The inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse Read Free Book Online Page A

there’s one thing I like, it’s a quiet life. I’m not one of those fellows who get all restless and depressed if things aren’t happening to them all the time. You can’t make it too placid for me. Give me regular meals, a good show with decent music every now and then, and one or two pals to totter round with, and I ask no more.
    That is why the jar, when it came, was such a particularly nasty jar. I mean, I’d returned from Roville with a sort of feeling that from now on nothing could occur to upset me. Aunt Agatha, I imagined, would require at least a year to recover from the Hem-mingway affair: and apart from Aunt Agatha there isn’t anybody who really does much in the way of harrying me. It seemed to me that the skies were blue, so to speak, and no clouds in sight.
    I little thought… Well, look here, what happened was this, and I ask you if it wasn’t enough to rattle anybody.
    Once a year Jeeves takes a couple of weeks’ vacation and biffs off to the sea or somewhere to restore his tissues. Pretty rotten for me, of course, while he’s away. But it has to be stuck, so I stick it; and I must admit that he usually manages to get hold of a fairly decent fellow to look after me in his absence.
    Well, the time had come round again, and Jeeves was in the kitchen giving the understudy a few tips about his duties. I happened to want a stamp or something, and I toddled down the passage to ask him for it. The silly ass had left the kitchen door open, and I hadn’t gone two steps when his voice caught me squarely in the eardrum.
    ‘You will find Mr Wooster,’ he was saying to the substitute chappie, ‘an exceedingly pleasant and amiable young gentleman, but not intelligent. By no means intelligent. Mentally he is negligible - quite negligible.’
    Well, I mean to say, what!
    I suppose, strictly speaking, I ought to have charged in and ticked the blighter off properly in no uncertain voice. But I doubt whether it’s humanly possible to tick Jeeves off. Personally, I didn’t even have a dash at it. I merely called for my hat and stick in a marked manner and legged it. But the memory rankled, if you know what I mean. We Woosters do not lightly forget. At least, we do - some things -appointments, and people’s birthdays, and letters to post, and all that - but not an absolute bally insult like the above. I brooded like the dickens.
    I was still brooding when I dropped in at the oyster-bar at Buck’s for a quick bracer. I needed a bracer rather particularly at the moment, because I was on my way to lunch with Aunt Agatha. A pretty frightful ordeal, believe me or believe me not, even though I took it that after what had happened at Roville she would be in a fairly subdued and amiable mood. I had just had one quick and another rather slower, and was feeling about as cheerio as was possible under the circs, when a muffled voice hailed me from the north-east, and, turning round, I saw young Bingo Little propped up in a corner, wrapping himself round a sizeable chunk of bread and cheese.
    ‘Hallo-allo-allo!’ I said. ‘Haven’t seen you for ages. You’ve not been in here lately, have you?’
    ‘No. I’ve been living out in the country.’
    ‘Eh?’ I said, for Bingo’s loathing for the country was well known. ‘Whereabouts?’
    ‘Down in Hampshire, at a place called Ditteredge.’
    ‘No, really? I know some people who’ve got a house there. The Glossops. Have you met them?’
    ‘Why, that’s where I’m staying!’ said young Bingo. ‘I’m tutoring the Glossop kid.’
    ‘What for?’ I said. I couldn’t seem to see young Bingo as a tutor. Though, of course, he did get a degree of sorts at Oxford, and I suppose you can always fool some of the people some of the time.
    ‘What for? For money, of course! An absolute sitter came unstitched in the second race at Haydock Park,’ said young Bingo, with some bitterness, ‘and I dropped my entire month’s allowance. I hadn’t the nerve to touch my uncle for