Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit by P.G. Wodehouse Read Free Book Online

cue when he hears one. Throw him the line, and he
will do the rest. I hitched up the larynx. The kippers and the bot had arrived
by now, and I took a mouthful of the former and a sip of the latter. It tasted
like hair-oil.
    ‘You
interest me strangely,’ I said. ‘Lost the girl he loved, had he?’
    ‘She
had told him she never wished to see or speak to him again.’
    ‘Well,
well. Always a nasty knock for a chap, that.’
    ‘So he
comes to this low night club. He is trying to forget.’
    ‘But
I’ll bet he doesn’t.’
    ‘No, it
is useless. He looks about him at the glitter and garishness and feels how
hollow it all is. I think I can use that waiter over there in the night club
scene, the one with the watery eyes and the pimple on his nose,’ she said,
jotting .down a note on the back of the bill of fare.
    I
fortified myself with a swig of whatever the stuff was in the bottle and
prepared to give her the works.
    ‘Always
a mistake,’ I said, starting to do the sympathetic man of the world, ‘fellows
losing girls and — conversely, if that’s the word I want — girls losing
fellows. I don’t know how you feel about it, but the way it seems to me is that
it’s a silly idea giving the dream man the raspberry just because of some
trifling tiff. Kiss and make up, I always say. I saw Stilton at the Drones
tonight,’ I said, getting down to it.
    She
stiffened and took a reserved mouthful of kipper. Her voice, when the
consignment had passed down the hatch and she was able to speak, was cold and
metallic.
    ‘Oh,
yes?’
    ‘He was
in wild mood.’
    ‘Oh,
yes?’
    ‘Reckless.
Desperate. He looked about him at the Drones smoking-room, and I could see he
was feeling what a hollow smoking-room it was.’
    ‘Oh,
yes?’
    Well, I
suppose if someone had come along at this moment and said to me ‘Hullo there,
Wooster, how’s it going? Are you making headway?’ I should have had to reply
in the negative. ‘Not perceptibly, Wilkinson’ — or Banks or Smith or
Knatchbull-Huguessen or whatever the name might have been, I would have said. I
had the uncomfortable feeling of having been laid a stymie. However, I
persevered.
    ‘Yes,
he was in quite a state of mind. He gave me the impression that it wouldn’t
take much to make him go off to the Rocky Mountains and shoot grizzly bears.
Not a pleasant thought.’
    ‘You
mean if one is fond of grizzly bears?’
    ‘I was
thinking more if one was fond of Stiltons.’
    ‘I’m
not.’
    ‘Oh?
Well, suppose he joined the Foreign Legion?’
    ‘It
would have my sympathy.’
    ‘You
wouldn’t like to think of him tramping through the hot sand without a pub in sight,
with Riffs or whatever they’re called potting at him from all directions.’
    ‘Yes, I
would. If I saw a Riff trying to shoot D’Arcy Cheesewright, I would hold his
hat for him and egg him on.’
    Once
more I had that sense of not making progress. Her face, I observed, was cold
and hard, like my kipper, which of course during these exchanges I had been
neglecting, and I began to understand how these birds in Holy Writ must have
felt after their session with the deaf adder. I can’t recall all the details,
though at my private school I once won a prize for Scripture Knowledge, but I
remember that they had the dickens of an uphill job trying to charm it, and
after they had sweated themselves to a frazzle no business resulted. It is
often this way, I believe, with deaf adders.
    ‘Do you
know Horace Pendlebury-Davenport?’ I said, after a longish pause during which
we worked away at our respective kippers.
    ‘The
man who married Valerie Twistleton?’
    ‘That’s
the chap. Formerly the Drones Club Darts champion.’
    ‘I’ve
met him. But why bring him up?’
    ‘Because
he points the moral and adorns the tale. During the period of their betrothal
he and Valerie had a row similar in calibre to that which has occurred between
you and Stilton and pretty nearly parted for ever.’
    She
gave me the frosty