Joy in the Morning (16 page)

‘She still does.’

‘You really feel that, do you?’

‘Of course.’

‘In spite of calling me a miserable fathead?’

‘Certainly. You are a miserable fathead.’

‘That’s true.’

‘You can’t go by what a girl says, when she’s giving you the devil for making a chump of yourself. It’s like Shakespeare. Sounds well, but doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Your view, then, is that the old affection still lingers?’

‘Definitely. Dash it, man, if she could love you in spite of those grey flannel trousers of yours, it isn’t likely that any mere acting of the goat on your part will have choked her off. Love is indestructible. Its holy flame burneth for ever.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Jeeves.’

‘He ought to know.’

‘He does. You can bank on Jeeves.’

‘That’s right. You can, can’t you? You’re a great comfort, Bertie.’

‘I try to be, Boko.’

‘You give me hope. You raise me from the depths.’

He had perked up considerably. He wasn’t actually squaring his shoulders and sticking his chin out, but the morale had plainly stiffened. And I have an idea that in another minute or two he might have become almost jaunty, had there not cut through the night air at this juncture a feminine voice, calling his name.

‘Boko!’

He shook like an aspen.

‘Yes, darling?’

‘Come here. I want you.’

‘Coming, darling. Oh, my God!’ I heard him whisper. ‘An encore!’

He tottered off, and I was left to ponder over the trend of affairs.

I may say at once that I viewed the situation without concern. To Boko, who had actually been in the ring with the young geezer while she was exploding in all directions, it had naturally seemed that the end of the world had come and Judgement Day set in with unusual severity. But to me, the cool and level-headed bystander, the whole thing had been pure routine. One shrugged the shoulders and recognized it for what it was – viz. pure apple sauce.

Love’s silken bonds are not broken just because the female half of the sketch takes umbrage at the loony behaviour of the male partner and slips it across him in a series of impassioned speeches. However devoutly a girl may worship the man of her choice, there always comes a time when she feels an irresistible urge to haul off and let him have it in the neck. I suppose if the young lovers I’ve known in my time were placed end to end – difficult to manage, of course, but what I mean is just suppose they were – they would reach half-way down Piccadilly. And I couldn’t think of a single dashed one who hadn’t been through what Boko had been through to-night.

Already, I felt, the second phase had probably set in, where the female lovebird weeps on the male lovebird’s chest and says she’s sorry she was cross. And that my surmise was correct was proved by Boko’s demeanour, as he rejoined me some minutes later. Even in the dim light, you could see that he was feeling like a million dollars. He walked as if on air, and the whole soul had obviously expanded, like a bath sponge placed in water.

‘Bertie.’

‘Hullo?’

‘Still there?’

‘On the spot.’

‘It’s all right, Bertie.’

‘She loves you still?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

‘She wept on my chest.’

‘Fine.’

‘And said she was sorry she had been cross. I said “There, there!” and everything is once more gas and gaiters.’

‘Splendid.’

‘I felt terrific.’

‘I bet you did.’

‘She withdrew the words “miserable fathead”.’

‘Good.’

‘She said I was the tree on which the fruit of her life hung.’

‘Fine.’

‘And apparently it was all a mistake when she told me she never wanted to see or speak to me again in this world or the next. She does. Frequently.’

‘Splendid.’

‘I clasped her to me, and kissed her madly.’

‘I bet you did.’

‘Jeeves, who was present, was much affected.’

‘Oh, Jeeves was there?’

‘Yes. He and Nobby had been discussing plans and schemes.’

‘For sweetening Uncle Percy?’

‘Yes. For, of course, that still has to be done.’

I looked grave. Not much use, of course, in that light.

‘It’s going to be difficult—’

‘Not a bit.’

‘– after your not only addressing him as “my dear Worples-don” but also calling him a silly ass.’

‘Not a bit, Bertie, not a bit. Jeeves has come across with one of his ripest suggestions.’

‘He has?’

‘What a man!’

‘Ah!’

‘I often say there’s nobody like Jeeves.’

‘And well you may.’

‘Have you ever noticed how his head sticks out at the back?’

‘Often.’

‘That’s where the brain is. Packed away behind the ears.’

‘Yes. What’s his idea?’

‘Briefly this. He thinks it would make an excellent impression and enable me to recover the lost ground, if I stuck up for old Worplesdon.’

‘Stuck him up? I don’t get that. With a gun, do you mean?’

‘I didn’t say “stuck up”. Stuck up for.’

‘Oh, stuck up for?’

‘That’s right. Stuck up for. In other words, he advises me to take the old boy’s part – protect him, as it were.’

‘Protect Uncle Percy?’

‘Oh, I know it sounds bizarre. But Jeeves thinks it will work.’

‘I still don’t get it.’

‘It’s perfectly simple, really. Look here. Suppose some great blustering brute of a chap barges into old Worplesdon’s study at ten sharp to-morrow morning and starts ballyragging him like the dickens, calling him every name under the sun and generally making himself thoroughly offensive. I’m waiting outside the study window, and at the psychological moment I stick my head in and in a quiet, reproving voice, say “Stop, Bertie!—”’

‘Bertie?’

‘The chap’s name is Bertie. But don’t interrupt. I’ll lose the thread. I stick my head in and say “Stop, Bertie! You are strangely forgetting yourself. I cannot stand by and listen to you abusing a man I admire and respect as highly as Lord Worples-don. Lord Worplesdon and I may have had our differences – the fault was mine and I am heartily sorry for it – but I have never deviated from the opinion that it is an honour to know him. And when I hear you calling him a—”’

I am pretty quick. Already, I had spotted the nature of the frightful scheme.

‘You want me to go into Uncle Percy’s lair and call him names?’

‘At ten sharp. Most important, that. We shall have to synchronize to the second. Nobby tells me he always spends the morning in his study, no doubt writing stinkers to the captains of his ships.’

‘And you bob up and tick me off for ticking him off?’

‘That’s the idea. It can hardly fail to show me in a sympathetic light, causing him to warm to me and feel that I’m a pretty good chap, after all. There he will be, I mean to say, cowering in his chair, while you stand over him, shaking your finger in his face—’

The vision conjured up by these words was so ghastly that I staggered and would have fallen, had I not clutched at a tree.

‘You say Jeeves suggested that?’

‘As I told you, just like a flash.’

‘He must be tight.’

A stiffness crept into Boko’s manner.

‘I don’t understand you, Bertie. I rank the scheme among his very subtlest efforts. It seems to me one of those simple stratagems, all the more effective for their simplicity, which can hardly drop a stitch. Coming in at the moment when you are intimidating old Worplesdon, and throwing the whole weight of my sympathy and support on his side, I shall—’

There are moments when we Woosters can be very firm – adamant is perhaps the word – and one of these is when we are asked to intimidate men like Uncle Percy.

‘I’m sorry, Boko.’

‘Sorry? Why?’

‘Include me out.’

‘What!’

‘Nothing doing.’

He leaned forward, the better to stare incredulously into my face. The man seemed stunned.

‘Bertie!’

‘Yes, I know. But I repeat – nothing doing.’

‘Nothing doing?’

‘Nothing doing.’

A pleading note came into his voice, the same sort of note I’ve sometimes heard in Bingo Little’s, when asking a bookie to take the broad, spacious view and wait for his money till Wednesday week.

‘But, Bertie, you’re fond of Nobby?’

‘Of course.’

‘Of course you are, or you would never have given her that threepennyworth of acid drops. And you don’t, I take it, dispute the fact that you and I were at school together? Of course, you don’t. When I thought I heard you say you wouldn’t sit in, I must have misunderstood you.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘I didn’t?’

‘No.’

‘You refuse to do your bit?’

‘I do.’

‘You – I want to get this straight – you really decline to play your part – your simple, easy part – in this enterprise?’

‘That’s right.’

‘This
is
Bertie Wooster speaking?’

‘It is.’

‘The Bertie Wooster I was at school with?’

‘That’s right.’

He drew in his breath with a sort of whistle.

‘Well, if anybody had told me this would happen, I wouldn’t have believed it. I would have laughed mockingly. Bertie Wooster let me down? No, no, I would have said – not Bertie, who was not only at school with me but is at this very moment bursting with my meat.’

This was a nasty one. I wasn’t actually bursting with his meat, of course, because there hadn’t been such a frightful lot of it, but I saw what it meant. For an instant, when he put it like that, I nearly weakened. Then I thought of Uncle Percy ‘cowering in his chair’ – cowering in his chair, my foot! – and was strong again.

‘I’m sorry, Boko.’

‘So am I, Bertie. Sorry and disappointed. Sick at heart is the expression that leaps to the lips. Well, I suppose I shall have to go and break the news to Nobby. Golly, how she’ll cry!’

I could not repress a pang.

‘I don’t want to make Nobby cry.’

‘You will, though. Gallons.’

He faded away into the darkness, sighing reproachfully, leaving me alone with the stars.

And I was just examining them and wondering what had given Jeeves the idea that they were quiring to the young-eyed cherubims – 1 couldn’t see the slightest indication of such a thing myself– when they suddenly merged, as if they had been Uncle Percy and J. Chichester Clam, and became a jagged sheet of flame.

This was because a hidden hand, creeping up behind me unperceived, had given me the dickens of a slosh with what I assumed to be some blunt instrument. It caught me squarely on the back hair, bringing me to earth with a sharp ‘Ouch!’

CHAPTER 17

I
  sat up, rubbing the occiput, and a squeaky voice spoke in my earhole. Eyeing me solicitously, or else gloating over his handiwork, I couldn’t tell which, was young blighted Edwin.

‘Coo!’ he said. ‘Is that you, Bertie?’

‘Yes, it jolly well is,’ I replied with a touch of not unnatural asperity. I mean, life’s difficult enough without having Boy Scouts beaning one every other minute, and I was incensed. ‘What’s the idea? What do you mean, you repellent young boll weevil, by socking me with a dashed great club?’

‘It wasn’t a club. It was my Scout’s stick. Sort of like a hockey stick. Very useful.’

‘Comes in handy, does it?’

‘Rather! Did it hurt?’

‘You may take it as definitely official that it hurt like blazes.’

‘Coo! I’m sorry. I mistook you for the burglar. There’s one lurking in the grounds. I heard him underneath my window. I said “Who’s there?” and he slunk off with horrid imprecations. I say, I’m not having much luck to-night. The last chap I mistook for the burglar turned out to be father.’

‘Father?’

‘Yes. How was I to know it was him? I never thought he would be wandering about the garden in the middle of the night. I saw a shadowy form crouching down, as if about to spring, and I crept up behind it and—’

‘You didn’t biff him?’

‘Yes. Rather a juicy one.’

I must say my heart leaped up, as Jeeves tells me his does when he beholds a rainbow in the sky. The thought of Uncle Percy stopping a hot one with the trouser seat was pretty stimulating. It had been coming to him for years. I had that sort of awed feeling one gets sometimes, when one has a close-up of the workings of Providence and realizes that nothing is put into this world without a purpose, not even Edwin, and that the meanest creatures have their uses.

‘He was a bit shirty about it.’

‘It annoyed him, eh?’

‘He wanted to give me beans, but Florence wouldn’t let him. She said, “Father, you are not to touch him. It was a pure misunderstanding.” Florence is very fond of me.’

I raised my eyebrows. A girl, I felt, of strange, even morbid tastes.

‘So all he did was to tell me to go to bed.’

‘Then why aren’t you in bed?’

‘Bed? Coo! Not likely. How’s your head?’

‘Rotten.’

‘Does it ache?’

‘Of course it aches.’

‘Have you got a contusion?’

Yes, I have.’

‘This is where I could give you first aid.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘Don’t you want first aid?’

‘No, I don’t. We have threshed all this out before, young Edwin. You know my views.’

‘I don’t ever seem able to get anyone to let me give them first aid,’ he said wistfully. ‘And what one needs is lots of practice. What are you doing here, Bertie?’

‘Everybody asks me what I’m doing here,’ I replied, with a touch of pique. ‘Why shouldn’t I be here? This place is related to me by ties of blood. If you really want to know, I came here for an after dinner saunter with Boko Fittleworth.’