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

waiting for him to come out, and would give a miss to perfectly good strollers just so as to be in good condition for him.

It was during the day that I found Freddie, poor old chap, a trifle heavy as a guest. I suppose you can’t blame a bloke whose heart is broken, but it required a good deal of fortitude to bear up against this gloom-crushed exhibit during the early days of our little holiday. When he wasn’t chewing a pipe and scowling at the carpet, he was sitting at the piano, playing “The Rosary” with one finger. He couldn’t play anything except “The Rosary,” and he couldn’t play much of that. However firmly and confidently he started off, somewhere around the third bar a fuse would blow out and he would have to start all over again.

He was playing it as usual one morning when I came in from bathing and it seemed to me that he was extracting more hideous melancholy from it even than usual. Nor had my senses deceived me.

“Bertie,” he said in a hollow voice, skidding on the fourth crotchet from the left as you enter the second bar and producing a distressing sound like the death-rattle of a sand-eel, “I’ve seen her!”

“Seen her?” I said. “What, Elizabeth Vickers? How do you mean, you’ve seen her? She isn’t down here.”

“Yes, she is. I suppose she’s staying with relations or something. I was down at the post office, seeing if there were any letters, and we met in the doorway.”

“What happened?”

“She cut me dead.”

He started “The Rosary” again, and stubbed his finger on a semiquaver.

“Bertie,” he said, “you ought never to have brought me here. I must go away.”

“Go away? Don’t talk such rot. This is the best thing that could have happened. It’s a most amazing bit of luck, her being down here. This is where you come out strong.”

“She cut me.”

“Never mind. Be a sportsman. Have another dash at her.”

“She looked clean through me.”

“Well, don’t mind that. Stick at it. Now, having got her down here, what you want,” I said, “is to place her under some obligation to you. What you want is to get her timidly thanking you. What you want⁠—”

“What’s she going to thank me timidly for?”

I thought for a while. Undoubtedly he had put his finger on the hub of the problem. For some moments I was at a loss, not to say nonplussed. Then I saw the way.

“What you want,” I said, “is to look out for a chance and save her from drowning.”

“I can’t swim.”

That was Freddie Bullivant all over. A dear old chap in a thousand ways, but no help to a fellow, if you know what I mean.

He cranked up the piano once more, and I legged it for the open.

I strolled out on the beach and began to think this thing over. I would have liked to consult Jeeves, of course, but Jeeves had disappeared for the morning. There was no doubt that it was hopeless expecting Freddie to do anything for himself in this crisis. I’m not saying that dear old Freddie hasn’t got his strong qualities. He is good at polo, and I have heard him spoken of as a coming man at snooker-pool. But apart from this you couldn’t call him a man of enterprise.

Well, I was rounding some rocks, thinking pretty tensely, when I caught sight of a blue dress, and there was the girl in person. I had never met her, but Freddie had sixteen photographs of her sprinkled round his bedroom, and I knew I couldn’t be mistaken. She was sitting on the sand, helping a small, fat child to build a castle. On a chair close by was an elderly female reading a novel. I heard the girl call her “aunt.” So, getting the reasoning faculties to work, I deduced that the fat child must be her cousin. It struck me that if Freddie had been there he would probably have tried to work up some sentiment about the kid on the strength of it. I couldn’t manage this. I don’t think I ever saw a kid who made me feel less sentimental. He was one of those round, bulging kids.

After he had finished his castle he seemed to get bored with life and began to cry. The girl, who seemed to read him like a book, took him off to where a fellow was selling sweets at a stall. And I walked on.

Now, those who know me, if you ask them, will tell you that I’m a chump. My Aunt Agatha would testify to this effect. So would my Uncle Percy and many more of my nearest and⁠—if you like to use the expression⁠—dearest. Well, I don’t mind. I admit it. I am a chump. But what I do say⁠—and I should like to lay the greatest possible stress on this⁠—is that every now and then, just when the populace has given up hope that I will ever show any real human intelligence⁠—I get what it is idle to pretend is not an inspiration. And that’s what happened now. I doubt if the idea that came to me at this juncture would have occurred to a single one of any dozen of the largest-brained blokes in history. Napoleon might have got it, but I’ll bet Darwin and Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy wouldn’t have thought of it in a thousand years.

It came to me on my return journey. I was walking back along the shore, exercising the old bean fiercely, when I saw the fat child meditatively smacking a jellyfish with a spade. The girl wasn’t with him. The aunt wasn’t with him. In fact, there wasn’t anybody else in sight. And the solution of the whole trouble between Freddie and his Elizabeth suddenly came to me in a flash.

From what I had seen of the two, the girl was evidently fond of this kid and, anyhow, he was her cousin, so what I