The World of Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. (4/4)
Title: The World of Jeeves.
Author: P.G. Wodehouse.
Genre: Literature, fiction, short stories, humour.
Country: England.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1922, 1930, 1958, and 1965 (this collection 1967).
Summary: A collection of 34 stories about Wooster and his crafty and trusted valet, Jeeves. (Stories 30-34 in this post, refer to PART 1 for stories 1-11, PART 2 for stories 12-20 and PART 3 for stories 21-29.) In Indian Summer of an Uncle (1930), Wooster is instructed by Aunt Agatha to sever the connection between one of his uncles and a way too young working-class girl he intends to marry, and when Wooster defers to Jeeves once more, the butler has a few surprises up his sleeve for the solution. In The Ordeal of Young Tuppy (1930), it is up to Wooster and Jeeves to break up an infatuation between a young lady and Wooster's nemesis, Tuppy, and while the young man enters a violent, ruthless game of rugby to prove his affections, Jeeves's behind-the-scenes schemes win the day. In Bertie Changes His Mind (1922), narrated by Jeeves, Jeeves is disturbed to find Wooster restless and bored, and contemplating marriage and particularly fatherhood, but a chance visit to a school for young ladies gives him an opportunity to realign Wooster's priorities back to safe bachelor grounds. In Jeeves Makes an Omelette (1958), Wooster is charged to steal an offensive painting by his Aunt Dahlia so she can get the painter's wife to write an article for her magazine, but when Wooster steals (and burns) the wrong one, and encounters the artist stealing his own painting, only Jeeves's quick wits can untangle the situation. In Jeeves and the Greasy Bird (1965), Wooster finds himself in a pickle when to get out of an accidental engagement with his ex-fianceé Honoria Glossop, he instead finds himself engaged to a scam artist, and its Jeeves to the rescue once more to get him out of the complicated situation.
My rating: 8/10
My review:
♥ Then I suddenly perceived that he was wearing a sort of horrible simper, and I confess it chilled the blood to no little extent. Uncle George, with face in repose, is hard enough on the eye. Simpering, he goes right above the odds.
♥ "One must remember, however, that it is not unusual to find gentlemen of a certain age yielding to what might be described as a sentimental urge. They appear to experience what I may term a sort of Indian summer, a kind of temporarily renewed youth. The phenomenon is particularly noticeable, I am given to understand, in the United States of America among the wealthier inhabitants of the city of Pittsburg. It is notorious, I am told, that sooner or later, unless restrained, they always endeavour to marry chorus-girls. Why this should be so, I am at a loss to say, but-"
I saw that this was going to take some time. I tuned out.
♥ We sat for a bit, brooding. The family always sits brooding when the subject of Uncle George's early romance comes up. I was too young to be actually in on it at the time, but I've had the details frequently from many sources, including Uncle George. Let him get even the slightest bit pickled, and he will tell you the whole story, sometimes twice in an evening. It was a barmaid at the Criterion, just before he came into the title. Her name was Maudie and he loved her dearly, but the family would have none of it. They dug down into the sock and paid her off. Just one of those human-interest stories, if you know what I mean.
I wasn't so sold on this money-offering scheme.
♥ I don't know if you have ever tooled off to East Dulwich to offer a strange female a hundred smackers to release your Uncle George. In case you haven't, I may tell you that there are plenty of things that are lots better fun.
♥ Barring a dentist's waiting-room, which it rather resembles, there isn't anything that quells the spirit much more than one of these suburban parlours. They are extremely apt to have stuffed birds in glass cases standing about on small tables, and if there is one thing which gives the man of sensibility that sinking feeling it is the cold, accusing eye of a ptarmigan or whatever it may be that has had its interior organs removed and sawdust substituted.
There were three of these cases in the parlour of Wistaria Lodge, so that, wherever you looked, you were sure to connect. Two were singletons, the third a family group, consisting of a father bullfinch, a mother bullfinch, and little Master Bullfinch, the last-named of whom wore an expression that was definitely that of a thug, and did more to damp my joie de vivre than all the rest of them put together.
♥ I hung about in the offing, now on this leg, now on that. For all the notice they took of me, I might just have well been the late Bertram Wooster, disembodied.
♥ "And which of us is going to tell Aunt Agatha that?"
"If I might make the suggestion, sir, I would advise that we omitted to communicate with Mrs. Spenser Gregson in any way. I have your suit-case practically packed. It would be a matter of but a few minutes to bring the car round from the garage-"
"And off over the horizon to where men are men?"
"Precisely, sir."
.."I'll get the car at once."
"Very good, sir."
"Remember what the poet Shakespeare said, Jeeves."
"What was that, sir?"
"'Exit hurriedly, pursued by a bear.' You'll find it in one of his plays. I remember drawing a picture of it on the side of the page, when I was at school."
~~Indian Summer of an Uncle.
♥ Every year, starting about the middle of November, there is a good deal of anxiety and apprehension among owners of the better-class of country-house throughout England as to who will get Bertram Wooster's patronage for the Christmas holidays. It may be one or it may be another. As my Aunt Dahlia says, you never know where the blow will fall.
This year, however, I had decided early. It wouldn't have been later than Nov. 10 when a sigh of relief went up from a frozen stately homes as it became known that the short straw had been drawn by Sir Reginald Witherspoon, Bart, of Bleaching Court, Upper Bleaching, Hants.
♥ I recollected the case. You will find it elsewhere in the archives. Cora Bellinger was the female's name. She was studying for Opera, and young Tuppy thought highly of her. Fortunately, however, she punched him in the eye during Beefy Bingham's clean, bright entertainment in Bermondsey East, and love died.
♥ "Bertie," said Aunt Dahlia, with a sort of frozen calm. "You are the Abysmal Chump. Listen to me. It's simply because I am fond of you and have influence with the Lunacy Commissioners that you weren't put in a padded cell years ago. Bungle this business, and I withdraw my protection,. Can't you understand that this thing is far too serious for any fooling about?"
♥ "Besides," he went on, in a quiet, meditative voice, "there is no power on earth that could get me off this field until I've thoroughly disembowelled that red-haired bounder. Have you noticed how he keeps tackling me when I haven't got the ball?"
"Isn't that right?"
"Of course it's not right. Never mind! A bitter retribution awaits that bird. I've had enough of it. From now on I assert my personality."
"I'm a bit foffy as to the rules of this pastime," I said. "Are you allowed to bite him?"
"I'll try, and see what happens," said Tuppy, struck with the idea and brightening a little.
At this point, the pall-bearers returned, and fighting became general again all along the Front.
♥ You know, only meeting a fellow at lunch or at the races or loafing round country-houses and so forth, you don't get on to his hidden depths, if you know what I mean. Until this moment, if asked, I would have said that Tuppy Glossop was, on the whole, essentially a pacific sport of bloke, with little or nothing of the tiger of the jungle in him. Yet here he was, running to and fro with fire streaming from his nostrils, a positive danger to traffic.
Yes, absolutely. Encouraged by the fact that the referee was either filled with the spirit of Live and Let Live or else had got his whistle choked up with mud, the result being that he appeared to regard the game with a sort of calm detachment, Tuppy was putting in some very impressive work. ..Tuppy was made of durable material. Every time the opposition talent ground him into the mire and sat on his head, he rose on stepping-stones of his dead self, if you follow me, to higher things.
~~The Ordeal of Young Tuppy.
♥ It has happened so frequently in the past few years that young fellows starting in my profession have come to me for a word of advice, that I have found it convenient now to condense my system into a brief formula. "Resource and Tact" - that is my motto. Tact, of course, has always been with me a sine qua non; while as for resource, I think I may say that I have usually contrived to show a certain modicum of what I might call finesse in handling those little contretemps which inevitably arise from time to time in the daily life of a gentleman's personal gentleman. I am reminded, by way of an instance, of the Episode of the School for Young Ladies near Brighton - an affair which, I think, may be said to have commenced one evening at the moment when I brought Mr. Wooster his whisky and siphon and he addressed me with such remarkable petulance.
♥ "Every night, dash it all," proceeded Mr. Wooster morosely, "you come in at exactly the same old time with the same old tray and put it on the same old table. I'm fed up, I tell you. It's the bally monotony of it that makes it all seem so frightfully bally."
I confess that his words filled me with a certain apprehension. I had heard gentlemen in whose employment I have been speak in very much the same way before, and it had almost invariably meant that they were contemplating matrimony. It disturbed me, therefore, I am free to admit, when Mr. Wooster addressed me in this fashion. I had no desire to sever a connection so pleasant in every respect as his and mine had been, and my experience is that when the wife comes in at the front door the valet of bachelor days goes out at the back.
♥ "..I've come to the conclusion mine is an empty life. I'm lonely, Jeeves."
"You have a great many friends, sir."
"What's the good of friends?"
"Emerson," I reminded him, "says a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature, sir."
"Well, you can tell Emerson from me the next time you see him that's he's an ass."
"Very good, sir."
"What I want- Jeeves, have you seen that play called I-forget-its-dashed-name?"
"No, sir."
"It's on at the What-d'you-call-it. I went last night."
♥ But I began to see that a crisis had arise which would require adroit handling. Rarely had I observed Mr. Wooster more set on a thing. Indeed, I could recall no such exhibition of determination on his part since the time when he had insisted, against my frank disapproval, on wearing purple socks. However, I had coped successfully with that outbreak, and I was by no means unsanguine that I should eventually be able to bring the present affair to a happy issue. Employers are like horses. They require managing. Some gentlemen's personal gentlemen have the knack of managing them, some have not. I, I am happy to say, have no cause for complaint.
♥ "He told me nothing about himself, except that he was a friend of Professor Mainwaring."
"He did not inform you, then, that he was the Mr. Wooster?"
"The Mr. Wooster?"
"Bertram Wooster, madam."
I will say for Mr. Wooster that, mentally negligible though he no doubt is, he has a name that suggests almost infinite possibilities. He sounds, if I may elucidate my meaning, like Someone - especially if you have just been informed that he is an intimate friend of so eminent a man as Professor Mainwaring. You might not, no doubt, be able to say off-hand whether he was Bertram Wooster the novelist, or Bertram Wooster the founder of a new school of thought; but you would have an uneasy feeling that you were exposing your ignorance if you did not give the impression of familiarity with the name. Miss Tomlinson, as I had rather foreseen, nodded brightly.
"Oh, Bertram Wooster!" she said.
♥ I drove round to the stables and halted the car in the yard. As I got out, I looked at it somewhat intently. It was a good car, and appeared to be in excellent condition, but somehow I seemed to feel that something was going to go wrong with it - soothing serious - something that would not be ale to be put right again for at least a couple of hours.
One gets these presentiments.
♥ "I'd no idea small girls were such demons."
"More deadly than the male, sir."
♥ I have spoken earlier of resource and the part it plays in the life of a gentleman's personal gentleman. It is a quality peculiarly necessary if one is to share in scenes not primarily designed for one's co-operation. So much that is interesting in life goes on apart behind closed doors that your gentleman's gentleman, if he is not to remain hopelessly behind the march of events, should exercise his wits in order to enable himself to be - if not a spectator - at least an auditor when there is anything of interest toward. I deprecate as vulgar and undignified the practice of listening at keyholes, but without lowering myself to that, I have generally contrived to find a way.
♥ Mr. Wooster is a young gentleman with practically every desirable quality except one. I do not mean brains, for in an employer brains are not desirable. The quality to which I allude is hard to define, about perhaps I might call it the gift of dealing with the Unusual Situation. In the presence of the Unusual, Mr. Wooster is too prone to smile weakly and allow his eyes to protrude. He lacks Presence.
♥ "Girls," said Miss Tomlinson, "some of you have already met Mr. Wooster - Mr. Bertram Wooster, and you all, I hope, know him by reputation." Here, I regret to say, Mr. Wooster gave a hideous, gurgling laugh and, catching Miss Tomlinson's eye, turned a bright scarlet.
~~Bertie Changes His Mind.
♥ In these disturbed days in which we live, it has probably occurred to all thinking men that something drastic ought to be done about aunts. Speaking for myself, I have long felt that stones should be turned and avenues explored with a view to putting a stopper on the relatives in question. If someone were to come to me and say, "Wooster, would you be interested in joining a society I am starting whose aim will be the suppression of aunts or at least will see to it that they are kept on a short chain and not permitted to roam hither and thither at will, scattering desolation on all sides?", I would reply, "Wilbraham," if his name was Wilbraham, "I am with you heart and soul. Put me down as a foundation member." And my mind would flit to the sinister episode of my Aunt Dahlia and the Fothergill Venus, from which I am making only a slow recovery. Whisper the words "Marsham Manor" in my ear, and I still quiver like a humming-bird.
♥ A bit oddish it seems to me, looking back on it that as I went to the instrument I should have had no premonition of an impending doom. Not psychic, that's my trouble. Having no inkling of the soup into which I was so shortly to be plunged, I welcome the opportunity of exchanging ideas with this sister of my late father who, as is widely known, is my good and deserving aunt, not to be confused with Aunt Agatha, the werewolf. What with one thing and another, it was some little time since we had chewed the fat together.
"What ho, old blood relation," I said.
"Hullo, Bertie, you revolting young blot," she responded in her hearty way. "Are you sober?"
"As a judge."
♥ She has since sold it, but at the time of which I speak this aunt was the proprietor or proprietress of a weekly paper for the half-witted woman called Milady's Boudoir..
♥ Shown into the hall, I found myself in as cosy an interior as one could wish - large log fire, comfortable chairs and a tea-table that gave out an invigorating aroma of buttered toast and muffins, all very pleasant to encounter after a long drive on a chilly winter afternoon - but a single glance at the personnel was enough to tell me that I had stuck one of those joints where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.
♥ It was with bowed head and the feeling that the curse had come upon me that I proceeded to my room. Jeeves was there, studding the shirt, and I lost no time in giving him the low-down. My attitude towards Jeeves on these occasions is always that of a lost sheep getting together with its shepherd.
♥ "The female of the species is more deadly than the male, sir. May I ask fi you ahve formlayed a plan of action?"
♥ "A broken window would lend greater verisimilitude."
"Wouldn't it rouse the house?"
"No, sir, it can be done quite noiselessly by smearing treacle on a sheet of brown paper, attaching the paper to the pane and striking it a sharp blow with the fist. This is the recognised method in vogue in the burgling industry."
♥ He went to the door, opened it, said "Certainly, madam, I will give it to Mr. Wooster immediately," and came back with a sort of young sabre.
"Your knife, sir."
"Thank you, Jeeves, curse it," I said, regarding the object with a shudder, and slipped sombrely into the mesh-knit underwear.
♥ My meditations on Aunt Dahlia, who had let me in for this horror in the night, were rather markedly lacking in a nephew's love. Indeed, it is not too much to say that every step I took deepened my conviction that what the aged relative needed was a swift kick in the pants.
♥ "Mr. Wooster!" he... quavered, I think, the word. "Thank God you are not Everard!"
Well, I was pretty pleased about that, too, of course. The last thing I would have wanted to be was a small, thin artist with a beard.
♥ "And so," I concluded, "we learn once again the lesson never, however dark the outlook, to despair. The storm clouds lowered, the skies were black, but now what do we see? The sun shining and the blue bird back once more at the old stand. La Fothergill wanted the Venus expunged, and it has been expunged. Voila!" I said, becoming a bit Parisian.
"And when she finds that owing to your fatheadedness Everard's very valuable picture has also been expunged?"
I h'med. I saw what she had in mind.
.."I withdraw what I said about the sun and the blue bird."
♥ "I am better without Anatole's cooking. I don't want to look like Uncle George."
I was alluding to the present Lord Yaxley, a prominent London clubman who gets more prominent yearly, especially seen sideways.
♥ Hers is carrying a voice. She used, as I have mentioned, to go in a lot for hunting, and though I have never hunted myself, I understand that the whole essence of the thing is to be able to make yourself heard across three ploughed fields and a spinney.
~~Jeeves Makes an Omelette.
♥ I had just returned from a week end at the Chuffnel Regis clinic of Sir Roderick Glossop, the eminent loony doctor or nerve specialist as he prefers to call himself - not, I may add, as a patient but as a guest. My Aunt Dahlia's cousin Percy had recently put in there for repairs, and she had asked me to pop down and see how he was making out. He had got the idea, I don't know why, that he was being followed about by little men with black beards, a state of affairs which he naturally wished to have adjusted with all possible speed.
♥ As I closed the front door behind her some twenty minutes later, I had rather the feeling you get when parting company with a tigress of the jungle or one of those fiends with hatchet who are always going about slaying six. Normally the old relative is as genial a soul as ever downed a veal cutlet, but she's apt to get hot under the collar when thwarted, and in the course of the recent meal, as we have seen, I had been compelled to thwart her like a ton of bricks. It was with quite a few beads of persp. bedewing the brow that I went back to the dining-room, where Jeeves was cleaning up the debris.
♥ "And owing to... what's that something of circumstances you hear people talking about? Cats enter into it, if I remember rightly."
"Would concatenation be the word for which you are groping?"
"That's it. Owing to a concatenation of circumstances B has got it into her nut that A's in love with her. But he isn't."
♥ "I want you to bend your brain to is the problem of how A can oil out of it. Don't get the idea that it's simple, because A is what is known as a preux chevalier, and this hampers him. I mean when B comes to him and says 'A, I will be yours,' he can't just reply 'You will, will you? That's what you think.' He has his code, and the code rules that he must kid her along and accept the situation. And frankly, Jeeves, he would rather be dead in a ditch. So there you are. The facts are before you. Anything stirring?"
♥ "She plays Fairy Queens in pantomime. Not in London owing to jealousy in high places, but they think a lot of her in Leeds, Wigan, Hull and Huddersfield. The critic of the Hull Daily News describes her as a talented bit of all right."
He was silent for a space, appearing to be turning this over in his mind. Then he spoke in the frank, forthright and fearless way these modern novelists have.
"She looks like a hippopotamus."
I conceded this.
"There is a resemblance, perhaps. I suppose Fairy Queens have to be stoutish if they are to keep faith with their public in towns like Leeds and Huddesfield. Those audiences up North want lots for their money."
"And she exudes a horrible scent which I am unable at the moment to identify."
"Patchouli. Yes, I noticed that."
♥ In a broken voice I supplied her with the facts and was surprised and touched to find her sympathetic and understanding. It's often this way with the female sex. They put you through it in no uncertain manner if you won't see eye to eye with them in the matter - to take an instance at random - of disguising yourself in white whiskers and stomach padding, but if they see you are really up against it, their hearts melt, rancour is forgotten and they do all they can to give you a shot in the arm. It was so with the aged relative. Having expressed the opinion that I was the king of the fatheads and ought never to be allowed out without a nurse, she continued in gentler strain.
"But after all you are my brother's son whom I frequently dandled on my knee as a baby, and a subhuman baby you were if ever I saw one, though I suppose you were to be pitied rather than censured if you looked like a cross between a poached egg and a ventriloquist's dummy, so I can't let you sink in the soup without a trace. I must rally round and lend a hand.
♥ "Is he coming?" said Aunt Dahlia.
"Like the wind. Just looking for his bowler hat."
"Then you pop off."
"You don't want me for the conference?"
"No."
"Three heads are better than two," I argued.
"Not if one of them is solid ivory from the neck up," said the aged relative, reverting to something more like her customary form.
~~Jeeves and the Greasy Bird.