Read Online The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 4: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.4 by P.G. Wodehouse - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: P.G. Wodehouse
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yourself.’
‘Absurd.’
‘Absurd, my foot! You needn’t think you can fool me. You worship that girl, and I am still inclined to believe that the whole of this moustache sequence was a vile plot on your part to steal her from me. Well, all I have to say is that if I ever catch you oiling round her and trying to alienate her affections, I shall break your spine in four places.’
‘Three, I thought you said.’
‘No, four. However, she will be out of your reach for some little time, I am glad to say. She goes today to visit your aunt, Mrs. Travers, in Worcestershire.’
Amazing how with a careless word you can land yourself in the soup. I was within the merest toucher of saying Yes, so she had told me, which would, of course, have been fatal. In the nick of time I contrived to substitute an ‘Oh, really?’
‘She’s going to Brinkley, is she? You also?’
‘I shall be following in a few days.’
‘You aren’t going with her?’
‘Talk sense. You don’t suppose I intend to appear in public during the early stages of growing that damned moustache she insists on. I shall remain confined to my room till the foul thing has started to sprout a bit. Good-bye, Wooster. You will remember what I was saying about your spine?’
I assured him that I would bear it in mind, and he finished his special and withdrew.
8
----
THE DAYS THAT followed saw me at the peak of my form, fizzy to an almost unbelievable extent and enchanting one and all with my bright smile and merry sallies. During this halcyon period, if halcyon is the word I want, it would not be too much to say that I revived like a watered flower.
It was as if a great weight had been rolled off the soul. Only those who have had to endure the ordeal of having G. D’Arcy Cheesewright constantly materialize from thin air and steal up behind them, breathing down the back of their necks as they took their ease in their smoking-room, can fully understand the relief of being able to sink into a chair and order a restorative, knowing that the place would be wholly free from this pre-eminent scourge. My feelings, I suppose, were roughly what those of Mary would have been, had she looked over her shoulder one morning and found the lamb no longer among those present.
And then –
bing
– just as I was saying to myself that this was the life, along came all those telegrams.
The first to arrive reached me at my residence just as I was lighting the after-breakfast cigarette, and I eyed it with something of the nervous discomfort of one confronted with a ticking bomb. Telegrams have so often been the heralds or harbingers or whatever they’re called of sharp crises in my affairs that I have come to look on them askance, wondering if something is going to pop out of the envelope and bite me in the leg. It was with a telegram, it may be recalled, that Fate teed off in the sinister episode of Sir Watkyn Bassett, Roderick Spode and the silver cow-creamer which I was instructed by Aunt Dahlia to pinch from the first-named’s collection at Totleigh Towers.
Little wonder, then, that as I brooded over this one – eyeing it, as I say, askance – I was asking myself if Hell’s foundations were about to quiver again.
Still, there the thing was, and it seemed to me, weighing the pros and cons, that only one course lay before me – viz. to open it.
I did so. Handed in at Brinkley-cum-Snodsfield-in-the-Marsh, it was signed ‘Travers’, this revealing it as the handiwork either of Aunt Dahlia or Thomas P. Travers, her husband, a pleasant old bird whom she had married at her second pop some years earlier. From the fact that it started with the words ‘Bertie, you worm’ I deduced that it was the former who had taken post-office pen in hand. Uncle Tom is more guarded in his speech than the female of the species. He generally calls me ‘Me boy’.
This was the substance of the communication:
Bertie, you worm, your early presence desired. Drop everything and come down
‘Absurd.’
‘Absurd, my foot! You needn’t think you can fool me. You worship that girl, and I am still inclined to believe that the whole of this moustache sequence was a vile plot on your part to steal her from me. Well, all I have to say is that if I ever catch you oiling round her and trying to alienate her affections, I shall break your spine in four places.’
‘Three, I thought you said.’
‘No, four. However, she will be out of your reach for some little time, I am glad to say. She goes today to visit your aunt, Mrs. Travers, in Worcestershire.’
Amazing how with a careless word you can land yourself in the soup. I was within the merest toucher of saying Yes, so she had told me, which would, of course, have been fatal. In the nick of time I contrived to substitute an ‘Oh, really?’
‘She’s going to Brinkley, is she? You also?’
‘I shall be following in a few days.’
‘You aren’t going with her?’
‘Talk sense. You don’t suppose I intend to appear in public during the early stages of growing that damned moustache she insists on. I shall remain confined to my room till the foul thing has started to sprout a bit. Good-bye, Wooster. You will remember what I was saying about your spine?’
I assured him that I would bear it in mind, and he finished his special and withdrew.
8
----
THE DAYS THAT followed saw me at the peak of my form, fizzy to an almost unbelievable extent and enchanting one and all with my bright smile and merry sallies. During this halcyon period, if halcyon is the word I want, it would not be too much to say that I revived like a watered flower.
It was as if a great weight had been rolled off the soul. Only those who have had to endure the ordeal of having G. D’Arcy Cheesewright constantly materialize from thin air and steal up behind them, breathing down the back of their necks as they took their ease in their smoking-room, can fully understand the relief of being able to sink into a chair and order a restorative, knowing that the place would be wholly free from this pre-eminent scourge. My feelings, I suppose, were roughly what those of Mary would have been, had she looked over her shoulder one morning and found the lamb no longer among those present.
And then –
bing
– just as I was saying to myself that this was the life, along came all those telegrams.
The first to arrive reached me at my residence just as I was lighting the after-breakfast cigarette, and I eyed it with something of the nervous discomfort of one confronted with a ticking bomb. Telegrams have so often been the heralds or harbingers or whatever they’re called of sharp crises in my affairs that I have come to look on them askance, wondering if something is going to pop out of the envelope and bite me in the leg. It was with a telegram, it may be recalled, that Fate teed off in the sinister episode of Sir Watkyn Bassett, Roderick Spode and the silver cow-creamer which I was instructed by Aunt Dahlia to pinch from the first-named’s collection at Totleigh Towers.
Little wonder, then, that as I brooded over this one – eyeing it, as I say, askance – I was asking myself if Hell’s foundations were about to quiver again.
Still, there the thing was, and it seemed to me, weighing the pros and cons, that only one course lay before me – viz. to open it.
I did so. Handed in at Brinkley-cum-Snodsfield-in-the-Marsh, it was signed ‘Travers’, this revealing it as the handiwork either of Aunt Dahlia or Thomas P. Travers, her husband, a pleasant old bird whom she had married at her second pop some years earlier. From the fact that it started with the words ‘Bertie, you worm’ I deduced that it was the former who had taken post-office pen in hand. Uncle Tom is more guarded in his speech than the female of the species. He generally calls me ‘Me boy’.
This was the substance of the communication:
Bertie, you worm, your early presence desired. Drop everything and come down
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