More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Tell him my future is in his hands, and that, if the wedding bells ring out, he can rely on me, even unto half my kingdom. Well, call it ten quid.
I’ve always said, and I always shall say, that for sheer brains, Jeeves, you stand alone. All the other great thinkers of the age are simply in the crowd, watching you go by.’ ‘Thank you very much, sir. I endeavour to give satisfaction.’
But have you ever noticed a rummy thing about life? I mean the way something always comes along to give it you in the neck at the very moment when you’re feeling most braced about things in general.
I got a headache early in the proceedings which started at the sole of my feet and got worse all the way up.
I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.
I looked at the poor fish anxiously. I knew that he was always falling in love with someone, but it didn’t seem possible that even he could have fallen in love with Honoria Glossop.
‘I worship her, Bertie! I worship the very ground she treads on!’ continued the patient, in a loud, penetrating voice.
‘Have you told her?’ ‘No. I haven’t the nerve. But we walk together in the garden most evenings, and it sometimes seems to me that there is a look in her eyes.’ ‘I know that look. Like a sergeant-major.’ ‘Nothing of the kind! Like a tender goddess.’ ‘Half a second, old thing,’ I said. ‘Are you sure we’re talking about the same girl? The one I mean is Honoria. Perhaps there’s a younger sister or something I’ve not heard of?
The great point is that she is strong, self-reliant and sensible, and will counterbalance the deficiencies and weaknesses of your character. She has met you; and, while there is naturally much in you of which she disapproves, she does not dislike you.
She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.
It seems rummy that water should be so much wetter when you go into it with your clothes on than when you’re just bathing, but take it from me that it is.
I mean to say, the whole essence of a rescue, if you know what I mean, is that the party of the second part shall keep fairly still and in one spot. If he starts swimming off on his own account and can obviously give you at least forty yards in the hundred, where are you? The whole thing falls through.
I didn’t laugh, but I distinctly heard a couple of my floating ribs part from their moorings under the strain.
I know that London is a biggish city, but, believe me, it isn’t half big enough for any fellow to live in with Aunt Agatha when she’s after him with the old hatchet.
‘Good Lord, Jeeves! You don’t mean to say the day starts earlier than this?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, you know, don’t you know!’ I said.
‘It isn’t a question of money. But – of course, you’ve never met my Aunt Agatha, so it’s rather hard to explain. But she’s a sort of human vampire-bat, and she’ll make things most fearfully unpleasant for me when I go back to England. She’s the kind of woman who comes and rags you before breakfast, don’t you know.’
I’m down to zero. Ever since he married he’s been launching out in every direction and economizing on me. I suppose that peerage cost the old devil the deuce of a sum. Even baronetcies have gone up frightfully nowadays, I’m told.
Some things will never change
I’ve found, as a general rule in life, that the things you think are going to be the scaliest nearly always turn out not so bad after all; but it wasn’t that way with Bingo’s tea-party.
‘I suppose what it amounts to, Jeeves, is that, when young Bingo really takes his coat off and starts in, there is no power of God or man that can prevent him making a chump of himself.’
Bingo acted with a good deal of decision and character. To grab Comrade Butt by the neck and try to twist his head off was with him the work of a moment.
I read the letter again. It was from Eustace. Claude and Eustace are twins, and more or less generally admitted to be the curse of the human race.
‘Has he got the wind up?’ ‘Somewhat vertically, sir, to judge by his voice.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Then we will form a syndicate and bust the Ring. I supply the money, you supply the brains, and Bingo – what do you supply, Bingo?’
Jeeves appeared perturbed. He allowed his left eyebrow to flicker upwards in a concerned sort of manner.
You know, with the most charitable feelings towards him, there are moments when you can’t help thinking that young Bingo ought to be in some sort of a home.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I can sneak out through the cellar and climb over the wall at the back. They can’t intimidate me!’
As a rule, you see, I’m not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps and Uncle James’s letter about Cousin Mabel’s peculiar behaviour is being shot round the family circle (‘Please read this carefully and send it on to Jane’), the clan has a tendency to ignore me.
It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.
A man after my own heart is Bertie Wooster's Uncle George!
‘It is the eel’s eyebrows,’ agreed young Bingo. ‘I believe that old boy over by the window has been dead three days, but I don’t like to mention it to anyone.’
‘Warm-hearted! I should think he has to wear asbestos vests.
