My reaction now was very similar. It was a highly liquid Bertram who, hearing his vis-a-vis give a couple of hiccups and start to speak bent an attentive ear.
“Please don’t say any more, Mr. Wooster.”
Well, I wasn’t going to, of course.
“I understand.”
I was glad to hear this.
“Yes, I understand. I won’t be so silly as to pretend not to know what you mean. I suspected this at Cannes, when you used to stand and stare at me without speaking a word, but with whole volumes in your eyes.”
If Angela’s shark had bitten me in the leg, I couldn’t have leaped more convulsively. So tensely had I been concentrating on Gussie’s interests that it hadn’t so much as crossed my mind that another and an unfortunate construction could be placed on those words of mine. The persp., already bedewing my brow, became a regular Niagara.
My whole fate hung upon a woman’s word. I mean to say, I couldn’t back out. If a girl thinks a man is proposing to her, and on that understanding books him up, he can’t explain to her that she has got hold of entirely the wrong end of the stick and that he hadn’t the smallest intention of suggesting anything of the kind. He must simply let it ride. And the thought of being engaged to a girl who talked openly about fairies being born because stars blew their noses, or whatever it was, frankly appalled me.
She was carrying on with her remarks, and as I listened I clenched my fists till I shouldn’t wonder if the knuckles didn’t stand out white under the strain. It seemed as if she would never get to the nub.
“Yes, all through those days at Cannes I could see what you were trying to say. A girl always knows. And then you followed me down here, and there was that same dumb, yearning look in your eyes when we met this evening. And then you were so insistent that I should come out and walk with you in the twilight. And now you stammer out those halting words. No, this does not come as a surprise. But I am sorry–-”
The word was like one of Jeeves’s pick-me-ups. Just as if a glassful of meat sauce, red pepper, and the yolk of an egg—though, as I say, I am convinced that these are not the sole ingredients—had been shot into me, I expanded like some lovely flower blossoming in the sunshine. It was all right, after all. My guardian angel had not been asleep at the switch.
“—but I am afraid it is impossible.”
She paused.
“Impossible,” she repeated.
I had been so busy feeling saved from the scaffold that I didn’t get on to it for a moment that an early reply was desired.
“Oh, right ho,” I said hastily.
“I’m sorry.”
“Quite all right.”
“Sorrier than I can say.”
“Don’t give it another thought.”
“We can still be friends.”
“Oh, rather.”
“Then shall we just say no more about it; keep what has happened as a tender little secret between ourselves?”
“Absolutely.”
“We will. Like something lovely and fragrant laid away in lavender.”
“In lavender—right.”
There was a longish pause. She was gazing at me in a divinely pitying sort of way, much as if I had been a snail she had happened accidentally to bring her short French vamp down on, and I longed to tell her that it was all right, and that Bertram, so far from being the victim of despair, had never felt fizzier in his life. But, of course, one can’t do that sort of thing. I simply said nothing, and stood there looking brave.
“I wish I could,” she murmured.
“Could?” I said, for my attensh had been wandering.
“Feel towards you as you would like me to feel.”
“Oh, ah.”
“But I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“Absolutely O.K. Faults on both sides, no doubt.”
“Because I am fond of you, Mr.—no, I think I must call you Bertie. May I?”
“Oh, rather.”
“Because we are real friends.”
“Quite.”
“I do like you, Bertie. And if things were different—I wonder–-”
“Eh?”
“After all, we are real friends…. We have this common memory…. You have a right to know…. I don’t want you to think–-Life is such a muddle, isn’t it?”