Carry On, Jeeves

by P.G. Wodehouse

It was one of those still evenings you get in the summer, when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away.

I understand they deliberately teach these dashed Boy Scouts to cultivate their powers of observation and deduction and what not. Devilish thoughtless and inconsiderate of them, I call it. Look at the trouble it causes.

‘Oh, Jeeves,’ I said; ‘about that check suit.’ ‘Yes, sir?’ ‘Is it really a frost?’ ‘A trifle too bizarre, sir, in my opinion.’ ‘But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.’ ‘Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.’ ‘He’s supposed to be one of the best men in London.’ ‘I am saying nothing against his moral character, sir.’

I made up my mind. ‘All right, Jeeves,’ I said. ‘You know! Give the bally thing away to somebody!’ He looked down at me like a father gazing tenderly at the wayward child. ‘Thank you, sir. I gave it to the under-gardener last night. A little more tea, sir?’

I’M NOT ABSOLUTELY certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare – or, if not, it’s some equally brainy bird – who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.

She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season.

‘Last year,’ said Biffy, ‘I buzzed over to Canada to do a bit of salmon fishing.’ I ordered another. If this was going to be a fish-story, I needed stimulants. ‘On the liner going to New York I met a girl.’ Biffy made a sort of curious gulping noise not unlike a bulldog trying to swallow half a cutlet in a hurry so as to be ready for the other half. ‘Bertie, old man, I can’t describe her. I simply can’t describe her.’ This was all to the good.

I don’t know if you have ever experienced the sensation of seeing the announcement of the engagement of a pal of yours to a girl whom you were only saved from marrying yourself by the skin of your teeth. It induces a sort of – well, it’s difficult to describe it exactly; but I should imagine a fellow would feel much the same if he happened to be strolling through the jungle with a boyhood chum and met a tigress or a jaguar, or what not, and managed to shin up a tree and looked down and saw the friend of his youth vanishing into the undergrowth in the animal’s slavering jaws.

Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to have to face over the breakfast table.

“Hey?” says deaf chap. “Is this Wembley?” says chap. “No, Thursday,” says deaf chap. Ha, ha, I mean, what?’ The merry laughter froze on my lips. Sir Roderick sort of just waggled an eyebrow in my direction and I saw that it was back to the basket for Bertram. I never met a man who had such a knack of making a fellow feel like a waste-product.

Sippy had described them as England’s premier warts, and it looked to me as if he might be about right. Professor Pringle was a thinnish, baldish, dyspeptic-lookingish cove with an eye like a haddock, while Mrs Pringle’s aspect was that of one who had had bad news round about the year 1900 and never really got over it. And I was just staggering under the impact of these two when I was introduced to a couple of ancient females with shawls all over them. ‘No doubt you remember my mother?’ said Professor Pringle mournfully, indicating Exhibit A. ‘Oh – ah!’ I said, achieving a bit of a beam. ‘And my aunt,’ sighed the Prof, as if things were getting worse and worse.

I give you my honest word that if I had had the foggiest notion of what I was letting myself in for, not even a nephew’s devotion would have kept me from giving her the raspberry. A deuce of a job it had been, taxing the physique to the utmost. I don’t wonder now that all these author blokes have bald heads and faces like birds who have suffered.

Aunt Dahlia was chatting with Rosie in a corner, while Uncle Thomas, standing by the mantelpiece with Bingo, sucked down a cocktail in a frowning, suspicious sort of manner, rather like a chappie having a short snort before dining with the Borgias: as if he were saying to himself that, even if this particular cocktail wasn’t poisoned, he was bound to cop it later on.

Yet now he and Uncle Thomas were a pair. He looked haggard and careworn, like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to shove cyanide in the consommé, and the dinner-gong due any moment.