Jeeves/Wooster Dictionary Fraglets: 3-4/20
4. In which an unnamed narrator pokes fun at the romance genre:
Careful
Years of caution and circumspection, a precise science of how long a gaze could trail or a hand linger, smiles kept for solitary moments and tones schooled into placid indifference-- this entire arsenal of evasions and illusions was backed by even more years of practiced discipline, and all it took to send it crumbling into rubble was a single stray gunshot.
The plot may seem familiar: the hero rushes to the side of his wounded secret-beloved and at the most crucial of touch-and-go moments, makes his confession. Perhaps there is a clasping of hands, a kiss that drags the object of his affection back from the brink. A whispered 'you mustn't leave me' or some such declaration, and after a sleepless night of anxious vigil, all is well and the lovers sail happily ever after off into the sunset.
It didn't precisely happen that way.
What happened, precisely, was that Jeeves did not arrive at Totleigh Towers in time to contrive a reason for his employer not to join the shooting party, and so Bertie was obliged to go along. Jeeves did not arrive in time to see the footman clatter in and demand someone go for the doctor, nor did he arrive in time to hear the anguished moans fade away as the ether dragged Bertie under.
It was all over, in fact, by the time he descended from the train. None of the customary dramatic moments were his to play out.
All he was granted was a piece of heart-stopping news from Butterfield: "You'd better go straight to the drawing-room, Mr Jeeves. Mr Wooster's been shot."
Jeeves dropped the bags where he stood and ran directly there, the pounding blood in his ears drowning out whatever else Butterfield was saying.
One might now expect a tense scene, a terrified man bursting through the fraught silence of the room and all eyes turning towards him.
What Jeeves instead came upon in the corridor was Dahlia Travers, annoyed but not mourning or apparently even worried, lecturing Harold Pinker like a naughty child while clipping him repeatedly on the side of the head with a newspaper.
"What possessed a bumbling oaf such as yourself to take hold of a rifle of all things I'll never know!" Dahlia bellowed, punctuating the admonition with a resounding thwap of the paper and scoring a direct hit on his ear.
"Ouch! I said I was sorry, Dahlia!" Harold exclaimed, vainly attempting to duck the next blow and upsetting a Ming Dynasty vase in the process.
Dahlia averted her eyes from the shattering ceramics and noticed Jeeves. "Oh, thank goodness you're here, Jeeves! He's out of his head and talking nonsense, not that that's anything new, but I think he asked for you."
Sense wormed its way through the frozen terror to tell Jeeves that given this scene, the circumstances could not be so very dire-- Mrs Travers was by no means of the soft and sensitive Madeline Bassett kidney, but certainly she would shed a tear or two for her favourite nephew if the occasion called for it-- but Jeeves had to see for himself.
He flung open the drawing-room doors and nearly collapsed with relief when he saw Bertie, lying on a sofa with his entire right leg swathed in bandages. He was clearly dazed and possibly in some pain, but largely, mercifully unharmed.
"Jeeves, old thing!" Bertie slurred. "S'that you, or'm I dreaming?"
Jeeves was vaguely aware of Dahlia ushering out a housemaid and what might've been a nurse and shutting the door behind her, but true to the requirements of the genre, his focus was on one person alone as he flew to the side of the sofa and knelt down.
There was, indeed, a clasping of hands. Bertie looked down at them as though they belonged to someone else. "Now I know'm dreaming," he said. "Or dead. 'm I dead, Jeeves? Is this heaven?"
Here was the moment in which the already fissured armament of precaution shattered with a spectacular bang to shame all rifle shots. He could always argue hallucination later if necessary, and therefore untangled one of his hands from Bertie's to tenderly stroke his cheek. "No, dearest," he said, unmasked and unarmoured. "You are alive, and I am here."
The glazed blue eyes cleared for just half a moment, blinking with something like surprise before drooping back into their drugged haze as a wobbly smile graced Bertie's lips. "If you kiss me, I'll wake up."
Paying no heed to the possibility that anyone could enter at any moment, Jeeves leaned down and proved him wrong.
It's usual to end these things with some assurance of future happiness, of the sailing-into of sunsets and all that, but those sorts of things are ten a penny. Let us instead simply say that Bertie's leg healed, and though in later years the ghost of the injury did make itself known on occasion, Jeeves was always there for him to lean on, which he vastly preferred to using a cane.