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

eye.
    ‘Must
we talk about Mr. Cheesewright?’
    ‘I see
him as tonight’s big topic.’
    ‘I
don’t, and I think I’ll go home.’
    ‘Oh,
not yet. I want to tell you about Horace and Valerie. They had this row of
which I speak and might, as I say, have parted for ever, had they not been
reconciled by a woman who, so Horace says, looked as if she bred cocker
spaniels. She told them a touching story, which melted their hearts. She said
she had once loved a bloke and quarrelled with him about some trifle, and he
turned on his heel and went off to the Federated Malay States and married the
widow of a rubber planter. And each year from then on there arrived at her
address a simple posy of white violets, together with a slip of paper bearing
the words “It might have been”. You wouldn’t like that to happen with you and
Stilton, would you?’
    ‘I’d
love it.’
    ‘It
doesn’t give you a pang to think that at this very moment he may be going the
rounds of the shipping offices, inquiring about sailings to the Malay States?’
    ‘They’d
be shut at this time of night.’
    ‘Well,
first thing tomorrow morning, then.’
    She
laid down her knife and fork and gave me an odd look.
    ‘Bertie,
you’re extraordinary,’ she said.
    ‘Eh? How
do you mean, extraordinary?’
    ‘All
this nonsense you have been talking, trying to reconcile me and D’Arcy. Not
that I don’t admire you for it. I think it’s rather wonderful of you. But then
everybody says that, though you have a brain like a peahen, you’re the soul of
kindness and generosity.’
    Well, I
was handicapped here by the fact that, never having met a peahen, I was unable
to estimate the quality of these fowls’ intelligence, but she had spoken as if
they were a bit short of the grey matter, and I was about to ask her who the
hell she meant by ‘everybody’, when she resumed.
    ‘You
want to marry me yourself, don’t you?’
    I had
to take another mouthful of the substance in the bottle before I could speak. One
of those difficult questions to answer.
    ‘Oh, rather,’
I said, for I was anxious to make the evening a success. ‘Of course. Who
wouldn’t?’
    ‘And
yet you —‘
    She did
not proceed further than the word ‘you’, for at this juncture, with the
abruptness with which these things always happen, the joint was pinched. The
band stopped in the middle of a bar. A sudden hush fell upon the room.
Square-jawed men shot up through the flooring, and one, who seemed to be
skippering the team, stood out in the middle and in a voice like a foghorn told
everybody to keep their seats. I remember thinking how nicely timed the whole
thing was — breaking loose, I mean, at a moment when the conversation had taken
a distasteful turn and threatened to become fraught with embarrassment. I have
heard hard things said about the London police force — notably by Catsmeat
Potter-Pirbright and others on the morning after the annual Oxford and
Cambridge boat race — but a fair-minded man had to admit that there were
occasions when they showed tact of no slight order.
    I
wasn’t alarmed, of course. I had been through this sort of thing many a time
and oft, as the expression is, and I knew what happened. So, noting that my
guest was giving a rather close imitation of a cat on hot bricks, I hastened to
dispel her alarm.
    ‘No
need to get the breeze up,’ I said. ‘Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
or knock the breast,’ I added, using one of Jeeves’s gags which I chanced to
remember. ‘Everything is quite in order.’
    ‘But
won’t they arrest us?’
    I
laughed lightly. These novices!
    ‘Absurd.
No danger of that whatsoever.’
    ‘How do
you know?’
    ‘All
this is old stuff to me. Here in a nutshell is the procedure. They round us up,
and we push off in an orderly manner to the police station in plain vans. There
we assemble in the waiting-room and give our names and addresses, exercising a
certain latitude as regards the details. I, for