Aunts Aren't Gentlemen: Read online

  'But he's here,' I said.

  'Here? In Maiden Eggesford?'

  'Right plump spang in Maiden Eggesford.'

  'Are you being funny, Bertie?'

  'Of course I'm not being funny. If I were being funny, I'd have had you in convulsions from the outset. I tell you he's here. I met him this afternoon. He was watching a Clarkson's warbler. Arising from which, you don't happen to have any data relating to Clarkson, do you? I've been wondering who he was and how he got a warbler.'

  She ignored my observation. This generally happens with me. Show me a woman, I sometimes say, and I will show you someone who is going to ignore my observations.

  Looking at her closely, I noted a change in her aspect. I have said that her face had hardened as the result of going about the place socking policemen, but now it had got all soft. And while her two eyes didn't actually start from their spheres, they widened to about the size of regulation golf balls, and a tender smile lit up her map. She said, 'Well, strike me pink!' or words to that effect.

  'So he has come! He has followed me!' She spoke as if it had given her no end of a kick that he had done this. Apparently it wasn't being followed that she objected to; it just had to be the right chap. 'Like some knight in shining armour riding up on his white horse.'

  Here would have been a chance to give Jeeves's friend who came out of the West a plug by saying that Orlo reminded me of him, but I had to give it a miss because I couldn't remember the fellow's name.

  'I wonder how he managed to get away from his job,' I said.

  'He was on his annual two weeks' holiday. That is how he came to be at that protest march. He and I were heading the procession.'

  'I know. I was watching from afar.'

  'I have not found out yet what happened to him that day. After he knocked the policeman down he suddenly disappeared.'

  'Always the best thing to do if you knock a policeman down. He jumped into my car and I drove him to safety.'

  'Oh, I see.'

  I must say I thought she might have put it a bit stronger. One does not desire thanks for these little kindnesses one does here and there, but considering that on his behalf I had interfered with the police in the execution of their duty, if that's how the script reads, thereby rendering myself liable to a sizeable sojourn in chokey, a little enthusiasm would not have been amiss. Nothing to be done about it except give her a reproachful look. I did this. It made no impression whatever, and she proceeded.

  'Is he staying at the Goose and Grasshopper?'

  'I couldn't say,' I said, and if I spoke with a touch of what-d'you- call-it in my voice, who can blame me? 'When I met him, we talked mostly about my interior organs.'

  'What's wrong with your interior organs?'

  'Nothing so far, but he thought there might be something later on.'

  'He has a wonderfully sympathetic nature.'

  'Yes, hasn't he.'

  'Did he recommend anything that would be good for you?'

  'As a matter of fact he did.'

  'How like him!' She was silent for a while, no doubt pondering on all Orlo's lovable qualities, many of which I had missed. At length she spoke.

  'He must be at the Goose and Grasshopper. It's the only decent inn in the place. Go there and tell him to meet me here at three o'clock tomorrow afternoon.'

  'Here?'

  'Yes.'

  'You mean at this cottage?'

  'Why not?'

  'I thought you might want to see him alone.'

  'Oh, that's all right. You can go for a walk.'

  Once more I sent up a silent vote of thanks to my guardian angel for having fixed it that this proud beauty should not become Mrs Bertram Wooster. Her cool assumption that she had only got to state her wishes and all and sundry would jump to fulfil them gave me the pip. So stung was the Wooster pride by the thought of being slung out at her bidding from my personal cottage that it is not too much to say that my blood boiled, and I would probably have said something biting like 'Oh, yes?', only I felt that a pieux chevalier, which I always aim to be, ought not to crush the gentler sex beneath the iron heel, no matter what the provocation.

  So I changed it to 'Right-ho', and went off to the Goose and Grasshopper to give Orlo the low-down.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I found him in the private bar having a gin and ginger ale. His face, never much to write home about, was rendered even less of a feast for the eye by a dark scowl. His spirits were plainly at their lowest ebb, as so often happens when Sundered Heart A is feeling that the odds against his clicking with Sundered Heart B cannot be quoted at better than a hundred to eight.

  Of course he may have been brooding because he had just heard that a pal of his in Moscow had been liquidated that morning, or he had murdered a capitalist and couldn't think of a way of getting rid of the body, but I preferred to attribute his malaise to frustrated love, and I couldn't help feeling a pang of pity for him.

  He looked at me as I entered in a manner which made me realize how little chance there was of our exchanging presents at Christmas, and I remember thinking what a lot of him there was and all of it anti-Wooster. I had often felt the same about Spode. It seemed that there was something about me that aroused the baser passions in men who were eight feet tall and six across. I took this up with Jeeves once, and he agreed that it was singular.

  His eye as I approached was what I have heard described as lacklustre. Whatever it was that was causing this V-shaped depression, seeing me had not brought the sunshine into his life. His demeanour was that of any member of a Wednesday matinée audience or, let us say, a dead fish on a fishmonger's slab. Nor did he brighten when I had delivered my message. After I had done so there was a long silence, broken only by the gurgling of ginger ale as it slid down his throat.

  Eventually he spoke, his voice rather like that of a living corpse in one of those horror films where the fellow takes the lid off the tomb in the vault beneath the ruined chapel and blowed if the occupant doesn't start a conversation with him.

  'I don't understand this.'

  'What don't you understand?' I said, adding 'Comrade', for there is never anything lost by being civil. 'Any assistance I can give in the way of solving any little problems you may have will be freely given. I am only here to help.'

  The amount of sunny charm I had put into these words ought to have melted the reserve of a brass monkey, but they got absolutely nowhere with him. He continued to eye me in an Aunt Agathaesque manner.

  'It seems odd, if as you say you are the merest acquaintance, that she should be paying you clandestine visits at your cottage. Taken in conjunction with your surreptitious appearance at Eggesford Court, it cannot but invite suspicion.'

  When someone talks like that, using words like 'clandestine' and 'surreptitious' and saying that something cannot but invite suspicion, the prudent man watches his step. It was a great relief to me that I had a watertight explanation. I gave it with a winning frankness which I felt could scarcely fail to bring home the bacon.

  'My appearance at Eggesford Court wasn't surreptitious. I was there because I had come to the wrong house. And Miss Cook's visit to my cottage had to be clandestine because her father watches her as closely as the paper on the wall. And she visited my cottage because there was no other way of getting in touch with you. She didn't know you were in Maiden Eggesford, and she thought if you wrote her a letter that Pop would intercept it, he being a man who would intercept a daughter's letter at the drop of a hat.'

  It sounded absolutely copper-bottomed to me, but he went on giving me the eye.

  'All the same,' he said, 'I find it curious that she should have confided in you. It suggests an intimacy.'

  'Oh, I wouldn't call it that. Girls I hardly know confide in me. They look upon me as a father figure.'

  'Father figure my foot. Any girl who takes you for a father figure ought to have her head examined.'

  'Well, let us say a brother figure. They know their secrets are safe with good old Bert
ie.'

  'I'm not so sure you are good old Bertie. More like a snake who goes about the place robbing men of the women they love, if you ask me.'

  'Certainly not,' I protested, learning for the first time that this was what snakes did.

  'Well, it looks fishy to me,' he said. Then to my relief he changed the subject. 'Do you know a man named Spofforth?'

  I said No, I didn't think so.

  'P. B. Spofforth. Big fellow with a clipped moustache.'

  'No, I've never met him.'

  'And you won't for some time. He's in hospital.'

  'Too bad. What sent him there?'

  'I did. He kissed the woman I love at the annual picnic of the Slade Social and Outing Club. Have you ever kissed the woman I love, Wooster?'

  'Good Lord, no.'

  'Be careful not to. Did she make a long stay at your cottage?'

  'No, very short. In and out like a flash, Just had time to say you were like a knight in shining armour riding up on a white horse and to tell me to tell you to show up at my address tomorrow at three on the dot, and she was off.'

  This seemed to soothe him. He went on brooding but now not so much like Jack the Ripper getting up steam for his next murder. He was not, however, quite satisfied.

  'I don't call it much of an idea meeting at your cottage,' he said.

  'Why not?'

  'We shall have you underfoot all the time.'

  'Oh, that's all right, Comrade. I shall be going for a walk.'

  'Ah,' he said, brightening visibly. 'Going for a walk, eh? Just the thing to do. Capital exercise. Bring the roses to your cheeks. Take your time. Don't hurry back. They tell me there are beauty spots around here well worth seeing.'

  And on this cordial note we parted, he to go to the bar for another gin and ginger, I to go back and tell Vanessa that the pourparlers had been completed and that he would be at the starting post at three pip-emma on the morrow.

  'How did he look?' she asked, all eagerness.

  It was a little difficult to answer this, because he had looked like a small-time gangster with a painful gum-boil, but I threw together a tactful word or two which, as Jeeves would say, gave satisfaction, and she buzzed off.

  Jeeves came shimmering in shortly after she had left. He seemed a shade perturbed.

  'We were interrupted in our recent conversation, sir.'

  'We were, Jeeves, and I am glad to say that I no longer need your advice. During your absence the situation has become clarified. A meeting has been arranged and will shortly take place, in fact here at this cottage at three o'clock tomorrow afternoon. I, not wishing to intrude, shall be going for a walk.'

  'Extremely gratifying, sir,' he said, and I agreed with him that he had tetigisti-ed the rem acu.

  CHAPTER NINE

  At five minutes to three on the following afternoon I had girded my loins and was preparing to iris out, when Vanessa Cook arrived. The sight of me appeared to displease her. She frowned as if I were something that didn't smell just right, and said:

  'Haven't you gone yet?'

  I considered this a shade brusque, even for a proud beauty, but, true to my resolve to be preux, I responded suavely:

  'Just going.'

  'Well, go,' she said, and I went.

  The street outside was as usual, offering little entertainment to the sightseer. A few centenarians were dotted about, exchanging reminiscences of the Boer War, and the eye detected a dog which had interested itself in something it had found in the gutter, but otherwise it was empty. I walked down it and had a look at the Jubilee watering-trough and was walking back on the other side, thinking how pleased E. J. Murgatroyd would be if he could see me, when I caught sight of the shop which acted as a post office and remembered that Jeeves had told me that in addition to selling stamps, picture postcards, socks, boots, overalls, pink sweets, yellow sweets, string, cigarettes and stationery it ran a small lending library.

  I went in. I had come away rather short of reading matter, and it never does to neglect one's intellectual side.

  Like all village lending libraries, this one had not bothered much about keeping itself up to date, and I was hesitating between By Order Of The Czar and The Mystery Of A Hansom Cab, which seemed the best bets, when the door opened to Angelica Briscoe, the personable wench I had met at lunch. The vicar's daughter, if you remember.

  Her behaviour on seeing me was peculiar. She suddenly became all conspiratorial, as if she had been a Nihilist in By Order Of The Czar meeting another Nihilist. I had not yet read that opus, but I assumed that it was full of Nihilists who were always meeting other Nihilists and plotting dark plots with them. She clutched my arm and lowering her voice to a sinister whisper said:

  'Has he brought it yet?'

  I missed her drift by a wide margin. I like to think of myself as a polished man of the world who can kid back and forth with a pretty girl as well as the next chap, but I must confess that my only response to this query was a silent goggle. It struck me as unusual that a vicar's daughter should be a member of a secret society, but I could think of no other explanation for her words. They had sounded like a secret code, the sort of thing you haven't a hope of making sense of if you aren't a unit of The Uncanny Seven in good standing with all your dues paid up.

  Eventually I found speech. Not much of it, but some.

  'Eh?' I said.

  She seemed to feel that her question had been answered. Her manner changed completely. She dropped the By Order Of The Czar stuff and became the nice girl who in all probability played the organ in her father's church.

  'I see he hasn't. But of course one has to give him time for a job like that.'

  'Like what?'

  'I can't explain. Here's Father.'

  And the Reverend Briscoe ambled in, his purpose, as it appeared immediately, to purchase half a pound of the pink sweets and half a pound of the yellow as a present for the more deserving of his choir boys. His presence choked the personable wench off from further revelations, and the only conversation that followed had to do with the weather, the condition of the church roof and how-well-your-aunt-is looking-it-was-such-a-pleasure-seeing-her-again. And after a few desultory exchanges I left them and resumed my walk.

  It is always difficult to estimate the time two sundered hearts, unexpectedly reunited, will require for picking up the threads. To be on the safe side I gave Orlo and Vanessa about an hour and a half, and when I returned to the cottage I found I had called my shots correctly. Both had legged it.

  I was still much perplexed by that utterance of Angelica Briscoe's. The more I brooded on it, the more cryptic, if that's the word, it became. 'Has he brought it yet?', I mean to say. Has who? Brought what? I called Jeeves in, to see what he made of it.

  'Tell me, Jeeves,' I said. 'Suppose you were in a shop taking By Order Of The Czar out of the lending library and a clergyman's daughter came in and without so much as a preliminary "Hullo, there", said to you, "Has he brought it yet?", what interpretation would you place on those words?'

  He pondered, this way and that dividing the swift mind, as I have heard him put it.

  ' "Has he brought it yet", sir?'

  'Just that.'

  'I should reach the conclusion that the lady was expecting a male acquaintance to have arrived or to be arriving shortly bearing some unidentified object.'

  'Exactly what I thought. What unidentified object we shall presumably learn in God's good time.'

  'No doubt, sir.'

  'We must wait patiently till all is revealed.'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'In the meantime, pigeon-holing that for the moment, did Miss Cook and Mr Porter have their conference all right?'

  'Yes, sir, they conversed for some time.'

  'In low, throbbing voices?'

  'No, sir, the voices of both lady and gentleman became noticeably raised.'

  'Odd. I thought lovers generally whispered.'

  'Not when an argument is in progress, sir.'

  'Good Lord. Did
they have an argument?'

  'A somewhat acrimonious one, sir, plainly audible in the kitchen, where I was reading the volume of Spinoza which you so kindly gave me for Christmas. The door happened to be ajar.'

  'So you were an earwitness?'

  'Throughout, sir.'

  'Tell me all, Jeeves.'

  'Very good, sir. I must begin by explaining that Mr Cook is trustee for a sum of money left to Mr Porter by his late uncle, who appears to have been a partner of Mr Cook in various commercial enterprises.'

  'Yes, I know about that. Porter told me.'

  'Until Mr Cook releases this money Mr Porter is in no position to marry. I gathered that his present occupation is not generously paid.'

  'He's an insurance salesman. Didn't I tell you that I had taken out an accident policy with him?'

  'Not that I recall, sir.'

  'And a life policy as well, both for sums beyond the dreams of avarice. He talked me into it. But I mustn't interrupt you. Go on telling me all.'

  'Very good, sir. Miss Cook was urging Mr Porter to demand an interview with her father.'

  'In order to make him cough up?'

  'Precisely, sir. "Be firm", I heard her say. "Throw your weight about. Look him in the eye and thump the table."' 'She specified that?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'To which he replied?'

  'That any time he started thumping tables in the presence of Mr Cook you could certify him as mentally unbalanced and ship him off to the nearest home for the insane – or loony-bin, as he phrased it.'

  'Strange.'

  'Sir?'

  'I wouldn't have thought Porter would have shown such what-is-it.'

  'Would pusillanimity be the word for which you are groping, sir?'

  'Quite possibly. I know it begins with pu. I said it was strange because I hadn't supposed these knights in shining armour were afraid of anything.'

  'Apparently they make an exception in the case of Mr Cook. I gathered from your account of your visit to Eggesford Court that he is a gentleman of somewhat formidable personality.'