My Man Jeeves - Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (best ereader for pc .TXT) 📗
- Author: Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
- Performer: 1933652217
Book online «My Man Jeeves - Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (best ereader for pc .TXT) 📗». Author Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
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 GUESTI’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.”
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