I turned, accordingly, to the door, but before I got there he stopped me, wanting to know if when coming to stay with Aunt Dahlia I had brought Reggie Jeeves with me. I said I had, and he said he would like to see old Reggie again.
‘What a cough drop! ‘ he said mirthfully. The word was strange to me, but weighing it and deciding that it was intended to be a compliment and a tribute to his many gifts, I agreed that Jeeves was in the deepest and truest sense a cough drop.
‘Tell Bastable as you go out that if Reggie calls to send him up. But nobody else.’
‘Right ho.’
‘Good man, Bastable. He places my bets for me. Which reminds me. Have you done as I advised and put a bit on Ma McCorkadale for the Market Snodsbury stakes? No? Do it without fail, Wooster old man. You’ll never regret it. It’ll be like finding money in the street.
‘ I wasn’t feeling any too good as I drove away. I have described my heart-bowed-down-ness on approaching the Arnold Abney study door after morning prayers in the days when I was in statu pupillari, as the expression is, and I was equally apprehensive now as I faced the prospect of telling the old ancestor of my failure to deliver the goods in the matter of Bingley. I didn’t suppose that she would give me six of the best, as A. Abney was so prone to do, but she would certainly not hesitate to let me know she was displeased. Aunts as a class are like Napoleon, if it was Napoleon; they expect their orders to be carried out without a hitch and don’t listen to excuses.
Nor was I mistaken. After lunching at a pub in order to postpone the meeting as long as possible, I returned to the old homestead and made my report, and was unfortunate enough to make it while she was engaged in reading a Rex Stout, — in the hard cover, not a paper-back. When she threw this at me with the accurate aim which years of practice have given her, its sharp edge took me on the tip of the nose, making me blink not a little.
‘I might have known you would mess the whole thing up,’ she boomed.
‘Not my fault, aged relative,’ I said. ‘I did my best. Than which,’ I added, ‘no man can do more.’
I thought I had her there, but I was wrong. It was the sort of line which can generally be counted on to soothe the savage breast, but this time it laid an egg. She snorted. Her snorts are not the sniffing snorts snorted by Ma McCorkadale, they resemble more an explosion in the larger type of ammunition dump and send strong men rocking back on their heels as if struck by lightning.
‘How do you mean you did your best? You don’t seem to me to have done anything. Did you threaten to have him arrested?’
‘No, I didn’t do that.’
‘Did you grasp him by the throat and shake him like a rat?’ I admitted that that had not occurred to me.
‘In other words, you did absolutely nothing,’ she said, and thinking it over I had to own that she was perfectly right. It’s funny how one doesn’t notice these things at the time. It was only now that I realized that I had let Bingley do all the talking, self offering practic- ally nil in the way of a come-back. I could hardly have made less of a contribution to our conversation if I had been the deaf adder I mentioned earlier.
She heaved herself up from the chaise longue on which she was reclining. Her manner was peevish. In time, of course, she would get over her chagrin and start loving her Bertram again as of yore, but there was no getting away from it that an aunt’s affection was, as of even date, at its lowest ebb. She said gloomily:
‘I’ll have to do it myself.’
‘Are you going to see Bingley?’
‘I am going to see Bingley, and I am going to talk to Bingley, and I am going, if necessary, to take Bingley by the throat and shake him-‘