The Mating Season Read online

A glance at it tells me that you are trustworthy. By that I mean that I can trust you.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, if you follow what I mean. Because what I am about to tell you must go no further, Gussie.’

  ‘Not an inch, Esmond.’

  ‘Well, then, the reason my soul is on the rack is that I love a girl with every fibre of my being, and she has given me the brush-off. Enough to put anyone’s soul on the rack, what?’

  ‘I should say so.’

  ‘Her name . . . But naturally I can’t mention names.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Not cricket.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘So I will merely say that her name is Cora Pirbright. Corky to her pals. You don’t know her, of course. I remember when I told her you were coming here she said she had heard from mutual friends that you were a freak of the first water and practically dotty, but she had never met you. But she is probably familiar to you on the screen. The name she goes by professionally is Cora Starr. You’ve seen her?’

  ‘Oh, rather.’

  ‘An angel in human shape, didn’t you think?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘That was my view, too, Gussie. I was in love with her long before I met her. I had frequently seen her pictures in Basing-stoke. And when old Pirbright, the vicar here, mentioned that his niece was coming to keep house for him and that she was just back from Hollywood and I said “Oh really? Who is she?” and he said “Cora Starr”, you could have knocked me down with a feather, Gussie.’

  ‘I bet I could, Esmond. Proceed. You are interesting me strangely’

  ‘Well, she arrived. Old Pirbright introduced us. Our eyes met.’

  ‘They would, of course.’

  ‘And it wasn’t more than about two days after that that we talked it over and agreed that we were twin souls.’

  ‘And then she gave you the brusheroo?’

  And then she gave me the brusheroo. But mark this, Gussie. Even though she has given me the brusheroo, she is still the lodestar of my life. My aunts . . . More port?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘My aunts, Gussie, will try to kid you that I love my cousin Gertrude. Don’t believe a word of it. I’ll tell you how that mistake arose. Shortly after Corky handed me my papers, I went to the pictures in Basingstoke, and in the thing they were showing there was a fellow who had been turned down by a girl, and in order to make her think a bit and change her mind he started surging around another girl.’

  ‘To make her jealous?’

  ‘Exactly. I thought it a clever idea.’

  ‘Very clever.’

  And it occurred to me that if I started surging round Gertrude, it might make Corky change her mind. So I surged.’

  ‘I see. A bit risky, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Risky?’

  ‘Suppose you overdid it and got too fascinating. Broke her heart, I mean.’

  ‘Corky’s heart?’

  ‘No, your cousin Gertrude’s heart.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. She’s in love with Corky’s brother. No chance of breaking Gertrude’s heart. We might drink to the success of my scheme, don’t you think, Gussie?’

  An excellent idea, Esmond.’

  I was, as you may imagine, profoundly bucked. What this meant was that the dark menace of Esmond Haddock had passed from Catsmeat’s life. No more need for him to worry about that rose garden. You could unleash Esmond Haddock in rose gardens with Gertrude Winkworth by the hour, and no business would result. I raised my glass and emptied it to Catsmeat’s happiness. Whether or not a tear stole into my eye, I couldn’t say, but I should think it very probable.

  It was a pity, of course, that, being supposed never to have met Corky, I couldn’t electrify Esmond Haddock and bring the sunshine breezing back into his life by telling him what she had told me – viz. that she loved him still. All I could do was to urge him not to lose hope, and he said he hadn’t lost hope, not by a jugful.

  ‘And I’ll tell you why I haven’t lost hope, Gussie. The other day a very significant thing happened. She came to me and asked me to sing a song at this ghastly concert she’s getting up. Well, of course, it wasn’t a thing I would have gone out of my way to do, had the circumstances been different. I’ve never sung at a village concert. Have you?’

  ‘Oh, rather. Often.’

  A terrible ordeal, was it not?’

  ‘Oh, no. I enjoyed it. I don’t say it was all jam for the audience, but a good time was had by me. You feel nervous at the prospect, do you, Esmond?’

  ‘There are moments, Gussie, when the thought of what is before me makes me break into a cold perspiration. But then I say to myself that I’m the young Squire and pretty popular around these parts, so I’ll probably get by all right.’

  ‘That’s the attitude.’

  ‘But you’re wondering why I said it was significant that she should have come to me and asked me to sing a song at this foul concert. I’ll tell you. I take it as definite evidence that the old affection still lingers. Well, I mean, if it didn’t would she come asking me to sing at concerts? I am banking everything on that song, Gussie. Corky is an emotional girl, and when she hears that audience cheering me to the echo, it will do something to her. She will melt. She will relent. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t say “Oh, Esmond!” and fling herself into my arms. Always provided, of course, that I don’t get the bird.’

  ‘You won’t get the bird.’

  ‘You think not?’

  ‘Not a chance. You’ll go like a breeze.’

  ‘You’re a great comfort, Gussie.’

  ‘I try to be, Esmond. What are you going to sing? The ‘Yeoman’s Wedding Song”?’

  ‘No, it’s a thing written by my Aunt Charlotte, with music by my Aunt Myrtle.’

  I pursed the lips. This didn’t sound too good. Nothing that I had seen of Aunt Charlotte had led me to suppose that the divine fire lurked within her. One didn’t want to condemn her unheard, of course, but I was prepared to bet that anything proceeding from her pen would be well on the lousy side.

  ‘I say,’ said Esmond Haddock, struck by an idea, ‘would you mind if I just ran through it for you now?’

  ‘Nothing I’d like better.’

  ‘Except perhaps another spot of port?’

  ‘Except that, perhaps. Thanks.’

  Esmond Haddock drained his glass.

  ‘I won’t sing the verse. It’s just a lot of guff about the sun is high up in the sky and the morn is bright and fair, and so forth.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘The chorus is what brings home the bacon. It goes like this.’

  He assumed the grave, intent expression of a stuffed frog, and let it rip.

  ‘“Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo . . .”’

  I raised a hand.

  ‘Just a second. What are you supposed to be doing? Telephoning?’

  ‘No, it’s a hunting song.’

  ‘Oh, a hunting song? I see. I thought it might be one of those “I’m going to telephone ma baby” things. Right ho.’

  He resumed.

  ‘“Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo!

  A-hunting we will go, pom pom,

  A-hunting we will go, Gussie.”’

  I raised the hand again.

  ‘I don’t like that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That “pom pom”.’

  ‘Oh, that’s just in the accompaniment.’

  ‘And I don’t like that “Gussie”. It lets the side down.’

  ‘Did I say “Gussie”?’

  ‘Yes. You said “A-hunting we will go, pom pom, a-hunting we will go, Gussie”.’

  ‘Just a slip of the tongue.’

  ‘It isn’t in the script?’

  ‘No, it isn’t in the script.’

  ‘I’d leave it out on the night.’

  ‘I will. Shall I continue?’

  ‘Do.’

  ‘Where was I?’

  ‘Be
tter start again at the beginning.’

  ‘Right. Another drop of port?’

  ‘Just a trickle, perhaps.’

  ‘Well, then, starting again at the beginning and omitting, as before, all the-sun-is-high-up-in-the-sky stuff, “Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo! A-hunting we will go, pom pom, a-hunting we will go. To-day’s the day, so come what may, a-hunting we will go”.’

  I began to see that I had been right about Charlotte. This wouldn’t do at all. Young Squire or no young Squire, a songster singing this sort of thing at a village concert was merely asking for the raspberry.

  ‘All wrong,’ I said.

  All wrong?’

  ‘Well, think it out for yourself. You start off “A-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go”, and then, just as the audience is all keyed up for a punch line, you repeat that a-hunting we will go. There will be a sense of disappointment.’

  ‘You think so, Gussie?’

  ‘I’m sure of it, Esmond.’

  ‘Then what would you advise?’

  I pondered a moment.

  ‘Try this,’ I said. ‘“Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo! A-hunting we will go, my lads, a-hunting we will go, pull up our socks and chase the fox and lay the blighter low”’

  ‘I say, that’s good!’

  ‘Stronger, I think?’

  ‘Much stronger.’

  ‘How do you go on from there?’

  He switched on the stuffed-frog expression once more:

  ‘“Oh, hearken to the merry horn!

  Over brake and over thorn

  Upon this jolly hunting morn

  A-hunting we will go.”’

  I weighed this.

  ‘I pass the first two lines,’ I said. ‘“Merry horn.” “Brake and thorn.” Not bad at all. At-a-girl, Charlotte, we always knew you had it in you! But not the finish.’

  ‘You don’t like it?’

  ‘Weak. Very weak. I don’t know what sort of standees you get at King’s Deverill, but if they’re like the unshaven thugs behind the back row at every village concert I’ve ever known, you’re simply inviting them to chi-yike and make a noise like tearing calico. No, we must do better than that. Born . . . corn . . . pawn . . . torn . . . Ha!’ I said, reaching out for the decanter, ‘I think I have it. “Oh, hearken to the merry horn! Over brake and over thorn we’ll ride although our bags get torn! What ho! What ho! What ho!”’

  I had more or less expected it to knock him cold and it did.

  For an instant he was speechless with admiration, then he said it lifted the whole thing and he couldn’t thank me enough.

  ‘It’s terrific!’

  ‘I was hoping you would like it.’

  ‘How do you think of these things?’

  ‘Oh, they just come to one.’

  ‘We might run through the authorized version, old man, shall we?’

  ‘No time like the present, dear old chap.’

  It’s curious how, looking back, you can nearly always spot where you went wrong in any binge or enterprise. Take this little slab of community singing of ours, for instance. In order to give the thing zip, I stood on my chair and waved the decanter like a baton, and this, I see now, was a mistake. It helped the composition enormously, but it tended to create a false impression in the mind of the observer, conjuring up a picture of drunken revels.

  And if you are going to say that on the present occasion there was no observer, I quietly reply that you are wrong. We had just worked through the ‘brake and thorn’ and were going all out for the rousing finish, when a voice spoke behind us.

  It said:

  ‘Well!’

  There are, of course, many ways of saying ‘Well!’ The speaker who had the floor at the moment – Dame Daphne Winkworth – said it rather in the manner of the prudish Queen of a monarch of Babylon who has happened to wander into the banqueting hall just as the Babylonian orgy is beginning to go nicely.

  ‘Well!’ she said.

  Of course, what Corky had told me about Esmond Haddock’s aunt-fixation ought to have prepared me for it, but I must say I was shocked at his deportment at this juncture. It was the deportment of a craven and a worm. Possibly stimulated by my getting on a chair, he had climbed onto the table and was using a banana as a hunting-crop, and he now came down like an apologetic sack of coals, his whole demeanour so crushed and cringing that I could hardly bear to look at him.

  ‘It’s all right, Aunt Daphne!’

  All right!’

  ‘We were rehearsing. For the concert, you know. With the concert so near, one doesn’t want to lose a minute.’

  ‘Oh? Well, we are expecting you in the drawing-room.’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Daphne.’

  ‘Gertrude is waiting to play backgammon with you.’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Daphne.’

  ‘If you feel capable of playing backgammon.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Aunt Daphne.’

  He slunk from the room with bowed head, and I was about to follow, when the old geezer checked me with an imperious gesture. One noted a marked increase in the resemblance to Wallace Beery, and the thought crossed my mind that life for the unfortunate moppets who had drawn this Winkworth as a headmistress must have been like Six Weeks on Sunny Devil’s Island. Previous to making her acquaintance, I had always supposed the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn to be the nearest thing to the late Captain Bligh of the Bounty which the scholastic world had provided to date, but I could see now that compared with old Battling Daphne he was a mere prelim boy.

  Augustus, did you bring a great, rough dog with you this evening?’ she demanded.

  It shows how the rush and swirl of events at Deverill Hall had affected me when I say that for an instant nothing stirred.

  ‘Dog?’

  ‘Silversmith says it belongs to you.’

  ‘Oh, ah,’ I said, memory returning to its throne. ‘Yes, yes, yes, of course. Yes, to be sure. You mean Sam Goldwyn. But he’s not mine. He belongs to Corky’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘Corky Pirbright. She asked me to put him up for a day or two.’

  The mention of Corky’s name, as had happened at the dinner-table, caused her to draw in her breath and do a quick-take-um. There was no getting away from the fact that the girl’s popularity at Deverill Hall was but slight.

  ‘Is Miss Pirbright a great friend of yours?’

  ‘Oh, rather,’ I said, remembering too late that this scarcely squared with what Corky had told Esmond Haddock. I was glad that he was no longer with us. ‘She was a trifle dubious about springing the animal on her uncle without a certain amount of preliminary spade-work, he being apparently not very dog-minded, so she turned it over to me. It’s in the stables.’

  ‘It is not in the stables.’

  ‘Then Silversmith was pulling my leg. He said he would have it taken there!’

  ‘He did have it taken there, but it broke loose and came rushing into the drawing-room just now like a mad thing.’

  I saw that here was where the soothing word was required.

  ‘Sam Goldwyn isn’t dotty,’ I assured her. ‘I wouldn’t say he was one of our great minds, but he’s perfectly compos. In re his rushing into the drawing-room, that was because he thought I was there. He has conceived a burning passion for me and counts every minute lost when he is not in my society. No doubt his first act on being tied up in the stables was to start gnawing through the rope in order to be free to come and look for me. Rather touching.’

  Her manner suggested that she did not think it in the least touching. Her eye was alight with anti-Sam sentiment.

  ‘Well, it was most unpleasant. We had left the french windows open, as the night was so warm, and suddenly this disgusting brute came galloping in. My sister Charlotte received a nervous shock from which it will take her a long time to recover. The animal leaped upon her back and chased her all over the room.’

  I did not give the thought utterance, for if there is one thing the Woosters are, it is tactful, but it did occur to me that this had co
me more or less as a judgement on Charlotte for writing all that Hallo-hallo-hallo-hallo, a-hunting-we-will-go stuff and would be a lesson to her next time she took pen in hand. She was now in a position to see the thing from the fox’s point of view.

  ‘And when we rang for Silversmith, the creature bit him.’

  I must confess to feeling a thrill of admiration as I heard these words. ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din’, I came within a toucher of saying. I wouldn’t have bitten Silversmith myself to please a dying grandmother.

  ‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ I said. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘I have considerable influence with this hound. I might be able to induce him to call it a day and go back to the stables and get his eight hours.’

  ‘It will not be necessary. Silversmith succeeded in overpowering the animal and locking it in a cupboard. Now that you tell me its home is at the Vicarage, I will send it there at once.’

  ‘I’ll take him, shall I?’

  ‘Pray do not trouble. I think it would be better if you were to go straight to bed.’

  This seemed to me the most admirable suggestion. From the moment when the females had legged it from the dinner-table, I had been musing somewhat apprehensively on the quiet home evening which would set in as soon as Esmond and I were through with the port. You know what these quiet home evenings are like at country houses where the personnel of the ensemble is mainly feminine. You get backed into corners and shown photograph albums. Folk songs are sung at you. You find the head drooping like a lily on its stem and have to keep jerking it back into position one with an effort that taxes the frail strength to the utmost. Far, far better to retire to my sleeping quarters now, especially as I was most anxious to get in touch with Jeeves, who long ‘ere this must have arrived by train with the heavy luggage.

  I am not saying that this woman’s words, with their underlying suggestion that I was fried to the tonsils, had not wounded me. It was all too plainly her opinion that, if let loose in drawing-rooms, I would immediately proceed to create an atmosphere reminiscent of a waterfront saloon when the Fleet is in. But the Woosters are essentially fair-minded, and I did not blame her for holding these views. I could quite see that when you come into a dining-room and find a guest leaping about on a chair with a decanter in his hand, singing Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo, a-hunting we will go, my lads, a-hunting we will go, you are pretty well bound to fall into a certain train of thought.