P G Wodehouse - Much Obliged, Jeeves

I gave the blighter a distant look. Knowing that this blot on the species resided in Market Snodsbury, I had foreseen that I might run into him sooner or later, so I was not surprised to see him. But I certainly wasn't pleased. The last thing I wanted in the delicate state to which the McCorkadale had reduced me was conversation with a man who set cottages on fire and chased the hand that fed him hither and thither with a carving knife.

He was as unduly intimate, forward, bold, intrusive and deficient in due respect as he had been at the Junior Ganymede. He gave my back a cordial slap and would, I think, have prodded me in the ribs if it had occurred to him. You wouldn't have thought that carving knives had ever come between us.

'And what are you doing in these parts, cocky?' he asked.

I said I was visiting my aunt Mrs. Travers, who had a house in the vicinity, and he said he knew the place, though he had never met the old geezer to whom I referred.

'I've seen her around. Red-faced old girl, isn't she?'

'Fairly vermilion.'

'High blood pressure, probably.'

'Or caused by going in a lot for hunting. It chaps the cheeks.'

'Different from a barmaid. She cheeks the chaps.'

If he had supposed that his crude humour would get so much as a simper out of me, he was disappointed. I preserved the cold aloofness of a Wednesday matinee audience, and he proceeded.

'Yes, that might be it. She looks a sport. Making a long stay?'

'I don't know,' I said, for the length of my visits to the old ancestor is always uncertain. So much depends on whether she throws me out or not.

'Actually I'm here to canvass for the Conservative candidate. He's a pal of mine.'

He whistled sharply. He had been looking repulsive and cheerful; he now looked repulsive and grave. Seeming to realize that he had omitted a social gesture, he prodded me in the ribs.

'You're wasting your time, Wooster, old man,' he said. 'He hasn't an earthly.'

'No?' I quavered. It was simply one man's opinion, of course, but the earnestness with which he had spoken was unquestionably impressive. 'What makes you think that?'

'Never you mind what makes me think it. Take my word for it. If you're sensible, you'll phone your bookie and have a big bet on McCorkadale. You'll never regret it. You'll come to me later and thank me for the tip with tears in your -'

At some point in this formal interchange of thoughts by spoken word, as Jeeves's Dictionary Of Synonyms puts it, he must have pressed the bell, for at this moment the door opened and my old buddy the maid appeared. Quickly adding the word 'eyes', he turned to her.

'Mrs. McCorkadale in, dear?' he asked, and having been responded to in the affirmative he left me, and I headed for home. I ought, of course, to have carried on along River Row, taking the odd numbers while Jeeves attended to the even, but I didn't feel in the vein. I was uneasy. You might say, if you happened to know the word, that the prognostications of a human wart like Bingley deserved little credence, but he had spoken with such conviction, so like someone who has heard something, that I couldn't pass them off with a light laugh.

Brooding tensely, I reached the old homestead and found the ancestor lying on a chaise longue, doing the Observer crossword puzzle.

CHAPTER Nine

There was a time when this worthy housewife, tackling the Observer crossword puzzle, would snort and tear her hair and fill the air with strange oaths picked up from cronies on the hunting field, but consistent inability to solve more than about an eighth of the clues has brought a sort of dull resignation and today she merely sits and stares at it, knowing that however much she licks the end of her pencil little or no business will result.

As I came in, I heard her mutter, soliloquising like someone in Shakespeare, 'Measured tread of saint round St. Paul's, for God's sake', seeming to indicate that she had come up against a hot one, and I think it was a relief to her to become aware that her favourite nephew was at her side and that she could conscientiously abandon her distasteful task, for she looked up and greeted me cheerily. She wears tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles for reading which make her look like a fish in an aquarium. She peered at me through these.

'Hullo, my bounding Bertie.'

'Good morning, old ancestor.'

'Up already?'

'I have been up some time.'

'Then why aren't you out canvassing? And why are you looking like something the cat brought in?'

I winced. I had not intended to disclose the recent past, but with an aunt's perception she had somehow spotted that in some manner I had passed through the furnace and she would go on probing and questioning till I came clean. Any capable aunt can give Scotland Yard inspectors strokes and bisques in the matter of interrogating a suspect, and I knew that all attempts at concealment would be fruitless. Or is it bootless? I would have to check with Jeeves.

'I am looking like something the cat brought in because I am feeling like something the c b in,' I said.