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.