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

in

which Rocky lived; but it seems that, if you stick to exhortations to

young men to lead the strenuous life and don’t shove in any rhymes,

American editors fight for the stuff. Rocky showed me one of his things

once. It began:

 

Be!

Be!

The past is dead.

To-morrow is not born.

Be to-day!

To-day!

Be with every nerve,

With every muscle,

With every drop of your red blood!

Be!

 

It was printed opposite the frontispiece of a magazine with a sort of

scroll round it, and a picture in the middle of a fairly-nude chappie,

with bulging muscles, giving the rising sun the glad eye. Rocky said

they gave him a hundred dollars for it, and he stayed in bed till four

in the afternoon for over a month.

 

As regarded the future he was pretty solid, owing to the fact that he

had a moneyed aunt tucked away somewhere in Illinois; and, as he had

been named Rockmetteller after her, and was her only nephew, his

position was pretty sound. He told me that when he did come into the

money he meant to do no work at all, except perhaps an occasional poem

recommending the young man with life opening out before him, with all

its splendid possibilities, to light a pipe and shove his feet upon the

mantelpiece.

 

And this was the man who was prodding me in the ribs in the grey dawn!

 

“Read this, Bertie!” I could just see that he was waving a letter or

something equally foul in my face. “Wake up and read this!”

 

I can’t read before I’ve had my morning tea and a cigarette. I groped

for the bell.

 

Jeeves came in looking as fresh as a dewy violet. It’s a mystery to me

how he does it.

 

“Tea, Jeeves.”

 

“Very good, sir.”

 

He flowed silently out of the room—he always gives you the impression

of being some liquid substance when he moves; and I found that Rocky

was surging round with his beastly letter again.

 

“What is it?” I said. “What on earth’s the matter?”’

 

“Read it!”

 

“I can’t. I haven’t had my tea.”

 

“Well, listen then.”

 

“Who’s it from?”

 

“My aunt.”

 

At this point I fell asleep again. I woke to hear him saying:

 

“So what on earth am I to do?”

 

Jeeves trickled in with the tray, like some silent stream meandering

over its mossy bed; and I saw daylight.

 

“Read it again, Rocky, old top,” I said. “I want Jeeves to hear it. Mr.

Todd’s aunt has written him a rather rummy letter, Jeeves, and we want

your advice.”

 

“Very good, sir.”

 

He stood in the middle of the room, registering devotion to the cause,

and Rocky started again:

 

“MY DEAR ROCKMETTELLER.—I have been thinking things over for a

long while, and I have come to the conclusion that I have been

very thoughtless to wait so long before doing what I have made

up my mind to do now.”

 

“What do you make of that, Jeeves?”

 

“It seems a little obscure at present, sir, but no doubt it becomes

cleared at a later point in the communication.”

 

“It becomes as clear as mud!” said Rocky.

 

“Proceed, old scout,” I said, champing my bread and butter.

 

“You know how all my life I have longed to visit New York and see

for myself the wonderful gay life of which I have read so much. I

fear that now it will be impossible for me to fulfil my dream. I

am old and worn out. I seem to have no strength left in me.”

 

“Sad, Jeeves, what?”

 

“Extremely, sir.”

 

“Sad nothing!” said Rocky. “It’s sheer laziness. I went to see her last

Christmas and she was bursting with health. Her doctor told me himself

that there was nothing wrong with her whatever. But she will insist

that she’s a hopeless invalid, so he has to agree with her. She’s got a

fixed idea that the trip to New York would kill her; so, though it’s

been her ambition all her life to come here, she stays where she is.”

 

“Rather like the chappie whose heart was ‘in the Highlands a-chasing of

the deer,’ Jeeves?”

 

“The cases are in some respects parallel, sir.”

 

“Carry on, Rocky, dear

boy.”

 

“So I have decided that, if I cannot enjoy all the marvels of the

city myself, I can at least enjoy them through you. I suddenly

thought of this yesterday after reading a beautiful poem in the

Sunday paper about a young man who had longed all his life for a

certain thing and won it in the end only when he was too old to

enjoy it. It was very sad, and it touched me.”

 

“A thing,” interpolated Rocky bitterly, “that I’ve not been able to do

in ten years.”

 

“As you know, you will have my money when I am gone; but until now

I have never been able to see my way to giving you an allowance. I

have now decided to do so—on one condition. I have written to a

firm of lawyers in New York, giving them instructions to pay you

quite a substantial sum each month. My one condition is that you

live in New York and enjoy yourself as I have always wished to do.

I want you to be my representative, to spend this money for me as

I should do myself. I want you to plunge into the gay, prismatic

life of New York. I want you to be the life and soul of brilliant

supper parties.

 

“Above all, I want you—indeed, I insist on this—to write me

letters at least once a week giving me a full description of all

you are doing and all that is going on in the city, so that I may

enjoy at second-hand what my wretched health prevents my enjoying

for myself. Remember that I shall expect full details, and that no

detail is too trivial to interest.—Your affectionate Aunt,

 

“ISABEL ROCKMETTELLER.”

 

“What about it?” said Rocky.

 

“What about it?” I said.

 

“Yes. What on earth am I going to do?”

 

It was only then that I really got on to the extremely rummy attitude

of the chappie, in view of the fact that a quite unexpected mess of the

right stuff had suddenly descended on him from a blue sky. To my mind

it was an occasion for the beaming smile and the joyous whoop; yet here

the man was, looking and talking as if Fate had swung on his solar

plexus. It amazed me.

 

“Aren’t you bucked?” I said.

 

“Bucked!”

 

“If I were in your place I should be frightfully braced. I consider

this pretty soft for you.”

 

He gave a kind of yelp, stared at me for a moment, and then began to

talk of New York in a way that reminded me of Jimmy Mundy, the reformer

chappie. Jimmy had just come to New York on a hit-the-trail campaign,

and I had popped in at the Garden a couple of days before, for half an

hour or so, to hear him. He had certainly told New York some pretty

straight things about itself, having apparently taken a dislike to the

place, but, by Jove, you know, dear old Rocky made him look like a

publicity agent for the old metrop.!

 

“Pretty soft!” he cried. “To have to come and live in New York! To have

to leave my little cottage and take a stuffy, smelly, overheated hole

of an apartment in this Heaven-forsaken, festering Gehenna. To have to

mix night after night with a mob who think that life is a sort of St.

Vitus’s dance, and imagine that they’re having a good time because

they’re making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I

loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn’t come near the place if I hadn’t got

to see editors occasionally. There’s a blight on it. It’s got moral

delirium tremens. It’s the limit. The very thought of staying more than

a day in it makes me sick. And you call this thing pretty soft for me!”

 

I felt rather like Lot’s friends must have done when they dropped in

for a quiet chat and their genial host began to criticise the Cities of

the Plain. I had no idea old Rocky could be so eloquent.

 

“It would kill me to have to live in New York,” he went on. “To have to

share the air with six million people! To have to wear stiff collars

and decent clothes all the time! To–-” He started. “Good Lord! I

suppose I should have to dress for dinner in the evenings. What a

ghastly notion!”

 

I was shocked, absolutely shocked.

 

“My dear chap!” I said reproachfully.

 

“Do you dress for dinner every night, Bertie?”

 

“Jeeves,” I said coldly. The man was still standing like a statue by

the door. “How many suits of evening clothes have I?”

 

“We have three suits full of evening dress, sir; two dinner jackets–-”

 

“Three.”

 

“For practical purposes two only, sir. If you remember we cannot wear

the third. We have also seven white waistcoats.”

 

“And shirts?”

 

“Four dozen, sir.”

 

“And white ties?”

 

“The first two shallow shelves in the chest of drawers are completely

filled with our white ties, sir.”

 

I turned to Rocky.

 

“You see?”

 

The chappie writhed like an electric fan.

 

“I won’t do it! I can’t do it! I’ll be hanged if I’ll do it! How on

earth can I dress up like that? Do you realize that most days I don’t

get out of my pyjamas till five in the afternoon, and then I just put

on an old sweater?”

 

I saw Jeeves wince, poor chap! This sort of revelation shocked his

finest feelings.

 

“Then, what are you going to do about it?” I said.

 

“That’s what I want to know.”

 

“You might write and explain to your aunt.”

 

“I might—if I wanted her to get round to her lawyer’s in two rapid

leaps and cut me out of her will.”

 

I saw his point.

 

“What do you suggest, Jeeves?” I said.

 

Jeeves cleared his throat respectfully.

 

“The crux of the matter would appear to be, sir, that Mr. Todd is

obliged by the conditions under which the money is delivered into his

possession to write Miss Rockmetteller long and detailed letters

relating to his movements, and the only method by which this can be

accomplished, if Mr. Todd adheres to his expressed intention of

remaining in the country, is for Mr. Todd to induce some second party

to gather the actual experiences which Miss Rockmetteller wishes

reported to her, and to convey these to him in the shape of a careful

report, on which it would be possible for him, with the aid of his

imagination, to base the suggested correspondence.”

 

Having got which off the old diaphragm, Jeeves was silent. Rocky looked

at me in a helpless sort of way. He hasn’t been brought up on Jeeves as

I have, and he isn’t on to his curves.

 

“Could he put it a little clearer, Bertie?” he said. “I thought at the

start it was going to make sense, but it kind of flickered. What’s the

idea?”

 

“My dear old man, perfectly simple. I knew we could stand on Jeeves.

All you’ve got to do is to get somebody to go round the town for you

and take a few notes, and then you work the notes up into letters.

That’s it, isn’t it, Jeeves?”

 

“Precisely,