Jeeves Stories P. G. Wodehouse (websites to read books for free txt) 📖

“He has. Let me tell you all about⁠—”

“Not just now, old man,” said Biffy, getting up. “I ought to be going back to my hotel to see about my packing.”

Which, after I had listened to his story, struck me as pretty low-down. However, the longer you live, the more you realize that the good old sporting spirit of give-and-take has practically died out in our midst. So I boosted him into a cab and went off to lunch.

It can’t have been more than ten days after this that I received a nasty shock while getting outside my morning tea and toast. The English papers had arrived, and Jeeves was just drifting out of the room after depositing The Times by my bedside, when, as I idly turned the pages in search of the sporting section, a paragraph leaped out and hit me squarely in the eyeball.

As follows⁠—

Forthcoming Marriages

Mr. C. E. Biffen and Miss Glossop

The engagement is announced between Charles Edward, only son of the late Mr. E. C. Biffen, and Mrs. Biffen, of 11, Penslow Square, Mayfair, and Honoria Jane Louise, only daughter of Sir Roderick and Lady Glossop, of 6b, Harley Street, W.

“Great Scott!” I exclaimed.

“Sir?” said Jeeves, turning at the door.

“Jeeves, you remember Miss Glossop?”

“Very vividly, sir.”

“She’s engaged to Mr. Biffen!”

“Indeed, sir?” said Jeeves. And, with not another word, he slid out. The blighter’s calm amazed and shocked me. It seemed to indicate that there must be a horrible streak of callousness in him. I mean to say, it wasn’t as if he didn’t know Honoria Glossop.

I read the paragraph again. A peculiar feeling it gave me. I don’t know if you have ever experienced the sensation of seeing the announcement of the engagement of a pal of yours to a girl whom you were only saved from marrying yourself by the skin of your teeth. It induces a sort of⁠—well, it’s difficult to describe it exactly; but I should imagine a fellow would feel much the same if he happened to be strolling through the jungle with a boyhood chum and met a tigress or a jaguar, or whatnot, and managed to shin up a tree, and looked down and saw the friend of his youth vanishing into the undergrowth in the animal’s slavering jaws. A sort of profound, prayerful relief, if you know what I mean, blended at the same time with a pang of pity. What I’m driving at is that, thankful as I was that I hadn’t had to marry Honoria myself, I was sorry to see a real good chap like old Biffy copping it. I sucked down a spot of tea and began to brood over the business.

Of course, there are probably fellows in the world⁠—tough, hardy blokes with strong chins and glittering eyes⁠—who could get engaged to this Glossop menace and like it; but I knew perfectly well that Biffy was not one of them. Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to have to face over the breakfast table. Brainy, moreover. The sort of girl who reduces you to pulp with sixteen sets of tennis and a few rounds of golf and then comes down to dinner as fresh as a daisy, expecting you to take an intelligent interest in Freud. If I had been engaged to her another week, her old father would have had one more patient on his books; and Biffy is much the same quiet sort of peaceful, inoffensive bird as me. I was shocked, I tell you, shocked.

And, as I was saying, the thing that shocked me most was Jeeves’s frightful lack of proper emotion. The man happening to trickle in at this juncture, I gave him one more chance to show some human sympathy.

“You got the name correctly, didn’t you, Jeeves?” I said. “Mr. Biffen is going to marry Honoria Glossop, the daughter of the old boy with the egg-like head and the eyebrows.”

“Yes, sir. Which suit would you wish me to lay out this morning?”

And this, mark you, from the man who, when I was engaged to the Glossop, strained every fibre in his brain to extricate me. It beat me. I couldn’t understand it.

“The blue with the red twill,” I said, coldly. My manner was marked, and I meant him to see that he had disappointed me sorely.

About a week later I went back to London, and scarcely had I got settled in the old flat when Biffy blew in. One glance was enough to tell me that the poisoned wound had begun to fester. The man did not look bright. No, there was no getting away from it, not bright. He had that kind of stunned, glassy expression which I used to see on my own face in the shaving-mirror during my brief engagement to the Glossop pestilence. However, if you don’t want to be one of the What Is Wrong With This Picture brigade, you must observe the conventions, so I shook his hand as warmly as I could.

“Well, well, old man,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” said Biffy, wanly, and there was rather a weighty silence.

“Bertie,” said Biffy, after the silence had lasted about three minutes.

“Hullo?”

“Is it really true⁠—?”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Biffy, and conversation languished again. After about a minute and a half he came to the surface once more.

“Bertie.”

“Still here, old thing. What is it?”

“I say, Bertie, is it really true that you were once engaged to Honoria?”

“It is.”

Biffy coughed.

“How did you get out⁠—I mean, what was the nature of the tragedy that prevented the marriage?”

“Jeeves worked it. He thought out the entire scheme.”

“I think, before I go,” said Biffy, thoughtfully, “I’ll just step into the kitchen and have a word with Jeeves.”

I felt that the situation called for complete candour.

“Biffy, old egg,” I said, “as man to man, do you want to oil out of this thing?”

“Bertie, old cork,” said Biffy, earnestly, “as one