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

it? Let’s–-”

 

And then he got it—suddenly, when he wasn’t set for the punch; and he

rocked back on his heels.

 

“Oosh!” he exclaimed. And for perhaps a minute there was one of the

scaliest silences I’ve ever run up against.

 

“Is this a practical joke?” he said at last, in a way that set about

sixteen draughts cutting through the room at once.

 

I thought it was up to me to rally round old Corky.

 

“You want to stand a bit farther away from it,” I said.

 

“You’re perfectly right!” he snorted. “I do! I want to stand so far

away from it that I can’t see the thing with a telescope!” He turned on

Corky like an untamed tiger of the jungle who has just located a chunk

of meat. “And this—this—is what you have been wasting your time and

my money for all these years! A painter! I wouldn’t let you paint a

house of mine! I gave you this commission, thinking that you were a

competent worker, and this—this—this extract from a comic coloured

supplement is the result!” He swung towards the door, lashing his tail

and growling to himself. “This ends it! If you wish to continue this

foolery of pretending to be an artist because you want an excuse for

idleness, please yourself. But let me tell you this. Unless you report

at my office on Monday morning, prepared to abandon all this idiocy and

start in at the bottom of the business to work your way up, as you

should have done half a dozen years ago, not another cent—not another

cent—not another—Boosh!”

 

Then the door closed, and he was no longer with us. And I crawled out

of the bombproof shelter.

 

“Corky, old top!” I whispered faintly.

 

Corky was standing staring at the picture. His face was set. There was

a hunted look in his eye.

 

“Well, that finishes it!” he muttered brokenly.

 

“What are you going to do?”

 

“Do? What can I do? I can’t stick on here if he cuts off supplies. You

heard what he said. I shall have to go to the office on Monday.”

 

I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I knew exactly how he felt about

the office. I don’t know when I’ve been so infernally uncomfortable. It

was like hanging round trying to make conversation to a pal who’s just

been sentenced to twenty years in quod.

 

And then a soothing voice broke the silence.

 

“If I might make a suggestion, sir!”

 

It was Jeeves. He had slid from the shadows and was gazing gravely at

the picture. Upon my word, I can’t give you a better idea of the

shattering effect of Corky’s uncle Alexander when in action than by

saying that he had absolutely made me forget for the moment that Jeeves

was there.

 

“I wonder if I have ever happened to mention to you, sir, a Mr. Digby

Thistleton, with whom I was once in service? Perhaps you have met him?

He was a financier. He is now Lord Bridgnorth. It was a favourite

saying of his that there is always a way. The first time I heard him

use the expression was after the failure of a patent depilatory which

he promoted.”

 

“Jeeves,” I said, “what on earth are you talking about?”

 

“I mentioned Mr. Thistleton, sir, because his was in some respects

a parallel case to the present one. His depilatory failed, but he

did not despair. He put it on the market again under the name of

Hair-o, guaranteed to produce a full crop of hair in a few months.

It was advertised, if you remember, sir, by a humorous picture of a

billiard-ball, before and after taking, and made such a substantial

fortune that Mr. Thistleton was soon afterwards elevated to the peerage

for services to his Party. It seems to me that, if Mr. Corcoran looks

into the matter, he will find, like Mr. Thistleton, that there is always

a way. Mr. Worple himself suggested the solution of the difficulty. In

the heat of the moment he compared the portrait to an extract from a

coloured comic supplement. I consider the suggestion a very valuable

one, sir. Mr. Corcoran’s portrait may not have pleased Mr. Worple as a

likeness of his only child, but I have no doubt that editors would gladly

consider it as a foundation for a series of humorous drawings. If Mr.

Corcoran will allow me to make the suggestion, his talent has always been

for the humorous. There is something about this picture—something bold

and vigorous, which arrests the attention. I feel sure it would be highly

popular.”

 

Corky was glaring at the picture, and making a sort of dry, sucking

noise with his mouth. He seemed completely overwrought.

 

And then suddenly he began to laugh in a wild way.

 

“Corky, old man!” I said, massaging him tenderly. I feared the poor

blighter was hysterical.

 

He began to stagger about all over the floor.

 

“He’s right! The man’s absolutely right! Jeeves, you’re a life-saver!

You’ve hit on the greatest idea of the age! Report at the office on

Monday! Start at the bottom of the business! I’ll buy the business if I

feel like it. I know the man who runs the comic section of the

Sunday Star. He’ll eat this thing. He was telling me only the

other day how hard it was to get a good new series. He’ll give me

anything I ask for a real winner like this. I’ve got a gold-mine.

Where’s my hat? I’ve got an income for life! Where’s that confounded

hat? Lend me a fiver, Bertie. I want to take a taxi down to Park Row!”

 

Jeeves smiled paternally. Or, rather, he had a kind of paternal

muscular spasm about the mouth, which is the nearest he ever gets to

smiling.

 

“If I might make the suggestion, Mr. Corcoran—for a title of the

series which you have in mind—‘The Adventures of Baby Blobbs.’”

 

Corky and I looked at the picture, then at each other in an awed way.

Jeeves was right. There could be no other title.

 

“Jeeves,” I said. It was a few weeks later, and I had just finished

looking at the comic section of the Sunday Star. “I’m an

optimist. I always have been. The older I get, the more I agree with

Shakespeare and those poet Johnnies about it always being darkest

before the dawn and there’s a silver lining and what you lose on the

swings you make up on the roundabouts. Look at Mr. Corcoran, for

instance. There was a fellow, one would have said, clear up to the

eyebrows in the soup. To all appearances he had got it right in the

neck. Yet look at him now. Have you seen these pictures?”

 

“I took the liberty of glancing at them before bringing them to you,

sir. Extremely diverting.”

 

“They have made a big hit, you know.”

 

“I anticipated it, sir.”

 

I leaned back against the pillows.

 

“You know, Jeeves, you’re a genius. You ought to be drawing a

commission on these things.”

 

“I have nothing to complain of in that respect, sir. Mr. Corcoran has

been most generous. I am putting out the brown suit, sir.”

 

“No, I think I’ll wear the blue with the faint red stripe.”

 

“Not the blue with the faint red stripe, sir.”

 

“But I rather fancy myself in it.”

 

“Not the blue with the faint red stripe, sir.”

 

“Oh, all right, have it your own way.”

 

“Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.”

 

Of course, I know it’s as bad as being henpecked; but then Jeeves is

always right. You’ve got to consider that, you know. What?

JEEVES AND THE UNBIDDEN GUEST

I’m not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it’s

Shakespeare—or, if not, it’s some equally brainy lad—who says that

it’s always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and

more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up

behind him with a bit of lead piping. There’s no doubt the man’s right.

It’s absolutely that way with me. Take, for instance, the fairly rummy

matter of Lady Malvern and her son Wilmot. A moment before they turned

up, I was just thinking how thoroughly all right everything was.

 

It was one of those topping mornings, and I had just climbed out from

under the cold shower, feeling like a two-year-old. As a matter of

fact, I was especially bucked just then because the day before I had

asserted myself with Jeeves—absolutely asserted myself, don’t you

know. You see, the way things had been going on I was rapidly becoming

a dashed serf. The man had jolly well oppressed me. I didn’t so much

mind when he made me give up one of my new suits, because, Jeeves’s

judgment about suits is sound. But I as near as a toucher rebelled when

he wouldn’t let me wear a pair of cloth-topped boots which I loved like

a couple of brothers. And when he tried to tread on me like a worm in

the matter of a hat, I jolly well put my foot down and showed him who

was who. It’s a long story, and I haven’t time to tell you now, but

the point is that he wanted me to wear the Longacre—as worn by John

Drew—when I had set my heart on the Country Gentleman—as worn by

another famous actor chappie—and the end of the matter was that, after

a rather painful scene, I bought the Country Gentleman. So that’s how

things stood on this particular morning, and I was feeling kind of

manly and independent.

 

Well, I was in the bathroom, wondering what there was going to be for

breakfast while I massaged the good old spine with a rough towel and

sang slightly, when there was a tap at the door. I stopped singing and

opened the door an inch.

 

“What ho without there!”

 

“Lady Malvern wishes to see you, sir,” said Jeeves.

 

“Eh?”

 

“Lady Malvern, sir. She is waiting in the sitting-room.”

 

“Pull yourself together, Jeeves, my man,” I said, rather severely, for

I bar practical jokes before breakfast. “You know perfectly well

there’s no one waiting for me in the sitting-room. How could there be

when it’s barely ten o’clock yet?”

 

“I gathered from her ladyship, sir, that she had landed from an ocean

liner at an early hour this morning.”

 

This made the thing a bit more plausible. I remembered that when I had

arrived in America about a year before, the proceedings had begun at

some ghastly hour like six, and that I had been shot out on to a

foreign shore considerably before eight.

 

“Who the deuce is Lady Malvern, Jeeves?”

 

“Her ladyship did not confide in me, sir.”

 

“Is she alone?”

 

“Her ladyship is accompanied by a Lord Pershore, sir. I fancy that his

lordship would be her ladyship’s son.”

 

“Oh, well, put out rich raiment of sorts, and I’ll be dressing.”

 

“Our heather-mixture lounge is in readiness, sir.”

 

“Then lead me to it.”

 

While I was dressing I kept trying to think who on earth Lady Malvern

could be. It wasn’t till I had climbed through the top of my shirt and

was reaching out for the studs that I remembered.

 

“I’ve placed her, Jeeves. She’s a pal of my Aunt Agatha.”

 

“Indeed, sir?”

 

“Yes. I met her at lunch one Sunday before I left

London. A very vicious specimen. Writes books. She wrote a book on

social conditions in India when she came back from the Durbar.”