‘You mean you slipped him a Mickey Finn? ‘
‘I believe that is what they are termed in the argot, madam.’
‘Do you always carry them about with you?’
‘I am seldom without a small supply, madam.’
‘Never know when they won’t come in handy, eh?’
‘Precisely, madam. Opportunities for their use are constantly arising.’
‘Well, I can only say Thank you. You have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.’
‘It is kind of you to say so, Madam.’
‘Much obliged, Jeeves.’
‘Not at all, madam.’
I was expecting the aged relative to turn to me at this point and tick me off for not having had the sense to give Bingley a Mickey Finn myself, and I knew, for you cannot reason with aunts, that it would be no use pleading that I hadn’t got any; but her jocund mood caused her to abstain. Returning to the subject of L. P. Runkle, she said this had made her realize that her luck was in, after all, and she was going to press it.
‘I’ll go and see him now,’ she yipped, ‘and I confidently expect to play on him as on a stringed instrument. Out of my way, young Bertie,’ she cried, heading for the door, ‘or I’ll trample you to the dust. Yoicks! ‘ she added, reverting to the patois of the old hunting days. ‘Tally ho ! Gone away ! Hark forrard ! ‘.
Or words to that effect.
CHAPTER Twelve
Her departure — at, I should estimate, some sixty m.p.h. — left behind it the sort of quivering stillness you get during hurricane time in America, when the howling gale, having shaken you to the back teeth, passes on to tickle up residents in spots further west. Kind of a dazed feeling it gives you. I turned to Jeeves, and found him, of course, as serene and unmoved as an oyster on the half shell. He might have been watching yowling aunts shoot out of rooms like bullets from early boyhood.
‘What was that she said, Jeeves?’
‘Yoicks, sir, if I am not mistaken. It seemed to me that Madam also added Tally-ho, Gone away and Hark forrard.’
‘I suppose members of the Quorn and the Pytchley are saying that sort of thing all the time.’
‘So I understand, sir. It encourages the hounds to renewed efforts. It must, of course, be trying for the fox.’
‘I’d hate to be a fox, wouldn’t you, Jeeves?’
‘Certainly I can imagine more agreeable existences, sir.’
‘Not only being chivvied for miles across difficult country but having to listen to men in top hats uttering those uncouth cries.’
‘Precisely, sir. A very wearing life.’
I produced my cambric handkerchief and gave the brow a mop. Recent events had caused me to perspire in the manner popularized by the fountains at Versailles.
‘Warm work, Jeeves.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Opens the pores a bit.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How quiet everything seems now.’
‘Yes, sir. Silence like a poultice comes to heal the blows of sound.’
‘Shakespeare?’
‘No, sir. The American author Oliver Wendell Holmes. His poem, The Organ Grinders. An aunt of mine used to read it to me as a child.’
‘I didn’t know you had any aunts.’
‘Three, sir.’
‘Are they as jumpy as the one who has just left us?’
‘No, sir. Their outlook on life is uniformly placid.’
I had begun to feel a bit more placid myself. Calmer, if you know what I mean. And with the calm had come more charitable thoughts.
‘Well, I don’t blame the aged relative for being jumpy,’ I said. ‘She’s all tied up with an enterprise of pith and something.’
‘Of great pith and moment, sir?’
‘That’s right ‘Let us hope that its current will not turn awry and lose the name of action.’
‘Yes, let’s. Turn what?’
‘Awry, sir.’
‘Don’t you mean agley?
‘ ‘No, sir.’
‘Then it isn’t the poet Burns?’
‘No. sir. The words occur in Shakespeare’s drama Hamlet.’
‘Oh, I know Hamlet. Aunt Agatha once made me take her son Thos to it at the Old Vic. Not a bad show, I thought, though a bit highbrow. You’re sure the poet Burns didn’t write it?’
‘Yes, sir. The fact, I understand, is well established.’