My Man Jeeves by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (reading cloud ebooks TXT) 📖

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Her name was Anthony. Mary Anthony. She was about five feet six; she

had a ton and a half of red-gold hair, grey eyes, and one of those

determined chins. She was a hospital nurse. When Bobbie smashed himself

up at polo, she was told off by the authorities to smooth his brow and

rally round with cooling unguents and all that; and the old boy hadn’t

been up and about again for more than a week before they popped off to

the registrar’s and fixed it up. Quite the romance.

 

Bobbie broke the news to me at the club one evening, and next day he

introduced me to her. I admired her. I’ve never worked myself—my

name’s Pepper, by the way. Almost forgot to mention it. Reggie Pepper.

My uncle Edward was Pepper, Wells, and Co., the Colliery people. He

left me a sizable chunk of bullion—I say I’ve never worked myself, but

I admire any one who earns a living under difficulties, especially a

girl. And this girl had had a rather unusually tough time of it, being

an orphan and all that, and having had to do everything off her own bat

for years.

 

Mary and I got along together splendidly. We don’t now, but we’ll come

to that later. I’m speaking of the past. She seemed to think Bobbie the

greatest thing on earth, judging by the way she looked at him when she

thought I wasn’t noticing. And Bobbie seemed to think the same about

her. So that I came to the conclusion that, if only dear old Bobbie

didn’t forget to go to the wedding, they had a sporting chance of being

quite happy.

 

Well, let’s brisk up a bit here, and jump a year. The story doesn’t

really start till then.

 

They took a flat and settled down. I was in and out of the place quite

a good deal. I kept my eyes open, and everything seemed to me to be

running along as smoothly as you could want. If this was marriage, I

thought, I couldn’t see why fellows were so frightened of it. There

were a lot of worse things that could happen to a man.

 

But we now come to the incident of the quiet Dinner, and it’s just here

that love’s young dream hits a snag, and things begin to occur.

 

I happened to meet Bobbie in Piccadilly, and he asked me to come back

to dinner at the flat. And, like a fool, instead of bolting and putting

myself under police protection, I went.

 

When we got to the flat, there was Mrs. Bobbie looking—well, I tell

you, it staggered me. Her gold hair was all piled up in waves and

crinkles and things, with a what-d’-you-call-it of diamonds in it. And

she was wearing the most perfectly ripping dress. I couldn’t begin to

describe it. I can only say it was the limit. It struck me that if this

was how she was in the habit of looking every night when they were

dining quietly at home together, it was no wonder that Bobbie liked

domesticity.

 

“Here’s old Reggie, dear,” said Bobbie. “I’ve brought him home to have

a bit of dinner. I’ll phone down to the kitchen and ask them to send it

up now—what?”

 

She stared at him as if she had never seen him before. Then she turned

scarlet. Then she turned as white as a sheet. Then she gave a little

laugh. It was most interesting to watch. Made me wish I was up a tree

about eight hundred miles away. Then she recovered herself.

 

“I am so glad you were able to come, Mr. Pepper,” she said, smiling at

me.

 

And after that she was all right. At least, you would have said so. She

talked a lot at dinner, and chaffed Bobbie, and played us ragtime on

the piano afterwards, as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Quite a jolly

little party it was—not. I’m no lynx-eyed sleuth, and all that sort of

thing, but I had seen her face at the beginning, and I knew that she was

working the whole time and working hard, to keep herself in hand, and

that she would have given that diamond what’s-its-name in her hair and

everything else she possessed to have one good scream—just one. I’ve

sat through some pretty thick evenings in my time, but that one had the

rest beaten in a canter. At the very earliest moment I grabbed my hat and

got away.

 

Having seen what I did, I wasn’t particularly surprised to meet Bobbie

at the club next day looking about as merry and bright as a lonely

gum-drop at an Eskimo tea-party.

 

He started in straightway. He seemed glad to have someone to talk to

about it.

 

“Do you know how long I’ve been married?” he said.

 

I didn’t exactly.

 

“About a year, isn’t it?”

 

“Not about a year,” he said sadly. “Exactly a year—yesterday!”

 

Then I understood. I saw light—a regular flash of light.

 

“Yesterday was–-?”

 

“The anniversary of the wedding. I’d arranged to take Mary to the

Savoy, and on to Covent Garden. She particularly wanted to hear Caruso.

I had the ticket for the box in my pocket. Do you know, all through

dinner I had a kind of rummy idea that there was something I’d

forgotten, but I couldn’t think what?”

 

“Till your wife mentioned it?”

 

He nodded–-

 

“She—mentioned it,” he said thoughtfully.

 

I didn’t ask for details. Women with hair and chins like Mary’s may be

angels most of the time, but, when they take off their wings for a bit,

they aren’t half-hearted about it.

 

“To be absolutely frank, old top,” said poor old Bobbie, in a broken

sort of way, “my stock’s pretty low at home.”

 

There didn’t seem much to be done. I just lit a cigarette and sat

there. He didn’t want to talk. Presently he went out. I stood at the

window of our upper smoking-room, which looks out on to Piccadilly, and

watched him. He walked slowly along for a few yards, stopped, then

walked on again, and finally turned into a jeweller’s. Which was an

instance of what I meant when I said that deep down in him there was a

certain stratum of sense.

 

*

 

It was from now on that I began to be really interested in this problem

of Bobbie’s married life. Of course, one’s always mildly interested in

one’s friends’ marriages, hoping they’ll turn out well and all that;

but this was different. The average man isn’t like Bobbie, and the

average girl isn’t like Mary. It was that old business of the immovable

mass and the irresistible force. There was Bobbie, ambling gently

through life, a dear old chap in a hundred ways, but undoubtedly a

chump of the first water.

 

And there was Mary, determined that he shouldn’t be a chump. And

Nature, mind you, on Bobbie’s side. When Nature makes a chump like

dear old Bobbie, she’s proud of him, and doesn’t want her handiwork

disturbed. She gives him a sort of natural armour to protect him

against outside interference. And that armour is shortness of memory.

Shortness of memory keeps a man a chump, when, but for it, he might

cease to be one. Take my case, for instance. I’m a chump. Well, if I

had remembered half the things people have tried to teach me during my

life, my size in hats would be about number nine. But I didn’t. I

forgot them. And it was just the same with Bobbie.

 

For about a week, perhaps a bit more, the recollection of that quiet

little domestic evening bucked him up like a tonic. Elephants, I read

somewhere, are champions at the memory business, but they were fools to

Bobbie during that week. But, bless you, the shock wasn’t nearly big

enough. It had dinted the armour, but it hadn’t made a hole in it.

Pretty soon he was back at the old game.

 

It was pathetic, don’t you know. The poor girl loved him, and she was

frightened. It was the thin edge of the wedge, you see, and she knew

it. A man who forgets what day he was married, when he’s been married

one year, will forget, at about the end of the fourth, that he’s

married at all. If she meant to get him in hand at all, she had got to

do it now, before he began to drift away.

 

I saw that clearly enough, and I tried to make Bobbie see it, when he

was by way of pouring out his troubles to me one afternoon. I can’t

remember what it was that he had forgotten the day before, but it was

something she had asked him to bring home for her—it may have been a

book.

 

“It’s such a little thing to make a fuss about,” said Bobbie. “And she

knows that it’s simply because I’ve got such an infernal memory about

everything. I can’t remember anything. Never could.”

 

He talked on for a while, and, just as he was going, he pulled out a

couple of sovereigns.

 

“Oh, by the way,” he said.

 

“What’s this for?” I asked, though I knew.

 

“I owe it you.”

 

“How’s that?” I said.

 

“Why, that bet on Tuesday. In the billiard-room. Murray and Brown were

playing a hundred up, and I gave you two to one that Brown would win,

and Murray beat him by twenty odd.”

 

“So you do remember some things?” I said.

 

He got quite excited. Said that if I thought he was the sort of rotter

who forgot to pay when he lost a bet, it was pretty rotten of me after

knowing him all these years, and a lot more like that.

 

“Subside, laddie,” I said.

 

Then I spoke to him like a father.

 

“What you’ve got to do, my old college chum,” I said, “is to pull

yourself together, and jolly quick, too. As things are shaping, you’re

due for a nasty knock before you know what’s hit you. You’ve got to

make an effort. Don’t say you can’t. This two quid business shows that,

even if your memory is rocky, you can remember some things. What you’ve

got to do is to see that wedding anniversaries and so on are included

in the list. It may be a brainstrain, but you can’t get out of it.”

 

“I suppose you’re right,” said Bobbie. “But it beats me why she thinks

such a lot of these rotten little dates. What’s it matter if I forgot

what day we were married on or what day she was born on or what day the

cat had the measles? She knows I love her just as much as if I were a

memorizing freak at the halls.”

 

“That’s not enough for a woman,” I said. “They want to be shown. Bear

that in mind, and you’re all right. Forget it, and there’ll be

trouble.”

 

He chewed the knob of his stick.

 

“Women are frightfully rummy,” he said gloomily.

 

“You should have thought of that before you married one,” I said.

 

*

 

I don’t see that I could have done any more. I had put the whole thing

in a nutshell for him. You would have thought he’d have seen the point,

and that it would have made him brace up and get a hold on himself. But

no. Off he went again in the same old way. I gave up arguing with him.

I had a good deal of time on my