Read Online Expecting Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse - Free Book Online Page B

the young master, even if it broke up his beauty-sleep.
    Jeeves emerged in a brown dressing-gown.
    â€œSir?”
    â€œDeuced sorry to wake you up, Jeeves, and what not, but all sorts of dashed disturbing things have been happening.”
    â€œI was not asleep. It is my practice, on retiring, to read a few pages of some instructive book.”
    â€œThat’s good! What I mean to say is, if you’ve just finished exercising the old bean, it’s probably in mid-season form for tackling problems. Jeeves, Mr. Bassington-Bassington is going on the stage!”
    â€œ Indeed, sir?”
    â€œAh! The thing doesn’t hit you! You don’t get it properly! Here’s the point. All his family are most fearfully dead against his going on the stage. There’s going to be no end of trouble if he isn’t headed off. And, what’s worse, my Aunt Agatha will blame me, you see.”
    I see, sir.
    â€œWell, can’t you think of some way of stopping him?”
    â€œNot, I confess, at the moment, sir.”
    â€œWell, have a stab at it.”
    â€œI will give the matter my best consideration, sir. Will there be anything further to-night?”
    â€œI hope not! I’ve had all I can stand already.”
    â€œVery good, sir.”
    He popped off.
    âˆ—
    The part which old George had written for the chump Cyril took up about two pages of typescript; but it might have been Hamlet, the way that poor, misguided pinhead worked himself to the bone over it. I suppose, if I heard him his lines once, I did it a dozen times in the first couple of days. He seemed to think that my only feeling about the whole affair was one of enthusiastic admiration, and that he could rely on my support and sympathy. What with trying to imagine how Aunt Agatha was going to take this thing, and being woken up out of the dreamless in the small hours every other night to give my opinion of some new bit of business which Cyril had invented, I became more or less the good old shadow. And all the time Jeeves remained still pretty cold and distant about the purple socks. It’s this sort of thing that ages a chappie, don’t you know, and makes his youthful
joie-de-vivre
go a bit groggy at the knees.
    In the middle of it Aunt Agatha’s letter arrived. It took her about six pages to do justice to Cyril’s father’s feelings in regard to his going on the stage and about six more to give me a kind of sketch of what she would say, think, and do if I didn’t keep him clear of injurious influences while he was in America. The letter came by the afternoon mail, and left me with a pretty firm conviction that it wasn’t a thing I ought to keep to myself. I didn’t even wait to ring the bell: I whizzed for the kitchen, bleating for Jeeves, and butted into the middle of a regular tea-party of sorts. Seated at the table were a depressed-looking cove who might have been a valet or something, and a boy in a Norfolk suit. The valet-chappie was drinking a whisky and soda, and the boy was being tolerably rough with some jam and cake.
    â€œOh, I say, Jeeves!” I said. “Sorry to interrupt the feast of reason and flow of soul and so forth, but—”
    At this juncture the small boy’s eye hit me like a bullet and stopped me in my tracks. It was one of those cold, clammy, accusing sort of eyes—the kind that makes you reach up to see if your tie is straight: and he looked at me as if I were some sort of unnecessary product which Cuthbert the Cat had brought in after a ramble among the local ash-cans. He was a stoutish infant with a lot of freckles and a good deal of jam on his face.
    â€œHallo! Hallo! Hallo!” I said. “What?” There didn’t seem much else to say.
    The stripling stared at me in a nasty sort of way through the jam. He may have loved me at first sight, but the impression he gave me was that he didn’t think a lot of me and wasn’t betting much that I would