‘Highly mysterious, sir.’
‘You said it. I seek in vain for a solution. When I gave her lunch yesterday, she told me she was off on the four o’clock train to go and stay at Totleigh Towers, and the point I want to drive home is that she hasn’t arrived. You remember the day I lunched at the Ritz?’
‘Yes, sir. You were wearing an Alpine hat.’
‘There is no need to dwell on the Alpine hat, Jeeves.’
‘No, sir.’
‘If you really want to know, several fellows at the Drones asked me where I had got it.’
‘No doubt with a view to avoiding your hatter, sir.’
I saw that nothing was to be gained by bandying words. I turned the conversation to a pleasanter and less controversial subject.
‘Well, Jeeves, you’ll be glad to hear that everything’s all right.’
‘Sir?’
‘About that lute we were speaking of. No rift. Sound as a bell. I have it straight from the horse’s mouth that Miss Bassett and Gussie are sweethearts still. The relief is stupendous.’
I hadn’t expected him to clap his hands and leap about, because of course he never does, but I wasn’t prepared for the way he took this bit of hot news. He failed altogether to string along with my jocund mood.
‘I fear, sir, that you are too sanguine. Miss Bassett’s attitude may well be such as you have described, but on Mr. Fink-Nottle’s side, I am sorry to say there exists no little dissatisfaction and resentment.’
The smile which had been splitting my face faded. It’s never easy to translate what Jeeves says into basic English, but I had been able to grab this one off the bat, and what I believe the French call a frisson went through me like a dose of salts.
‘You mean she’s a sweetheart still, but he isn’t?’
‘Precisely, sir. I encountered Mr. Fink-Nottle in the stable yard as I was putting away the car, and he confided his troubles to me. His story occasioned me grave uneasiness.’
Another frisson passed through my frame. I had the unpleasant feeling you get sometimes that centipedes in large numbers are sauntering up and down your spinal column. I feared the worst.
‘But what’s happened?’ I faltered, if faltered’s the word.
‘I regret to inform you, sir, that Miss Bassett has insisted on Mr. Fink-Nottle adopting a vegetarian diet. His mood is understandably disgruntled and rebellious.’
I tottered. In my darkest hour I had never anticipated anything as bad as this. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, because he’s small and shrimplike and never puts on weight, but Gussie loves food. Watching him tucking into his rations at the Drones, a tapeworm would raise its hat respectfully, knowing that it was in the presence of a master. Cut him off, therefore, from the roasts and boileds and particularly from cold steak and kidney pie, a dish of which he is inordinately fond, and you turned him into something fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils, as the fellow said – the sort of chap who would break an engagement as soon as look at you. At the moment of my entry I had been about to light a cigarette, and now the lighter fell from my nerveless hand.
‘She’s made him become a vegetarian’
‘So Mr. Fink-Nottle informed me, sir.’
‘No chops?’
‘No, sir.’
‘No steaks?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Just spinach and similar garbage?’
‘So I gather, sir.’
‘But why?’
‘I understand that Miss Bassett has recently been reading the life of the poet Shelley, sir, and has become converted to his view that the consumption of flesh foods is unspiritual. The poet Shelley held strong opinions on this subject.’
I picked up the lighter in a sort of trance. I was aware that Madeline B. was as potty as they come in the matter of stars and rabbits and what happened when fairies blew their wee noses, but I had never dreamed that her goofiness would carry her to such lengths as this. But as the picture rose before my eyes of Gussie at the dinner table picking with clouded brow at what had unquestionably looked like spinach, I knew that his story must be true. No wonder Gussie in agony of spirit had said that Madeline made him sick. Just so might a python at a Zoo have spoken of its keeper, had the latter suddenly started feeding it cheese straws in lieu of the daily rabbit. ‘But this is frightful, Jeeves!’