Jeeves Stories · Jeeves and the Impending Doom (2/3)

Young Bingo, you see, is one of those fellows who, once their fingers close over the handle of a tennis racket, fall into a sort of trance in which nothing outside the radius of the lawn exists for them. If you came up to Bingo in the middle of a set and told him that panthers were devouring his best friend in the kitchen garden, he would look at you and say, “Oh, ah?” or words to that effect. I knew that he would not give a thought to young Thomas and the Right Hon. till the last ball had bounced, and, as I dressed for dinner that night, I was conscious of an impending doom.

“Jeeves,” I said, “have you ever pondered on Life?”

“From time to time, sir, in my leisure moments.”

“Grim, isn’t it, what?”

“Grim, sir?”

“I mean to say, the difference between things as they look and things as they are.”

“The trousers perhaps a half-inch higher, sir. A very slight adjustment of the braces will effect the necessary alteration. You were saying, sir?”

“I mean, here at Woollam Chersey we have apparently a happy, carefree country-house party. But beneath the glittering surface, Jeeves, dark currents are running. One gazes at the Right Hon. wrapping himself round the salmon mayonnaise at lunch, and he seems a man without a care in the world. Yet all the while a dreadful fate is hanging over him, creeping nearer and nearer. What exact steps do you think the kid Thomas intends to take?”

“In the course of an informal conversation which I had with the young gentleman this afternoon, sir, he informed me that he had been reading a romance entitled Treasure Island, and had been much struck by the character and actions of a certain Captain Flint. I gathered that he was weighing the advisability of modelling his own conduct on that of the Captain.”

“But, good heavens, Jeeves! If I remember Treasure Island, Flint was the bird who went about hitting people with a cutlass. You don’t think young Thomas would bean Mr. Filmer with a cutlass?”

“Possibly he does not possess a cutlass, sir.”

“Well, with anything.”

“We can but wait and see, sir. The tie, if I might suggest it, sir, a shade more tightly knotted. One aims at the perfect butterfly effect. If you will permit me⁠—”

“What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this? Do you realize that Mr. Little’s domestic happiness is hanging in the scale?”

“There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter.”

I could see the man was pained, but I did not try to heal the wound. What’s the word I want? Preoccupied. I was too preoccupied, don’t you know. And distrait. Not to say careworn.

I was still careworn when, next day at half-past two, the revels commenced on the tennis lawn. It was one of those close, baking days, with thunder rumbling just round the corner; and it seemed to me that there was a brooding menace in the air.

“Bingo,” I said, as we pushed forth to do our bit in the first doubles, “I wonder what young Thos will be up to this afternoon, with the eye of authority no longer on him?”

“Eh?” said Bingo, absently. Already the tennis look had come into his face, and his eye was glazed. He swung his racket and snorted a little.

“I don’t see him anywhere,” I said.

“You don’t what?”

“See him.”

“Who?”

“Young Thos.”

“What about him?”

I let it go.

The only consolation I had in the black period of the opening of the tourney was the fact that the Right Hon. had taken a seat among the spectators and was wedged in between a couple of females with parasols. Reason told me that even a kid so steeped in sin as young Thomas would hardly perpetrate any outrage on a man in such a strong strategic position. Considerably relieved, I gave myself up to the game; and was in the act of putting it across the local curate with a good deal of vim when there was a roll of thunder and the rain started to come down in buckets.

We all stampeded for the house, and had gathered in the drawing-room for tea, when suddenly Aunt Agatha, looking up from a cucumber-sandwich, said:⁠—

“Has anybody seen Mr. Filmer?”

It was one of the nastiest jars I have ever experienced. What with my fast serve zipping sweetly over the net and the man of God utterly unable to cope with my slow bending return down the centre-line, I had for some little time been living, as it were, in another world. I now came down to earth with a bang: and my slice of cake, slipping from my nerveless fingers, fell to the ground and was wolfed by Aunt Agatha’s spaniel, Robert. Once more I seemed to become conscious of an impending doom.

For this man Filmer, you must understand, was not one of those men who are lightly kept from the tea-table. A hearty trencherman, and particularly fond of his five o’clock couple of cups and bite of muffin, he had until this afternoon always been well up among the leaders in the race for the food-trough. If one thing was certain, it was that only the machinations of some enemy could be keeping him from being in the drawing-room now, complete with nosebag.

“He must have got caught in the rain and be sheltering somewhere in the grounds,” said Aunt Agatha. “Bertie, go out and find him. Take a raincoat to him.”

“Right-ho!” I said. And I meant it. My only desire in life now was to find the Right Hon. And I hoped it wouldn’t be merely his body.

I put on a raincoat and tucked another under my arm, and was sallying forth, when in the hall I ran into Jeeves.

“Jeeves,” I said, “I fear the worst. Mr. Filmer is missing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I am about to scour the grounds in search of him.”

“I can save you the trouble, sir. Mr. Filmer is on the island in the middle of the lake.”

“In this rain? Why doesn’t the chump row back?”

“He has no boat, sir.”

“Then how can he be on the island?”

“He rowed there, sir. But Master Thomas rowed after him and set his boat adrift. He was informing me of the circumstances a moment ago, sir. It appears that Captain Flint was in the habit of marooning people on islands, and Master Thomas felt that he could pursue no more judicious course than to follow his example.”

“But, good Lord, Jeeves! The man must be getting soaked.”

“Yes, sir. Master Thomas commented upon that aspect of the matter.”

It was a time for action.

“Come with me, Jeeves!”

“Very good, sir.”

I buzzed for the boathouse.

My Aunt Agatha’s husband, Spenser Gregson, who is on the Stock Exchange, had recently cleaned up to an amazing extent in Sumatra Rubber; and Aunt Agatha, in selecting a country estate, had lashed out on an impressive scale. There were miles of what they call rolling parkland, trees in considerable profusion well provided with doves and whatnot cooing in no uncertain voice, gardens full of roses, and also stables, outhouses, and messuages, the whole forming a rather fruity tout ensemble. But the feature of the place was the lake.

It stood to the east of the house, beyond the rose garden, and covered several acres. In the middle of it was an island. In the middle of the island was a building known as the Octagon. And in the middle of the Octagon, seated on the roof and spouting water like a public fountain, was the Right Hon. A. B. Filmer. As we drew nearer, striking a fast clip with self at the oars and Jeeves handling the tiller-ropes, we heard cries of gradually increasing volume, if that’s the expression I want; and presently, up aloft, looking from a distance as if he were perched on top of the bushes, I located the Right Hon. It seemed to me that even a Cabinet Minister ought to have had more sense than to stay right out in the open like that, when there were trees to shelter under.

“A little more to the right, Jeeves.”

“Very good, sir.”

I made a neat landing.

“Wait here, Jeeves.”

“Very good, sir. The head gardener was informing me this morning, sir, that one of the swans had recently nested on this island.”

“This is no time for natural history gossip, Jeeves,” I said, a little severely, for the rain was coming down harder than ever and the Wooster trouser-legs were already considerably moistened.

“Very good, sir.”

I pushed my way through the bushes. The going was sticky and took about eight and elevenpence off the value of my Sure-Grip tennis shoes in the first two yards: but I persevered and presently came out in the open and found myself in a sort of clearing facing the Octagon.

This building was run up somewhere in the last century, I have been told, to enable the grandfather of the late owner to have some quiet place out of earshot of the house where he could practise the fiddle. From what I know of fiddlers, I should imagine that he had produced some fairly frightful sounds there in his time: but they can have been nothing to the ones that were coming from the roof of the place now. The Right Hon., not having spotted the arrival of the rescue-party, was apparently trying to make his voice carry across the waste of waters to the house; and I’m not saying it was not a good sporting effort. He had one of those highish tenors, and his yowls seemed to screech over my head like shells.

I thought it about time to slip him the glad news that assistance had arrived, before he strained a vocal cord.

“Hi!” I shouted, waiting for a lull.

He poked his head over the edge.

“Hi!” he bellowed, looking in every direction but the right one, of course.

“Hi!”

“Hi!”

“Hi!”

“Hi!”

“Oh!” he said, spotting me at last.

“What-ho!” I replied, sort of clinching the thing.

I suppose the conversation can’t be said to have touched a frightfully high level up to this moment; but probably we should have got a good deal brainier very shortly⁠—only just then, at the very instant when I was getting ready to say something good, there was a hissing noise like a tyre bursting in a nest of cobras, and out of the bushes to my left there popped something so large and white and active that, thinking quicker than I have ever done in my puff, I rose like a rocketing pheasant, and, before I knew what I was doing, had begun to climb for life. Something slapped against the wall about an inch below my right ankle, and any doubts I may have had about remaining below vanished. The lad who bore ’mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device “Excelsior!” was the model for Bertram.

“Be careful!” yipped the Right Hon.

I was.

Whoever built the Octagon might have constructed it especially for this sort of crisis. Its walls had grooves at regular intervals which were just right for the hands and feet, and it wasn’t very long before I was parked up on the roof beside the Right Hon., gazing down at one of the largest and shortest-tempered swans I had ever seen. It was standing below, stretching up a neck like a hosepipe, just where a bit of brick, judiciously bunged, would catch it amidships.

I bunged the brick and scored a bull’s-eye.

The Right Hon. didn’t seem any too well pleased.

“Don’t tease it!” he said.

“It teased me,” I said.

The swan extended another eight feet of neck and gave an imitation of steam escaping from a leaky pipe. The rain continued to lash down with what you might call indescribable fury, and I was sorry that in the agitation inseparable from shinning up a stone wall at practically a second’s notice I had dropped the raincoat which I had been bringing with me for my fellow-rooster. For a moment I thought of offering him mine, but wiser counsels prevailed.

“How near did it come to getting you?” I asked.

“Within an ace,” replied my companion, gazing down with a look of marked dislike. “I had to make a very rapid spring.”

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say “When!” and the picture he conjured up, if you know what I mean, was rather pleasing.

“It is no laughing matter,” he said, shifting the look of dislike to me.

“Sorry.”

“I might have been seriously injured.”

“Would you consider bunging another brick at the bird?”

“Do nothing of the sort. It will only annoy him.”

“Well, why not annoy him? He hasn’t shown such a dashed lot of consideration for our feelings.”

The Right Hon. now turned to another aspect of the matter.

“I cannot understand how my boat, which I fastened securely to the stump of a willow-tree, can have drifted away.”

“Dashed mysterious.”

“I begin to suspect that it was deliberately set loose by some mischievous person.”

“Oh, I say, no, hardly likely, that. You’d have seen them doing it.”

“No, Mr. Wooster. For the bushes form an effective screen. Moreover, rendered drowsy by the unusual warmth of the afternoon, I dozed off for some little time almost immediately I reached the island.”

This wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted his mind dwelling on, so I changed the subject.

“Wet, isn’t it, what?” I said.

“I had already observed it,” said the Right Hon. in one of those nasty, bitter voices. “I thank you, however, for drawing the matter to my attention.”

Chitchat about the weather hadn’t gone with much of a bang, I perceived. I had a shot at Bird Life in the Home Counties.

“Have you ever noticed,” I said, “how a swan’s eyebrows sort of meet in the middle?”

“I have had every opportunity of observing all that there is to observe about swans.”

“Gives them a sort of peevish look, what?”

“The look to which you allude has not escaped me.”

“Rummy,” I said, rather warming to my subject, “how bad an effect family life has on a swan’s disposition.”

“I wish you would select some other topic of conversation than swans.”

“No, but, really, it’s rather interesting. I mean to say, our old pal down there is probably a perfect ray of sunshine in normal circumstances. Quite the domestic pet, don’t you know. But purely and simply because the little woman happens to be nesting⁠—”

I paused. You will scarcely believe me, but until this moment, what with all the recent bustle and activity, I had clean forgotten that, while we were treed up on the roof like this, there lurked all the time in the background one whose giant brain, if notified of the emergency and requested to flock round, would probably be able to think up half-a-dozen schemes for solving our little difficulties in a couple of minutes.

“Jeeves!” I shouted.

“Sir?” came a faint respectful voice from the great open spaces.

“My man,” I explained to the Right Hon. “A fellow of infinite resource and sagacity. He’ll have us out of this in a minute. Jeeves!”

“Sir?”

“I’m sitting on the roof.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Don’t say ‘Very good.’ Come and help us. Mr. Filmer and I are treed, Jeeves.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Don’t keep saying ‘Very good.’ It’s nothing of the kind. The place is alive with swans.”

“I will attend to the matter immediately, sir.”

I turned to the Right Hon. I even went so far as to pat him on the back. It was like slapping a wet sponge.

“All is well,” I said. “Jeeves is coming.”

“What can he do?”

I frowned a trifle. The man’s tone had been peevish, and I didn’t like it.

“That,” I replied with a touch of stiffness, “we cannot say until we see him in action. He may pursue one course, or he may pursue another. But on one thing you can rely with the utmost confidence⁠—Jeeves will find a way. See, here he comes stealing through the undergrowth, his face shining with the light of pure intelligence. There are no limits to Jeeves’s brainpower. He virtually lives on fish.”

I bent over the edge and peered into the abyss.

“Look out for the swan, Jeeves.”

“I have the bird under close observation, sir.”

The swan had been uncoiling a further supply of neck in our direction; but now he whipped round. The sound of a voice speaking in his rear seemed to affect him powerfully. He subjected Jeeves to a short, keen scrutiny; and then, taking in some breath for hissing purposes, gave a sort of jump and charged ahead.

“Look out, Jeeves!”

“Very good, sir.”