This held her. She cheesed the rabbit theme. Her face, which had been aglow with what I supposed was a pretty animation, clouded. She unshipped a sigh that sounded like the wind going out of a rubber duck.
“Ah, yes. Life is very sad, isn’t it?”
“It is for some people. This aching heart, for instance.”
“Those wistful eyes of hers! Drenched irises. And they used to dance like elves of delight. And all through a foolish misunderstanding about a shark. What a tragedy misunderstandings are. That pretty romance broken and over just because Mr. Glossop would insist that it was a flatfish.”
I saw that she had got the wires crossed.
“I’m not talking about Angela.”
“But her heart is aching.”
“I know it’s aching. But so is somebody else’s.”
She looked at me, perplexed.
“Somebody else? Mr. Glossop’s, you mean?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Mrs. Travers’s?”
The exquisite code of politeness of the Woosters prevented me clipping her one on the ear-hole, but I would have given a shilling to be able to do it. There seemed to me something deliberately fatheaded in the way she persisted in missing the gist.
“No, not Aunt Dahlia’s, either.”
“I’m sure she is dreadfully upset.”
“Quite. But this heart I’m talking about isn’t aching because of Tuppy’s row with Angela. It’s aching for a different reason altogether. I mean to say—dash it, you know why hearts ache!”
She seemed to shimmy a bit. Her voice, when she spoke, was whispery: “You mean—for love?”
“Absolutely. Right on the bull’s-eye. For love.”
“Oh, Mr. Wooster!”
“I take it you believe in love at first sight?”
“I do, indeed.”
“Well, that’s what happened to this aching heart. It fell in love at first sight, and ever since it’s been eating itself out, as I believe the expression is.”
There was a silence. She had turned away and was watching a duck out on the lake. It was tucking into weeds, a thing I’ve never been able to understand anyone wanting to do. Though I suppose, if you face it squarely, they’re no worse than spinach. She stood drinking it in for a bit, and then it suddenly stood on its head and disappeared, and this seemed to break the spell.
“Oh, Mr. Wooster!” she said again, and from the tone of her voice, I could see that I had got her going.
“For you, I mean to say,” I proceeded, starting to put in the fancy touches. I dare say you have noticed on these occasions that the difficulty is to plant the main idea, to get the general outline of the thing well fixed. The rest is mere detail work. I don’t say I became glib at this juncture, but I certainly became a dashed glibber than I had been.
“It’s having the dickens of a time. Can’t eat, can’t sleep—all for love of you. And what makes it all so particularly rotten is that it—this aching heart—can’t bring itself up to the scratch and tell you the position of affairs, because your profile has gone and given it cold feet. Just as it is about to speak, it catches sight of you sideways, and words fail it. Silly, of course, but there it is.”
I heard her give a gulp, and I saw that her eyes had become moistish. Drenched irises, if you care to put it that way.
“Lend you a handkerchief?”
“No, thank you. I’m quite all right.”
It was more than I could say for myself. My efforts had left me weak. I don’t know if you suffer in the same way, but with me the act of talking anything in the nature of real mashed potatoes always induces a sort of prickly sensation and a hideous feeling of shame, together with a marked starting of the pores.
I remember at my Aunt Agatha’s place in Hertfordshire once being put on the spot and forced to enact the role of King Edward III saying goodbye to that girl of his, Fair Rosamund, at some sort of pageant in aid of the Distressed Daughters of the Clergy. It involved some rather warmish medieval dialogue, I recall, racy of the days when they called a spade a spade, and by the time the whistle blew, I’ll bet no Daughter of the Clergy was half as distressed as I was. Not a dry stitch.