took half, and we settled down to work. As I say, it
sounded good. But when we came to go into the thing, we saw that there was a
flaw. There was plenty of information all right, but there wasn’t a
single month that didn’t have something that exactly hit off Mary. For
instance, in the December book it said, “December people are apt to keep
their own secrets. They are extensive travellers.” Well, Mary had
certainly kept her secret, and she had travelled quite extensively enough for
Bobbie’s needs. Then, October people were “born with original
ideas” and “loved moving.” You couldn’t have summed up
Mary’s little jaunt more neatly. February people had “wonderful
memories”—Mary’s speciality.

We took a bit of a rest, then had another go at the thing.

Bobbie was all for May, because the book said that women born in that month
were “inclined to be capricious, which is always a barrier to a happy
married life”; but I plumped for February, because February women
“are unusually determined to have their own way, are very earnest, and
expect a full return in their companion or mates.” Which he owned was
about as like Mary as anything could be.

In the end he tore the books up, stamped on them, burnt them, and went home.

It was wonderful what a change the next few days made in dear old Bobbie. Have
you ever seen that picture, “The Soul’s Awakening”? It
represents a flapper of sorts gazing in a startled sort of way into the middle
distance with a look in her eyes that seems to say, “Surely that is
George’s step I hear on the mat! Can this be love?” Well, Bobbie
had a soul’s awakening too. I don’t suppose he had ever troubled to
think in his life before—not really think. But now he was wearing
his brain to the bone. It was painful in a way, of course, to see a fellow
human being so thoroughly in the soup, but I felt strongly that it was all for
the best. I could see as plainly as possible that all these brainstorms were
improving Bobbie out of knowledge. When it was all over he might possibly
become a rotter again of a sort, but it would only be a pale reflection of the
rotter he had been. It bore out the idea I had always had that what he needed
was a real good jolt.

I saw a great deal of him these days. I was his best friend, and he came to me
for sympathy. I gave it him, too, with both hands, but I never failed to hand
him the Moral Lesson when I had him weak.

One day he came to me as I was sitting in the club, and I could see that he had
had an idea. He looked happier than he had done in weeks.

“Reggie,” he said, “I’m on the trail. This time
I’m convinced that I shall pull it off. I’ve remembered something
of vital importance.”

“Yes?” I said.

“I remember distinctly,” he said, “that on Mary’s last
birthday we went together to the Coliseum. How does that hit you?”

“It’s a fine bit of memorizing,” I said; “but how does
it help?”

“Why, they change the programme every week there.”

“Ah!” I said. “Now you are talking.”

“And the week we went one of the turns was Professor Some One’s
Terpsichorean Cats. I recollect them distinctly. Now, are we narrowing it down,
or aren’t we? Reggie, I’m going round to the Coliseum this minute,
and I’m going to dig the date of those Terpsichorean Cats out of them, if
I have to use a crowbar.”

So that got him within six days; for the management treated us like brothers;
brought out the archives, and ran agile fingers over the pages till they treed
the cats in the middle of May.

“I told you it was May,” said Bobbie. “Maybe you’ll
listen to me another time.”

“If you’ve any sense,” I said, “there won’t be
another time.”

And Bobbie said that there wouldn’t.

Once you get your memory on the run, it parts as if it enjoyed doing it. I had
just got off to sleep that night when my telephone-bell rang. It was Bobbie, of
course. He didn’t apologize.

“Reggie,” he said, “I’ve got it now for certain.
It’s just come to me. We saw those Terpsichorean Cats at a matinee, old
man.”

“Yes?” I said.

“Well, don’t you see that that brings it down to two days? It must
have been either Wednesday the seventh or Saturday the tenth.”

“Yes,” I said, “if they didn’t have daily matinees at
the Coliseum.”

I heard him give a sort of howl.

“Bobbie,” I said. My feet were freezing, but I was fond of him.

“Well?”

“I’ve remembered something too. It’s this. The day you went
to the Coliseum I lunched with you both at the Ritz. You had forgotten to bring
any money with you, so you wrote a cheque.”

“But I’m always writing cheques.”

“You are. But this was for a tenner, and made out to the hotel. Hunt up
your cheque-book and see how many cheques for ten pounds payable to the Ritz
Hotel you wrote out between May the fifth and May the tenth.”

He gave a kind of gulp.

“Reggie,” he said, “you’re a genius. I’ve always
said so. I believe you’ve got it. Hold the line.”

Presently he came back again.

“Halloa!” he said.

“I’m here,” I said.

“It was the eighth. Reggie, old man, I——”

“Topping,” I said. “Good night.”

It was working along into the small hours now, but I thought I might as well
make a night of it and finish the thing up, so I rang up an hotel near the
Strand.

“Put me through to Mrs. Cardew,” I said.

“It’s late,” said the man at the other end.

“And getting later every minute,” I said. “Buck along,
laddie.”

I waited patiently. I had missed my beauty-sleep, and my feet had frozen hard,
but I was past regrets.

“What is the matter?” said Mary’s voice.

“My feet are cold,” I said. “But I didn’t call you up
to tell you that particularly. I’ve just been chatting with Bobbie, Mrs.
Cardew.”

“Oh! is that Mr. Pepper?”

“Yes. He’s remembered it, Mrs. Cardew.”

She gave a sort of scream. I’ve often thought how interesting it must be
to be one of those Exchange girls. The things they must hear, don’t you
know. Bobbie’s howl and gulp and Mrs. Bobbie’s scream and all about
my feet and all that. Most interesting it must be.

“He’s remembered it!” she gasped. “Did you tell
him?”

“No.”

Well, I hadn’t.

“Mr. Pepper.”

“Yes?”

“Was he—has he been—was he very worried?”

I chuckled. This was where I was billed to be the life and soul of the party.

“Worried! He was about the most worried man between here and Edinburgh.
He has been worrying as if he was paid to do it by the nation. He has started
out to worry after breakfast, and——”

Oh, well, you can never tell with women. My idea was that we should pass the
rest of the night slapping each other on the back across the wire, and telling
each other what bally brainy conspirators we were, don’t you know, and
all that. But I’d got just as far as this, when she bit at me.
Absolutely! I heard the snap. And then she said “Oh!” in that
choked kind of way. And when a woman says “Oh!” like that, it means
all the bad words she’d love to say if she only knew them.

And then she began.

“What brutes men are! What horrid brutes! How you could stand by and see
poor dear Bobbie worrying himself into a fever, when a word from you would have
put everything right, I can’t——”

“But——”

“And you call yourself his friend! His friend!” (Metallic laugh,
most unpleasant.) “It shows how one can be deceived. I used to think you
a kind-hearted man.”

“But, I say, when I suggested the thing, you thought it
perfectly——”

“I thought it hateful, abominable.”

“But you said it was absolutely top——”

“I said nothing of the kind. And if I did, I didn’t mean it. I
don’t wish to be unjust, Mr. Pepper, but I must say that to me there
seems to be something positively fiendish in a man who can go out of his way to
separate a husband from his wife, simply in order to amuse himself by gloating
over his agony——”

“But——!”

“When one single word would have——”

“But you made me promise not to——” I bleated.

“And if I did, do you suppose I didn’t expect you to have the sense
to break your promise?”

I had finished. I had no further observations to make. I hung up the receiver,
and crawled into bed.

I still see Bobbie when he comes to the club, but I do not visit the old
homestead. He is friendly, but he stops short of issuing invitations. I ran
across Mary at the Academy last week, and her eyes went through me like a
couple of bullets through a pat of butter. And as they came out the other side,
and I limped off to piece myself together again, there occurred to me the
simple epitaph which, when I am no more, I intend to have inscribed on my
tombstone. It was this: “He was a man who acted from the best motives.
There is one born every minute.”

HELPING FREDDIE

I don’t want to bore you, don’t you know, and all that sort of rot,
but I must tell you about dear old Freddie Meadowes. I’m not a flier at
literary style, and all that, but I’ll get some writer chappie to give
the thing a wash and brush up when I’ve finished, so that’ll be all
right.

Dear old Freddie, don’t you know, has been a dear old pal of mine for
years and years; so when I went into the club one morning and found him sitting
alone in a dark corner, staring glassily at nothing, and generally looking like
the last rose of summer, you can understand I was quite disturbed about it. As
a rule, the old rotter is the life and soul of our set. Quite the little lump
of fun, and all that sort of thing.

Jimmy Pinkerton was with me at the time. Jimmy’s a fellow who writes
plays—a deuced brainy sort of fellow—and between us we set to work
to question the poor pop-eyed chappie, until finally we got at what the matter
was.

As we might have guessed, it was a girl. He had had a quarrel with Angela West,
the girl he was engaged to, and she had broken off the engagement. What the row
had been about he didn’t say, but apparently she was pretty well fed up.
She wouldn’t let him come near her, refused to talk on the phone, and
sent back his letters unopened.

I was sorry for poor old Freddie. I knew what it felt like. I was once in love
myself with a girl called Elizabeth Shoolbred, and the fact that she
couldn’t stand me at any price will be recorded in my autobiography. I
knew the thing for Freddie.

“Change of scene is what you want, old scout,” I said. “Come
with me to Marvis Bay. I’ve taken a cottage there. Jimmy’s coming
down on the twenty-fourth. We’ll be a cosy party.”

“He’s absolutely right,” said Jimmy. “Change of
scene’s the thing. I knew a man. Girl refused him. Man went abroad. Two
months later girl wired him, ‘Come back. Muriel.’ Man started to
write out a reply; suddenly found that he couldn’t remember girl’s
surname; so never answered at all.”

But Freddie wouldn’t be comforted. He just went on looking as if he had
swallowed his last sixpence. However, I got him to promise to come to Marvis
Bay with me. He said he might as well be there as anywhere.

Do you know Marvis Bay? It’s in Dorsetshire. It isn’t what
you’d call a fiercely exciting spot, but it has its good points. You
spend the day there bathing and sitting on the sands, and in the evening you
stroll out on the shore with the gnats. At nine o’clock you rub ointment
on the wounds and go to bed.

It seemed to suit poor old Freddie. Once the moon was up and the breeze sighing
in the trees, you couldn’t drag him from that beach with a rope. He
became quite a popular pet with the gnats. They’d hang round waiting for
him to come out, and would give perfectly good strollers the miss-in-baulk just
so as to be in good condition for him.

Yes, it was a peaceful sort of life, but by the end of the first week I began
to wish that Jimmy Pinkerton had arranged to come down earlier: for as a
companion Freddie, poor old chap, wasn’t anything to write home to mother
about. When he wasn’t chewing a pipe and scowling at the carpet, he was
sitting at the piano, playing “The Rosary” with one finger. He
couldn’t play anything except “The Rosary,” and he
couldn’t play much of that. Somewhere round about the third bar a fuse
would blow out, and he’d have to start all over again.

He was playing it as usual one morning when I came in from bathing.

“Reggie,” he said, in a hollow voice, looking up, “I’ve
seen her.”

“Seen her?” I said. “What, Miss West?”

“I was down at the post office, getting the letters, and we met in the
doorway. She cut me!”

He started “The Rosary” again, and side-slipped in the second bar.

“Reggie,” he said, “you ought never to have brought me here.
I must go away.”

“Go away?” I said. “Don’t talk such rot. This is the
best thing that could have happened. This is where you come out strong.”

“She cut me.”

“Never mind. Be a sportsman. Have another dash at her.”

“She looked clean through me!”

“Of course she did. But don’t mind that. Put this thing in my
hands. I’ll see you through. Now, what you want,” I said, “is
to place her under some obligation to you. What you want is to get her timidly
thanking you. What you want——”

“But what’s she going to thank me timidly for?”

I thought for a moment.

“Look out for a chance and save her from drowning,” I said.

“I can’t swim,” said Freddie.

That was Freddie all over, don’t you know. A dear old chap in a thousand
ways, but no help to a fellow, if you know what I mean.

He cranked up the piano once more and I sprinted for the open.

I strolled out on to the sands and began to think this thing over. There was no
doubt that the brain-work had got to be done by me. Dear old Freddie had his
strong qualities. He was top-hole at polo, and in happier days I’ve heard
him give an imitation of cats fighting in a backyard that would have surprised
you. But apart from that he wasn’t a man of enterprise.

Well, don’t you know, I was rounding some rocks, with my brain whirring
like a dynamo, when I caught sight of a blue dress, and, by Jove, it was the
girl. I had never met her, but Freddie had sixteen photographs of her sprinkled
round his bedroom, and I knew I couldn’t be mistaken. She was sitting on
the sand, helping a small, fat child build a castle. On a chair close by was an
elderly lady reading a novel. I heard the girl call her “aunt.” So,
doing the Sherlock Holmes business, I deduced that the fat child was her
cousin. It struck me that if Freddie had been there he would probably have
tried to work up some sentiment about the kid on the strength of it. Personally
I couldn’t manage it. I don’t think I ever saw a child who made me
feel less sentimental. He was one of those round, bulging kids.

After he had finished the castle he seemed to get bored with life, and began to
whimper. The girl took him off to where a fellow was selling sweets at a stall.
And I walked on.

Now, fellows, if you ask them, will tell you that I’m a chump. Well, I
don’t mind. I admit it. I am a chump. All the Peppers have been
chumps. But what I do say is that every now and then, when you’d least
expect it, I get a pretty hot brain-wave; and that’s what happened now. I
doubt if the idea that came to me then would have occurred to a single one of
any dozen of the brainiest chappies you care to name.

It came to me on my return journey. I was walking back along the shore, when I
saw the fat kid meditatively smacking a jelly-fish with a spade. The girl
wasn’t with him. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any one in sight.
I was just going to pass on when I got the brain-wave. I thought the whole
thing out in a flash, don’t you know. From what I had seen of the two,
the girl was evidently fond of this kid, and, anyhow, he was her cousin, so
what I said to myself was this: If I kidnap this young heavy-weight for the
moment, and if, when the girl has got frightfully anxious about where he can
have got to, dear old Freddie suddenly appears leading the infant by the hand
and telling a story to the effect that he has found him wandering at large
about the country and practically saved his life, why, the girl’s
gratitude is bound to make her chuck hostilities and be friends again. So I
gathered in the kid and made off with him. All the way home I pictured that
scene of reconciliation. I could see it so vividly, don’t you know, that,
by George, it gave me quite a choky feeling in my throat.

Freddie, dear old chap, was rather slow at getting on to the fine points of the
idea. When I appeared, carrying the kid, and dumped him down in our
sitting-room, he didn’t absolutely effervesce with joy, if you know what
I mean. The kid had started to bellow by this time, and poor old Freddie seemed
to find it rather trying.

“Stop it!” he said. “Do you think nobody’s got any
troubles except you? What the deuce is all this, Reggie?”

The kid came back at him with a yell that made the window rattle. I raced to
the kitchen and fetched a jar of honey. It was the right stuff. The kid stopped
bellowing and began to smear his face with the stuff.

“Well?” said Freddie, when silence had set in. I explained the
idea. After a while it began to strike him.

“You’re not such a fool as you look, sometimes, Reggie,” he
said handsomely. “I’m bound to say this seems pretty good.”

And he disentangled the kid from the honey-jar and took him out, to scour the
beach for Angela.

I don’t know when I’ve felt so happy. I was so fond of dear old
Freddie that to know that he was soon going to be his old bright self again
made me feel as if somebody had left me about a million pounds. I was leaning
back in a chair on the veranda, smoking peacefully, when down the road I saw
the old boy returning, and, by George, the kid was still with him. And Freddie
looked as if he hadn’t a friend in the world.

“Hello!” I said. “Couldn’t you find her?”

“Yes, I found her,” he replied, with one of those bitter, hollow
laughs.

“Well, then——?”

Freddie sank into a chair and groaned.

“This isn’t her cousin, you idiot!” he said.

“He’s no relation at all. He’s just a kid she happened to
meet on the beach. She had never seen him before in her life.”

“What! Who is he, then?”

“I don’t know. Oh, Lord, I’ve had a time! Thank goodness
you’ll probably spend the next few years of your life in Dartmoor for
kidnapping. That’s my only consolation. I’ll come and jeer at you
through the bars.”

“Tell me all, old boy,” I said.

It took him a good long time to tell the story, for he broke off in the middle
of nearly every sentence to call me names, but I gathered gradually what had
happened. She had listened like an iceberg while he told the story he had
prepared, and then—well, she didn’t actually call him a liar, but
she gave him to understand in a general sort of way that if he and Dr. Cook
ever happened to meet, and started swapping stories, it would be about the
biggest duel on record. And then he had crawled away with the kid, licked to a
splinter.

“And mind, this is your affair,” he concluded. “I’m not
mixed up in it at all. If you want to escape your sentence, you’d better
go and find the kid’s parents and return him before the police come for
you.”

By Jove, you know, till I started to tramp the place with this infernal kid, I
never had a notion it would have been so deuced difficult to restore a child to
its anxious parents. It’s a mystery to me how kidnappers ever get caught.
I searched Marvis Bay like a bloodhound, but nobody came forward to claim the
infant. You’d have thought, from the lack of interest in him, that he was
stopping there all by himself in a cottage of his own. It wasn’t till, by
an inspiration, I thought to ask the sweet-stall man that I found out that his
name was Medwin, and that his parents lived at a place called Ocean Rest, in
Beach Road.

I shot off there like an arrow and knocked at the door. Nobody answered. I
knocked again. I could hear movements inside, but nobody came. I was just going
to get to work on that knocker in such a way that the idea would filter through
into these people’s heads that I wasn’t standing there just for the
fun of the thing, when a voice from somewhere above shouted, “Hi!”

I looked up and saw a round, pink face, with grey whiskers east and west of it,
staring down from an upper window.

“Hi!” it shouted again.

“What the deuce do you mean by ‘Hi’?” I said.

“You can’t come in,” said the face. “Hello, is that
Tootles?”

“My name is not Tootles, and I don’t want to come in,” I
said. “Are you Mr. Medwin? I’ve brought back your son.”

“I see him. Peep-bo, Tootles! Dadda can see ’oo!”

The face disappeared with a jerk. I could hear voices. The face reappeared.

“Hi!”

I churned the gravel madly.

“Do you live here?” said the face.

“I’m staying here for a few weeks.”

“What’s your name?”

“Pepper. But——”

“Pepper? Any relation to Edward Pepper, the colliery owner?”

“My uncle. But——”

“I used to know him well. Dear old Edward Pepper! I wish I was with him
now.”

“I wish you were,” I said.

He beamed down at me.

“This is most fortunate,” he said. “We were wondering what we
were to do with Tootles. You see, we have the mumps here. My daughter Bootles
has just developed mumps. Tootles must not be exposed to the risk of infection.
We could not think what we were to do with him. It was most fortunate your
finding him. He strayed from his nurse. I would hesitate to trust him to the
care of a stranger, but you are different. Any nephew of Edward Pepper’s
has my implicit confidence. You must take Tootles to your house. It will be an
ideal arrangement. I have written to my brother in London to come and fetch
him. He may be here in a few days.”

“May!”

“He is a busy man, of course; but he should certainly be here within a
week. Till then Tootles can stop with you. It is an excellent plan. Very much
obliged to you. Your wife will like Tootles.”

“I haven’t got a wife,” I yelled; but the window had closed
with a bang, as if the man with the whiskers had found a germ trying to escape,
don’t you know, and had headed it off just in time.

I breathed a deep breath and wiped my forehead.

The window flew up again.

“Hi!”

A package weighing about a ton hit me on the head and burst like a bomb.

“Did you catch it?” said the face, reappearing. “Dear me, you
missed it! Never mind. You can get it at the grocer’s. Ask for
Bailey’s Granulated Breakfast Chips. Tootles takes them for breakfast
with a little milk. Be certain to get Bailey’s.”

My spirit was broken, if you know what I mean. I accepted the situation. Taking
Tootles by the hand, I walked slowly away. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow
was a picnic by the side of it.

As we turned up the road we met Freddie’s Angela.

The sight of her had a marked effect on the kid Tootles. He pointed at her and
said, “Wah!”

The girl stopped and smiled. I loosed the kid, and he ran to her.

“Well, baby?” she said, bending down to him. “So father found
you again, did he? Your little son and I made friends on the beach this
morning,” she said to me.

This was the limit. Coming on top of that interview with the whiskered lunatic
it so utterly unnerved me, don’t you know, that she had nodded good-bye
and was half-way down the road before I caught up with my breath enough to deny
the charge of being the infant’s father.

I hadn’t expected dear old Freddie to sing with joy when he found out
what had happened, but I did think he might have shown a little more manly
fortitude. He leaped up, glared at the kid, and clutched his head. He
didn’t speak for a long time, but, on the other hand, when he began he
did not leave off for a long time. He was quite emotional, dear old boy. It
beat me where he could have picked up such expressions.

“Well,” he said, when he had finished, “say something!
Heavens! man, why don’t you say something?”

“You don’t give me a chance, old top,” I said soothingly.

“What are you going to do about it?”

“What can we do about it?”

“We can’t spend our time acting as nurses to this—this
exhibit.”

He got up.

“I’m going back to London,” he said.

“Freddie!” I cried. “Freddie, old man!” My voice shook.
“Would you desert a pal at a time like this?”

“I would. This is your business, and you’ve got to manage
it.”

“Freddie,” I said, “you’ve got to stand by me. You
must. Do you realize that this child has to be undressed, and bathed, and
dressed again? You wouldn’t leave me to do all that single-handed?
Freddie, old scout, we were at school together. Your mother likes me. You owe
me a tenner.”

He sat down again.

“Oh, well,” he said resignedly.

“Besides, old top,” I said, “I did it all for your sake,
don’t you know?”

He looked at me in a curious way.

“Reggie,” he said, in a strained voice, “one moment.
I’ll stand a good deal, but I won’t stand for being expected to be
grateful.”

Looking back at it, I see that what saved me from Colney Hatch in that crisis
was my bright idea of buying up most of the contents of the local sweet-shop.
By serving out sweets to the kid practically incessantly we managed to get
through the rest of that day pretty satisfactorily. At eight o’clock he
fell asleep in a chair, and, having undressed him by unbuttoning every button
in sight and, where there were no buttons, pulling till something gave, we
carried him up to bed.

Freddie stood looking at the pile of clothes on the floor and I knew what he
was thinking. To get the kid undressed had been simple—a mere matter of
muscle. But how were we to get him into his clothes again? I stirred the pile
with my foot. There was a long linen arrangement which might have been
anything. Also a strip of pink flannel which was like nothing on earth. We
looked at each other and smiled wanly.

But in the morning I remembered that there were children at the next bungalow
but one. We went there before breakfast and borrowed their nurse. Women are
wonderful, by George they are! She had that kid dressed and looking fit for
anything in about eight minutes. I showered wealth on her, and she promised to
come in morning and evening. I sat down to breakfast almost cheerful again. It
was the first bit of silver lining there had been to the cloud up to date.

“And after all,” I said, “there’s lots to be said for
having a child about the house, if you know what I mean. Kind of cosy and
domestic—what!”

Just then the kid upset the milk over Freddie’s trousers, and when he had
come back after changing his clothes he began to talk about what a
much-maligned man King Herod was. The more he saw of Tootles, he said, the less
he wondered at those impulsive views of his on infanticide.

Two days later Jimmy Pinkerton came down. Jimmy took one look at the kid, who
happened to be howling at the moment, and picked up his portmanteau.

“For me,” he said, “the hotel. I can’t write dialogue
with that sort of thing going on. Whose work is this? Which of you adopted this
little treasure?”

I told him about Mr. Medwin and the mumps. Jimmy seemed interested.

“I might work this up for the stage,” he said. “It
wouldn’t make a bad situation for act two of a farce.”

“Farce!” snarled poor old Freddie.

“Rather. Curtain of act one on hero, a well-meaning, half-baked sort of
idiot just like—that is to say, a well-meaning, half-baked sort of idiot,
kidnapping the child. Second act, his adventures with it. I’ll rough it
out to-night. Come along and show me the hotel, Reggie.”

As we went I told him the rest of the story—the Angela part. He laid down
his portmanteau and looked at me like an owl through his glasses.

“What!” he said. “Why, hang it, this is a play, ready-made.
It’s the old ‘Tiny Hand’ business. Always safe stuff. Parted
lovers. Lisping child. Reconciliation over the little cradle. It’s big.
Child, centre. Girl L.C.; Freddie, up stage, by the piano. Can Freddie play the
piano?”

“He can play a little of ‘The Rosary’ with one finger.”

Jimmy shook his head.

“No; we shall have to cut out the soft music. But the rest’s all
right. Look here.” He squatted in the sand. “This stone is the
girl. This bit of seaweed’s the child. This nutshell is Freddie. Dialogue
leading up to child’s line. Child speaks like, ‘Boofer lady, does
i’oo love dadda?’ Business of outstretched hands. Hold picture for
a moment. Freddie crosses L., takes girl’s hand. Business of swallowing
lump in throat. Then big speech. ‘Ah, Marie,’ or whatever her name
is—Jane—Agnes—Angela? Very well. ‘Ah, Angela, has not
this gone on too long? A little child rebukes us! Angela!’ And so on.
Freddie must work up his own part. I’m just giving you the general
outline. And we must get a good line for the child. ‘Boofer lady, does
’oo love dadda?’ isn’t definite enough. We want something
more—ah! ‘Kiss Freddie,’ that’s it. Short, crisp, and
has the punch.”

“But, Jimmy, old top,” I said, “the only objection is,
don’t you know, that there’s no way of getting the girl to the
cottage. She cuts Freddie. She wouldn’t come within a mile of him.”

Jimmy frowned.

“That’s awkward,” he said. “Well, we shall have to make
it an exterior set instead of an interior. We can easily corner her on the
beach somewhere, when we’re ready. Meanwhile, we must get the kid
letter-perfect. First rehearsal for lines and business eleven sharp
to-morrow.”

Poor old Freddie was in such a gloomy state of mind that we decided not to tell
him the idea till we had finished coaching the kid. He wasn’t in the mood
to have a thing like that hanging over him. So we concentrated on Tootles. And
pretty early in the proceedings we saw that the only way to get Tootles worked
up to the spirit of the thing was to introduce sweets of some sort as a
sub-motive, so to speak.

“The chief difficulty,” said Jimmy Pinkerton at the end of the
first rehearsal, “is to establish a connection in the kid’s mind
between his line and the sweets. Once he has grasped the basic fact that those
two words, clearly spoken, result automatically in acid-drops, we have got a
success.”

I’ve often thought, don’t you know, how interesting it must be to
be one of those animal-trainer Johnnies: to stimulate the dawning intelligence,
and that sort of thing. Well, this was every bit as exciting. Some days success
seemed to be staring us in the eye, and the kid got the line out as if
he’d been an old professional. And then he’d go all to pieces
again. And time was flying.

“We must hurry up, Jimmy,” I said. “The kid’s uncle may
arrive any day now and take him away.”

“And we haven’t an understudy,” said Jimmy.
“There’s something in that. We must work! My goodness, that
kid’s a bad study. I’ve known deaf-mutes who would have learned the
part quicker.”

I will say this for the kid, though: he was a trier. Failure didn’t
discourage him. Whenever there was any kind of sweet near he had a dash at his
line, and kept on saying something till he got what he was after. His only
fault was his uncertainty. Personally, I would have been prepared to risk it,
and start the performance at the first opportunity, but Jimmy said no.

“We’re not nearly ready,” said Jimmy. “To-day, for
instance, he said ‘Kick Freddie.’ That’s not going to win any
girl’s heart. And she might do it, too. No; we must postpone production
awhile yet.”

But, by George, we didn’t. The curtain went up the very next afternoon.

It was nobody’s fault—certainly not mine. It was just Fate. Freddie
had settled down at the piano, and I was leading the kid out of the house to
exercise it, when, just as we’d got out to the veranda, along came the
girl Angela on her way to the beach. The kid set up his usual yell at the sight
of her, and she stopped at the foot of the steps.

“Hello, baby!” she said. “Good morning,” she said to
me. “May I come up?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She just came. She seemed to be that sort
of girl. She came up on the veranda and started fussing over the kid. And six
feet away, mind you, Freddie smiting the piano in the sitting-room. It was a
dash disturbing situation, don’t you know. At any minute Freddie might
take it into his head to come out on to the veranda, and we hadn’t even
begun to rehearse him in his part.

I tried to break up the scene.

“We were just going down to the beach,” I said.

“Yes?” said the girl. She listened for a moment. “So
you’re having your piano tuned?” she said. “My aunt has been
trying to find a tuner for ours. Do you mind if I go in and tell this man to
come on to us when he’s finished here?”

“Er—not yet!” I said. “Not yet, if you don’t
mind. He can’t bear to be disturbed when he’s working. It’s
the artistic temperament. I’ll tell him later.”

“Very well,” she said, getting up to go. “Ask him to call at
Pine Bungalow. West is the name. Oh, he seems to have stopped. I suppose he
will be out in a minute now. I’ll wait.”

“Don’t you think—shouldn’t we be going on to the
beach?” I said.

She had started talking to the kid and didn’t hear. She was feeling in
her pocket for something.

“The beach,” I babbled.

“See what I’ve brought for you, baby,” she said. And, by
George, don’t you know, she held up in front of the kid’s bulging
eyes a chunk of toffee about the size of the Automobile Club.

That finished it. We had just been having a long rehearsal, and the kid was all
worked up in his part. He got it right first time.

“Kiss Fweddie!” he shouted.

And the front door opened, and Freddie came out on to the veranda, for all the
world as if he had been taking a cue.

He looked at the girl, and the girl looked at him. I looked at the ground, and
the kid looked at the toffee.

“Kiss Fweddie!” he yelled. “Kiss Fweddie!”

The girl was still holding up the toffee, and the kid did what Jimmy Pinkerton
would have called “business of outstretched hands” towards it.

“Kiss Fweddie!” he shrieked.

“What does this mean?” said the girl, turning to me.

“You’d better give it to him, don’t you know,” I said.
“He’ll go on till you do.”

She gave the kid his toffee, and he subsided. Poor old Freddie still stood
there gaping, without a word.

“What does it mean?” said the girl again. Her face was pink, and
her eyes were sparkling in the sort of way, don’t you know, that makes a
fellow feel as if he hadn’t any bones in him, if you know what I mean.
Did you ever tread on your partner’s dress at a dance and tear it, and
see her smile at you like an angel and say: “Please don’t
apologize. It’s nothing,” and then suddenly meet her clear blue
eyes and feel as if you had stepped on the teeth of a rake and had the handle
jump up and hit you in the face? Well, that’s how Freddie’s Angela
looked.

“Well?” she said, and her teeth gave a little click.

I gulped. Then I said it was nothing. Then I said it was nothing much. Then I
said, “Oh, well, it was this way.” And, after a few brief remarks
about Jimmy Pinkerton, I told her all about it. And all the while Idiot Freddie
stood there gaping, without a word.

And the girl didn’t speak, either. She just stood listening.

And then she began to laugh. I never heard a girl laugh so much. She leaned
against the side of the veranda and shrieked. And all the while Freddie, the
World’s Champion Chump, stood there, saying nothing.

Well I sidled towards the steps. I had said all I had to say, and it seemed to
me that about here the stage-direction “exit” was written in my
part. I gave poor old Freddie up in despair. If only he had said a word, it
might have been all right. But there he stood, speechless. What can a fellow do
with a fellow like that?

Just out of sight of the house I met Jimmy Pinkerton.

“Hello, Reggie!” he said. “I was just coming to you.
Where’s the kid? We must have a big rehearsal to-day.”

“No good,” I said sadly. “It’s all over. The
thing’s finished. Poor dear old Freddie has made an ass of himself and
killed the whole show.”

“Tell me,” said Jimmy.

I told him.

“Fluffed in his lines, did he?” said Jimmy, nodding thoughtfully.
“It’s always the way with these amateurs. We must go back at once.
Things look bad, but it may not be too late,” he said as we started.
“Even now a few well-chosen words from a man of the world,
and——”

“Great Scot!” I cried. “Look!”

In front of the cottage stood six children, a nurse, and the fellow from the
grocer’s staring. From the windows of the houses opposite projected about
four hundred heads of both sexes, staring. Down the road came galloping five
more children, a dog, three men, and a boy, about to stare. And on our porch,
as unconscious of the spectators as if they had been alone in the Sahara, stood
Freddie and Angela, clasped in each other’s arms.

Dear old Freddie may have been fluffy in his lines, but, by George, his
business had certainly gone with a bang!

RALLYING ROUND OLD GEORGE

I think one of the rummiest affairs I was ever mixed up with, in the course of
a lifetime devoted to butting into other people’s business, was that
affair of George Lattaker at Monte Carlo. I wouldn’t bore you,
don’t you know, for the world, but I think you ought to hear about it.

We had come to Monte Carlo on the yacht Circe, belonging to an old
sportsman of the name of Marshall. Among those present were myself, my man
Voules, a Mrs. Vanderley, her daughter Stella, Mrs. Vanderley’s maid
Pilbeam and George.

George was a dear old pal of mine. In fact, it was I who had worked him into
the party. You see, George was due to meet his Uncle Augustus, who was
scheduled, George having just reached his twenty-fifth birthday, to hand over
to him a legacy left by one of George’s aunts, for which he had been
trustee. The aunt had died when George was quite a kid. It was a date that
George had been looking forward to; for, though he had a sort of
income—an income, after-all, is only an income, whereas a chunk of
o’ goblins is a pile. George’s uncle was in Monte Carlo, and had
written George that he would come to London and unbelt; but it struck me that a
far better plan was for George to go to his uncle at Monte Carlo instead. Kill
two birds with one stone, don’t you know. Fix up his affairs and have a
pleasant holiday simultaneously. So George had tagged along, and at the time
when the trouble started we were anchored in Monaco Harbour, and Uncle Augustus
was due next day.

Looking back, I may say that, so far as I was mixed up in it, the thing began
at seven o’clock in the morning, when I was aroused from a dreamless
sleep by the dickens of a scrap in progress outside my state-room door. The
chief ingredients were a female voice that sobbed and said: “Oh,
Harold!” and a male voice “raised in anger,” as they say,
which after considerable difficulty, I identified as Voules’s. I hardly
recognized it. In his official capacity Voules talks exactly like you’d
expect a statue to talk, if it could. In private, however, he evidently relaxed
to some extent, and to have that sort of thing going on in my midst at that
hour was too much for me.

“Voules!” I yelled.

Spion Kop ceased with a jerk. There was silence, then sobs diminishing in the
distance, and finally a tap at the door. Voules entered with that impressive,
my-lord-the-carriage-waits look which is what I pay him for. You wouldn’t
have believed he had a drop of any sort of emotion in him.

“Voules,” I said, “are you under the delusion that I’m
going to be Queen of the May? You’ve called me early all right.
It’s only just seven.”

“I understood you to summon me, sir.”

“I summoned you to find out why you were making that infernal noise
outside.”

“I owe you an apology, sir. I am afraid that in the heat of the moment I
raised my voice.”

“It’s a wonder you didn’t raise the roof. Who was that with
you?”

“Miss Pilbeam, sir; Mrs. Vanderley’s maid.”

“What was all the trouble about?”

“I was breaking our engagement, sir.”

I couldn’t help gaping. Somehow one didn’t associate Voules with
engagements. Then it struck me that I’d no right to butt in on his secret
sorrows, so I switched the conversation.

“I think I’ll get up,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

“I can’t wait to breakfast with the rest. Can you get me some right
away?”

“Yes, sir.”

So I had a solitary breakfast and went up on deck to smoke. It was a lovely
morning. Blue sea, gleaming Casino, cloudless sky, and all the rest of the
hippodrome. Presently the others began to trickle up. Stella Vanderley was one
of the first. I thought she looked a bit pale and tired. She said she
hadn’t slept well. That accounted for it. Unless you get your eight
hours, where are you?

“Seen George?” I asked.

I couldn’t help thinking the name seemed to freeze her a bit. Which was
queer, because all the voyage she and George had been particularly close pals.
In fact, at any moment I expected George to come to me and slip his little hand
in mine, and whisper: “I’ve done it, old scout; she loves
muh!”

“I have not seen Mr. Lattaker,” she said.

I didn’t pursue the subject. George’s stock was apparently low that
a.m.

The next item in the day’s programme occurred a few minutes later when
the morning papers arrived.

Mrs. Vanderley opened hers and gave a scream.

“The poor, dear Prince!” she said.

“What a shocking thing!” said old Marshall.

“I knew him in Vienna,” said Mrs. Vanderley. “He waltzed
divinely.”

Then I got at mine and saw what they were talking about. The paper was full of
it. It seemed that late the night before His Serene Highness the Prince of
Saxburg-Leignitz (I always wonder why they call these chaps
“Serene”) had been murderously assaulted in a dark street on his
way back from the Casino to his yacht. Apparently he had developed the habit of
going about without an escort, and some rough-neck, taking advantage of this,
had laid for him and slugged him with considerable vim. The Prince had been
found lying pretty well beaten up and insensible in the street by a passing
pedestrian, and had been taken back to his yacht, where he still lay
unconscious.

“This is going to do somebody no good,” I said. “What do you
get for slugging a Serene Highness? I wonder if they’ll catch the
fellow?”

“‘Later,’” read old Marshall, “‘the
pedestrian who discovered His Serene Highness proves to have been Mr. Denman
Sturgis, the eminent private investigator. Mr. Sturgis has offered his services
to the police, and is understood to be in possession of a most important
clue.’ That’s the fellow who had charge of that kidnapping case in
Chicago. If anyone can catch the man, he can.”

About five minutes later, just as the rest of them were going to move off to
breakfast, a boat hailed us and came alongside. A tall, thin man came up the
gangway. He looked round the group, and fixed on old Marshall as the probable
owner of the yacht.

“Good morning,” he said. “I believe you have a Mr. Lattaker
on board—Mr. George Lattaker?”

“Yes,” said Marshall. “He’s down below. Want to see
him? Whom shall I say?”

“He would not know my name. I should like to see him for a moment on
somewhat urgent business.”

“Take a seat. He’ll be up in a moment. Reggie, my boy, go and hurry
him up.”

I went down to George’s state-room.

“George, old man!” I shouted.

No answer. I opened the door and went in. The room was empty. What’s
more, the bunk hadn’t been slept in. I don’t know when I’ve
been more surprised. I went on deck.

“He isn’t there,” I said.

“Not there!” said old Marshall. “Where is he, then? Perhaps
he’s gone for a stroll ashore. But he’ll be back soon for
breakfast. You’d better wait for him. Have you breakfasted? No? Then will
you join us?”

The man said he would, and just then the gong went and they trooped down,
leaving me alone on deck.

I sat smoking and thinking, and then smoking a bit more, when I thought I heard
somebody call my name in a sort of hoarse whisper. I looked over my shoulder,
and, by Jove, there at the top of the gangway in evening dress, dusty to the
eyebrows and without a hat, was dear old George.

“Great Scot!” I cried.

“‘Sh!” he whispered. “Anyone about?”

“They’re all down at breakfast.”

He gave a sigh of relief, sank into my chair, and closed his eyes. I regarded
him with pity. The poor old boy looked a wreck.

“I say!” I said, touching him on the shoulder.

He leaped out of the chair with a smothered yell.

“Did you do that? What did you do it for? What’s the sense of it?
How do you suppose you can ever make yourself popular if you go about touching
people on the shoulder? My nerves are sticking a yard out of my body this
morning, Reggie!”

“Yes, old boy?”

“I did a murder last night.”

“What?”

“It’s the sort of thing that might happen to anybody. Directly
Stella Vanderley broke off our engagement I——”

“Broke off your engagement? How long were you engaged?”

“About two minutes. It may have been less. I hadn’t a stop-watch. I
proposed to her at ten last night in the saloon. She accepted me. I was just
going to kiss her when we heard someone coming. I went out. Coming along the
corridor was that infernal what’s-her-name—Mrs. Vanderley’s
maid—Pilbeam. Have you ever been accepted by the girl you love,
Reggie?”

“Never. I’ve been refused dozens——”

“Then you won’t understand how I felt. I was off my head with joy.
I hardly knew what I was doing. I just felt I had to kiss the nearest thing
handy. I couldn’t wait. It might have been the ship’s cat. It
wasn’t. It was Pilbeam.”

“You kissed her?”

“I kissed her. And just at that moment the door of the saloon opened and
out came Stella.”

“Great Scott!”

“Exactly what I said. It flashed across me that to Stella, dear girl, not
knowing the circumstances, the thing might seem a little odd. It did. She broke
off the engagement, and I got out the dinghy and rowed off. I was mad. I
didn’t care what became of me. I simply wanted to forget. I went ashore.
I—It’s just on the cards that I may have drowned my sorrows a bit.
Anyhow, I don’t remember a thing, except that I can recollect having the
deuce of a scrap with somebody in a dark street and somebody falling, and
myself falling, and myself legging it for all I was worth. I woke up this
morning in the Casino gardens. I’ve lost my hat.”

I dived for the paper.

“Read,” I said. “It’s all there.”

He read.

“Good heavens!” he said.

“You didn’t do a thing to His Serene Nibs, did you?”

“Reggie, this is awful.”

“Cheer up. They say he’ll recover.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It does to him.”

He read the paper again.

“It says they’ve a clue.”

“They always say that.”

“But—My hat!”

“Eh?”

“My hat. I must have dropped it during the scrap. This man, Denman
Sturgis, must have found it. It had my name in it!”

“George,” I said, “you mustn’t waste time. Oh!”

He jumped a foot in the air.

“Don’t do it!” he said, irritably. “Don’t bark
like that. What’s the matter?”

“The man!”

“What man?”

“A tall, thin man with an eye like a gimlet. He arrived just before you
did. He’s down in the saloon now, having breakfast. He said he wanted to
see you on business, and wouldn’t give his name. I didn’t like the
look of him from the first. It’s this fellow Sturgis. It must be.”

“No!”

“I feel it. I’m sure of it.”

“Had he a hat?”

“Of course he had a hat.”

“Fool! I mean mine. Was he carrying a hat?”

“By Jove, he was carrying a parcel. George, old scout, you must
get a move on. You must light out if you want to spend the rest of your life
out of prison. Slugging a Serene Highness is lèse-majesté. It’s
worse than hitting a policeman. You haven’t got a moment to waste.”

“But I haven’t any money. Reggie, old man, lend me a tenner or
something. I must get over the frontier into Italy at once. I’ll wire my
uncle to meet me in——”

“Look out,” I cried; “there’s someone coming!”

He dived out of sight just as Voules came up the companion-way, carrying a
letter on a tray.

“What’s the matter!” I said. “What do you want?”

“I beg your pardon, sir. I thought I heard Mr. Lattaker’s voice. A
letter has arrived for him.”

“He isn’t here.”

“No, sir. Shall I remove the letter?”

“No; give it to me. I’ll give it to him when he comes.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Oh, Voules! Are they all still at breakfast? The gentleman who came to
see Mr. Lattaker? Still hard at it?”

“He is at present occupied with a kippered herring, sir.”

“Ah! That’s all, Voules.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He retired. I called to George, and he came out.

“Who was it?”

“Only Voules. He brought a letter for you. They’re all at breakfast
still. The sleuth’s eating kippers.”

“That’ll hold him for a bit. Full of bones.” He began to read
his letter. He gave a kind of grunt of surprise at the first paragraph.

“Well, I’m hanged!” he said, as he finished.

“Reggie, this is a queer thing.”

“What’s that?”

He handed me the letter, and directly I started in on it I saw why he had
grunted. This is how it ran:

“My dear George—I shall be seeing you to-morrow, I hope; but I
think it is better, before we meet, to prepare you for a curious situation that
has arisen in connection with the legacy which your father inherited from your
Aunt Emily, and which you are expecting me, as trustee, to hand over to you,
now that you have reached your twenty-fifth birthday. You have doubtless heard
your father speak of your twin-brother Alfred, who was lost or
kidnapped—which, was never ascertained—when you were both babies.
When no news was received of him for so many years, it was supposed that he was
dead. Yesterday, however, I received a letter purporting that he had been
living all this time in Buenos Ayres as the adopted son of a wealthy South
American, and has only recently discovered his identity. He states that he is
on his way to meet me, and will arrive any day now. Of course, like other
claimants, he may prove to be an impostor, but meanwhile his intervention will,
I fear, cause a certain delay before I can hand over your money to you. It will
be necessary to go into a thorough examination of credentials, etc., and this
will take some time. But I will go fully into the matter with you when we
meet.—Your affectionate uncle,

“AUGUSTUS ARBUTT.”

I read it through twice, and the second time I had one of those ideas I do
sometimes get, though admittedly a chump of the premier class. I have seldom
had such a thoroughly corking brain-wave.

“Why, old top,” I said, “this lets you out.”

“Lets me out of half the darned money, if that’s what you mean. If
this chap’s not an imposter—and there’s no earthly reason to
suppose he is, though I’ve never heard my father say a word about
him—we shall have to split the money. Aunt Emily’s will left the
money to my father, or, failing him, his ‘offspring.’ I thought
that meant me, but apparently there are a crowd of us. I call it rotten work,
springing unexpected offspring on a fellow at the eleventh hour like
this.”

“Why, you chump,” I said, “it’s going to save you. This
lets you out of your spectacular dash across the frontier. All you’ve got
to do is to stay here and be your brother Alfred. It came to me in a
flash.”

He looked at me in a kind of dazed way.

“You ought to be in some sort of a home, Reggie.”

“Ass!” I cried. “Don’t you understand? Have you ever
heard of twin-brothers who weren’t exactly alike? Who’s to say you
aren’t Alfred if you swear you are? Your uncle will be there to back you
up that you have a brother Alfred.”

“And Alfred will be there to call me a liar.”

“He won’t. It’s not as if you had to keep it up for the rest
of your life. It’s only for an hour or two, till we can get this
detective off the yacht. We sail for England to-morrow morning.”

At last the thing seemed to sink into him. His face brightened.

“Why, I really do believe it would work,” he said.

“Of course it would work. If they want proof, show them your mole.
I’ll swear George hadn’t one.”

“And as Alfred I should get a chance of talking to Stella and making
things all right for George. Reggie, old top, you’re a genius.”

“No, no.”

“You are.”

“Well, it’s only sometimes. I can’t keep it up.”

And just then there was a gentle cough behind us. We spun round.

“What the devil are you doing here, Voules,” I said.

“I beg your pardon, sir. I have heard all.”

I looked at George. George looked at me.

“Voules is all right,” I said. “Decent Voules! Voules
wouldn’t give us away, would you, Voules?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You would?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But, Voules, old man,” I said, “be sensible. What would you
gain by it?”

“Financially, sir, nothing.”

“Whereas, by keeping quiet”—I tapped him on the
chest—“by holding your tongue, Voules, by saying nothing about it
to anybody, Voules, old fellow, you might gain a considerable sum.”

“Am I to understand, sir, that, because you are rich and I am poor, you
think that you can buy my self-respect?”

“Oh, come!” I said.

“How much?” said Voules.

So we switched to terms. You wouldn’t believe the way the man haggled.
You’d have thought a decent, faithful servant would have been delighted
to oblige one in a little matter like that for a fiver. But not Voules. By no
means. It was a hundred down, and the promise of another hundred when we had
got safely away, before he was satisfied. But we fixed it up at last, and poor
old George got down to his state-room and changed his clothes.

He’d hardly gone when the breakfast-party came on deck.

“Did you meet him?” I asked.

“Meet whom?” said old Marshall.

“George’s twin-brother Alfred.”

“I didn’t know George had a brother.”

“Nor did he till yesterday. It’s a long story. He was kidnapped in
infancy, and everyone thought he was dead. George had a letter from his uncle
about him yesterday. I shouldn’t wonder if that’s where George has
gone, to see his uncle and find out about it. In the meantime, Alfred has
arrived. He’s down in George’s state-room now, having a brush-up.
It’ll amaze you, the likeness between them. You’ll think it
is George at first. Look! Here he comes.”

And up came George, brushed and clean, in an ordinary yachting suit.

They were rattled. There was no doubt about that. They stood looking at him, as
if they thought there was a catch somewhere, but weren’t quite certain
where it was. I introduced him, and still they looked doubtful.

“Mr. Pepper tells me my brother is not on board,” said George.

“It’s an amazing likeness,” said old Marshall.

“Is my brother like me?” asked George amiably.

“No one could tell you apart,” I said.

“I suppose twins always are alike,” said George. “But if it
ever came to a question of identification, there would be one way of
distinguishing us. Do you know George well, Mr. Pepper?”

“He’s a dear old pal of mine.”

“You’ve been swimming with him perhaps?”

“Every day last August.”

“Well, then, you would have noticed it if he had had a mole like this on
the back of his neck, wouldn’t you?” He turned his back and stooped
and showed the mole. His collar hid it at ordinary times. I had seen it often
when we were bathing together.

“Has George a mole like that?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Oh, no.”

“You would have noticed it if he had?”

“Yes,” I said. “Oh, yes.”

“I’m glad of that,” said George. “It would be a
nuisance not to be able to prove one’s own identity.”

That seemed to satisfy them all. They couldn’t get away from it. It
seemed to me that from now on the thing was a walk-over. And I think George
felt the same, for, when old Marshall asked him if he had had breakfast, he
said he had not, went below, and pitched in as if he hadn’t a care in the
world.

Everything went right till lunch-time. George sat in the shade on the foredeck
talking to Stella most of the time. When the gong went and the rest had started
to go below, he drew me back. He was beaming.

“It’s all right,” he said. “What did I tell you?”

“What did you tell me?”

“Why, about Stella. Didn’t I say that Alfred would fix things for
George? I told her she looked worried, and got her to tell me what the trouble
was. And then——”

“You must have shown a flash of speed if you got her to confide in you
after knowing you for about two hours.”

“Perhaps I did,” said George modestly, “I had no notion, till
I became him, what a persuasive sort of chap my brother Alfred was. Anyway, she
told me all about it, and I started in to show her that George was a pretty
good sort of fellow on the whole, who oughtn’t to be turned down for what
was evidently merely temporary insanity. She saw my point.”

“And it’s all right?”

“Absolutely, if only we can produce George. How much longer does that
infernal sleuth intend to stay here? He seems to have taken root.”

“I fancy he thinks that you’re bound to come back sooner or later,
and is waiting for you.”

“He’s an absolute nuisance,” said George.

We were moving towards the companion way, to go below for lunch, when a boat
hailed us. We went to the side and looked over.

“It’s my uncle,” said George.

A stout man came up the gangway.

“Halloa, George!” he said. “Get my letter?”

“I think you are mistaking me for my brother,” said George.
“My name is Alfred Lattaker.”

“What’s that?”

“I am George’s brother Alfred. Are you my Uncle Augustus?”

The stout man stared at him.

“You’re very like George,” he said.

“So everyone tells me.”

“And you’re really Alfred?”

“I am.”

“I’d like to talk business with you for a moment.”

He cocked his eye at me. I sidled off and went below.

At the foot of the companion-steps I met Voules.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Voules. “If it would be
convenient I should be glad to have the afternoon off.”

I’m bound to say I rather liked his manner. Absolutely normal. Not a
trace of the fellow-conspirator about it. I gave him the afternoon off.

I had lunch—George didn’t show up—and as I was going out I
was waylaid by the girl Pilbeam. She had been crying.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but did Mr. Voules ask you for the
afternoon?”

I didn’t see what business if was of hers, but she seemed all worked up
about it, so I told her.

“Yes, I have given him the afternoon off.”

She broke down—absolutely collapsed. Devilish unpleasant it was.
I’m hopeless in a situation like this. After I’d said,
“There, there!” which didn’t seem to help much, I
hadn’t any remarks to make.

“He s-said he was going to the tables to gamble away all his savings and
then shoot himself, because he had nothing left to live for.”

I suddenly remembered the scrap in the small hours outside my state-room door.
I hate mysteries. I meant to get to the bottom of this. I couldn’t have a
really first-class valet like Voules going about the place shooting himself up.
Evidently the girl Pilbeam was at the bottom of the thing. I questioned her.
She sobbed.

I questioned her more. I was firm. And eventually she yielded up the facts.
Voules had seen George kiss her the night before; that was the trouble.

Things began to piece themselves together. I went up to interview George. There
was going to be another job for persuasive Alfred. Voules’s mind had got
to be eased as Stella’s had been. I couldn’t afford to lose a
fellow with his genius for preserving a trouser-crease.

I found George on the foredeck. What is it Shakespeare or somebody says about
some fellow’s face being sicklied o’er with the pale cast of care?
George’s was like that. He looked green.

“Finished with your uncle?” I said.

He grinned a ghostly grin.

“There isn’t any uncle,” he said. “There isn’t
any Alfred. And there isn’t any money.”

“Explain yourself, old top,” I said.

“It won’t take long. The old crook has spent every penny of the
trust money. He’s been at it for years, ever since I was a kid. When the
time came to cough up, and I was due to see that he did it, he went to the
tables in the hope of a run of luck, and lost the last remnant of the stuff. He
had to find a way of holding me for a while and postponing the squaring of
accounts while he got away, and he invented this twin-brother business. He knew
I should find out sooner or later, but meanwhile he would be able to get off to
South America, which he has done. He’s on his way now.”

“You let him go?”

“What could I do? I can’t afford to make a fuss with that man
Sturgis around. I can’t prove there’s no Alfred when my only chance
of avoiding prison is to be Alfred.”

“Well, you’ve made things right for yourself with Stella Vanderley,
anyway,” I said, to cheer him up.

“What’s the good of that now? I’ve hardly any money and no
prospects. How can I marry her?”

I pondered.

“It looks to me, old top,” I said at last, “as if things were
in a bit of a mess.”

“You’ve guessed it,” said poor old George.

I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer
thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don’t you know, if you see what I
mean. At any moment you may be strolling peacefully along, and all the time
Life’s waiting around the corner to fetch you one. You can’t tell
when you may be going to get it. It’s all dashed puzzling. Here was poor
old George, as well-meaning a fellow as ever stepped, getting swatted all over
the ring by the hand of Fate. Why? That’s what I asked myself. Just Life,
don’t you know. That’s all there was about it.

It was close on six o’clock when our third visitor of the day arrived. We
were sitting on the afterdeck in the cool of the evening—old Marshall,
Denman Sturgis, Mrs. Vanderley, Stella, George, and I—when he came up. We
had been talking of George, and old Marshall was suggesting the advisability of
sending out search-parties. He was worried. So was Stella Vanderley. So, for
that matter, were George and I, only not for the same reason.

We were just arguing the thing out when the visitor appeared. He was a
well-built, stiff sort of fellow. He spoke with a German accent.

“Mr. Marshall?” he said. “I am Count Fritz von Cöslin,
equerry to His Serene Highness”—he clicked his heels together and
saluted—“the Prince of Saxburg-Leignitz.”

Mrs. Vanderley jumped up.

“Why, Count,” she said, “what ages since we met in Vienna!
You remember?”

“Could I ever forget? And the charming Miss Stella, she is well, I
suppose not?”

“Stella, you remember Count Fritz?”

Stella shook hands with him.

“And how is the poor, dear Prince?” asked Mrs. Vanderley.
“What a terrible thing to have happened!”

“I rejoice to say that my high-born master is better. He has regained
consciousness and is sitting up and taking nourishment.”

“That’s good,” said old Marshall.

“In a spoon only,” sighed the Count. “Mr. Marshall, with your
permission I should like a word with Mr. Sturgis.”

“Mr. Who?”

The gimlet-eyed sportsman came forward.

“I am Denman Sturgis, at your service.”

“The deuce you are! What are you doing here?”

“Mr. Sturgis,” explained the Count, “graciously volunteered
his services——”

“I know. But what’s he doing here?”

“I am waiting for Mr. George Lattaker, Mr. Marshall.”

“Eh?”

“You have not found him?” asked the Count anxiously.

“Not yet, Count; but I hope to do so shortly. I know what he looks like
now. This gentleman is his twin-brother. They are doubles.”

“You are sure this gentleman is not Mr. George Lattaker?”

George put his foot down firmly on the suggestion.

“Don’t go mixing me up with my brother,” he said. “I am
Alfred. You can tell me by my mole.”

He exhibited the mole. He was taking no risks.

The Count clicked his tongue regretfully.

“I am sorry,” he said.

George didn’t offer to console him,

“Don’t worry,” said Sturgis. “He won’t escape me.
I shall find him.”

“Do, Mr. Sturgis, do. And quickly. Find swiftly that noble young
man.”

“What?” shouted George.

“That noble young man, George Lattaker, who, at the risk of his life,
saved my high-born master from the assassin.”

George sat down suddenly.

“I don’t understand,” he said feebly.

“We were wrong, Mr. Sturgis,” went on the Count. “We leaped
to the conclusion—was it not so?—that the owner of the hat you
found was also the assailant of my high-born master. We were wrong. I have
heard the story from His Serene Highness’s own lips. He was passing down
a dark street when a ruffian in a mask sprang out upon him. Doubtless he had
been followed from the Casino, where he had been winning heavily. My high-born
master was taken by surprise. He was felled. But before he lost consciousness
he perceived a young man in evening dress, wearing the hat you found, running
swiftly towards him. The hero engaged the assassin in combat, and my high-born
master remembers no more. His Serene Highness asks repeatedly, ‘Where is
my brave preserver?’ His gratitude is princely. He seeks for this young
man to reward him. Ah, you should be proud of your brother, sir!”

“Thanks,” said George limply.

“And you, Mr. Sturgis, you must redouble your efforts. You must search
the land; you must scour the sea to find George Lattaker.”

“He needn’t take all that trouble,” said a voice from the
gangway.

It was Voules. His face was flushed, his hat was on the back of his head, and
he was smoking a fat cigar.

“I’ll tell you where to find George Lattaker!” he shouted.

He glared at George, who was staring at him.

“Yes, look at me,” he yelled. “Look at me. You won’t be
the first this afternoon who’s stared at the mysterious stranger who won
for two hours without a break. I’ll be even with you now, Mr. Blooming
Lattaker. I’ll learn you to break a poor man’s heart. Mr. Marshall
and gents, this morning I was on deck, and I over’eard ’im plotting
to put up a game on you. They’d spotted that gent there as a detective,
and they arranged that blooming Lattaker was to pass himself off as his own
twin-brother. And if you wanted proof, blooming Pepper tells him to show them
his mole and he’d swear George hadn’t one. Those were his very
words. That man there is George Lattaker, Hesquire, and let him deny it if he
can.”

George got up.

“I haven’t the least desire to deny it, Voules.”

“Mr. Voules, if you please.”

“It’s true,” said George, turning to the Count. “The
fact is, I had rather a foggy recollection of what happened last night. I only
remembered knocking some one down, and, like you, I jumped to the conclusion
that I must have assaulted His Serene Highness.”

“Then you are really George Lattaker?” asked the Count.

“I am.”

“’Ere, what does all this mean?” demanded Voules.

“Merely that I saved the life of His Serene Highness the Prince of
Saxburg-Leignitz, Mr. Voules.”

“It’s a swindle!” began Voules, when there was a sudden rush
and the girl Pilbeam cannoned into the crowd, sending me into old
Marshall’s chair, and flung herself into the arms of Voules.

“Oh, Harold!” she cried. “I thought you were dead. I thought
you’d shot yourself.”

He sort of braced himself together to fling her off, and then he seemed to
think better of it and fell into the clinch.

It was all dashed romantic, don’t you know, but there are limits.

“Voules, you’re sacked,” I said.

“Who cares?” he said. “Think I was going to stop on now
I’m a gentleman of property? Come along, Emma, my dear. Give a
month’s notice and get your ’at, and I’ll take you to dinner
at Ciro’s.”

“And you, Mr. Lattaker,” said the Count, “may I conduct you
to the presence of my high-born master? He wishes to show his gratitude to his
preserver.”

“You may,” said George. “May I have my hat, Mr.
Sturgis?”

There’s just one bit more. After dinner that night I came up for a smoke,
and, strolling on to the foredeck, almost bumped into George and Stella. They
seemed to be having an argument.

“I’m not sure,” she was saying, “that I believe that a
man can be so happy that he wants to kiss the nearest thing in sight, as you
put it.”

“Don’t you?” said George. “Well, as it happens,
I’m feeling just that way now.”

I coughed and he turned round.

“Halloa, Reggie!” he said.

“Halloa, George!” I said. “Lovely night.”

“Beautiful,” said Stella.

“The moon,” I said.

“Ripping,” said George.

“Lovely,” said Stella.

“And look at the reflection of the stars on the——”

George caught my eye. “Pop off,” he said.

I popped.

DOING CLARENCE A BIT OF GOOD

Have you ever thought about—and, when I say thought about, I mean really
carefully considered the question of—the coolness, the cheek, or, if you
prefer it, the gall with which Woman, as a sex, fairly bursts? I have,
by Jove! But then I’ve had it thrust on my notice, by George, in a way I
should imagine has happened to pretty few fellows. And the limit was reached by
that business of the Yeardsley “Venus.”

To make you understand the full what-d’you-call-it of the situation, I
shall have to explain just how matters stood between Mrs. Yeardsley and myself.

When I first knew her she was Elizabeth Shoolbred. Old Worcestershire family;
pots of money; pretty as a picture. Her brother Bill was at Oxford with me.

I loved Elizabeth Shoolbred. I loved her, don’t you know. And there was a
time, for about a week, when we were engaged to be married. But just as I was
beginning to take a serious view of life and study furniture catalogues and
feel pretty solemn when the restaurant orchestra played “The Wedding
Glide,” I’m hanged if she didn’t break it off, and a month
later she was married to a fellow of the name of Yeardsley—Clarence
Yeardsley, an artist.

What with golf, and billiards, and a bit of racing, and fellows at the club
rallying round and kind of taking me out of myself, as it were, I got over it,
and came to look on the affair as a closed page in the book of my life, if you
know what I mean. It didn’t seem likely to me that we should meet again,
as she and Clarence had settled down in the country somewhere and never came to
London, and I’m bound to own that, by the time I got her letter, the
wound had pretty well healed, and I was to a certain extent sitting up and
taking nourishment. In fact, to be absolutely honest, I was jolly thankful the
thing had ended as it had done.

This letter I’m telling you about arrived one morning out of a blue sky,
as it were. It ran like this:

“MY DEAR OLD REGGIE,—What ages it seems since I saw anything of
you. How are you? We have settled down here in the most perfect old house, with
a lovely garden, in the middle of delightful country. Couldn’t you run
down here for a few days? Clarence and I would be so glad to see you. Bill is
here, and is most anxious to meet you again. He was speaking of you only this
morning. Do come. Wire your train, and I will send the car to meet you.

—Yours most sincerely,

ELIZABETH YEARDSLEY.

“P.S.—We can give you new milk and fresh eggs. Think of that!

“P.P.S.—Bill says our billiard-table is one of the best he has ever
played on.

“P.P.S.S.—We are only half a mile from a golf course. Bill says it
is better than St. Andrews.

“P.P.S.S.S.—You must come!”

Well, a fellow comes down to breakfast one morning, with a bit of a head on,
and finds a letter like that from a girl who might quite easily have blighted
his life! It rattled me rather, I must confess.

However, that bit about the golf settled me. I knew Bill knew what he was
talking about, and, if he said the course was so topping, it must be something
special. So I went.

Old Bill met me at the station with the car. I hadn’t come across him for
some months, and I was glad to see him again. And he apparently was glad to see
me.

“Thank goodness you’ve come,” he said, as we drove off.
“I was just about at my last grip.”

“What’s the trouble, old scout?” I asked.

“If I had the artistic what’s-its-name,” he went on,
“if the mere mention of pictures didn’t give me the pip, I dare say
it wouldn’t be so bad. As it is, it’s rotten!”

“Pictures?”

“Pictures. Nothing else is mentioned in this household. Clarence is an
artist. So is his father. And you know yourself what Elizabeth is like when one
gives her her head?”

I remembered then—it hadn’t come back to me before—that most
of my time with Elizabeth had been spent in picture-galleries. During the
period when I had let her do just what she wanted to do with me, I had had to
follow her like a dog through gallery after gallery, though pictures are poison
to me, just as they are to old Bill. Somehow it had never struck me that she
would still be going on in this way after marrying an artist. I should have
thought that by this time the mere sight of a picture would have fed her up.
Not so, however, according to old Bill.

“They talk pictures at every meal,” he said. “I tell you, it
makes a chap feel out of it. How long are you down for?”

“A few days.”

“Take my tip, and let me send you a wire from London. I go there
to-morrow. I promised to play against the Scottish. The idea was that I was to
come back after the match. But you couldn’t get me back with a
lasso.”

I tried to point out the silver lining.

“But, Bill, old scout, your sister says there’s a most corking
links near here.”

He turned and stared at me, and nearly ran us into the bank.

“You don’t mean honestly she said that?”

“She said you said it was better than St. Andrews.”

“So I did. Was that all she said I said?”

“Well, wasn’t it enough?”