Contents

About the Book

About the Author

Also by P.G. Wodehouse

Title Page

Ring for Jeeves

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

The Mating Season

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Very Good, Jeeves

Dedication

Preface

1: Jeeves and the Impending Doom

2: The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy

3: Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit

4: Jeeves and the Song of Songs

5: Episode of the Dog McIntosh

6: The Spot of Art

7: Jeeves and the Kid Clementina

8: The Love that Purifies

9: Jeeves and the Old School Chum

10: Indian Summer of an Uncle

11: The Ordeal of Young Tuppy

Copyright

About the Book

‘There are aspects of Jeeves’s character which have frequently caused coldness to arise between us. He is one of those fellows who, if you give them a thingummy, take a what-d’you-call-it.’

BERTRAM WOOSTER

This volume, containing The Mating Season, Ring for Jeeves and Very Good, Jeeves, gives bumper opportunities for both thingummies and what-d’you-call-its in plots as devious and situations as funny as any in Wodehouse.

About the Author

The author of almost a hundred books and the creator of Jeeves, Blandings Castle, Psmith, Ukridge, Uncle Fred and Mr Mulliner, P.G. Wodehouse was born in 1881 and educated at Dulwich College. After two years with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank he became a full-time writer, contributing to a variety of periodicals. As well as his novels and short stories, he wrote lyrics for musical comedies, and at one stage had five shows running simultaneously on Broadway.

At the age of 93, in the New Year’s Honours List of 1975, he received a long-overdue Knighthood, only to die on St Valentine’s Day some 45 days later.

Books by P. G. Wodehouse

THE
JEEVES OMNIBUS

Volume 3

P. G. Wodehouse

RING FOR JEEVES

1

THE WAITER, WHO had slipped out to make a quick telephone call, came back into the coffee room of the Goose and Gherkin wearing the starry-eyed look of a man who has just learned that he has backed a long-priced winner. He yearned to share his happiness with someone, and the only possible confidant was the woman at the table near the door, who was having a small gin and tonic and whiling away the time by reading a book of spiritualistic interest. He decided to tell her the good news.

‘I don’t know if you would care to know, madam,’ he said, in a voice that throbbed with emotion, ‘but Whistler’s Mother won the Oaks.’

The woman looked up, regarding him with large, dark, soulful eyes as if he had been something recently assembled from ectoplasm.

‘The what?’

‘The Oaks, madam.’

‘And what are the Oaks?’

It seemed incredible to the waiter that there should be anyone in England who could ask such a question, but he had already gathered that the lady was an American lady, and American ladies, he knew, are often ignorant of the fundamental facts of life. He had once met one who had wanted to know what a football pool was.

‘It’s an annual horse race, madam, reserved for fillies. By which I mean that it comes off once a year and the male sex isn’t allowed to compete. It’s run at Epsom Downs the day before the Derby, of which you have no doubt heard.’

‘Yes, I have heard of the Derby. It is your big race over here, is it not?’

‘Yes, madam. What is sometimes termed a classic. The Oaks is run the day before it, though in previous years the day after. By which I mean,’ said the waiter, hoping he was not being too abstruse, ‘it used to be run the day following the Derby, but now they’ve changed it.’

‘And Whistler’s Mother won this race you call the Oaks?’

‘Yes, madam. By a couple of lengths. I was on five bob.’

‘I see. Well, that’s fine, isn’t it? Will you bring me another gin and tonic?’

‘Certainly, madam. Whistler’s Mother!’ said the waiter, in a sort of ecstasy. ‘What a beauty!’

He went out. The woman resumed her reading. Quiet descended on the coffee room.

In its general essentials the coffee room at the Goose and Gherkin differed very little from the coffee rooms of all the other inns that nestle by the wayside in England and keep the island race from dying of thirst. It had the usual dim religious light, the customary pictures of The Stag at Bay and The Huguenot’s Farewell over the mantelpiece, the same cruets and bottles of sauce, and the traditional ozone-like smell of mixed pickles, gravy soup, boiled potatoes, waiters and old cheese.

What distinguished it on this June afternoon and gave it a certain something that the others had not got was the presence in it of the woman the waiter had been addressing. As a general rule, in the coffee rooms of English wayside inns, all the eye is able to feast on is an occasional farmer eating fried eggs or a couple of commercial travellers telling each other improper stories, but the Goose and Gherkin had drawn this strikingly handsome hand across the sea, and she raised the tone of the place unbelievably.

The thing about her that immediately arrested the attention and drew the startled whistle to the lips was the aura of wealth which she exuded. It showed itself in her rings, her hat, her stockings, her shoes, her platinum fur cape and the Jacques Fath sports costume that clung lovingly to her undulating figure. Here, you would have said to yourself, beholding her, was a woman who had got the stuff in sackfuls and probably suffered agonies from coupon-clipper’s thumb, a woman at the mention of whose name the blood-sucking leeches of the Internal Revenue Department were accustomed to raise their filthy hats with a reverent intake of the breath.

Nor would you have been in error. She was just as rich as she looked. Twice married and each time to a multi-millionaire, she was as nicely fixed financially as any woman could have wished.

Hers had been one of those Horatio Alger careers which are so encouraging to girls who hope to get on in the world, showing as they do that you never know what prizes Fate may be storing up for you around the corner. Born Rosalinda Banks, of the Chilicothe, Ohio, Bankses, with no assets beyond a lovely face, a superb figure and a mild talent for vers libre, she had come to Greenwich Village to seek her fortune and had found it first crack out of the box. At a studio party in Macdougall Alley she had met and fascinated Clifton Bessemer, the Pulp Paper Magnate, and in almost no time at all had become his wife.

Widowed owing to Clifton Bessemer trying to drive his car one night through a truck instead of round it, and two years later meeting in Paris and marrying the millionaire sportsman and big game hunter, A.B. Spottsworth, she was almost immediately widowed again.

It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A.B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn’t. The result being that when he placed his foot on the animal’s neck preparatory to being photographed by Captain Biggar, the White Hunter accompanying the expedition, a rather unpleasant brawl had ensued, and owing to Captain Biggar having to drop the camera and spend several vital moments looking about for his rifle, his bullet, though unerring, had come too late to be of practical assistance. There was nothing to be done but pick up the pieces and transfer the millionaire sportsman’s vast fortune to his widow, adding it to the sixteen million or so which she had inherited from Clifton Bessemer.

Such, then, was Mrs Spottsworth, a woman with a soul and about forty-two million dollars in the old oak chest. And, to clear up such minor points as may require elucidation, she was on her way to Rowcester Abbey, where she was to be the guest of the ninth Earl of Rowcester, and had stopped off at the Goose and Gherkin because she wanted to stretch her legs and air her Pekinese dog Pomona. She was reading a book of spiritualistic interest because she had recently become an enthusiastic devotee of psychical research. She was wearing a Jacques Fath sports costume because she liked Jacques Fath sports costumes. And she was drinking gin and tonic because it was one of those warm evenings when a gin and tonic just hits the spot.

The waiter returned with the elixir, and went on where he had left off.

‘Thirty-three to one the price was, madam.’

Mrs Spottsworth raised her lustrous eyes.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘That’s what she started at.’

‘To whom do you refer?’

‘This filly I was speaking of that’s won the Oaks.’

‘Back to her, are we?’ said Mrs Spottsworth with a sigh. She had been reading about some interesting manifestations from the spirit world, and this earthy stuff jarred upon her.

The waiter sensed the lack of enthusiasm. It hurt him a little. On this day of days he would have preferred to have to do only with those in whose veins sporting blood ran.

‘You’re not fond of racing, madam?’

Mrs Spottsworth considered.

‘Not particularly. My first husband used to be crazy about it, but it always seemed to me so unspiritual. All that stuff about booting them home and goats and beetles and fast tracks and mudders and something he referred to as a boat race. Not at all the sort of thing to develop a person’s higher self. I’d bet a grand now and then, just for the fun of it, but that’s as far as I would go. It never touched the deeps in me.’

‘A grand, madam?’

‘A thousand dollars.’

‘Coo!’ said the waiter, awed. ‘That’s what I’d call putting your shirt on. Though for me it’d be not only my shirt but my stockings and pantie-girdle as well. Lucky for the bookies you weren’t at Epsom today, backing Whistler’s Mother.’

He moved off, and Mrs Spottsworth resumed her book.

For perhaps ten minutes after that nothing of major importance happened in the coffee room of the Goose and Gherkin except that the waiter killed a fly with his napkin and Mrs Spottsworth finished her gin and tonic. Then the door was flung open by a powerful hand, and a tough, square, chunky, weather-beaten-looking man in the middle forties strode in. He had keen blue eyes, a very red face, a round head inclined to baldness and one of those small, bristly moustaches which abound in such profusion in the outposts of Empire. Indeed, these sprout in so widespread a way on the upper lips of those who bear the white man’s burden that it is a tenable theory that the latter hold some sort of patent rights. One recalls the nostalgic words of the poet Kipling, when he sang ‘Put me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, where there ain’t no ten commandments and a man can raise a small bristly moustache.’

It was probably this moustache that gave the newcomer the exotic look he had. It made him seem out of place in the coffee room of an English inn. You felt, eyeing him, that his natural setting was Black Mike’s bar in Pago-Pago, where he would be the life and soul of the party, though of course most of the time he would be out on safari, getting rough with such fauna as happened to come his way. Here, you would have said, was a man who many a time had looked his rhinoceros in the eye and made it wilt.

And again, just as when you were making that penetrating analysis of Mrs Spottsworth, you would have been perfectly right. This bristly moustached he-man of the wilds was none other than the Captain Biggar whom we mentioned a moment ago in connection with the regrettable fracas which had culminated in A.B. Spottsworth going to reside with the morning stars, and any of the crowd out along Bubbling Well Road or in the Long Bar at Shanghai could have told you that Bwana Biggar had made more rhinoceri wilt than you could shake a stick at.

At the moment, he was thinking less of our dumb chums than of something cool in a tankard. The evening, as we have said, was warm, and he had driven many miles – from Epsom Downs, where he had started immediately after the conclusion of the race known as The Oaks, to this quiet inn in Southmoltonshire.

‘Beer!’ he thundered, and at the sound of his voice Mrs Spottsworth dropped her book with a startled cry, her eyes leaping from the parent sockets.

And in the circumstances it was quite understandable that her eyes should have leaped, for her first impression had been that this was one of those interesting manifestations from the spirit world, of which she had been reading. Enough to make any woman’s eyes leap.

The whole point about a hunter like Captain Biggar, if you face it squarely, is that he hunts. And, this being so, you expect him to stay put in and around his chosen hunting grounds. Meet him in Kenya or Malaya or Borneo or India, and you feel no surprise. ‘Hullo there, Captain Biggar,’ you say. ‘How’s the spooring?’ And he replies that the spooring is tophole. Everything perfectly in order.

But when you see him in the coffee room of an English country inn, thousands of miles from his natural habitat, you may be excused for harbouring a momentary suspicion that this is not the man in the flesh but rather his wraith or phantasm looking in, as wraiths and phantasms will, to pass the time of day.

‘Eek!’ Mrs Spottsworth exclaimed, visibly shaken. Since interesting herself in psychical research, she had often wished to see a ghost, but one likes to pick one’s time and place for that sort of thing. One does not want spectres muscling in when one is enjoying a refreshing gin and tonic.

To the captain, owing to the dimness of the light in the Goose and Gherkin’s coffee room, Mrs Spottsworth, until she spoke, had been simply a vague female figure having one for the road. On catching sight of her, he had automatically twirled his moustache, his invariable practice when he observed anything female in the offing, but he had in no sense drunk her in. Bending his gaze upon her now, he quivered all over like a nervous young hippopotamus finding itself face to face with its first White Hunter.

‘Well, fry me in butter!’ he ejaculated. He stood staring at her. ‘Mrs Spottsworth! Well, simmer me in prune juice! Last person in the world I’d have dreamed of seeing. I thought you were in America.’

Mrs Spottsworth had recovered her poise.

‘I flew over for a visit a week ago,’ she said.

‘Oh, I see. That explains it. What made it seem odd, finding you here, was that I remember you told me you lived in California or one of those places.’

‘Yes, I have a home in Pasadena. In Carmel, too, and one in New York and another in Florida and another up in Maine.’

‘Making five in all?’

‘Six. I was forgetting the one in Oregon.’

‘Six?’ The captain seemed thoughtful. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘it’s nice to have a roof over your head, of course.’

‘Yes. But one gets tired of places after a while. One yearns for something new. I’m thinking of buying this house I’m on my way to now, Rowcester Abbey. I met Lord Rowcester’s sister in New York on her way back from Jamaica, and she said her brother might be willing to sell. But what are you doing in England, Captain? I couldn’t believe my eyes at first.’

‘Oh, I thought I’d take a look at the old country, dear lady. Long time since I had a holiday, and you know the old proverb – all work and no play makes Jack a peh-bah pom bahoo. Amazing the way things have changed since I was here last. No idle rich, if you know what I mean. Everybody working. Everybody got a job of some kind.’

‘Yes, it’s extraordinary, isn’t it? Lord Rowcester’s sister, Lady Carmoyle, tells me her husband, Sir Roderick Carmoyle, is a floorwalker at Harrige’s. And he’s a tenth baronet or something.’

‘Amazing, what? Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar won’t believe me when I tell them.’

‘Who?’

‘Couple of pals of mine out in Kuala Lumpur. They’ll be astounded. But I like it,’ said the captain stoutly. ‘It’s the right spirit. The straight bat.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘A cricket term, dear lady. At cricket you’ve got to play with a straight bat, or … or, let’s face it, you don’t play with a straight bat, if you see what I mean.’

‘I suppose so. But do sit down, won’t you?’

‘Thanks, if I may, but only for a minute. I’m chasing a foe of the human species.’

In Captain Biggar’s manner, as he sat down, a shrewd observer would have noted a trace of embarrassment, and might have attributed this to the fact that the last time he and Mrs Spottsworth had seen each other he had been sorting out what was left of her husband with a view to shipping it to Nairobi. But it was not the memory of that awkward moment that was causing his diffidence. Its roots lay deeper than that.

He loved this woman. He had loved her from the very moment she had come into his life. How well he remembered that moment. The camp among the acacia trees. The boulder-strewn cliff. The boulder-filled stream. Old Simba the lion roaring in the distance, old Tembo the elephant doing this and that in the bimbo or tall grass, and A.B. Spottsworth driving up in the car with a vision in jodhpurs at his side. ‘My wife,’ A.B. Spottsworth had said, indicating the combination of Cleopatra and Helen of Troy by whom he was accompanied, and as he replied ‘Ah, the memsahib’ and greeted her with a civil ‘Kraiyu ti ny ma pay’, it was as if a powerful electric shock had passed through Captain Biggar. This, he felt, was It.

Naturally, being a white man, he had not told his love, but it had burned steadily within him ever since, a strong, silent passion of such a calibre that sometimes, as he sat listening to the hyaenas and gazing at the snows of Kilimanjaro, it had brought him within an ace of writing poetry.

And here she was again, looking lovelier than ever. It seemed to Captain Biggar that somebody in the vicinity was beating a bass drum. But it was only the thumping of his heart.

His last words had left Mrs Spottsworth fogged.

‘Chasing a foe of the human species?’ she queried.

‘A blighter of a bookie. A cad of the lowest order with a soul as black as his fingernails. I’ve been after him for hours. And I’d have caught him,’ said the captain, moodily sipping beer, ‘if something hadn’t gone wrong with my bally car. They’re fixing it now at that garage down the road.’

‘But why were you chasing this bookmaker?’ asked Mrs Spottsworth. It seemed to her a frivolous way for a strong man to be passing his time.

Captain Biggar’s face darkened. Her question had touched an exposed nerve.

‘The low hound did the dirty on me. Seemed straight enough, too. Chap with a walrus moustache and a patch over his left eye. Honest Patch Perkins, he called himself. “Back your fancy and fear nothing, my noble sportsman,” he said. “If you don’t speculate, you can’t accumulate,” he said. “Walk up, walk up. Roll, bowl or pitch. Ladies half-way and no bad nuts returned,” he said. So I put my double on with him.’

‘Your double?’

‘A double, dear lady, is when you back a horse in one race and if it wins, put the proceeds on another horse in another race.’

‘Oh, what we call a parlay in America.’

‘Well, you can readily see that if both bounders pull it off, you pouch a princely sum. I’ve got in with a pretty knowledgeable crowd since I came to London, and they recommended as a good double for today Lucy Glitters and Whistler’s Mother.’

The name struck a chord.

‘The waiter was telling me that Whistler’s Mother won.’

‘So did Lucy Glitters in the previous race. I had a fiver on her at a hundred to six and all to come on Whistler’s Mother for the Oaks. She ambled past the winning post at –’

‘Thirty-three to one, the waiter was saying. My goodness! You certainly cleaned up, didn’t you!’

Captain Biggar finished his beer. If it is possible to drink beer like an overwrought soul, he did so.

‘I certainly ought to have cleaned up,’ he said, with a heavy frown. ‘There was the colossal sum of three thousand pounds two shillings and sixpence owing to me, plus my original fiver which I had handed to the fellow’s clerk, a chap in a check suit and another walrus moustache. And what happened? This inky-hearted bookie welshed on me. He legged it in his car with me after him. I’ve been pursuing him, winding and twisting through the country roads, for what seems an eternity. And just as I was on the point of grappling with him, my car broke down. But I’ll have the scoundrel! I’ll catch the louse! And when I do, I propose to scoop out his insides with my bare hands and twist his head off and make him swallow it. After which –’

Captain Biggar broke off. It had suddenly come to him that he was monopolizing the conversation. After all, of what interest could these daydreams of his be to this woman?

‘But let’s not talk about me any more,’ he said. ‘Dull subject. How have you been all these years, dear lady? Pretty fit, I hope? You look right in the pink. And how’s your husband? Oh, sorry!’

‘Not at all. You mean, have I married again? No, I have not married again, though Clifton and Alexis keep advising me to. They are sweet about it. So broad-minded and considerate.’

‘Clifton? Alexis?’

‘Mr Bessemer and Mr Spottsworth, my two previous husbands. I get them on the ouija board from time to time. I suppose,’ said Mrs Spottsworth, laughing a little self-consciously, ‘you think it’s odd of me to believe in things like the ouija board?’

‘Odd?’

‘So many of my friends in America call all that sort of thing poppycock.’

Captain Biggar snorted militantly.

‘I’d like to be there to talk to them! I’d astonish their weak intellects. No, dear lady, I’ve seen too many strange things in my time, living as I have done in the shadow-lands of mystery, to think anything odd. I have seen barefooted pilgrims treading the path of Ahura-Mazda over burning coals. I’ve seen ropes tossed in the air and small boys shinning up them in swarms. I’ve met fakirs who slept on beds of spikes.’

‘Really?’

‘I assure you. And think of it, insomnia practically unknown. So you don’t catch me laughing at people because they believe in ouija boards.’

Mrs Spottsworth gazed at him tenderly. She was thinking how sympathetic and understanding he was.

‘I am intensely interested in psychical research. I am proud to be one of the little band of devoted seekers who are striving to pierce the veil. I am hoping to be vouchsafed some enthralling spiritual manifestation at this Rowcester Abbey where I’m going. It is one of the oldest houses in England, they tell me.’

‘Then you ought to flush a spectre or two,’ agreed Captain Biggar. ‘They collect in gangs in these old English country houses. How about another gin and tonic?’

‘No, I must be getting along. Pomona’s in the car, and she hates being left alone.’

‘You couldn’t stay and have one more quick one?’

‘I fear not. I must be on my way. I can’t tell you how delightful it has been, meeting you again, Captain.’

‘Just made my day, meeting you, dear lady,’ said Captain Biggar, speaking hoarsely, for he was deeply moved. They were out in the open now, and he was able to get a clearer view of her as she stood beside her car bathed in the sunset glow. How lovely she was, he felt, how wonderful, how … Come, come, Biggar, he said to himself gruffly, this won’t do, old chap. Play the game, Biggar, play the game, old boy!

‘Won’t you come and see me when I get back to London, Captain? I shall be at the Savoy.’

‘Charmed, dear lady, charmed,’ said Captain Biggar. But he did not mean it.

For what would be the use? What would it profit him to renew their acquaintance? Just twisting the knife in the wound, that’s what he would be doing. Better, far better, to bite the bullet and wash the whole thing out here and now. A humble hunter with scarcely a bob to his name couldn’t go mixing with wealthy widows. It was the kind of thing he had so often heard Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar denouncing in the old Anglo-Malay Club at Kuala Lumpur. ‘Chap’s nothing but a bally fortune-hunter, old boy,’ they would say, discussing over the gin pahits some acquaintance who had made a rich marriage. ‘Simply a blighted gigolo, old boy, nothing more. Can’t do that sort of thing, old chap, what? Not cricket, old boy.’

And they were right. It couldn’t be done. Damn it all, a feller had his code. ‘Meh nee pan kong bahn rotfai’ about summed it up.

Stiffening his upper lip, Captain Biggar went down the road to see how his car was getting on.

2

ROWCESTER ABBEY – PRONOUNCED Roaster – was about ten miles from the Goose and Gherkin. It stood – such portions of it as had not fallen down – just beyond Southmolton in the midst of smiling country. Though if you had asked William Egerton Bamfylde Ossingham Belfry, ninth Earl of Rowcester, its proprietor, what the English countryside had to smile about these days, he would have been unable to tell you. Its architecture was thirteenth-century, fifteenth-century and Tudor, its dilapidation twentieth-century post-World War Two.

To reach the abbey you turned off the main road and approached by a mile-long drive thickly encrusted with picturesque weeds and made your way up stone steps, chipped in spots, to a massive front door which badly needed a lick of paint. And this was what Bill Rowcester’s sister Monica and her husband, Sir Roderick (‘Rory’) Carmoyle, had done at just about the hour when Mrs Spottsworth and Captain Biggar were starting to pick up the threads at their recent reunion.

Monica, usually addressed as Moke, was small and vivacious, her husband large and stolid. There was something about his aspect and deportment that suggested a more than ordinarily placid buffalo chewing a cud and taking in its surroundings very slowly and methodically, refusing to be hurried. It was thus that, as they stood on the front steps, he took in Rowcester Abbey.

‘Moke,’ he said at length, having completed his scrutiny, ‘I’ll tell you something which you may or may not see fit to release to the press. This bally place looks mouldier every time I see it.’

Monica was quick to defend her childhood home.

‘It might be a lot worse.’

Rory considered this, chewing his cud for a while in silence.

‘How?’ he asked.

‘I know it needs doing up, but where’s the money to come from? Poor old Bill can’t afford to run a castle on a cottage income.’

‘Why doesn’t he get a job like the rest of us?’

‘You needn’t stick on side just because you’re in trade, you old counterjumper.’

‘Everybody’s doing it, I mean to say. Nowadays the House of Lords is practically empty except on evenings and bank holidays.’

‘We Rowcesters aren’t easy to place. The Rowcester men have all been lilies of the field. Why, Uncle George didn’t even put on his own boots.’

‘Whose boots did he put on?’ asked Rory, interested.

‘Ah, that’s what we’d all like to know. Of course, Bill’s big mistake was letting that American woman get away from him.’

‘What American woman would that be?’

‘It was just after you and I got married. A Mrs Bessemer. A widow. He met her in Cannes one summer. Fabulously rich and, according to Bill, unimaginably beautiful. It seemed promising for a time, but it didn’t come to anything. I suppose someone cut him out. Of course, he was plain Mr Belfry then, not my lord Rowcester, which may have made a difference.’

Rory shook his head.

‘It wouldn’t be that. I was plain Mr Carmoyle when I met you and look at the way I snaffled you in the teeth of the pick of the County.’

‘But then think what you were like in those days. A flick of the finger, a broken heart. And you’re not so bad now, either,’ added Monica fondly. ‘Something of the old magic remains.’

‘True,’ said Rory placidly. ‘In a dim light I still cast a spell. But the trouble with Bill was, I imagine, that he lacked drive … the sort of drive you see so much of at Harrige’s. The will to win, I suppose you might call it. Napoleon had it. I have it, Bill hasn’t. Oh, well, there it is,’ said Rory philosophically. He resumed his study of Rowcester Abbey. ‘You know what this house wants?’ he proceeded. ‘An atom bomb, dropped carefully on the roof of the main banqueting hall.’

‘It would help, wouldn’t it?’

‘It would be the making of the old place. Put it right in no time. Still, atom bombs cost money, so I suppose that’s out of the question. What you ought to do is use your influence with Bill to persuade him to buy a lot of paraffin and some shavings and save the morning papers and lay in plenty of matches and wait till some moonless night and give the joint the works. He’d feel a different man, once the old ruin was nicely ablaze.’

Monica looked mysterious.

‘I can do better than that.’

Rory shook his head.

‘No. Arson. It’s the only way. You can’t beat good old arson. Those fellows down in the east end go in for it a lot. They touch a match to the shop, and it’s like a week at the seaside to them.’

‘What would you say if I told you I was hoping to sell the house?’

Rory stared, amazed. He had a high opinion of his wife’s resourcefulness, but he felt that she was attempting the impossible.

‘Sell it? I don’t believe you could give it away. I happen to know Bill offered it for a song to one of these charitable societies as a Home for Reclaimed Juvenile Delinquents, and they simply sneered at him. Probably thought it would give the Delinquents rheumatism. Very damp house, this.’

‘It is a bit moist.’

‘Water comes through the walls in heaping handfuls. I suppose because it’s so close to the river. I remember saying to Bill once, “Bill,” I said, “I’ll tell you something about your home surroundings. In the summer the river is at the bottom of your garden, and in the winter your garden is at the bottom of the river.” Amused the old boy quite a bit. He thought it clever.’

Monica regarded her husband with that cold, wifely eye which married men learn to dread.

‘Very clever,’ she said frostily. ‘Extremely droll. And I suppose the first thing you’ll do is make a crack like that to Mrs Spottsworth.’

‘Eh?’ It stole slowly into Rory’s mind that a name had been mentioned that was strange to him. ‘Who’s Mrs Spottsworth?’

‘The woman I’m hoping to sell the house to. American. Very rich. I met her when I was passing through New York on my way home. She owns dozens of houses in America, but she’s got a craving to have something old and picturesque in England.’

‘Romantic, eh?’

‘Dripping with romance. Well, when she told me that – we were sitting next to each other at a women’s lunch – I immediately thought of Bill and the abbey, of course, and started giving her a sales talk. She seemed interested. After all, the abbey is chock full of historical associations.’

‘And mice.’

‘She was flying to England next day, so I told her when I would be arriving and we arranged that she was to come here and have a look at the place. She should be turning up at any moment.’

‘Does Bill know she’s coming?’

‘No. I ought to have sent him a cable, but I forgot. Still, what does it matter? He’ll be only too delighted. The important thing is to keep you from putting her off with your mordant witticisms. “I often say in my amusing way, Mrs Spottsworth, that whereas in the summer months the river is at the bottom of the garden, in the winter months – ha, ha – the garden – this is going to slay you – is at the bottom of the river, ho, ho, ho.” That would just clinch the sale.’

‘Now would I be likely to drop a brick of that sort, old egg?’

‘Extremely likely, old crumpet. The trouble with you is that, though a king among men, you have no tact.’

Rory smiled. The charge tickled him.

‘No tact? The boys at Harrige’s would laugh if they heard that.’

‘Do remember that it’s vital to put this deal through.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind. I’m all for giving poor old Bill a leg-up. It’s a damn shame,’ said Rory, who often thought rather deeply on these subjects. ‘Bill starts at the bottom of the ladder as a mere heir to an earldom, and by pluck and perseverance works his way up till he becomes the Earl himself. And no sooner has he settled the coronet on his head and said to himself “Now to whoop it up!” than they pull a social revolution out of their hats like a rabbit and snitch practically every penny he’s got. Ah, well!’ said Rory with a sigh. ‘I say,’ he went on, changing the subject, ‘have you noticed, Moke, old girl, that throughout this little chat of ours – which I for one have thoroughly enjoyed – I have been pressing the bell at frequent intervals and not a damn thing has happened? What is this joint, the palace of the sleeping beauty? Or do you think the entire strength of the company has been wiped out by some plague or pestilence?’

‘Good heavens!’ said Monica, ‘bells at Rowcester Abbey don’t ring. I don’t suppose they’ve worked since Edward the Seventh’s days. If Uncle George wished to summon the domestic staff, he just shoved his head back and howled like a prairie wolf.’

‘That would have been, I take it, when he wanted somebody else’s boots to put on?’

‘You just open the door and walk in. Which is what I am about to do now. You bring the bags in from the car.’

‘Depositing them where?’

‘In the hall for the moment,’ said Monica. ‘You can take them upstairs later.’

She went in, and made her way to that familiar haunt, the living room off the hall where in her childhood days most of the life of Rowcester Abbey had centred. Like other English houses of its size, the abbey had a number of vast state apartments which were never used, a library which was used occasionally, and this living room, the popular meeting place. It was here that in earlier days she had sat and read the Girl’s Own Paper and, until the veto had been placed on her activities by her Uncle George, whose sense of smell was acute, had kept white rabbits. A big, comfortable, shabby room with french windows opening into the garden, at the bottom of which – in the summer months – the river ran.

As she stood looking about her, sniffing the old familiar smell of tobacco and leather and experiencing, as always, a nostalgic thrill and a vague wish that it were possible to put the clock back, there came through the french window a girl in overalls, who, having stared for a moment in astonishment, uttered a delighted squeal.

‘Moke … darling!’

Monica turned.

‘Jill, my angel!’

They flung themselves into each other’s arms.

3

JILL WYVERN WAS YOUNG, very pretty, slightly freckled and obviously extremely practical and competent. She wore her overalls as if they had been a uniform. Like Monica, she was small, and an admirer of hers, from Bloomsbury, had once compared her, in an unpublished poem, to a Tanagra statuette. It was not a very apt comparison, for Tanagra statuettes, whatever their merits, are on the static side and Jill was intensely alert and alive. She moved with a springy step and in her time had been a flashy outside-right on the hockey field.

‘My precious Moke,’ she said. ‘Is it really you? I thought you were in Jamaica.’

‘I got back this morning. I picked up Rory in London, and we motored down here. Rory’s outside, looking after the bags.’

‘How brown you are!’

‘That’s Montego Bay. I worked on this sunburn for three months.’

‘It suits you. But Bill didn’t say anything about expecting you. Aren’t you appearing rather suddenly?’

‘Yes, I cut my travels short rather suddenly. My allowance met those New York prices and gave up the ghost with a low moan. Ah, here’s the merchant prince.’

Rory came in, mopping his forehead.

‘What have you got in those bags of yours, old girl? Lead?’ He saw Jill, and stopped, gazing at her with wrinkled brow. ‘Oh, hullo,’ he said uncertainly.

‘You remember Jill Wyvern, Rory.’

‘Of course, yes. Jill Wyvern, to be sure. As you so sensibly observe, Jill Wyvern. You been telling her about your sunburn?’

‘She noticed it for herself.’

‘It does catch the eye. She says she’s that colour all over,’ said Rory confidentially to Jill. ‘Might raise a question or two from an old-fashioned husband, what? Still, I suppose it all makes for variety. So you’re Jill Wyvern, are you? How you’ve grown!’

‘Since when?’

‘Since … since you started growing.’

‘You haven’t a notion who I am, have you?’

‘I wouldn’t say that …’

‘I’ll help you out. I was at your wedding.’

‘You don’t look old enough.’

‘I was fifteen. They gave me the job of keeping the dogs from jumping on the guests. It was pouring, you may remember, and they all had muddy paws.’

‘Good God! Now I have you placed. So you were that little squirt. I noticed you bobbing about and thought what a frightful young excrescence you looked.’

‘My husband is noted for the polish of his manners,’ said Monica. ‘He is often called the modern Chesterfield.’

‘What I was about to add,’ said Rory with dignity, ‘was that she’s come on a lot since those days, showing that we should never despair. But didn’t we meet again some time?’

‘Yes, a year or two later when you stayed here one summer. I was just coming out then, and I expect I looked more of an excrescence than ever.’

Monica sighed.

‘Coming out! The dear old getting-ready-for-market stage! How it takes one back. Off with the glasses and the teeth-braces.’

‘On with things that push you in or push you out, whichever you needed.’

This was Rory’s contribution, and Monica looked at him austerely.

‘What do you know about it?’

‘Oh, I get around in our Ladies’ Foundation department,’ said Rory.

Jill laughed.

‘What I remember best are those agonized family conferences about my hockey-player’s hands. I used to walk about for hours holding them in the air.’

‘And how did you make out? Has it paid off yet?’

‘Paid off?’

Monica lowered her voice confidentially.

‘A man, dear. Did you catch anything worth while?’

‘I think he’s worth while. As a matter of fact, you don’t know it, but you’re moving in rather exalted circles. She whom you see before you is none other than the future Countess of Rowcester.’

Monica screamed excitedly.

‘You don’t mean you and Bill are engaged?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Since when?’

‘Some weeks ago.’

‘I’m delighted. I wouldn’t have thought Bill had so much sense.’

‘No,’ agreed Rory in his tactful way. ‘One raises the eyebrows in astonishment. Bill, as I remember it, was always more of a lad for the buxom, voluptuous type. Many a passionate romance have I seen him through with females who looked like a cross between pantomime Fairy Queens and all-in wrestlers. There was a girl in the Hippodrome chorus –’

He broke off these reminiscences, so fraught with interest to a fiancée, in order to say ‘Ouch!’ Monica had kicked him shrewdly on the ankle.

‘Tell me, darling,’ said Monica. ‘How did it happen? Suddenly?’

‘Quite suddenly. He was helping me give a cow a bolus –’

Rory blinked. ‘A –?’

‘Bolus. Medicine. You give it to cows. And before I knew what was happening, he had grabbed my hand and was saying, “I say, arising from this, will you marry me?”’

‘How frightfully eloquent. When Rory proposed to me, all he said was “Eh, what?”’

‘And it took me three weeks to work up to that,’ said Rory. His forehead had become wrinkled again. It was plain that he was puzzling over something. ‘This bolus of which you were speaking. I don’t quite follow. You were giving it to a cow, you say?’

‘A sick cow.’

‘Oh, a sick cow? Well, here’s the point that’s perplexing me. Here’s the thing that seems to me to need straightening out. Why were you giving boluses to sick cows?’

‘It’s my job. I’m the local vet.’

‘What! You don’t by any chance mean a veterinary surgeon?’

‘That’s right. Fully licensed. We’re all workers nowadays.’

Rory nodded sagely.

‘Profoundly true,’ he said. ‘I’m a son of toil myself.’

‘Rory’s at Harrige’s,’ said Monica.

‘Really?’

‘Floorwalker in the Hosepipe, Lawn Mower and Bird Bath department,’ said Rory. ‘But that is merely temporary. There’s a strong rumour going the rounds that hints at promotion to the Glass, Fancy Goods and Chinaware. And from there to the Ladies’ Underclothing is but a step.’

‘My hero!’ Monica kissed him lovingly. ‘I’ll bet they’ll all be green with jealousy.’

Rory was shocked at the suggestion.

‘Good God, no! They’ll rush to shake me by the hand and slap me on the back. Our esprit de corps is wonderful. It’s one for all and all for one in Harrige’s.’

Monica turned back to Jill.

‘And doesn’t your father mind you running about the country giving boluses to cows? Jill’s father,’ she explained to Rory, ‘is Chief Constable of the county.’

‘And very nice, too,’ said Rory.

‘I should have thought he would have objected.’

‘Oh, no. We’re all working at something. Except my brother Eustace. He won a Littlewood’s pool last winter and he’s gone frightfully upper class. Very high hat with the rest of the family. Moves on a different plane.’

‘Damn snob,’ said Rory warmly. ‘I hate class distinctions.’

He was about to speak further, for the subject was one on which he held strong opinions, but at this moment the telephone bell rang, and he looked round, startled.

‘For heaven’s sake! Don’t tell me the old boy has paid his telephone bill!’ he cried, astounded.

Monica took up the receiver.

‘Hullo? … Yes, this is Rowcester Abbey … No, Lord Rowcester is not in at the moment. This is his sister, Lady Carmoyle. The number of his car? It’s news to me that he’s got a car.’ She turned to Jill. ‘You don’t know the number of Bill’s car, do you?’

‘No. Why are they asking?’

‘Why are you asking?’ said Monica into the telephone. She waited a moment, then hung up. ‘He’s rung off.’

‘Who was it?’

‘He didn’t say. Just a voice from the void.’

‘You don’t think Bill’s had an accident?’

‘Good heavens, no,’ said Rory. ‘He’s much too good a driver. Probably he had to stop somewhere to buy some juice, and they need his number for their books. But it’s always disturbing when people don’t give their names on the telephone. There was a fellow in ours – second in command in the Jams, Sauces and Potted Meats – who was rung up one night by a Mystery Voice that wouldn’t give its name, and to cut a long story short –’

Monica did so.

‘Save it up for after dinner, my king of raconteurs,’ she said. ‘If there is any dinner,’ she added doubtfully.

‘Oh, there’ll be dinner all right,’ said Jill, ‘and you’ll probably find it’ll melt in the mouth. Bill’s got a very good cook.’

Monica stared.

‘A cook? These days? I don’t believe it. You’ll be telling me next he’s got a housemaid.’

‘He has. Name of Ellen.’

‘Pull yourself together, child. You’re talking wildly. Nobody has a housemaid.’

‘Bill has. And a gardener. And a butler. A wonderful butler called Jeeves. And he’s thinking of getting a boy to clean the knives and boots.’

‘Good heavens! It sounds like the home life of the Aga Khan.’ Monica frowned thoughtfully. ‘Jeeves?’ she said. ‘Why does that name seem to ring a bell?’

Rory supplied illumination.

‘Bertie Wooster. He has a man named Jeeves. This is probably a brother or an aunt or something.’

‘No,’ said Jill. ‘It’s the same man. Bill has him on lend-lease.’

‘But how on earth does Bertie get on without him?’

‘I believe Mr Wooster’s away somewhere. Anyhow, Jeeves appeared one day and said he was willing to take office, so Bill grabbed him, of course. He’s an absolute treasure. Bill says he’s an “old soul”, whatever that means.’

Monica was still bewildered.

‘But how about the financial end? Does he pay this entourage, or just give them a pleasant smile now and then?’

‘Of course he pays them. Lavishly. He flings them purses of gold every Saturday morning.’

‘Where does the money come from?’

‘He earns it.’

‘Don’t be silly. Bill hasn’t earned a penny since he was paid twopence a time for taking his castor oil. How could he possibly earn it?’

‘He’s doing some sort of work for the Agricultural Board.’

‘You don’t make a fortune out of that.’

‘Bill seems to. I suppose he’s so frightfully good at his job that they pay him more than the others. I don’t know what he does, actually. He just goes off in his car. Some kind of inspection, I suppose it is. Checking up on all those questionnaires. He’s not very good at figures, so he always takes Jeeves with him.’

‘Well, that’s wonderful,’ said Monica. ‘I was afraid he might have started backing horses again. It used to worry me so much in the old days, the way he would dash from race-course to race-course in a grey topper that he carried sandwiches in.’

‘Oh, no, it couldn’t be anything like that. He promised me faithfully he would never bet on a horse again.’

‘Very sensible,’ said Rory. ‘I don’t mind a flutter from time to time, of course. At Harrige’s we always run a Sweep on big events, five-bob chances. The brass hats frown on anything larger.’

Jill moved to the french window.

‘Well, I mustn’t stand here talking,’ she said. ‘I’ve got work to do. I came to attend to Bill’s Irish terrier. It’s sick of a fever.’

‘Give it a bolus.’

‘I’m giving it some new American ointment. It’s got mange. See you later.’

Jill went off on her errand of mercy, and Rory turned to Monica. His customary stolidity had vanished. He was keen and alert, like Sherlock Holmes on the trail.

‘Moke!’

‘Hullo?’

‘What do you make of it, old girl?’

‘Make of what?’

‘This sudden affluence of Bill’s. There’s something fishy going on here. If it had just been a matter of a simple butler, one could have understood it. A broker’s man in disguise, one would have said. But how about the housemaid and the cook and the car and, by Jove, the fact that he’s paid his telephone bill.’

‘I see what you mean. It’s odd.’

‘It’s more than odd. Consider the facts. The last time I was at Rowcester Abbey, Bill was in the normal state of destitution of the upper-class Englishman of today, stealing the cat’s milk and nosing about in the gutters for cigar ends. I come here now, and what do I find? Butlers in every nook and cranny, housemaids as far as the eye can reach, cooks jostling each other in the kitchen, Irish terriers everywhere, and a lot of sensational talk going on about boys to clean the knives and boots. It’s … what’s the word?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes, you do. Begins with “in”.’