Fic: Wooster At War, Part 2 of 3
Title: Wooster at War, part 2 of 3
Total Word Count: 6,968
Pairing: Jeeves/Bertie
Rating: PG
Summary: Bertie makes a terrible mistake during WWII, and Jeeves is powerless to help him.
Disclaimer: Jeeves and Wooster belong to PG Wodehouse, not me. "Wodehouse At War" belongs to Iain Sproat, not me.
Dashed difficult it is to admit this, but there was a short time there when I honestly began to doubt the good old Wooster spirits. I think it was quite possibly the darkest day of my life when those German chappies marched me off like that, handcuffed and whatnot. Old Jeeves practically threw himself in front of the door. I never saw him leap like that before in my life, and if the situation wasn't quite so dire, it might have melted the old heart. Even after all those years, I couldn't help but shake the idea that the fellow was mucking about waiting for something better to come along. Not that he ever gave me any reason to think such a thing, mind you. But honestly, did you ever in your puff meet a finer specimen? What could he really want from me? I mean to say, really.
He must have cared something for me, though, because leap he did, like a leopard, and got himself a stern talking-to from the cove who spoke English, and another from yours truly.
“Jeeves,” I said, doing my best to put him at ease, “relax, old boy. It's not as though I haven't been in the dock before.” That was true, of course. My mind strayed back to the time I nearly did three months for a crime a didn't commit; I'd managed to find a bright spot there. I could find one here as well. “It wouldn't do to get yourself killed over a little matter like this. Keep out of trouble, and get home if you can. I'll be with you the minute this little war of theirs is over.”
Of course, had I known that I wouldn't see him again for eight years, that these would be the last words he would have to remember me by all that long while, I might have said something a little more, well, memorable. But there you are.
The coves holding onto me weren't too keen on our little chat, and they pulled me out of the room right quick. My last sight of Jeeves nearly broke my heart; the way he stood there staring after me, looking hopeless and helpless and desolate. That made me angrier than anything, because Jeeves shouldn't ever be made to look or feel helpless. He's a chap who likes to be in control. It drives him mad when I don't give him say in the daily Wooster wardrobe - back when I used to do that sort of thing, anyway, which was years and years ago, when I was young and rather more full of myself - so I could hardly think what he'd do if he couldn't do or say a single dashed thing about my life at all.
It was a sort of repeating anthem for the ensuing days, really. Each new event had me worrying a-fresh, “What would Jeeves say?” They took my nice new suit away, don't you know, giving me some drab baggy affair that would have put Jeeves so out of commission he would have had to scratch three months' worth of entries.
“Heavens!” I said to myself, noting that the solemn affair was even missing its uppermost button. “What would Jeeves say?”
Soon after, of course, I was packed up in a rummy sort of truck that must have been used to transport cattle at some point, since an unmistakable touch of the farmyard still lingered about it. I stood there in my shameful costume, packed cheek by jowl with a whole lot of other similarly dressed coves, and we all jostled about pretty chummily over the damned rutted road our chauffeur had foolishly chosen for about a day and a half. I take no shame in telling you that I was fairly well dead on my feet by the end of the ordeal, and I was not the worst of the lot. I'll spare you details, but I saw, smelled, and did things on that truck that made me feel that maybe I and my companions were just the sort of cattle that that truck was accustomed to carting about. I maintain that we all of us had very little choice, but still. What would Jeeves say?
After that we were given a little glimpse of sunlight for a time, which was jolly well appreciated, even though I suspect it was not meant to be any sort of favor. They had to move us, you see, from the t. to the train. At first I was rather bucked to catch sight of the old steam engine; it rather brought me back to finer times when Jeeves and I were traveling to some new locale, and I was looking forward to a nice long sit, regardless of where that fine seat chose to take me. However, we weren't herded into a passenger car but - and I suppose I should have predicted this, in my right mind - into a cattle car. There were even more of us there, and I was sorry to see that some of the chaps whose acquaintance I'd made on the last leg of the journey weren't destined to be my neighbors for this little jaunt.
I didn't dwell on this disappointment for too long, however, since the word came around in a hushed sort of whisper that we were going to be fed. Aside from a little tin cup of water a few hours before, I hadn't consumed a blessed thing in about two days, and I dare-say I was more eager for this proposed repast than I had been for any meal before in my life, even during Anatole's prime.
Sure enough, without too much more to-do I was passed a bowl of broth and a bit of bread, and I lit into the same with an enthusiasm I daresay I could never again match. It was gone in about three seconds, but they were the finest three seconds I'd passed in many a weary hour. Drinks went round after that; some of my neighbors drank sparingly and saved the rest for later, but I've never been a fellow to see things in the long-term and I drank down what turned out to by my daily water alotment in two great gulps.
I was starting to get a bit shaky at this point, and I found myself wishing that the fellows who took my clothes had seen fit to leave me with my cigarette case at least, but there you are. No conideration, I might go so far as to say. Anyhow, I wasn't called upon to think or worry about much of anything for much longer, since exhaustion overpowered anxiety and pushed me down hard onto the floor of the train, which by this time had started rumbling along to whatever fate awaited us.
When I woke, I could tell some great time had passed, since the light was so different, and the old muscles ached fiercely. I found that I had been sleeping in a most unusual position, necessarily owing to the fact that I had not space to stretch myself out in my usual manner. I was, in fact, kneeling upon my knees with my face pressed down against the back of the fellow in front of me, who, as far as I could tell, was d. to the w.
“I say!” I said, sitting up, and inadvertently upsetting another fellow who had been using my own back for his pillow.
“I say,” he growled back at me. “Don't move!”
“I say,” I replied, “Frightfully sorry and what not, don't you know.”
“Not another word!” said my neighbor to the rear. “You've woken me enough times already, what with your blasted screaming and weeping and other cowardly nonsense!”
“I say!” I said, thoroughly pipped. We Woosters are not cowards, you know, and we do not scream and cry in public; not unless we lose a good parcel on a cert, of course. A man has his limits, after all.
“No!” he snapped. “You don't say. Not another word!”
I kept my peace there, remembering that we were all in a rummy situation and that every fellow has his own way of coping. It seemed my neighbor was apt to be tightly wound, considering the circs, and I could hardly blame him. So I lay my face back down on my other neighbor's back and tried to go to sleep again. Sleep didn't come, but it was strangely reassuring to feel the fellow breathing under my ear. It put me in mind of my cosy little life with Jeeves, though this strange cove's heartbeat and breathing pattern weren't at all like my own man's. It was pleasant enough, however, and if I closed my eyes I could almost pretend that Jeeves was right there with me. Not that I would have had him there. Not for all the t. in C.
Of course, that got me thinking about the blessed oolong, and the blessed sight of the blessed Jeeves bringing it in for me on a tray, and I admit that if I had been a man for tears and what not - though I am not, for no Wooster is - I might, in that moment, have indulged in a few of the saltiest. But then I should have gotten the fellow's back wet, and where should I have been then, what?
In all, I should say the train jouney lasted about three days. I can't say exactly how far we traveled, since we took all kinds of turns and stopped at seemingly random intervals. Had Sherlock Holmes been on the train he could have told you by the smell of the place or by the angles of the turns where we were headed, but I've always been rather more along the lines of a Watson than a Holmes. I hadn't the foggiest.
Any way, once the journey itself was at an end, I can't say that much more of interest ocurred for about a year or so. They took me in for questioning every now and then, but with decreasing frequency. I think they had it in their heads that, being a member of the noblesse I might actualy know something, but it became pretty clear pretty quickly that I have never known anything of any sort. They experimented with a bit of what you might call torture; I've got a few scars on my back and at least one finger that will never be quite straight again. Still, all in all, I think I got off fairly easy.
We weren't so terribly bad off, my fellow inmates and I. We had ample room in our little compound for -
Oh! I say. I've rather skipped a bit here, haven't I? I've never been one to focus on my surroundings, don't you know, and it shows in my writing, of course. I don't suppose anybody really likes to read about what a place looks like and all that, but sometimes it's just a little necessary.
We were somewhere in Poland, I think, and it wasn't such a bad-looking place. Mountains and trees and what not. Not unlike Totleigh-on-the-Wold, only rather superior, since it was entirely free of Bassets and Spodes. There was this ghastly big fence with barbed wire round the top, and I know it would have given Jeeves a bit of a bad taste. We had these little barracks with beds all lined up and stacked atop one another and what not; rather how I imagined school might have been for those fellows who hadn't got it quite so nice as I had at Eton. There was a bit of a field there, too, which I was getting to before when I said that we had ample room to amble about, and even play a game of cricket or rugger, or whatever we had it in our minds to play. I've never been much for cavorting about and slamming into other chaps on the field, but in this case it was a pleasant enough diversion. I didn't participate so much, of course, since I'm not gifted in the realm and I was nearing my fortieth birthday. But I enjoyed watching the younger set disport themselves so admirably.
So, as I say, it wasn't such a bad time, and really the only cause I had to suffer - aside from the occasional broken finger, which I saw to be a sort of occupational hazard - was that Jeeves was so dashed far away and impossible to contact. Not, I must repeat, that I would wish him to be there, for even the pleasantest, most comfortable cage was still a cage, and I knew that Jeeves required freedom of a sort in order to be happy. He wasn't used to the old confines as I was. Not that I think back to my days in the sanitorium often, mind you, but once you've spent a formative boyhood year in a padded white cell, it gets to be almost a comfort to be restained. I never did take so well to what you might call a normal life; I needed Jeeves there to help me manage. Even when I defied him - in my younger, more foolish days - his little rules about what I could and could not do and say and wear were, how should I say it? Reassuring! Yes. Reassuring.
All I mean to say is that I didn't suffer too much, except for lack of Jeeves.
Of course, it wasn't Jeeves alone who occupied my thoughts. As the months crawled by and the weather grew less clement and rations less filling, I spent rather a lot of time examining all of my relationships. It had seemed rather a lark to lose them forever when it was my choice to do so, knowing as I did that precious few would miss me or, indeed, even notice that I had gone. Even when I lived in London, there was no question that young Bertram was far from being an esteemed member of the clan, even if I was next in line to inherit the family title, due to the deaths of all my uncles save George, and the conspicuous absence of any male offspring older than myself. In fact, I believe that little fact made the presence all the more resented amongst kith and kin, since I was by far the most brainless of the lot, save, perhaps, Claude and Eustace. But they were off in South Africa anyway, having made some sort of splash in the diamond business, and though they protested readily enough at their initial exile, they had made no attempt to return to old Blightey in the ensuing years.
Anyhow, though thinking of the old flesh and blood did little for my spirits, think of them I did, with quite a vim. Aunt Dahlia occupied my thoughts quite often, as did dear cousin Angela, who I fancied might just miss me a little. I hoped that life was pleasant enough for her tastes, considering she was married to that somewhat troublesome Tuppy Glossop - who, I remembered with a burning sort of regret, had never received his comeuppance for the Drone's Club Pool affair. Perhaps, I mused, my imprisonment was vengeance enough, if anyone back home knew of it, since it might stir feelings of remorse in his breast. But I doubted it.
I also spent no little amount of time ruminating on the subject of my elder sister Ethel, stowed away all these years in India, along with her three young daughters who - I suddenly realized for the first time - must not be quite so young anymore. They had all returned to England for a brief foray in the twenties, but as Ethel and I had never been particularly close - she having been away at school for most of my childhood, taking her holidays with friends rather than relations, and then being married to some army officer named Scholfield when I was only just finishing up at Eton - I didn't see too much of her or the darling nieces before they high-tailed it back to India. In fact, I wasn't even positive that I could remember the girls' names. One, I think, had for her monacre a variation of the old standby “Anna.” All I really knew about them was that they were exceedingly quiet (no doubt due to the recent death of their father), and, in the year 1926, they had been aged six, three, and one, respectively. Which, in the year 1940, put them into their late teens and early twenties. Some of them, I realized, might even be married themselves!
So you understand the vein of my thinking at this juncture. Having little to look forward to, I chose, perhaps injudiciously, to focus on the past, especially all of those “what-ifs” and “what-might-have-beens” that are so easy to wallow in.
And that is really all that could be said for the first year or so of the war. That and the little plays, of course.
I can't quite remember how it all got started. It was sometime in the winter, when spirits were especially low among my fellow inmates, that I got it in my head that we could write plays and perform them. Cricket and rugby were all well and good, but they only sated one's need for diversion so far. I popped over to the commandant of the camp - who, as luck would have it, was rather a fan of my little memoirs - and induced him to give me some paper and a stump of a pencil on the condition that he be allowed first rights to read whatever I produced. I could hardly refuse such a simple request, given the circs, and I took it with a hearty handshake. Since most of the fellows I was holed up with were less inclined toward literature and the arts than I was, I thought it might be wise to use their own personalities for my characters, so that they would not have to stretch themselves too far to play their parts. I changed the names, of course, and since it is my experience that no one ever recognizes their likeness in print, I think they were none the wiser when I told them that the characters were entirely fictional. I also based the scripts on the sort of thing that might happen around a prison camp, such as the one we inhabited at the time, since I am not gifted in the art of plot-writing and I simply had no other inspiration.
The result was a sort of monthly pageant where the guards and inmates who chose to be entertained rather than directly involved would gather and watch whatever little entertainment I and my closest allies could produce. They weren't my best work, I'm afraid, since my greatest inspiration has always been the inimitable Jeeves who was, unfortunately and fortunately, absent. However, they did a good job raising the general spirits, and they consumed a lot of the truly maddening amounts of free time that we had been left with.
This had been going on for about six months, when a traveling journalist from Berlin barged in during one of our performances and wrote a little piece on it for the folks back home. Almost at once the old commandant was contacted by a Berlin radio station, who requested my services for a radio show. When the offer came, I thought little of it, except that it would be awfully nice to raise more spirits that were no doubt rather crushed by the war. I always liked to do a good turn for anyone who needed one.
So I did the bally shows. They took me out of the camp and put me in a rather nice hotel in Berlin - under constant guard, of course - and each week I went to the station and delivered the little comic monologue on prison camp life that I had written during said week. I'm not certain how long I went on doing these; the weeks run together, don't you know. But I daresay I was having a rather jolly time doing it, and it gave me the added pleasure of imagining that some of my nearest and dearest back home might be able to hear my voice every now and then and know that I was oojah-cum-spiff and what not.
It wasn't until quite a while later, perhaps a year or so, when one of my guards let slip that there had apparently been quite an uproar on the homefront - my homefront, not his - in regards to these little shows of mine. It seems that I had been heard in Britain, but rather than causing all kinds of rejoicing and dancing in the streets, the reaction had been rather less than pleased. In short, I was hailed as a traitor and a coward for giving comfort to the enemy, of all the bally things, and the good King George himself had made it known that I was to return to Blightey at my own r.
Well, I mean to say. Really!
I couldn't figure it, you see. I couldn't see that what I'd done was anything but what I'd always done, and the people back home had always been rather bucked about my writing and comic radio shows I sometimes did in London. And even if it had been a break from the usual Bertram fare, I still couldn't see how it could make one jot of difference as far as the war effort went, what?
But there it was, you see. It was plain to me that I had made the mistake of a lifetime, though how I was supposed to know it I'll never be able to say. I've always held that the British race - though undoubtedly the finest and best in many respects - is apt to take little things rather too seriously and rather too personally.
So I was an orphan again, for the second - or was it third? - time of my life. Needless to say, I stopped doing the radio shows after that. My captors were rather pipped, and they kept me right there in that bally hotel room for four months trying to starve a humorous radio show out of me. I mean, I say! Really!
At this point I'd given up all hope of a happy ending for Bertram. I had told Jeeves to return to England and wait for me there, but I would go to England no more forever, as the fellow said, and so I was pipped. I mean to say, I was lost.
And this was where the famous Wooster spirits faltered. Dipped, you might say. After nearly half a year living in a single room with no prospect of anything better for me in life, I quite got it in my head that I had had quite enough. So I went over to the old window and I hopped out.
Now, of course, I suppose it would be important to note that the current Wooster residence was on the fifth storey without a single awning to break my fall. To this day I couldn't tell you precisely what I had going through my mind when I took the leap, so to speak. I don't precisely think that I intended self-harm, so much as I required a change of scenery. When I say that captivity is a comfort to me, that is said with the understanding that said captivity includes some sort of companionship. I could be locked in the loony bin with Jeeves for the rest of my life and not feel a day of it. But one week without a soul to talk to drove me to a wild distraction. My confinement in the hotel had been all right when I had the guards to pass the time of day with, but they had been ordered to cease all communication with me once it became clear that it was a conversation with a guard that had caused me to become uncooperative. So for four months I had not spoken to a soul.
Jeeves can handle that sort of thing. I cannot.
And so I jumped. I became immediately aware that it was not the greatest idea I had ever had. I fell frightfully fast, you see, and the ground was rushing right at me in a most confrontational manner all the way. Rather like a runaway train, if trains can run away. We collided pretty solidly, I landing rather on my right side with the right leg sort of twisted beneath me. I felt the old legbone snap soundly. So soundly, in fact, that I actually heard it, too! For a time I didn't know what to do with myself. I considered calling for help, but then my mind rather returned to me and I realized that, odd as this may seem, no one was raising an alarm. It appeared that they actually did not know that I had jumped, and so, in a sense, I was as free as ever I had been in my life.
I won't lie and say that this was not a terrifying prospect. This was the first time in my life that I did not have a single soul telling me what to do, or at least politely suggesting a course of action. I was free and utterly on my own, and with a broken leg, to boot!
I thought of Jeeves then, and the old anthem from the earliest war days rang through my head:
“What would Jeeves say?”
I hissed it to myself five or six times, and it rather gave me strength, for suddenly I knew exactly what Jeeves would say.
“I would advise, sir, that you make your escape.” Of course, he would have told me exactly how to escape and all that, but I reasoned that any direction was better than none at all, and I dragged myself to my working foot and hobbled off.
I forgot to mention, of course, that night had quite fallen by the time I took the leap at all, and so there was no danger of being seen, provided I kept clear of any kind of light and got out of city limits by dawn. This I did, gritting my teeth against the pain in my leg. Every time I came near to collapsing, either from pain or fear or hopelessness, I kept myself going by muttering my old adage, “What would Jeeves say?”
In this way I did make it out of city limits by dawn, and I was well hidden in the countryside by the time anyone could have noticed my absence. I suppose they could have set dogs on me or somesuch horror, but I didn't think of it then, and evidently, neither did they. So away I wandered until the pain became unbearable, and I hid myself away in a hollow tree stump.
I suppose I crouched there for quite some time. Fortunately it began to rain after a few hours, and I let my head hang back and drank the rain drops as they fell. It went on for hours, it seemed, and for the first time in years I drank as much as I could handle. Of course, I still wondered a bit what Jeeves would think, seeing me crouching there in a stump like a racoon, but I permitted myself to believe that he would allow such behavior, given the circs.
Once I'd rested the wound and had my drink, I began to take stock of my situation. I've always been a bit foggy on geography, not being too keen on maps and such. My understanding of the lay of the land, as it were, is based on how long it takes to get from place to place. I know, for instance, that America is quite a frightfully long way away, since it takes about a week to get there by boat, and only a few hours to get to France. I knew also that I had been on a train for several days a few years back, so I must be about a half an Atlantic Ocean away from France. From there I reasoned that I could not walk to France in less than a month. Well, I didn't want to get to bally old France anyway, since that was where all the trouble started in the first place. No, I wanted to get to Switzerland, of course. I had heard it mentioned that Switzerland was what they call neutral in this little conflict, which meant that they weren't likely to throw me in prison no matter who I'd given comfort to. Trouble was, I wasn't entirely pos. where Switzerland was exactly. I had an idea that it was rather southward, but I had reason to believe that an awful lot of Germany lay southward as well.
Not that any of this made any kind of difference. I knew jolly well that the sun set in the West and rose in the East, but after that I was utterly lost. North and South remained a complete mystery. In the end I picked a direction rather at random (though I know it was neither East nor West) and stuck with it.
I had been hobbling along for three or four days when a complete miracle ocurred. I was just settling down behind a largish rock for a good night's sleep when I heard voices. At first I froze in utter terror, I can tell you, but I relaxed when I realized that the voices were speaking English. And not German-accented English, either, but good old familiar American English!
Now, if there is one thing I'm rather good at (and I don't mention it often, being a humble chap and all that) it is impressions and impersonations. If I wasn't so frightfully terrified of speaking in front of the masses, I might have gone and become an actor like so many of my fellow drones. Nevertheless, when I was a boy at school, I got on quite well by doing impressions of the headmaster and the tutors for my chums. What's more, I had spent quite a goodish amount of time in America over the years, and Jeeves told me once that I could swing a reasonable American accent, though, he said, the exact dialect was uncertain. So when I realized that these were American fellows wandering along through the wilderness within a stone's throw of me, I decided to try my luck. Had they been British, I might have quailed the same as for Germans, but Americans, I thought, might not know or care so much about my silly little radio shows, since my writing had never really taken off there in the first place. So I had a go at shouting, “I say!”
And then I remembered that Americans don't say that so much, and I changed my tack. “Hey!”
The voices stopped, and one called out cautiously, “We're armed.”
I took heart, for some reason, and said, “Well, I'm not. But I am injured, and I'm an American.”
There was a whispered conference and then the fellows approached. There were three of them, all young and tough and quite roughed up. As it turned out, they were not armed at all; it had been a desperate bluff. But it didn't make any difference to me either way.
They gathered about me right quick once they saw the state of my leg; it had been off at an odd angle all that time, and it wasn't very pleasant to look at.
“God Almighty!” one of the Americans cried. “How did you get that?”
I decided to go with honesty. Lying has never been easy for me, so the more I could keep accurate, the better I thought it would go for me. “I was imprisoned in a hotel in Berlin. I jumped out the window.”
Another gave a low whistle.
After that, the most terrible thing happened. Without even conferring, two of the brutes suddenly held me down while the third grabbed hold of my leg and gave it a horrible wrench. I screamed like the dickens, but one fellow clapped his hand over my mouth and hissed, “Shut up!”
Once it was all over and I'd had some time to recover, I realized what they had done for me; they'd straightened the old leg out, of course. It was really a rather good turn. Then they made me a sort of splint out of a stick and a torn up coat, and we all settled down for a sleep.
They asked far fewer questions than I expected them to. All they asked was where I had been captured, where I was from, and what my name was.
My answers were France, New York, and, after a moment's frantic thought, Billy Wilson. After all that, they welcomed me as one of their own, they being honorable soldiers captured in battle. They -Archie, Paul, and Andrew - had made their escape from their own prison camp about three days before, and they were trying to make their way to the coast, where they believed American ships could be signaled.
For myself, I was grateful that I had found someone to make my decisions for me.
The three stalwart lads dragged me all the way to some coast or other with them. It took several weeks at least. By that time the American forces had made some sort of headway, and there was a great lot of them all camped out on the beach. It was a grim scene, really, but I couldn't help but think of the old days with Jeeves at Westcomb-on-Sea. In no short time I was processed, and though they couldn't find any paperwork for me, they seemed to think that this was not unusual, and they “rotated” me “home.” In a few week's time I was resting comfortably in a hospital in New York City, feeling pretty well bucked about the way things had turned out. I could scarcely belief my good fortune. Maybe it's my honest face, or maybe everyone felt sorry for an old wounded prisoner of war, but when I told them my name and said that all my papers had been taken by the Germans, the American government officials assured me that new papers could be prepared, and soon enough my legal name was William Wilson, of New York City.
And that's that, really. I mean, the war only lasted about another year, and I spent most of that year recovering, don't you know. When it really was all over, they rather turned me out on the street, but I could hardly blame them, could I?
It was then, for the first time in my life, that I set out to get a job. It won't come as a surprise to anyone that I didn't quite know how to go about it. In addition to my general idiocy, my options were limited, considering that I was now the proud owner of a gimp leg. Not many people are overeager in their quest to hire a cripple, don't you know. Anyhow, I thought long and hard about what it is that people usually do to earn money. I'd always earned mine from that land left me by Uncle Willoughby, and later I'd bolstered up the old stores by publishing those little memoirs of mine. But I couldn't help but think that those weren't exactly the sort of thing I could expect to find in New York. Catsmeat was an actor, but as I already stated, that was right out. Some fellows back at the Drones, I recalled, were reading for the bar, but again, that required an awful lot of schooling. Schooling that Bertram Wilberforce Wooster may have had but Billy Wilson did not.
About the only thing poor Billy Wilson had going for him was that he was a former prisoner of war. What I mean is, people want to do you a good turn when they learn something like that about you, provided you didn't provide comfort to the enemy.
Anyway, the only other jobs I could think of were service jobs. I didn't really think I had it in me to be a valet or a butler, or even a footman. And besides, such opportunities didn't precisely abound in Manhattan. So the only option, really, was to work in a store. But how did one go about working in a store? I mean, what was the process? That was something I knew nothing about. In the end I think I spent about three weeks hobbling from store to store asking if they needed help, getting thinner and thinner by the day. It took time and - what is that word I'm thinking of? It starts with “ten” and it means to stick to something. Jeeves would know.
Anyway, it took that, whatever it is, but I managed to get myself fairly well settled at a men's clothing store on Forty Second and Sixth. Since I'm an amiable sort, and since I know good clothes and fashions when I see them (whether Jeeves agrees or not), it turned out that I was fairly well suited to this line of work. I had a dickens of a time getting my mind around having a schedule and a boss, but of course, a boss isn't so different from an aunt, only better, since he gives you money and all that. I also had a nice little room provided on the premises of the local chapter of the Young Men's Christian Association. They had special services for prisoners of war, don't you know, so I lived relatively comfortably, considering what I'd grown accustomed to over the past few years.
I won't say it wasn't frightening, that ghastly freedom I had, but I managed to some extent, and I made myself a jolly good lot of friends, which has always been a special gift of mine. The only real trouble came when the old clothes shop went belly up around the year 1947. By then I'd been working there a good three years, and I'd got it into my head that I was jolly well set for life. But b. u. she went, and I scrounged around for some time seeking new employment.
At last I pinpointed a brand new restaurant on Third Avenue. They were looking for waiters, and I fancied that I'd spent enough of my life observing waiters to enable me to mimic one, so I popped right in the front door. There didn't seem to be anybody about at that precise moment, and my wandering eye focused suddenly on a lovely little piano in the corner.
I don't quite know what a beeline is, but whatever it is, I made one straight to that piano. It was delish! And, what is more, it had been about seven years since I'd had the opportunity to play. I'd scarcely realized what a hardship that had been until I felt the old long-forgotten r. of b. through my veins as I put my fingers on the keys. Of course, some of the old fingers didn't quite sit straight anymore, and my pedal foot sat at an odd angle as well, but I made due with these minor setbacks and I began to play.
I won't say that I sounded very fantastic at first; I was quite out of practise, don't you know, but nevertheless I perservered, and within ten or fifteen minutes I daresay I was playing nearly as well as I used to. Obviously I didn't know any new songs; all I knew were the old dance-hall rubbish I used to play in the twenties. I found that the songs I'd learned in the thirties hadn't stuck with me nearly so well for some reason. So I knocked off a hasty rendition of Oh! By Jingo! and played about with Minnie the Moocher for a time. When I felt reasonably certain with those, I set in with an old Gershwin love song I've always been quite fond of, since it reminded me of those early days when Jeeves and I first - well. The point is, I hadn't got halfway through it before I became aware that I was being watched.
I don't know if you know the feeling I mean. Like a rummy sort of tingling on the back of the neck. Can't really explain it, can I? But I knew someone was there. I turned about right quick, and there he was. He was an older man, probably hovering about his mid-sixties, with little whisps of white hair framing his gleaming crown.
“Bravo!” he cried, clapping his hands. “You know, I never thought I'd actually be happy to hear that God awful tripe!”
“Eh?” I said.
“Why, now that I've been subject to two decades of even worse music, it sounds positively gorgeous! It's sentimental! And you play it just the way they always used to, like you've been transported straight from 1927!”
“Really,” I said, getting nervous. The old fellow was rushing to me now, holding out his hands, and I didn't entirely trust him.
“Do you have a job?” he asked me.
“Funny you should ask that,” I replied, but he cut me off.
“I want to you play the piano here, every night!”
And that was that, really. I took the job; I'd have been mad not to, what?
Dashed lucky thing I did, too. Dashed lucky.
Total Word Count: 6,968
Pairing: Jeeves/Bertie
Rating: PG
Summary: Bertie makes a terrible mistake during WWII, and Jeeves is powerless to help him.
Disclaimer: Jeeves and Wooster belong to PG Wodehouse, not me. "Wodehouse At War" belongs to Iain Sproat, not me.
Dashed difficult it is to admit this, but there was a short time there when I honestly began to doubt the good old Wooster spirits. I think it was quite possibly the darkest day of my life when those German chappies marched me off like that, handcuffed and whatnot. Old Jeeves practically threw himself in front of the door. I never saw him leap like that before in my life, and if the situation wasn't quite so dire, it might have melted the old heart. Even after all those years, I couldn't help but shake the idea that the fellow was mucking about waiting for something better to come along. Not that he ever gave me any reason to think such a thing, mind you. But honestly, did you ever in your puff meet a finer specimen? What could he really want from me? I mean to say, really.
He must have cared something for me, though, because leap he did, like a leopard, and got himself a stern talking-to from the cove who spoke English, and another from yours truly.
“Jeeves,” I said, doing my best to put him at ease, “relax, old boy. It's not as though I haven't been in the dock before.” That was true, of course. My mind strayed back to the time I nearly did three months for a crime a didn't commit; I'd managed to find a bright spot there. I could find one here as well. “It wouldn't do to get yourself killed over a little matter like this. Keep out of trouble, and get home if you can. I'll be with you the minute this little war of theirs is over.”
Of course, had I known that I wouldn't see him again for eight years, that these would be the last words he would have to remember me by all that long while, I might have said something a little more, well, memorable. But there you are.
The coves holding onto me weren't too keen on our little chat, and they pulled me out of the room right quick. My last sight of Jeeves nearly broke my heart; the way he stood there staring after me, looking hopeless and helpless and desolate. That made me angrier than anything, because Jeeves shouldn't ever be made to look or feel helpless. He's a chap who likes to be in control. It drives him mad when I don't give him say in the daily Wooster wardrobe - back when I used to do that sort of thing, anyway, which was years and years ago, when I was young and rather more full of myself - so I could hardly think what he'd do if he couldn't do or say a single dashed thing about my life at all.
It was a sort of repeating anthem for the ensuing days, really. Each new event had me worrying a-fresh, “What would Jeeves say?” They took my nice new suit away, don't you know, giving me some drab baggy affair that would have put Jeeves so out of commission he would have had to scratch three months' worth of entries.
“Heavens!” I said to myself, noting that the solemn affair was even missing its uppermost button. “What would Jeeves say?”
Soon after, of course, I was packed up in a rummy sort of truck that must have been used to transport cattle at some point, since an unmistakable touch of the farmyard still lingered about it. I stood there in my shameful costume, packed cheek by jowl with a whole lot of other similarly dressed coves, and we all jostled about pretty chummily over the damned rutted road our chauffeur had foolishly chosen for about a day and a half. I take no shame in telling you that I was fairly well dead on my feet by the end of the ordeal, and I was not the worst of the lot. I'll spare you details, but I saw, smelled, and did things on that truck that made me feel that maybe I and my companions were just the sort of cattle that that truck was accustomed to carting about. I maintain that we all of us had very little choice, but still. What would Jeeves say?
After that we were given a little glimpse of sunlight for a time, which was jolly well appreciated, even though I suspect it was not meant to be any sort of favor. They had to move us, you see, from the t. to the train. At first I was rather bucked to catch sight of the old steam engine; it rather brought me back to finer times when Jeeves and I were traveling to some new locale, and I was looking forward to a nice long sit, regardless of where that fine seat chose to take me. However, we weren't herded into a passenger car but - and I suppose I should have predicted this, in my right mind - into a cattle car. There were even more of us there, and I was sorry to see that some of the chaps whose acquaintance I'd made on the last leg of the journey weren't destined to be my neighbors for this little jaunt.
I didn't dwell on this disappointment for too long, however, since the word came around in a hushed sort of whisper that we were going to be fed. Aside from a little tin cup of water a few hours before, I hadn't consumed a blessed thing in about two days, and I dare-say I was more eager for this proposed repast than I had been for any meal before in my life, even during Anatole's prime.
Sure enough, without too much more to-do I was passed a bowl of broth and a bit of bread, and I lit into the same with an enthusiasm I daresay I could never again match. It was gone in about three seconds, but they were the finest three seconds I'd passed in many a weary hour. Drinks went round after that; some of my neighbors drank sparingly and saved the rest for later, but I've never been a fellow to see things in the long-term and I drank down what turned out to by my daily water alotment in two great gulps.
I was starting to get a bit shaky at this point, and I found myself wishing that the fellows who took my clothes had seen fit to leave me with my cigarette case at least, but there you are. No conideration, I might go so far as to say. Anyhow, I wasn't called upon to think or worry about much of anything for much longer, since exhaustion overpowered anxiety and pushed me down hard onto the floor of the train, which by this time had started rumbling along to whatever fate awaited us.
When I woke, I could tell some great time had passed, since the light was so different, and the old muscles ached fiercely. I found that I had been sleeping in a most unusual position, necessarily owing to the fact that I had not space to stretch myself out in my usual manner. I was, in fact, kneeling upon my knees with my face pressed down against the back of the fellow in front of me, who, as far as I could tell, was d. to the w.
“I say!” I said, sitting up, and inadvertently upsetting another fellow who had been using my own back for his pillow.
“I say,” he growled back at me. “Don't move!”
“I say,” I replied, “Frightfully sorry and what not, don't you know.”
“Not another word!” said my neighbor to the rear. “You've woken me enough times already, what with your blasted screaming and weeping and other cowardly nonsense!”
“I say!” I said, thoroughly pipped. We Woosters are not cowards, you know, and we do not scream and cry in public; not unless we lose a good parcel on a cert, of course. A man has his limits, after all.
“No!” he snapped. “You don't say. Not another word!”
I kept my peace there, remembering that we were all in a rummy situation and that every fellow has his own way of coping. It seemed my neighbor was apt to be tightly wound, considering the circs, and I could hardly blame him. So I lay my face back down on my other neighbor's back and tried to go to sleep again. Sleep didn't come, but it was strangely reassuring to feel the fellow breathing under my ear. It put me in mind of my cosy little life with Jeeves, though this strange cove's heartbeat and breathing pattern weren't at all like my own man's. It was pleasant enough, however, and if I closed my eyes I could almost pretend that Jeeves was right there with me. Not that I would have had him there. Not for all the t. in C.
Of course, that got me thinking about the blessed oolong, and the blessed sight of the blessed Jeeves bringing it in for me on a tray, and I admit that if I had been a man for tears and what not - though I am not, for no Wooster is - I might, in that moment, have indulged in a few of the saltiest. But then I should have gotten the fellow's back wet, and where should I have been then, what?
In all, I should say the train jouney lasted about three days. I can't say exactly how far we traveled, since we took all kinds of turns and stopped at seemingly random intervals. Had Sherlock Holmes been on the train he could have told you by the smell of the place or by the angles of the turns where we were headed, but I've always been rather more along the lines of a Watson than a Holmes. I hadn't the foggiest.
Any way, once the journey itself was at an end, I can't say that much more of interest ocurred for about a year or so. They took me in for questioning every now and then, but with decreasing frequency. I think they had it in their heads that, being a member of the noblesse I might actualy know something, but it became pretty clear pretty quickly that I have never known anything of any sort. They experimented with a bit of what you might call torture; I've got a few scars on my back and at least one finger that will never be quite straight again. Still, all in all, I think I got off fairly easy.
We weren't so terribly bad off, my fellow inmates and I. We had ample room in our little compound for -
Oh! I say. I've rather skipped a bit here, haven't I? I've never been one to focus on my surroundings, don't you know, and it shows in my writing, of course. I don't suppose anybody really likes to read about what a place looks like and all that, but sometimes it's just a little necessary.
We were somewhere in Poland, I think, and it wasn't such a bad-looking place. Mountains and trees and what not. Not unlike Totleigh-on-the-Wold, only rather superior, since it was entirely free of Bassets and Spodes. There was this ghastly big fence with barbed wire round the top, and I know it would have given Jeeves a bit of a bad taste. We had these little barracks with beds all lined up and stacked atop one another and what not; rather how I imagined school might have been for those fellows who hadn't got it quite so nice as I had at Eton. There was a bit of a field there, too, which I was getting to before when I said that we had ample room to amble about, and even play a game of cricket or rugger, or whatever we had it in our minds to play. I've never been much for cavorting about and slamming into other chaps on the field, but in this case it was a pleasant enough diversion. I didn't participate so much, of course, since I'm not gifted in the realm and I was nearing my fortieth birthday. But I enjoyed watching the younger set disport themselves so admirably.
So, as I say, it wasn't such a bad time, and really the only cause I had to suffer - aside from the occasional broken finger, which I saw to be a sort of occupational hazard - was that Jeeves was so dashed far away and impossible to contact. Not, I must repeat, that I would wish him to be there, for even the pleasantest, most comfortable cage was still a cage, and I knew that Jeeves required freedom of a sort in order to be happy. He wasn't used to the old confines as I was. Not that I think back to my days in the sanitorium often, mind you, but once you've spent a formative boyhood year in a padded white cell, it gets to be almost a comfort to be restained. I never did take so well to what you might call a normal life; I needed Jeeves there to help me manage. Even when I defied him - in my younger, more foolish days - his little rules about what I could and could not do and say and wear were, how should I say it? Reassuring! Yes. Reassuring.
All I mean to say is that I didn't suffer too much, except for lack of Jeeves.
Of course, it wasn't Jeeves alone who occupied my thoughts. As the months crawled by and the weather grew less clement and rations less filling, I spent rather a lot of time examining all of my relationships. It had seemed rather a lark to lose them forever when it was my choice to do so, knowing as I did that precious few would miss me or, indeed, even notice that I had gone. Even when I lived in London, there was no question that young Bertram was far from being an esteemed member of the clan, even if I was next in line to inherit the family title, due to the deaths of all my uncles save George, and the conspicuous absence of any male offspring older than myself. In fact, I believe that little fact made the presence all the more resented amongst kith and kin, since I was by far the most brainless of the lot, save, perhaps, Claude and Eustace. But they were off in South Africa anyway, having made some sort of splash in the diamond business, and though they protested readily enough at their initial exile, they had made no attempt to return to old Blightey in the ensuing years.
Anyhow, though thinking of the old flesh and blood did little for my spirits, think of them I did, with quite a vim. Aunt Dahlia occupied my thoughts quite often, as did dear cousin Angela, who I fancied might just miss me a little. I hoped that life was pleasant enough for her tastes, considering she was married to that somewhat troublesome Tuppy Glossop - who, I remembered with a burning sort of regret, had never received his comeuppance for the Drone's Club Pool affair. Perhaps, I mused, my imprisonment was vengeance enough, if anyone back home knew of it, since it might stir feelings of remorse in his breast. But I doubted it.
I also spent no little amount of time ruminating on the subject of my elder sister Ethel, stowed away all these years in India, along with her three young daughters who - I suddenly realized for the first time - must not be quite so young anymore. They had all returned to England for a brief foray in the twenties, but as Ethel and I had never been particularly close - she having been away at school for most of my childhood, taking her holidays with friends rather than relations, and then being married to some army officer named Scholfield when I was only just finishing up at Eton - I didn't see too much of her or the darling nieces before they high-tailed it back to India. In fact, I wasn't even positive that I could remember the girls' names. One, I think, had for her monacre a variation of the old standby “Anna.” All I really knew about them was that they were exceedingly quiet (no doubt due to the recent death of their father), and, in the year 1926, they had been aged six, three, and one, respectively. Which, in the year 1940, put them into their late teens and early twenties. Some of them, I realized, might even be married themselves!
So you understand the vein of my thinking at this juncture. Having little to look forward to, I chose, perhaps injudiciously, to focus on the past, especially all of those “what-ifs” and “what-might-have-beens” that are so easy to wallow in.
And that is really all that could be said for the first year or so of the war. That and the little plays, of course.
I can't quite remember how it all got started. It was sometime in the winter, when spirits were especially low among my fellow inmates, that I got it in my head that we could write plays and perform them. Cricket and rugby were all well and good, but they only sated one's need for diversion so far. I popped over to the commandant of the camp - who, as luck would have it, was rather a fan of my little memoirs - and induced him to give me some paper and a stump of a pencil on the condition that he be allowed first rights to read whatever I produced. I could hardly refuse such a simple request, given the circs, and I took it with a hearty handshake. Since most of the fellows I was holed up with were less inclined toward literature and the arts than I was, I thought it might be wise to use their own personalities for my characters, so that they would not have to stretch themselves too far to play their parts. I changed the names, of course, and since it is my experience that no one ever recognizes their likeness in print, I think they were none the wiser when I told them that the characters were entirely fictional. I also based the scripts on the sort of thing that might happen around a prison camp, such as the one we inhabited at the time, since I am not gifted in the art of plot-writing and I simply had no other inspiration.
The result was a sort of monthly pageant where the guards and inmates who chose to be entertained rather than directly involved would gather and watch whatever little entertainment I and my closest allies could produce. They weren't my best work, I'm afraid, since my greatest inspiration has always been the inimitable Jeeves who was, unfortunately and fortunately, absent. However, they did a good job raising the general spirits, and they consumed a lot of the truly maddening amounts of free time that we had been left with.
This had been going on for about six months, when a traveling journalist from Berlin barged in during one of our performances and wrote a little piece on it for the folks back home. Almost at once the old commandant was contacted by a Berlin radio station, who requested my services for a radio show. When the offer came, I thought little of it, except that it would be awfully nice to raise more spirits that were no doubt rather crushed by the war. I always liked to do a good turn for anyone who needed one.
So I did the bally shows. They took me out of the camp and put me in a rather nice hotel in Berlin - under constant guard, of course - and each week I went to the station and delivered the little comic monologue on prison camp life that I had written during said week. I'm not certain how long I went on doing these; the weeks run together, don't you know. But I daresay I was having a rather jolly time doing it, and it gave me the added pleasure of imagining that some of my nearest and dearest back home might be able to hear my voice every now and then and know that I was oojah-cum-spiff and what not.
It wasn't until quite a while later, perhaps a year or so, when one of my guards let slip that there had apparently been quite an uproar on the homefront - my homefront, not his - in regards to these little shows of mine. It seems that I had been heard in Britain, but rather than causing all kinds of rejoicing and dancing in the streets, the reaction had been rather less than pleased. In short, I was hailed as a traitor and a coward for giving comfort to the enemy, of all the bally things, and the good King George himself had made it known that I was to return to Blightey at my own r.
Well, I mean to say. Really!
I couldn't figure it, you see. I couldn't see that what I'd done was anything but what I'd always done, and the people back home had always been rather bucked about my writing and comic radio shows I sometimes did in London. And even if it had been a break from the usual Bertram fare, I still couldn't see how it could make one jot of difference as far as the war effort went, what?
But there it was, you see. It was plain to me that I had made the mistake of a lifetime, though how I was supposed to know it I'll never be able to say. I've always held that the British race - though undoubtedly the finest and best in many respects - is apt to take little things rather too seriously and rather too personally.
So I was an orphan again, for the second - or was it third? - time of my life. Needless to say, I stopped doing the radio shows after that. My captors were rather pipped, and they kept me right there in that bally hotel room for four months trying to starve a humorous radio show out of me. I mean, I say! Really!
At this point I'd given up all hope of a happy ending for Bertram. I had told Jeeves to return to England and wait for me there, but I would go to England no more forever, as the fellow said, and so I was pipped. I mean to say, I was lost.
And this was where the famous Wooster spirits faltered. Dipped, you might say. After nearly half a year living in a single room with no prospect of anything better for me in life, I quite got it in my head that I had had quite enough. So I went over to the old window and I hopped out.
Now, of course, I suppose it would be important to note that the current Wooster residence was on the fifth storey without a single awning to break my fall. To this day I couldn't tell you precisely what I had going through my mind when I took the leap, so to speak. I don't precisely think that I intended self-harm, so much as I required a change of scenery. When I say that captivity is a comfort to me, that is said with the understanding that said captivity includes some sort of companionship. I could be locked in the loony bin with Jeeves for the rest of my life and not feel a day of it. But one week without a soul to talk to drove me to a wild distraction. My confinement in the hotel had been all right when I had the guards to pass the time of day with, but they had been ordered to cease all communication with me once it became clear that it was a conversation with a guard that had caused me to become uncooperative. So for four months I had not spoken to a soul.
Jeeves can handle that sort of thing. I cannot.
And so I jumped. I became immediately aware that it was not the greatest idea I had ever had. I fell frightfully fast, you see, and the ground was rushing right at me in a most confrontational manner all the way. Rather like a runaway train, if trains can run away. We collided pretty solidly, I landing rather on my right side with the right leg sort of twisted beneath me. I felt the old legbone snap soundly. So soundly, in fact, that I actually heard it, too! For a time I didn't know what to do with myself. I considered calling for help, but then my mind rather returned to me and I realized that, odd as this may seem, no one was raising an alarm. It appeared that they actually did not know that I had jumped, and so, in a sense, I was as free as ever I had been in my life.
I won't lie and say that this was not a terrifying prospect. This was the first time in my life that I did not have a single soul telling me what to do, or at least politely suggesting a course of action. I was free and utterly on my own, and with a broken leg, to boot!
I thought of Jeeves then, and the old anthem from the earliest war days rang through my head:
“What would Jeeves say?”
I hissed it to myself five or six times, and it rather gave me strength, for suddenly I knew exactly what Jeeves would say.
“I would advise, sir, that you make your escape.” Of course, he would have told me exactly how to escape and all that, but I reasoned that any direction was better than none at all, and I dragged myself to my working foot and hobbled off.
I forgot to mention, of course, that night had quite fallen by the time I took the leap at all, and so there was no danger of being seen, provided I kept clear of any kind of light and got out of city limits by dawn. This I did, gritting my teeth against the pain in my leg. Every time I came near to collapsing, either from pain or fear or hopelessness, I kept myself going by muttering my old adage, “What would Jeeves say?”
In this way I did make it out of city limits by dawn, and I was well hidden in the countryside by the time anyone could have noticed my absence. I suppose they could have set dogs on me or somesuch horror, but I didn't think of it then, and evidently, neither did they. So away I wandered until the pain became unbearable, and I hid myself away in a hollow tree stump.
I suppose I crouched there for quite some time. Fortunately it began to rain after a few hours, and I let my head hang back and drank the rain drops as they fell. It went on for hours, it seemed, and for the first time in years I drank as much as I could handle. Of course, I still wondered a bit what Jeeves would think, seeing me crouching there in a stump like a racoon, but I permitted myself to believe that he would allow such behavior, given the circs.
Once I'd rested the wound and had my drink, I began to take stock of my situation. I've always been a bit foggy on geography, not being too keen on maps and such. My understanding of the lay of the land, as it were, is based on how long it takes to get from place to place. I know, for instance, that America is quite a frightfully long way away, since it takes about a week to get there by boat, and only a few hours to get to France. I knew also that I had been on a train for several days a few years back, so I must be about a half an Atlantic Ocean away from France. From there I reasoned that I could not walk to France in less than a month. Well, I didn't want to get to bally old France anyway, since that was where all the trouble started in the first place. No, I wanted to get to Switzerland, of course. I had heard it mentioned that Switzerland was what they call neutral in this little conflict, which meant that they weren't likely to throw me in prison no matter who I'd given comfort to. Trouble was, I wasn't entirely pos. where Switzerland was exactly. I had an idea that it was rather southward, but I had reason to believe that an awful lot of Germany lay southward as well.
Not that any of this made any kind of difference. I knew jolly well that the sun set in the West and rose in the East, but after that I was utterly lost. North and South remained a complete mystery. In the end I picked a direction rather at random (though I know it was neither East nor West) and stuck with it.
I had been hobbling along for three or four days when a complete miracle ocurred. I was just settling down behind a largish rock for a good night's sleep when I heard voices. At first I froze in utter terror, I can tell you, but I relaxed when I realized that the voices were speaking English. And not German-accented English, either, but good old familiar American English!
Now, if there is one thing I'm rather good at (and I don't mention it often, being a humble chap and all that) it is impressions and impersonations. If I wasn't so frightfully terrified of speaking in front of the masses, I might have gone and become an actor like so many of my fellow drones. Nevertheless, when I was a boy at school, I got on quite well by doing impressions of the headmaster and the tutors for my chums. What's more, I had spent quite a goodish amount of time in America over the years, and Jeeves told me once that I could swing a reasonable American accent, though, he said, the exact dialect was uncertain. So when I realized that these were American fellows wandering along through the wilderness within a stone's throw of me, I decided to try my luck. Had they been British, I might have quailed the same as for Germans, but Americans, I thought, might not know or care so much about my silly little radio shows, since my writing had never really taken off there in the first place. So I had a go at shouting, “I say!”
And then I remembered that Americans don't say that so much, and I changed my tack. “Hey!”
The voices stopped, and one called out cautiously, “We're armed.”
I took heart, for some reason, and said, “Well, I'm not. But I am injured, and I'm an American.”
There was a whispered conference and then the fellows approached. There were three of them, all young and tough and quite roughed up. As it turned out, they were not armed at all; it had been a desperate bluff. But it didn't make any difference to me either way.
They gathered about me right quick once they saw the state of my leg; it had been off at an odd angle all that time, and it wasn't very pleasant to look at.
“God Almighty!” one of the Americans cried. “How did you get that?”
I decided to go with honesty. Lying has never been easy for me, so the more I could keep accurate, the better I thought it would go for me. “I was imprisoned in a hotel in Berlin. I jumped out the window.”
Another gave a low whistle.
After that, the most terrible thing happened. Without even conferring, two of the brutes suddenly held me down while the third grabbed hold of my leg and gave it a horrible wrench. I screamed like the dickens, but one fellow clapped his hand over my mouth and hissed, “Shut up!”
Once it was all over and I'd had some time to recover, I realized what they had done for me; they'd straightened the old leg out, of course. It was really a rather good turn. Then they made me a sort of splint out of a stick and a torn up coat, and we all settled down for a sleep.
They asked far fewer questions than I expected them to. All they asked was where I had been captured, where I was from, and what my name was.
My answers were France, New York, and, after a moment's frantic thought, Billy Wilson. After all that, they welcomed me as one of their own, they being honorable soldiers captured in battle. They -Archie, Paul, and Andrew - had made their escape from their own prison camp about three days before, and they were trying to make their way to the coast, where they believed American ships could be signaled.
For myself, I was grateful that I had found someone to make my decisions for me.
The three stalwart lads dragged me all the way to some coast or other with them. It took several weeks at least. By that time the American forces had made some sort of headway, and there was a great lot of them all camped out on the beach. It was a grim scene, really, but I couldn't help but think of the old days with Jeeves at Westcomb-on-Sea. In no short time I was processed, and though they couldn't find any paperwork for me, they seemed to think that this was not unusual, and they “rotated” me “home.” In a few week's time I was resting comfortably in a hospital in New York City, feeling pretty well bucked about the way things had turned out. I could scarcely belief my good fortune. Maybe it's my honest face, or maybe everyone felt sorry for an old wounded prisoner of war, but when I told them my name and said that all my papers had been taken by the Germans, the American government officials assured me that new papers could be prepared, and soon enough my legal name was William Wilson, of New York City.
And that's that, really. I mean, the war only lasted about another year, and I spent most of that year recovering, don't you know. When it really was all over, they rather turned me out on the street, but I could hardly blame them, could I?
It was then, for the first time in my life, that I set out to get a job. It won't come as a surprise to anyone that I didn't quite know how to go about it. In addition to my general idiocy, my options were limited, considering that I was now the proud owner of a gimp leg. Not many people are overeager in their quest to hire a cripple, don't you know. Anyhow, I thought long and hard about what it is that people usually do to earn money. I'd always earned mine from that land left me by Uncle Willoughby, and later I'd bolstered up the old stores by publishing those little memoirs of mine. But I couldn't help but think that those weren't exactly the sort of thing I could expect to find in New York. Catsmeat was an actor, but as I already stated, that was right out. Some fellows back at the Drones, I recalled, were reading for the bar, but again, that required an awful lot of schooling. Schooling that Bertram Wilberforce Wooster may have had but Billy Wilson did not.
About the only thing poor Billy Wilson had going for him was that he was a former prisoner of war. What I mean is, people want to do you a good turn when they learn something like that about you, provided you didn't provide comfort to the enemy.
Anyway, the only other jobs I could think of were service jobs. I didn't really think I had it in me to be a valet or a butler, or even a footman. And besides, such opportunities didn't precisely abound in Manhattan. So the only option, really, was to work in a store. But how did one go about working in a store? I mean, what was the process? That was something I knew nothing about. In the end I think I spent about three weeks hobbling from store to store asking if they needed help, getting thinner and thinner by the day. It took time and - what is that word I'm thinking of? It starts with “ten” and it means to stick to something. Jeeves would know.
Anyway, it took that, whatever it is, but I managed to get myself fairly well settled at a men's clothing store on Forty Second and Sixth. Since I'm an amiable sort, and since I know good clothes and fashions when I see them (whether Jeeves agrees or not), it turned out that I was fairly well suited to this line of work. I had a dickens of a time getting my mind around having a schedule and a boss, but of course, a boss isn't so different from an aunt, only better, since he gives you money and all that. I also had a nice little room provided on the premises of the local chapter of the Young Men's Christian Association. They had special services for prisoners of war, don't you know, so I lived relatively comfortably, considering what I'd grown accustomed to over the past few years.
I won't say it wasn't frightening, that ghastly freedom I had, but I managed to some extent, and I made myself a jolly good lot of friends, which has always been a special gift of mine. The only real trouble came when the old clothes shop went belly up around the year 1947. By then I'd been working there a good three years, and I'd got it into my head that I was jolly well set for life. But b. u. she went, and I scrounged around for some time seeking new employment.
At last I pinpointed a brand new restaurant on Third Avenue. They were looking for waiters, and I fancied that I'd spent enough of my life observing waiters to enable me to mimic one, so I popped right in the front door. There didn't seem to be anybody about at that precise moment, and my wandering eye focused suddenly on a lovely little piano in the corner.
I don't quite know what a beeline is, but whatever it is, I made one straight to that piano. It was delish! And, what is more, it had been about seven years since I'd had the opportunity to play. I'd scarcely realized what a hardship that had been until I felt the old long-forgotten r. of b. through my veins as I put my fingers on the keys. Of course, some of the old fingers didn't quite sit straight anymore, and my pedal foot sat at an odd angle as well, but I made due with these minor setbacks and I began to play.
I won't say that I sounded very fantastic at first; I was quite out of practise, don't you know, but nevertheless I perservered, and within ten or fifteen minutes I daresay I was playing nearly as well as I used to. Obviously I didn't know any new songs; all I knew were the old dance-hall rubbish I used to play in the twenties. I found that the songs I'd learned in the thirties hadn't stuck with me nearly so well for some reason. So I knocked off a hasty rendition of Oh! By Jingo! and played about with Minnie the Moocher for a time. When I felt reasonably certain with those, I set in with an old Gershwin love song I've always been quite fond of, since it reminded me of those early days when Jeeves and I first - well. The point is, I hadn't got halfway through it before I became aware that I was being watched.
I don't know if you know the feeling I mean. Like a rummy sort of tingling on the back of the neck. Can't really explain it, can I? But I knew someone was there. I turned about right quick, and there he was. He was an older man, probably hovering about his mid-sixties, with little whisps of white hair framing his gleaming crown.
“Bravo!” he cried, clapping his hands. “You know, I never thought I'd actually be happy to hear that God awful tripe!”
“Eh?” I said.
“Why, now that I've been subject to two decades of even worse music, it sounds positively gorgeous! It's sentimental! And you play it just the way they always used to, like you've been transported straight from 1927!”
“Really,” I said, getting nervous. The old fellow was rushing to me now, holding out his hands, and I didn't entirely trust him.
“Do you have a job?” he asked me.
“Funny you should ask that,” I replied, but he cut me off.
“I want to you play the piano here, every night!”
And that was that, really. I took the job; I'd have been mad not to, what?
Dashed lucky thing I did, too. Dashed lucky.