The Mating Season Read online

  At this point she seemed to become aware that we had skipped the customary pip-pippings, for she took time out to say how nice it was to see me again after all this time. I said how nice it was to see her again after all this time, and she asked me how I was, and I said I was fine. I asked her how she was, and she said she was fine. She inquired if I was still as big a chump as ever, and I satisfied her curiosity at this point.

  ‘I looked in yesterday, hoping to see you,’ she said, ‘but you were out.’

  ‘Yes, Jeeves told me.’

  ‘A small boy with red hair entertained me. He said he was your cousin.’

  ‘My Aunt Agatha’s son and, oddly enough, the apple of her eye.’

  ‘Why oddly enough?’

  ‘He’s the King of the Underworld. They call him The Shadow.’

  ‘I liked him. I gave him fifty of my autographs. He’s going to sell them to the boys at his school and expects to get sixpence apiece. He has long admired me on the screen, and we hit it off together like a couple of Yes-men. Catsmeat didn’t seem to take to him so much.’

  ‘He once put a drawing-pin on Catsmeat’s chair.’

  ‘Ah, that would account for the imperfect sympathy. Talking of Catsmeat, did he give you the Pat and Mike script?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got it. I was studying it in bed last night.’

  ‘Good. It was sporting of you to rally round.’

  I didn’t tell her that my rallying round had been primarily due to force majeure on the part of an aunt who brooks, if that’s the word, no back-chat. Instead, I asked who was to be my partner in the merry mélange of fun and topically, sustaining the minor but exacting role of Mike, and she said an artiste of the name of Dobbs.

  ‘Police Constable Dobbs, the local rozzer. And in this connexion, Bertie, there is one thing I want to impress upon you with all the emphasis at my disposal. When socking Constable Dobbs with your umbrella at the points where the script calls for it, don’t pull your punches. Let the blighter have it with every ounce of wrist and muscle. I want to see him come off that stage a mass of contusions.’

  It seemed to me, for I am pretty quick, that she had it in for this Dobbs. I said so, and she concurred, a quick frown marring the alabaster purity of her brow.

  ‘I have. I’m devoted to my poor old Uncle Sidney, and this uncouth bluebottle is a thorn in his flesh. He’s the village atheist.’

  ‘Oh, really? An atheist, is he? I never went in for that sort of thing much myself. In fact, at my private school I once won a prize for Scripture Knowledge.’

  ‘He annoys Uncle Sidney by popping out at him from side streets and making offensive cracks about Jonah and the Whale. This cross-talk act has been sent from heaven. In ordinary life, I mean, you get so few opportunities of socking cops with umbrellas, and if ever a cop needed the treatment, it is Ernest Dobbs. When he isn’t smirching Jonah and the Whale with his low sneers, he’s asking Uncle Sidney where Cain got his wife. You can’t say that sort of thing is pleasant for a sensitive vicar, so hew to the line, my poppet, and let the chips fall where they may’

  She had stirred the Wooster blood and aroused the Wooster chivalry. I assured her that by the time they struck up ‘God Save The King’ in the old village hall Constable Dobbs would know he had been in a fight, and she thanked me prettily.

  ‘I can see you’re going to be good, Bertie. And I don’t mind telling you your public is expecting big things. For days the whole village has been talking of nothing else but the coming visit of Bertram Wooster, the great London comic. You will be the high spot of the programme. And goodness knows it can do with a high spot or two.’

  ‘Who are the performers?’

  ‘Just the scourings of the neighbourhood . . . and Esmond Haddock. He’s singing a song.’

  The way she spoke that name, with a sort of frigid distaste as if it soiled her lips, told me that Catsmeat had not erred in saying that she was as sore as a gumboil about E. Haddock’s in-and-out running. Remembering that he had warned me to approach the subject tactfully, I picked my words with care.

  ‘Ah, yes. Esmond Haddock. Catsmeat was telling me about Esmond Haddock.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘Oh, this and that.’

  ‘Featuring me?’

  ‘Yes, to a certain extent featuring you.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Well, he seemed to hint, unless I misunderstood him, that the above Haddock hadn’t, as it were, done right by our Nell. According to Catsmeat, you and this modern Casanova were at one time holding hands, but after flitting and sipping for awhile he cast you aside like a worn-out glove and attached himself to Gertrude Winkworth. Quite incorrect, probably. I expect he got the whole story muddled up.’

  She came clean. I suppose a girl who has been going about for some weeks as sore as a gumboil, and with the heart cracked in two places gets to feel that maidenly pride is all very well but that what eases the soul is confession. And, of course, making me her confidant was not like spilling the inside stuff to a stranger. No doubt the thought crossed her mind that we had attended the same dancing class, and it may be that a vision of the child Wooster in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit and pimples rose before her eyes.

  ‘No, he didn’t get the story muddled up. We were holding hands. But Esmond didn’t cast me aside like a worn-out glove, I cast him aside like a worn-out glove. I told him I wouldn’t have any more to do with him unless he asserted himself and stopped crawling to those aunts of his.’

  ‘He crawls to his aunts, does he?’

  ‘Yes, the worm.’

  I could not pass this. Better men than Esmond Haddock have crawled to their aunts, and I said so, but she didn’t seem to be listening. Girls seldom do listen to me, I’ve noticed. Her face was drawn and her eyes had a misty look. The lips, I observed, were a-quiver.

  ‘I oughtn’t to call him a worm. It’s not his fault, really. They brought him up from the time he was six, oppressing him daily, and it’s difficult for him to cast off the shackles, I suppose. I’m very sorry for him. But there’s a limit. When it came to being scared to tell them we were engaged, I put my foot down. I said he’d got to tell them, and he turned green and said Oh, he couldn’t, and I said All right, then, let’s call the whole thing off. And I haven’t spoken to him since, except to ask him to sing this song at the concert. And the unfortunate part of it all is, Bertie, that I’m crazier about him than ever. Just to think of him makes me want to howl and chew the carpet.’

  At this point she buried her face in Sam Goldwyn’s coat, ostensibly by way of showing a proprietress’s affection, but really, I could see, being shrewd, in order to dry the starting tears. Personally, for the animal niffed to heaven, I would have preferred to use my cambric handkerchief, but girls will be girls.

  ‘Oh, well,’ she said, coming to the surface again.

  It was a bit difficult to know how to carry on. A ‘There, there, little woman’ might have gone well, or it might not. After thinking it over for a moment, I too-badded.

  ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ she said, stiffening the upper lip. ‘Just one of those things. When do you go down to Deverill?’

  ‘This evening.’

  ‘How do you feel about it?’

  ‘Not too good. A certain coolness in the feet. I’m never at my best in the society of aunts and, according to Jeeves, they assemble in gangs at Deverill Hall. There are five of them, he says.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It’s a lot.’

  ‘Five too many. I don’t think you’ll like them, Bertie. One’s deaf, one’s dotty, and they’re all bitches.’

  ‘You use strong words, child.’

  ‘Only because I can’t think of any stronger. They’re awful. They’ve lived all their lives at that mouldering old Hall, and they’re like something out of a three-volume novel. They judge everybody by the county standard. If you aren’t county, you don’t exist. I believe they swooned for weeks when their sister married Esmond�
��s father.’

  ‘Yes, Jeeves rather suggested that in their opinion he soiled the escutcheon.’

  ‘Nothing to the way I would have soiled it. Being in pix, I’m the scarlet woman.’

  ‘I’ve often wondered about that scarlet woman. Was she scarlet all over, or was it just that her face was red? However, that is not germane to the issue. So that’s how it is, is it?’

  ‘That’s how it is.’

  I was rather glad that at this juncture the hound Sam Gold-wyn made another of his sudden dives at my abdomen with the slogan ‘Back to Bertram’ on his lips, for it enabled me to bridge over an emotional moment. I was considerably concerned. What was to be done about it, I didn’t know, but there was no gainsaying that when it came to making matrimonial plans, the Pir-brights were not a lucky family.

  Corky seemed to be feeling this, too.

  ‘It would happen, wouldn’t it,’ she said, ‘that the only one of all the millions of men I’ve met that I’ve ever wanted to marry can’t marry me because his aunts won’t let him.’

  ‘It’s tough on you,’ I agreed.

  ‘And just as tough on poor old Catsmeat. You wouldn’t think, just seeing him around, that Catsmeat was the sort of man to break his heart over a girl, but he is. He’s full of hidden depths, if you really know him. Gertrude means simply everything to him. And I doubt if she will be able to hold out against a combination of Esmond and her mother and the aunts.’

  ‘Yes, he told me pressure was being applied.’

  ‘How did you think he seemed?’

  ‘Low-spirited.’

  ‘Yes, he’s taking it hard,’ said Corky.

  Her face clouded. Catsmeat has always been her ewe lamb, if you understand what I mean by ewe lamb. It was plain that she mourned for him in spirit, and no doubt at this point we should have settled down to a long talk about his spot of bother, examining it from every angle and trying to decide what was to be done for the best, had not the door opened and he blown in in person.

  ‘Hallo, Catsmeat,’ I said.

  ‘Hallo, Catsmeat, darling,’ said Corky.

  ‘Hallo,’ said Catsmeat.

  I looked at Corky. She looked at me. I rather think we pursed our lips and, speaking for myself, I know I raised my eyebrows. For the demeanour of this Pirbright was that of a man who has abandoned hope, and the voice in which he had said ‘Hallo’ had been to all intents and purposes a voice from the tomb. The whole set-up, in short, such as to occasion pity and terror in the bosoms of those who wished him well.

  He sank into a chair and closed his eyes, and for some moments remained motionless. Then, as if a bomb had suddenly exploded inside the bean, he shot up with a stifled cry, clasping his temples, and I began to see daylight. His deportment, so plainly that of a man aware that only prompt action in the nick of time has prevented his head splitting in half, told me that we had been mistaken in supposing that this living corpse had got that way purely through disappointed love. I touched the bell, and Jeeves appeared.

  ‘One of your special morning-afters, if you please, Jeeves.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  He shimmered out, and I subjected Catsmeat to a keen glance. I am told by those who know that there are six varieties of hangover – the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie, and his manner suggested that he had got them all.

  ‘So you were lathered last night?’ I said.

  ‘I was perhaps a mite polluted,’ he admitted.

  ‘Jeeves has gone for one of his revivers.’

  ‘Thank you, Bertie, thank you,’ said Catsmeat in a low, soft voice, and closed his eyes again.

  His intention obviously was to restore his tissues with a short nap, and personally I would have left him alone and let him go to it. But Corky was of sterner stuff. She took his head in both hands and shook it, causing him to shoot ceilingwards, this time with a cry so little stifled that it rang through the room like the death rattle of a hundred expiring hyenas. The natural consequence was that Sam Goldwyn began splitting the welkin, and with the view of taking him off the air I steered him to the door and bunged him out. I returned to find Corky ticking Catsmeat off in no uncertain manner.

  ‘You promised me faithfully you wouldn’t get pie-eyed, you poor fish,’ she was saying with sisterly vehemence. ‘What price the word of the Pirbrights?’

  ‘That’s all right “What price the word of the Pirbrights?”’ retorted Catsmeat with some spirit. ‘When I gave the word of the Pirbrights that I wouldn’t get pie-eyed, I didn’t know I should be dining with Gussie Fink-Nottle. Bertie will bear me out that it is not humanly possible to get through an evening alone with Gussie without large quantities of stimulants.’

  I nodded.

  ‘He’s quite right,’ I said. ‘Even at the peak of his form Gussie isn’t everybody’s dream-comrade, and last night I should imagine he was low-spirited.’

  ‘Very low-spirited,’ said Catsmeat. ‘In my early touring days I have sometimes arrived at Southport on a rainy Sunday morning. Gussie gave me that same sense of hopeless desolation. He sat there with his lower jaw drooping, goggling at me like a codfish –’

  ‘Gussie,’ I explained to Corky, ‘has had a lovers’ tiff with his betrothed.’

  ‘– until after a bit I saw that there was only one thing to be done, if I was to survive the ordeal. I told the waiter to bring a magnum and leave it at my elbow. After that, things seemed to get better.’

  ‘Gussie, of course, drank orange juice?’

  ‘Throughout,’ said Catsmeat with a slight shudder.

  I could see that even though he had made this manly, straight-forward statement, Corky was still threatening to do the heavy sister and heap reproaches on a man who was in no condition to receive them, for even the best of women cannot refrain from saying their say the morning after, so I hastened to continue the conversation on a neutral note.

  ‘Where did you dine?’

  ‘At the Dorchester.’

  ‘Go anywhere after dinner?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Oh, hither and thither. East Dulwich, Ponder’s End, Lime-house –’

  ‘Why Limehouse?’

  ‘Well, I had always wanted to see it, and I may have had some idea of comparing its blues with mine. As to East Dulwich and Ponder’s End, I am not sure. Perhaps I heard someone recommend them, or possibly I just felt that the thing to do was to get about and see fresh faces. I had chartered a taxi for the evening and we roamed around, taking in the sights. Eventually we fetched up in Trafalgar Square.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘About five in the morning. Have you ever been in Trafalgar Square at five in the morning? Very picturesque, that fountain in the first early light of the dawn. It was as we stood on its brink with the sun just beginning to gild the house-tops that I got an idea which I can now see, though it seemed a good one at the time, was a mistake.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘It struck me as a possibility that there might be newts in the fountain, and knowing how keen Gussie is on newts I advised him to wade in and hunt around.’

  ‘With all his clothes on?’

  ‘Yes, he had his clothes on. I remember noticing.’

  ‘But you can’t go wading in the Trafalgar Square fountain with all your clothes on.’

  ‘Yes, you can. Gussie did. My recollection of the thing is a trifle blurred, but I seem to recall that he took a bit of persuading. Yes, I’ve got it now,’ said Catsmeat, brightening. ‘I told him to wade, and he wouldn’t wade, and I said if he didn’t wade I would bean him with my magnum. So he waded.’

  ‘You still had the magnum?’

  ‘This was another one, which we had picked up in Lime-house.’

  ‘And Gussie waded?’

  ‘Yes, Gussie waded.’

  ‘I wonder he wasn’t pinched.’

  ‘He was,’ said Catsmeat. ‘A cop came along and
gaffed him, and this morning he was given fourteen days without the option at Bosher Street police court.’

  The door opened. Sam Goldwyn came bounding in and flung himself on my chest as if we had been a couple of lovers meeting at journey’s end.

  He was followed by Jeeves, bearing a salver with a glass on it containing one of his dynamite specials.

  CHAPTER 4

  When I was a piefaced lad of some twelve summers, doing my stretch at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, the private school conducted by the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn, I remember hearing the Rev. Aubrey give the late Sir Philip Sidney a big build-up because, when wounded at the battle of somewhere and offered a quick one by a companion in arms, he told the chap who was setting them up to leave him out ofthat round and slip his spot to a nearby stretcher-case, whose need was greater than his. This spirit of selfless sacrifice, said the Rev. Aubrey, was what he would like to see in you boys – particularly you, Wooster, and how many times have I told you not to gape at me in that halfwitted way? Close your mouth, boy, and sit up.

  Well, if he had been one of our little circle, he would have seen it now. My primary impulse was to charge across and grab that glass from that salver and lower it at a gulp, for if ever I needed a bracer, it was then. But I stayed my hand. Even in that dreadful moment I was able to tell myself that Catsmeat’s need was greater than mine. I stood back, shimmying in every limb, and he got the juice and drained it, and after going through the motions of a man struck by lightning, always the immediate reaction to these pick-me-ups of Jeeves’s, said ‘Ha!’ and looked a lot better.

  I passed a fevered hand across the brow.

  ‘Jeeves!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Do you know what?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Gussie Fink-Nottle is in stir.’

  ‘Indeed, sir?’

  I passed another hand across the brow, and the blood pressure rose several notches. I ought, I suppose, to have got it into my nut by this time that no news item, however front page, is going to make Jeeves roll his eyes and leap about, but that ‘Indeed, sir?’ stuff of his never fails to get the Wooster goat.

  ‘Don’t say “Indeed, sir?” I repeat. Wading in the Trafalgar Square fountain at five ack emma this morning, Augustus Fink-Nottle was apprehended by the police and is in the coop for fourteen days. And he’s due at Deverill Hall this evening.’