On the threshold I paused. I remember in my early days at the private school where I won my Scripture Knowledge prize, Arnold Abney M.A., the headmaster, would sometimes announce that he wished to see Wooster in his study after morning prayers, and I always halted at the study door, a prey to uneasiness and apprehension, not liking the shape of things to come. It was much the same now. I shrank from the impending interview. But whereas in the case of A. Abney my disinclination to get things moving had been due to the fear that the proceedings were going to lead up to six of the best from a cane that stung like an adder, with Bingley it was a natural reluctance to ask a favour of a fellow I couldn’t stand the sight of. I wouldn’t say the Woosters were particularly proud, but we do rather jib at having to grovel to the scum of the earth.
However, it had to be done, and, as I heard Jeeves say once, if it were done, then ’twere well ’twere done quickly. Stiffening the sinews and summoning up the blood, to quote another of his gags, I pressed the bell.
If I had any doubts as to Bingley now being in the chips, the sight of the butler who opened the door would have dispelled them. In assembling his domestic staff, Bingley had done himself proud, sparing no expense. I don’t say his butler was quite in the class of Jeeves’s Uncle Charlie Silversmith, but he came so near it that the breath was taken. And like Uncle Charlie he believed in pomp and ceremony when buttling. I asked him if I could see Mr. Bingley, and he said coldly that the master was not receiving.
‘I think he’ll see me. I’m an old friend of his.’
‘I will enquire. Your name, sir?’
‘Mr. Wooster.’
He pushed off, to return some moments later to say that Mr. Bingley would be glad if I would join him in the library. Speaking in what seemed to me a disapproving voice, as though to suggest that, while he was compelled to carry out the master’s orders however eccentric, he would never had admitted a chap like me if it had been left to him.
‘If you would step this way, sir,’ he said haughtily. What with one thing and another I had rather got out of touch lately with that If-you-would-step-this-way-sir stuff, and it was in a somewhat rattled frame of mind that I entered the library and found Bingley in an arm chair with his feet up on an occasional table. He greeted me cordially enough, but with that touch of the patronizing so noticeable at our two previous meetings.
‘Ah, Wooster, my dear fellow, come in. I told Bastable to tell everyone I was not at home, but of course you’re different. Always glad to see an old pal. And what can I do for you, Wooster?’
I had to say for him that he had made it easy for me to introduce the subject I was anxious to discuss. I was about to get going, when he asked me if I would like a drink. I said No, thanks, and he said in an in- sufferably smug way that I was probably wise.
‘I often thought, when I was staying with you at Chuffnell Regis, that you drank too much, Wooster. Remember how you burned that cottage down? A sober man wouldn’t have done that. You must have been stewed to the eyebrows, cocky.’
A hot denial trembled on my lips. I mean to say, it’s a bit thick to be chided for burning cottages down by the very chap who put them to the flames. But I restrained myself. The man, I reminded myself, had to be kept in with. If that was how he remembered that night of terror at Chuffnell Regis, it was not for me to destroy his illusions. I refrained from comment, and he asked me if I would like a cigar. When I said I wouldn’t, he nodded like a father pleased with a favourite son.
‘I am glad to see this improvement in you, Wooster. I always thought you smoked too much. Moderation, moderation in all things, that’s the only way. But you were going to tell me why you came here. Just for a cozy chat about old times, was it?’