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

old bird was looking pretty green about the gills. I recognized the symptoms. I had felt much the same myself when waiting for Sir Roderick to turn up and lunch with me. How the deuce people who have anything wrong with their nerves can bring themselves to chat with that man, I can’t imagine; and yet he has the largest practice in London. Scarcely a day passes without his having to sit on somebody’s head and ring for the attendant to bring the strait-waistcoat: and his outlook on life has become so jaundiced through constant association with coves who are picking straws out of their hair that I was convinced that Biffy had merely got to press the bulb and nature would do the rest.

So I patted him on the shoulder and said: “It’s all right, old man!”

“What does Jeeves suggest?” asked Biffy, eagerly.

“Jeeves doesn’t suggest anything.”

“But you said it was all right.”

“Jeeves isn’t the only thinker in the Wooster home, my lad. I have taken over your little problem, and I can tell you at once that I have the situation well in hand.”

“You?” said Biffy.

His tone was far from flattering. It suggested a lack of faith in my abilities, and my view was that an ounce of demonstration would be worth a ton of explanation. I shoved the bouquet at him.

“Are you fond of flowers, Biffy?” I said.

“Eh?”

“Smell these.”

Biffy extended the old beak in a careworn sort of way, and I pressed the bulb as per printed instructions on the label.

I do like getting my money’s-worth. Elevenpence-ha’penny the thing had cost me, and it would have been cheap at double. The advertisement on the outside of the box had said that its effects were “indescribably ludicrous,” and I can testify that it was no overstatement. Poor old Biffy leaped three feet in the air and smashed a small table.

“There!” I said.

The old egg was a trifle incoherent at first, but he found words fairly soon and began to express himself with a good deal of warmth.

“Calm yourself, laddie,” I said, as he paused for breath. “It was no mere jest to pass an idle hour. It was a demonstration. Take this, Biffy, with an old friend’s blessing, refill the bulb, shove it into Sir Roderick’s face, press firmly, and leave the rest to him. I’ll guarantee that in something under three seconds the idea will have dawned on him that you are not required in his family.”

Biffy stared at me.

“Are you suggesting that I squirt Sir Roderick?”

“Absolutely. Squirt him good. Squirt as you have never squirted before.”

“But⁠—”

He was still yammering at me in a feverish sort of way when there was a ring at the front-door bell.

“Good Lord!” cried Biffy, quivering like a jelly. “There he is. Talk to him while I go and change my shirt.”

I had just time to refill the bulb and shove it beside Biffy’s plate, when the door opened and Sir Roderick came in. I was picking up the fallen table at the moment, and he started talking brightly to my back.

“Good afternoon. I trust I am not⁠—Mr. Wooster!”

I’m bound to say I was not feeling entirely at my ease. There is something about the man that is calculated to strike terror into the stoutest heart. If ever there was a bloke at the very mention of whose name it would be excusable for people to tremble like aspens, that bloke is Sir Roderick Glossop. He has an enormous bald head, all the hair which ought to be on it seeming to have run into his eyebrows, and his eyes go through you like a couple of Death Rays.

“How are you, how are you, how are you?” I said, overcoming a slight desire to leap backwards out of the window. “Long time since we met, what?”

“Nevertheless, I remember you most distinctly, Mr. Wooster.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Old Biffy asked me to come and join you in mangling a bit of lunch.”

He waggled the eyebrows at me.

“Are you a friend of Charles Biffen?”

“Oh, rather. Been friends for years and years.”

He drew in his breath sharply, and I could see that Biffy’s stock had dropped several points. His eye fell on the floor, which was strewn with things that had tumbled off the upset table.

“Have you had an accident?” he said.

“Nothing serious,” I explained. “Old Biffy had some sort of fit or seizure just now and knocked over the table.”

“A fit!”

“Or seizure.”

“Is he subject to fits?”

I was about to answer, when Biffy hurried in. He had forgotten to brush his hair, which gave him a wild look, and I saw the old boy direct a keen glance at him. It seemed to me that what you might call the preliminary spadework had been most satisfactorily attended to and that the success of the good old bulb could be in no doubt whatever.

Biffy’s man came in with the nosebags and we sat down to lunch.

It looked at first as though the meal was going to be one of those complete frosts which occur from time to time in the career of a constant luncher-out. Biffy, a very C-3 host, contributed nothing to the feast of reason and flow of soul beyond an occasional hiccup, and every time I started to pull a nifty, Sir Roderick swung round on me with such a piercing stare that it stopped me in my tracks. Fortunately, however, the second course consisted of a chicken fricassee of such outstanding excellence that the old boy, after wolfing a plateful, handed up his dinner-pail for a second instalment and became almost genial.

“I am here this afternoon, Charles,” he said, with what practically amounted to bonhomie, “on what I might describe as a mission. Yes, a mission. This is most excellent chicken.”

“Glad you like it,” mumbled old Biffy.

“Singularly toothsome,” said Sir Roderick, pronging another half ounce. “Yes, as I was saying, a mission. You young fellows nowadays are, I know, content to live in the centre of the most wonderful metropolis the world has seen, blind