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

the girl’s gratitude is bound to make

her chuck hostilities and be friends again. So I gathered in the kid

and made off with him. All the way home I pictured that scene of

reconciliation. I could see it so vividly, don’t you know, that, by

George, it gave me quite a choky feeling in my throat.

 

Freddie, dear old chap, was rather slow at getting on to the fine

points of the idea. When I appeared, carrying the kid, and dumped him

down in our sitting-room, he didn’t absolutely effervesce with joy, if

you know what I mean. The kid had started to bellow by this time, and

poor old Freddie seemed to find it rather trying.

 

“Stop it!” he said. “Do you think nobody’s got any troubles except you?

What the deuce is all this, Reggie?”

 

The kid came back at him with a yell that made the window rattle. I

raced to the kitchen and fetched a jar of honey. It was the right

stuff. The kid stopped bellowing and began to smear his face with the

stuff.

 

“Well?” said Freddie, when silence had set in. I explained the idea.

After a while it began to strike him.

 

“You’re not such a fool as you look, sometimes, Reggie,” he said

handsomely. “I’m bound to say this seems pretty good.”

 

And he disentangled the kid from the honey-jar and took him out, to

scour the beach for Angela.

 

I don’t know when I’ve felt so happy. I was so fond of dear old Freddie

that to know that he was soon going to be his old bright self again

made me feel as if somebody had left me about a million pounds. I was

leaning back in a chair on the veranda, smoking peacefully, when down

the road I saw the old boy returning, and, by George, the kid was still

with him. And Freddie looked as if he hadn’t a friend in the world.

 

“Hello!” I said. “Couldn’t you find her?”

 

“Yes, I found her,” he replied, with one of those bitter, hollow

laughs.

 

“Well, then–-?”

 

Freddie sank into a chair and groaned.

 

“This isn’t her cousin, you idiot!” he said.

 

“He’s no relation at all. He’s just a kid she happened to meet on the

beach. She had never seen him before in her life.”

 

“What! Who is he, then?”

 

“I don’t know. Oh, Lord, I’ve had a time! Thank goodness you’ll

probably spend the next few years of your life in Dartmoor for

kidnapping. That’s my only consolation. I’ll come and jeer at you

through the bars.”

 

“Tell me all, old boy,” I said.

 

It took him a good long time to tell the story, for he broke off in the

middle of nearly every sentence to call me names, but I gathered

gradually what had happened. She had listened like an iceberg while he

told the story he had prepared, and then—well, she didn’t actually

call him a liar, but she gave him to understand in a general sort of

way that if he and Dr. Cook ever happened to meet, and started swapping

stories, it would be about the biggest duel on record. And then he had

crawled away with the kid, licked to a splinter.

 

“And mind, this is your affair,” he concluded. “I’m not mixed up in it

at all. If you want to escape your sentence, you’d better go and find

the kid’s parents and return him before the police come for you.”

 

*

 

By Jove, you know, till I started to tramp the place with this infernal

kid, I never had a notion it would have been so deuced difficult to

restore a child to its anxious parents. It’s a mystery to me how

kidnappers ever get caught. I searched Marvis Bay like a bloodhound,

but nobody came forward to claim the infant. You’d have thought, from

the lack of interest in him, that he was stopping there all by himself

in a cottage of his own. It wasn’t till, by an inspiration, I thought

to ask the sweet-stall man that I found out that his name was Medwin,

and that his parents lived at a place called Ocean Rest, in Beach Road.

 

I shot off there like an arrow and knocked at the door. Nobody

answered. I knocked again. I could hear movements inside, but nobody

came. I was just going to get to work on that knocker in such a way

that the idea would filter through into these people’s heads that I

wasn’t standing there just for the fun of the thing, when a voice from

somewhere above shouted, “Hi!”

 

I looked up and saw a round, pink face, with grey whiskers east and

west of it, staring down from an upper window.”

 

“Hi!” it shouted again.

 

“What the deuce do you mean by ‘Hi’?” I said.

 

“You can’t come in,” said the face. “Hello, is that Tootles?”

 

“My name is not Tootles, and I don’t want to come in,” I said. “Are you

Mr. Medwin? I’ve brought back your son.”

 

“I see him. Peep-bo, Tootles! Dadda can see ‘oo!”

 

The face disappeared with a jerk. I could hear voices. The face

reappeared.

 

“Hi!”

 

I churned the gravel madly.

 

“Do you live here?” said the face.

 

“I’m staying here for a few weeks.”

 

“What’s your name?”

 

“Pepper. But–-”

 

“Pepper? Any relation to Edward Pepper, the colliery owner?”

 

“My uncle. But–-”

 

“I used to know him well. Dear old Edward Pepper! I wish I was with him

now.”

 

“I wish you were,” I said.

 

He beamed down at me.

 

“This is most fortunate,” he said. “We were wondering what we were to

do with Tootles. You see, we have the mumps here. My daughter Bootles

has just developed mumps. Tootles must not be exposed to the risk of

infection. We could not think what we were to do with him. It was most

fortunate your finding him. He strayed from his nurse. I would hesitate

to trust him to the care of a stranger, but you are different. Any

nephew of Edward Pepper’s has my implicit confidence. You must take

Tootles to your house. It will be an ideal arrangement. I have written

to my brother in London to come and fetch him. He may be here in a few

days.”

 

“May!”

 

“He is a busy man, of course; but he should certainly be here within a

week. Till then Tootles can stop with you. It is an excellent plan.

Very much obliged to you. Your wife will like Tootles.”

 

“I haven’t got a wife,” I yelled; but the window had closed with a

bang, as if the man with the whiskers had found a germ trying to

escape, don’t you know, and had headed it off just in time.

 

I breathed a deep breath and wiped my forehead.

 

The window flew up again.

 

“Hi!”

 

A package weighing about a ton hit me on the head and burst like a

bomb.

 

“Did you catch it?” said the face, reappearing. “Dear me, you missed

it! Never mind. You can get it at the grocer’s. Ask for Bailey’s

Granulated Breakfast Chips. Tootles takes them for breakfast with a

little milk. Be certain to get Bailey’s.”

 

My spirit was broken, if you know what I mean. I accepted the situation.

Taking Tootles by the hand, I walked slowly away. Napoleon’s retreat

from Moscow was a picnic by the side of it.

 

As we turned up the road we met Freddie’s Angela.

 

The sight of her had a marked effect on the kid Tootles. He pointed at

her and said, “Wah!”

 

The girl stopped and smiled. I loosed the kid, and he ran to her.

 

“Well, baby?” she said, bending down to him. “So father found you

again, did he? Your little son and I made friends on the beach this

morning,” she said to me.

 

This was the limit. Coming on top of that interview with the whiskered

lunatic it so utterly unnerved me, don’t you know, that she had nodded

good-bye and was half-way down the road before I caught up with my

breath enough to deny the charge of being the infant’s father.

 

I hadn’t expected dear old Freddie to sing with joy when he found out

what had happened, but I did think he might have shown a little more

manly fortitude. He leaped up, glared at the kid, and clutched his

head. He didn’t speak for a long time, but, on the other hand, when he

began he did not leave off for a long time. He was quite emotional,

dear old boy. It beat me where he could have picked up such

expressions.

 

“Well,” he said, when he had finished, “say something! Heavens! man,

why don’t you say something?”

 

“You don’t give me a chance, old top,” I said soothingly.

 

“What are you going to do about it?”

 

“What can we do about it?”

 

“We can’t spend our time acting as nurses to this—this exhibit.”

 

He got up.

 

“I’m going back to London,” he said.

 

“Freddie!” I cried. “Freddie, old man!” My voice shook. “Would you

desert a pal at a time like this?”

 

“I would. This is your business, and you’ve got to manage it.”

 

“Freddie,” I said, “you’ve got to stand by me. You must. Do you realize

that this child has to be undressed, and bathed, and dressed again? You

wouldn’t leave me to do all that single-handed? Freddie, old scout, we

were at school together. Your mother likes me. You owe me a tenner.”

 

He sat down again.

 

“Oh, well,” he said resignedly.

 

“Besides, old top,” I said, “I did it all for your sake, don’t you

know?”

 

He looked at me in a curious way.

 

“Reggie,” he said, in a strained voice, “one moment. I’ll stand a good

deal, but I won’t stand for being expected to be grateful.”

 

Looking back at it, I see that what saved me from Colney Hatch in that

crisis was my bright idea of buying up most of the contents of the

local sweet-shop. By serving out sweets to the kid practically

incessantly we managed to get through the rest of that day pretty

satisfactorily. At eight o’clock he fell asleep in a chair, and, having

undressed him by unbuttoning every button in sight and, where there

were no buttons, pulling till something gave, we carried him up to bed.

 

Freddie stood looking at the pile of clothes on the floor and I knew

what he was thinking. To get the kid undressed had been simple—a mere

matter of muscle. But how were we to get him into his clothes again? I

stirred the pile with my foot. There was a long linen arrangement which

might have been anything. Also a strip of pink flannel which was like

nothing on earth. We looked at each other and smiled wanly.

 

But in the morning I remembered that there were children at the next

bungalow but one. We went there before breakfast and borrowed their

nurse. Women are wonderful, by George they are! She had that kid

dressed and looking fit for anything in about eight minutes. I showered

wealth on her, and she promised to come in morning and evening. I sat

down to breakfast almost cheerful again. It was the first bit of silver

lining there had been to the cloud up to date.

 

“And after all,” I said, “there’s lots to be said for having a

child about the house, if you know