‘Oh,
Bertie
!’ she repeated. ‘Well, of course, I must autograph it for you,’ she said, and at the same moment all was suddenly made clear to me. I had missed it at first, because I had been concentrating on the girl with the green face, but I now perceived at the bottom of the jacket the words ‘By Florence Craye’. They had been half hidden by a gummed-on label which said ‘Book Society Choice of the Month’. I saw all, and the thought of how near I had come to marrying a female novelist made everything go black for a bit.
She wrote in the book with a firm hand, thus dishing any prospect that the shop would take it back and putting me seven bob and a tanner down almost, as you might say, before the day had started. Then she said ‘Well!’ still with that turtle dove timbre in her voice.
‘Fancy you buying “Spindrift”!’
Well, one has to say the civil thing, and it may be that in the agitation of the moment I overdid it a bit. I rather think that the impression I must have conveyed, when I assured her that I had made a bee-line for the beastly volume, was that I had been counting the minutes till I could get my hooks on it. At any rate, she came back with a gratified simper.
‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am. Not just because it’s mine, but because I see that all the trouble I took training your mind was not wasted. You have grown to love good literature.’
It was at this point, as if he had entered on cue, that the motheaten bird returned and said they had not got old Pop Spinoza, but could get him for me. He seemed rather depressed about it all, but Florence’s eyes lit up as if somebody had pressed a switch.
‘Bertie! This is amazing! Do you really read Spinoza?’
It’s extraordinary how one yields to that fatal temptation to swank. It undoes the best of us. Nothing, I mean, would have been simpler than to reply that she had got the data twisted and that the authoritatively annotated edition was a present for Jeeves. But, instead of doing the simple, manly, straightforward thing, I had to go and put on dog.
‘Oh, rather,’ I said, with an intellectual flick of the umbrella. ‘When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza’s latest.’
‘Well!
’
A simple word, but as she spoke it a shudder ran through me from brilliantined topknot to rubber shoe sole.
It was the look that accompanied the yip that caused this shudder. It was exactly the same sort of look that Madeline Bassett had given me, that time I went to Totleigh Towers to pinch old Bassett’s cow-creamer and she thought I had come because I loved her so much that I couldn’t stay away from her side. A frightful, tender, melting look that went through me like a red-hot bradawl through a pat of butter and filled me with a nameless fear.
I wished now I hadn’t plugged Spinoza so heartily, and above all I wished I hadn’t been caught in the act of apparently buying this blighted ‘Spindrift’. I saw that unwittingly I had been giving myself a terrific build-up, causing this girl to see Bertram Wooster with new eyes and to get hep to his hidden depths. It might quite well happen that she would review the position in the light of this fresh evidence and decide that she had made a mistake in breaking off her engagement to so rare a spirit. And once she got thinking along those lines, who knew what the harvest might be?
An imperious urge came upon me to be elsewhere, before I could make a chump of myself further.
‘Well, I’m afraid I must be popping,’ I said. ‘Most important appointment. Frightfully jolly, seeing you again.’
‘We ought to see each other more,’ she replied, still with that melting look. ‘We ought to have some long talks.’
‘Oh, rather.’
‘A developing mind is so fascinating. Why don’t you ever come to the Hall?’
‘Oh, well, one gets a bit chained to the metropolis, you know.’
‘I should like to show you the reviews of “Spindrift”. They are wonderful. Edwin is pasting them in an album for me.’
‘I’d love to see them some time. Later on, perhaps. Good-bye.’
‘You’re forgetting your book.’
‘Oh, thanks. Well, toodle-oo,’ I said, and fought my way out.
The appointment to which I had alluded was with the barman at the Bollinger. Seldom, if ever, had I felt in such sore need of a restorative. I headed for my destination like a hart streaking towards cooling streams, when heated in the chase, and was speedily in conference with the dispenser of life savers.
Ten minutes later, feeling considerably better, though still shaken, I was standing in the doorway, twirling my umbrella and wondering what to do next, when my eye was arrested by an odd spectacle.
A certain rumminess had begun to manifest itself across the way.
CHAPTER 3
T
he Bollinger bar conducts its beneficent activities about halfway up Bond Street, and on the other side of the thoroughfare, immediately opposite, there stands a courteous and popular jeweller’s, where I generally make my purchases when the question of investing in
bijouterie
arises. In fact, the day being so fine, I was rather thinking of looking in there now and buying a new cigarette case.
It was outside this jeweller’s that the odd spectacle was in progress. A bloke of furtive aspect was shimmering to and fro on the threshold of the emporium, his demeanour rather like that of the cat in the adage, which, according to Jeeves, and I suppose he knows, let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’. He seemed, that is to say, desirous of entering, but was experiencing some difficulty in making the grade. He would have a sudden dash at it, and then draw back and stand shooting quick glances right and left, as if fearing the scrutiny of the public eye. Over in New York, during the days of Prohibition, I have seen fellows doing the same sort of thing outside speakeasies.
He was a massive bloke, and there was something in his appearance that seemed familiar. Then, as I narrowed my gaze and scanned him more closely, memory did its stuff. That beefy frame . . . That pumpkin-shaped head . . . The face that looked like a slab of pink dough . . . It was none other than my old friend, Stilton Cheesewright. And what he was doing, pirouetting outside jewellery bins, was more than I could understand.
I started across the road with the idea of instituting a probe or quiz, and at the same moment he seemed to summon up a sudden burst of resolution. As I paused to disentangle myself from a passing bus, he picked up his feet, tossed his head in a mettlesome sort of way, and was through the door like a man dashing into a railway-station buffet with only two minutes for a gin and tonic before his train goes.
When I entered the establishment, he was leaning over the counter, his gaze riveted on some species of merchandise which was being shown him by the gentlemanly assistant. To prod him in the hindquarters with my umbrella was with me the work of an instant.
Ahoy there, Stilton!’ I cried.
He spun round with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk.
‘Oh, hullo,’ he said.
There was a pause. At a moment like this, with old boyhood friends meeting again after long separation, I mean to say, you might have expected a good deal of animated what-ho-ing and an immediate picking up of the threads. Of this, however, there was a marked absence. The Auld Lang Syne spirit was strong in me, but not, or I was mistaken, equally strong in G. D’Arcy Cheesewright. I have met so many people in my time who have wished that Bertram was elsewhere that I have come to recognize the signs. And it was these signs that this former playmate was now exhibiting.
He drew me away from the counter, shielding it from my gaze with his person, like somebody trying to hide the body.
‘I wish you wouldn’t go spiking people in the backside with your beastly umbrella,’ he said, and one sensed the querulous note. ‘Gave me a nasty shock.’
I apologized gracefully, explaining that if you have an umbrella and are fortunate enough to catch an old acquaintance bending, you naturally do not let the opportunity slip, and endeavoured to set him at his ease with genial chit-chat. From the embarrassment he was displaying, I might have been some high official in the police force interrupting him in the middle of a smash and grab raid. His demeanour perplexed me.
‘Well, well, well, Stilton,’ I said. ‘Quite awhile since we met.’
‘Yes,’ he responded, his air that of a man who was a bit sorry it hadn’t been longer.
‘How’s the boy?’
‘Oh, all right. How are you?’
‘Fine, thanks. As a matter of fact, I’m feeling unusually fizzy.’
‘That’s good.’
‘I thought you’d be pleased.’
‘Oh, I am. Well, good-bye, Bertie,’ he said, shaking me by the hand. ‘Nice to have seen you.’
I looked at him, amazed. Did he really imagine, I asked myself, that I was as easily got rid of as this? Why, experts have tried to get rid of Bertram Wooster and have been forced to admit defeat.
‘I’m not leaving you yet,’ I assured him.
‘Aren’t you?’ he said, wistfully.
‘No, no. Still here. Jeeves tells me you dropped in on me this morning.’
‘Yes.’
Accompanied by Nobby.’
‘Yes.’
‘You live at Steeple Bumpleigh, too, I hear.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s a small world.’
‘Not so very.’
‘Jeeves thinks it is.’
‘Well, fairly small, perhaps,’ he agreed, making a concession. ‘You’re sure I’m not keeping you, Bertie?’
‘No, no.’
‘I thought you might have some date somewhere.’
‘Oh, no, not a thing.’
There was another pause. He hummed a few bars of a popular melody, but not rollickingly. He also shuffled his feet quite a bit.
‘Been there long?’
‘Where?’
‘Steeple Bumpleigh.’
‘Oh? No, not very long.’
‘Like it?’
‘Very much.’
‘What do you do there?’
‘Do?’
‘Come, come, you know what I mean by “do”. Boko Fittleworth, for instance, writes wholesome fiction for the masses there. My Uncle Percy relaxes there after the day’s shipping magnateing. What is your racket?’
A rather odd look came into his map, and he fixed me with a cold and challenging eye, as if daring me to start something. I remembered having seen the same defiant glitter behind the spectacles of a man I met in a country hotel once, just before he told me his name was Snodgrass. It was as if this old companion of mine were on the brink of some shameful confession.
Then he seemed to think better of it.
‘Oh, I mess about.’
‘Mess about?’
‘Yes. Just mess about. Doing this and that, you know.’
There seemed nothing to be gained by pursuing this line of inquiry. It was obvious that he did not intend to loosen up. I passed on, accordingly, to the point which had been puzzling me so much.
‘Well, flitting lightly over that,’ I said, ‘why were you hovering?’
‘Hovering?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Just now. Outside the shop.’
‘I wasn’t hovering.’
‘You were distinctly hovering. You reminded me of a girl Jeeves was speaking about the other day, who stood with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet. And when I follow you in, I find you buzz-buzzing into the ear of the assistant, plainly making some furtive purchase. What are you buying, Stilton?’
Fixed by my penetrating eye, he came clean. I suppose he saw that further concealment was useless.
‘A ring,’ he said, in a low, hoarse voice.
‘What sort of a ring?’ I asked, pressing him.
An engagement ring,’ he muttered, twisting his fingers and in other ways showing that he was fully conscious of his position.
Are you engaged?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, well, well!’
I laughed heartily, as is my custom on these occasions, but on his inquiring in a throaty growl rather like the snarl of the Rocky Mountains timber wolf what the devil I was cackling about, cheesed the mirth. I had always found Stilton intimidating, when stirred. In a weak moment at Oxford, misled by my advisers, I once tried to do a bit of rowing, and Stilton was the bird who coached us from the towing path. I could still recall some of the things he had said about my stomach, which – rightly or wrongly – he considered that I was sticking out. It would seem that when you are a Volga boatman, you aren’t supposed to stick your stomach out.
‘I always laugh when people tell me they are engaged,’ I explained, more soberly.
It did not seem to mollify him – if’mollify’ is the word I want. He continued to glower.
‘You have no objection to my being engaged?’
‘No, no.’
‘Why shouldn’t I be engaged?’
‘Oh, quite.’
‘What do you mean by “Oh, quite”?’
I didn’t quite know what I had meant by ‘Oh, quite,’ unless possibly ‘Oh, quite.’ I explained this, trying to infuse into my manner a soothing what-is-it, for he appeared to be hotting up.
‘I hope you will be very, very happy,’ I said.
He thanked me, though not effusively.
‘Nice girl, I expect?’
‘Yes.’
The response was not what you would call lyrical, but we Woosters can read between the lines. His eyes were rolling in their sockets, and his face had taken on the colour and expression of a devout tomato. I could see that he loved like a thousand of bricks.
A thought struck me.
‘It isn’t Nobby?’
‘No. She’s engaged to Boko Fittleworth.’
‘What!’
‘Yes.’
‘I never knew that. He might have told me. Nobby and Boko have hitched up, have they?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, well, well! The laughing Love God has been properly up on his toes in and around Steeple Bumpleigh of late, what?’
‘Yes.’
‘Never an idle moment. Day and night shifts. Your betrothed, I take it, is a resident?’