‘Eh? Who?’ I said. It should have been ‘whom’, I suppose, but that didn’t occur to me at the time. ‘Madeline, of course.’
‘Oh, Madeline?’
‘As I told you, I have always loved her, and her happiness is very dear to me. It is everything to me. To give her a moment’s pleasure I would cut myself in pieces.’
I couldn’t follow him there, but before I could go into the question of whether girls enjoy seeing people cut themselves in pieces he had resumed.
‘It was a great shock to me when she became engaged to this man Fink-Nottle, but I accepted the situation because I thought that that was where her happiness lay. Though stunned, I kept silent.’
‘Very white.’
‘I said nothing that would give her a suspicion of how I felt.’
‘Very pukka.’
‘It was enough for me that she should be happy. Nothing else mattered. But when Fink-Nottle turns out to be a libertine -‘
‘Who, Gussie?’ I said, surprised. ‘The last chap I’d have attached such a label to. Pure as the driven s., I’d have thought, if not purer. What makes you think Gussie’s a libertine?’
‘The fact that less than ten minutes ago I saw him kissing the cook,’ said Spode through the teeth which I’m pretty sure he was grinding, and he dived out of the doof and was gone.
How long I remained motionless, like a ventriloquist’s dummy whose ventriloquist has gone off to the local and left it sitting, I cannot say. Probably not so very long, for when life returned to the rigid limbs and I legged it for the open spaces to try to find Gussie and warn him of this V-shaped depression which was coming his way, Spode was still in sight. He was disappearing in a nor’-nor’-easterly direction, so, not wanting to hobnob with him again while he was in this what you might call difficult mood, I pushed off sou’-sou’-west, and found that I couldn’t have set my course more shrewdly. There was a sort of yew alley or rhododendron walk or some such thing confronting me, and as I entered it I saw Gussie. He was standing in a kind of trance, and his fatheadedness in standing when he ought to have been running like a rabbit smote me like a blow and lent an extra emphasis to the ‘Hoy!’ with which I accosted him.
He turned, and as I approached him I noted that he seemed even more braced than when last seen. The eyes behind the horn-rimmed spectacles gleamed with a brighter light, and a smile wreathed his lips. He looked like a fish that’s just learned that its rich uncle in Australia has pegged out and left it a packet.
‘Ah, Bertie,’ he said, ‘we decided to go for a walk, not a row. We thought it might be a little chilly on the water. What a beautiful evening, Bertie, is it not?’
I couldn’t see eye to eye with him there.
‘It strikes you as that, does it? It doesn’t me.’
He seemed surprised.
‘In what respect do you find it not up to sample?’
Til tell you in what respect I find it not up to sample. What’s all this I hear about you and Emerald Stoker? Did you kiss her?’
The Soul’s Awakening expression on his face became intensified. Before my revolted eyes Augustus Fink-Nottle definitely smirked.
‘Yes, Bertie, I did, and I’ll do it again if it’s the last thing I do. What a girl, Bertie! So kind, so sympathetic. She’s my idea of a thoroughly womanly woman, and you don’t see many of them around these days. I hadn’t time when I was in your room to tell you about what happened at the school treat.’
‘Jeeves told me. He said Bartholomew bit you.’
‘And how right he was. The bounder bit me to the bone. And do you know what Emerald Stoker did? Not only did she coo over me like a mother comforting a favourite child, but she bathed and bandaged my lacerated leg. She was a ministering angel, the nearest thing to Florence Nightingale you could hope to find. It was shortly after she had done the swabbing and bandaging that I kissed her.’