So when Gussie unexpectedly eloped with the cook, it looked as though Bertram was for it. If a girl thinks you’re in love with her and says she will marry you, you can’t very well voice a preference for being dead in a ditch. Not, I mean, if you want to regard yourself as a preux chevalier, as the expression is, which is always my aim. But just as I was about to put in my order for sackcloth and ashes, up, as I say, popped Spode, now going about under the alias of Lord Sidcup. He had loved her since she was so high but had never got around to mentioning it, and when he did so now, they clicked immediately. And the thought that she was safely out of circulation and no longer a menace was possibly the prime ingredient in my current euphoria.
I think that makes everything clear to the meanest intelligence, does it not? Right ho, so we can go ahead. Where were we? Ah yes, I had just told Jeeves that I was sitting on top of the world with a rainbow round my shoulder, but expressing a doubt as to whether this state of things would last, and how wel founded that doubt proved to be; for scarcely a forkful of eggs and b later it was borne in upon me that life was not the grand sweet song I had supposed it to be, but, as you might say, stern and earnest and full of bumps.
‘Was I mistaken, Jeeves,’ I said, making idle conversation as I sipped my coffee, ‘or as the mists of sleep shredded away this morning did I hear your typewriter going?’
‘Yes, sir. I was engaged in composition.’
‘A dutiful letter to Charlie Silversmith?’ I said, alluding to his uncle who held the post of butler at Deverill Hall, where we had once been pleasant visitors. ‘Or possibly a lyric in the manner of the bloke who advocates gathering rosebuds ? ‘
‘Neither, sir. I was recording the recent happenings at Totleigh Towers for the club book.’
And here, dash it, I must once more ask what I may call the old sweats to let their attention wander while I put the new arrivals abreast. Jeeves, you must know (I am addressing the new arrivals), belongs to a club for butlers and gentlemen’s gentlemen round Curzon Street way, and one of the rules there is that every member must contribute to the club book the latest information concerning the fe low he’s working for, the idea being to inform those seeking employment of the sort of thing they will be taking on. If a member is contemplating signing up with someone, he looks him up in the club book, and if he finds that he puts out crumbs for the birdies every morning and repeatedly saves golden-haired children from being run over by automobiles, he knows he is on a good thing and has no hesitation in accepting office. Whereas if the book informs him that the fellow habitually kicks starving dogs and generally begins the day by throwing the breakfast porridge at his personal attendant, he is warned in time to steer clear of him.
Which is all very well and one follows the train of thought, but in my opinion such a book is pure dynamite and ought not to be permitted. There are, Jeeves has informed me, eleven pages in it about me; and what will the harvest be, I ask him, if it falls into the hands of my Aunt Agatha, with whom my standing is already low. She spoke her mind freely enough some years ago when–against my personal wishes–I was found with twenty-three cats in my bedroom and again when I was accused–unjustly, I need hardly say–of having marooned A. B. Filmer, the Cabinet minister, on an island in her lake. To what heights of eloquence would she not soar, if informed of my vicissitudes at Totleigh Towers? The imagination boggles, Jeeves, I tell him.
To which he replies that it won’t fall into the hands of my Aunt Agatha, she not being likely to drop in at the Junior Ganymede, which is what his club is called, and there the matter rests. His reasoning is specious and he has more or less succeeded in soothing my tremors, but I still can’t help feeling uneasy, and my manner, as I addressed him now, had quite a bit of agitation in it.