“I do.”
“It sounds thin to me, Wooster, very thin.”
I saw that it would be necessary to apply the finishing touch.
“I must ask you to treat this as entirely confidential, Glossop, but I may as well inform you that it is not twenty-four hours since she turned me down.”
“Turned you down?”
“Like a bedspread. In this very garden.”
“Twenty-four hours?”
“Call it twenty-five. So you will readily see that I can’t be the chap, if any, who stole Angela from you at Cannes.”
And I was on the brink of adding that I wouldn’t touch Angela with a barge pole, when I remembered I had said it already and it hadn’t gone frightfully well. I desisted, therefore.
My manly frankness seemed to be producing good results. The homicidal glare was dying out of Tuppy’s eyes. He had the aspect of a hired assassin who had paused to think things over.
“I see,” he said, at length. “All right, then. Sorry you were troubled.”
“Don’t mention it, old man,” I responded courteously.
For the first time since the bushes had begun to pour forth Glossops, Bertram Wooster could be said to have breathed freely. I don’t say I actually came out from behind the bench, but I did let go of it, and with something of the relief which those three chaps in the Old Testament must have experienced after sliding out of the burning fiery furnace, I even groped tentatively for my cigarette case.
The next moment a sudden snort made me take my fingers off it as if it had bitten me. I was distressed to note in the old friend a return of the recent frenzy.
What the hell did you mean by telling her that I used to be covered with ink when I was a kid?”
“My dear Tuppy–-”
“I was almost finickingly careful about my personal cleanliness as a boy. You could have eaten your dinner off me.”
“Quite. But–-”
“And all that stuff about having no soul. I’m crawling with soul. And being looked on as an outsider at the Drones–-”
“But, my dear old chap, I explained that. It was all part of my ruse or scheme.”
“It was, was it? Well, in future do me a favour and leave me out of your foul ruses.”
“Just as you say, old boy.”
“All right, then. That’s understood.”
He relapsed into silence, standing with folded arms, staring before him rather like a strong, silent man in a novel when he’s just been given the bird by the girl and is thinking of looking in at the Rocky Mountains and bumping off a few bears. His manifest pippedness excited my compash, and I ventured a kindly word.
“I don’t suppose you know what au pied de la lettre means, Tuppy, but that’s how I don’t think you ought to take all that stuff Angela was saying just now too much.”
He seemed interested.
“What the devil,” he asked, “are you talking about?”
I saw that I should have to make myself clearer.
“Don’t take all that guff of hers too literally, old man. You know what girls are like.”
“I do,” he said, with another snort that came straight up from his insteps. “And I wish I’d never met one.”
“I mean to say, it’s obvious that she must have spotted you in those bushes and was simply talking to score off you. There you were, I mean, if you follow the psychology, and she saw you, and in that impulsive way girls have, she seized the opportunity of ribbing you a bit—just told you a few home truths, I mean to say.”
“Home truths?”
“That’s right.”
He snorted once more, causing me to feel rather like royalty receiving a twenty-one gun salute from the fleet. I can’t remember ever having met a better right-and-left-hand snorter.
“What do you mean, ‘home truths’? I’m not fat.”
“No, no.”
“And what’s wrong with the colour of my hair?”
“Quite in order, Tuppy, old man. The hair, I mean.”
“And I’m not a bit thin on the top…. What the dickens are you grinning about?”
“Not grinning. Just smiling slightly. I was conjuring up a sort of vision, if you know what I mean, of you as seen through Angela’s eyes. Fat in the middle and thin on the top. Rather funny.”