J&W Dictionary Fraglets 15-17/20: Maliciously, Snore, Somebody
Just four three (go me with the numbering) more to go after this! The first one is not lamely short, it's not! It is pithy. PITHY. Laconic, even. Also, I doubt you'd want it to go on very much longer than it does, assuming I haven't been so obtuse you don't get it. And for your own health, please don't try to work out what year it's supposed to be in the last one.
Previous efforts || Table of doom
15. G, a piddling 245 words
Which is tiny and evil, like a White Castle burger. OFC warning.
Maliciously
16. Briefly NC-17, 591 words
In which even sleeping Berties can't shut up, and Jeeves muses.
Snore ( Snore )
17. PG, 1544 words
In which we are in a not-so-bright future, and there is a nephew.
Somebody ( Somebody )
15. G, a piddling 245 words
Which is tiny and evil, like a White Castle burger. OFC warning.
Maliciously
"Have you any idea what you are suggesting, girl?" McIntosh tumbled to the floor with an affronted yip at the sharpness of his mistress's movement as she leaned forward. "My entire family's reputation is at stake, not merely yours. Mark my words, the moment it goes wrong, I will not hesitate to paint you as the loosest, blackest--"
"But you must see it's the only way, Your Ladyship," the other party interrupted airily. "Even that Jeeves won't dare try to get him out of it. He can't, not once it's gone that far. No one can."
Lady Worplesdon took a considering sip of sherry. The girl was determined, one had to allow. Her nephew needed someone with a firm hand and a bit of spine. The problem with the others was that they had been inconstant and flighty, too easily swayed towards handsomer prospects or put off by faults. It was drastic, yes, and dangerous, but drastic measures were the only thing left. She sat back and smiled, an acid, needling thing. "Please, my dear, call me Agatha. We shall be family soon enough, after all."
The guest's lips turned upwards like those of a satisfied cat as she took her leave. Bertie Wooster would never know what hit him, and by the time that cursed valet of his returned from wherever he was, it would all be set in stone. A lady's virtue, after all, was not a thing to be toyed with.
16. briefly NC-17, 591 words
In which even sleeping Berties can't shut up, and Jeeves muses.
Snore
Out of long habit I wake at five, though it has been some time since the notion was very vocally frowned upon and any thought of my rising at such an hour dispensed with.
The only sounds in the room are the distant clang and clap of a milkman's cart and something akin to a wheezing drain. There will be the occasional nonsensical mutter, perhaps a pleased 'hmm' depending on how I choose to occupy my hands.
In time I may come to find the loud and constant snoring a nuisance and endeavour to affect some remedy, but as yet every foible and twitch is a gift in the process of knowing him wholly. Even long and careful study of Mr Wooster the devoted employer did not prepare me for the full force of adoration from the extraordinary creature who smiles to shame sunrises each time I address him as Bertram.
The effervescent man with questionable taste in clothing and the one who last night haltingly confessed a long-harboured wish to dance with me are one and the same, but for all that anyone who knows him would say he is an open book, these little discoveries are mine alone.
No one knows that three times a year without fail-- on their birthdays and on the anniversary of the accident-- he travels to where his parents are laid to rest and spends hours talking to him as though they have simply met for luncheon. His joy in music, such as the music is, may be observed by anyone who happens into his presence, but his face contorted in ecstasy is my secret to keep. He professes to lack hidden depths, but declared himself with a page marked in a book of poetry.
It has been said that no man is a hero to his valet, but if I could bottle his selfless good humour, his faith and optimisim, and take it as an elixir for my own bittered heart, I would. He frightens me. He is doors suddenly flung wide; I remain a column of stuck locks. He pries at them diligently. His delight at each dislodged pin elates and shames me. Why can I not give him the keys he deserves?
Mysteries all unravelled, would he tire? He gave his promise in earnest, as with all he gives, but his mind has changed before. If there were two of me, would the other enumerate my faults? Deem me unsuitable and engineer some elaborate scheme to push me out of favour? Or would I give myself my blessing and sadly go? After a fashion, there are two of me. One in public, and one behind closed doors.
I decide that there is no use in further examination and press my face into a warm shoulderblade. The snoring quiets and he presses back against me with a sigh. When I move a hand down between his legs I find him already half-erect, and shiver with the thrill of his cock swelling in my palm. I tease a tiny drop from it and bring my finger to my lips to taste, but a low whine of loss has my hand swiftly back where it was. I suck the sleep-salted skin of his neck and stroke him slowly. I know the moment he has woken enough to know what is happening, because he sighs, "Oh, Jeeves."
For all his clawing for shreds of the man, it's still only the faithful servant he knows. I make him a silent promise that I will try to give as he does.
17. PG, 1544 words
In which we are in a not-so-bright future, and there is a nephew.
Somebody
I squinted through a haze of cigarette smoke as I poked my head through the cracked door. "Uncle Bertie?"
The clacking of typewriter keys stopped and my self-proclaimed favourite uncle squinted back. His face exploded into a smile and he popped up from his chair. "Topper!" he exlclaimed, hopping over a pile of papers to shake my hand heartily. "I thought you weren't coming down till next week."
"I wasn't." I did my best not to sigh it. "Colin decided at the last moment that he wanted The Boil along as well, and I can't stand him for five minutes. If Lady Weatherley asks you were absolutely at death's door."
"Oh, I doubt she will. She's not speaking to me at the moment. Something about an evening gown and some beaujolais. Who's this Boil chappie again?"
"Monty Doyle. He's a tosser."
"Your dear mother would tell you not to use language like that, but I won't bother. Wasn't he the one-man crusade to keep you out of Pop?"
"And failed miserably." I moved to lift a stack of files off a chair and he fumbled them out of my hands. "Colin hated him too until a few weeks ago. Everyone did until the bloody cricket. There should be some law against a number eleven playing like that." I fell despondently into the cleared chair. "Not that I want Harrow winning, and good on him, I suppose, but...."
"You'd rather it had been someone else," he said understandingly.
I nodded with relief. Dad never understood these things (I sometimes wondered if Dad could understand anything that didn't come in a pie-crust), but Uncle Bertie always did. He didn't stop me from liberating a cigarette from the case on the desk, or from lighting it. "What is all this?" I asked instead of what I'd really come to ask.
"Oh, this and that. Memoirs, you know. I think it's a lot of gibber, but Angela seems to think it'd be good for me."
Mum had funny ideas of what was good for people, I knew first-hand, but Uncle Bertie rarely mentioned anything that hadn't happened in the last seventeen or so years and I couldn't help feeling curious. "Memoirs? Can I read them?" I picked up a crumpled sheet of paper off the floor. He lunged forwards and snatched it back.
"It's not finished," he said. "Why don't you have Colin up here when he's rid of his Boil? I don't think we've set eyes on him since he was in short trousers."
"Yes you have. You took us to lunch last term, remember?"
"I spoke metaphorically."
There was nothing I would have liked better than to have Colin... well, anywhere at all, really. And that was the problem. I blushed just thinking of it. "Uncle B?"
"Yes, young blot?"
"Young blot?"
He smiled, wistfully I thought. "Your gran used to call me that. What is it?"
"Do you remember when I was fourteen and got blotto on Dad's good scotch?"
"Oh, fondly."
"And you didn't tell?"
"I still haven't."
"And you said I could tell you things, if I was in a scrape? And that you wouldn't tell as long as it wouldn't hurt anybody?"
"What've you done?" he asked, every inch the trusty uncle.
"Nothing yet."
"Well, what's the scheme, then? Frogs in old Boily's cricket cap?"
"No, nothing like that, as much as I'd like to. It's just-- well, the thing is--" I took a deep breath. "How do you know you're in love?"
Something odd went over him, like shutters all shutting up. "I'm the wrong bird to ask, Tops. I hadn't a clue I'd loved till I'd already loved and lost."
I forgot all about Colin for the moment with this revelation. "Is that why you never got married?"
He picked at the corner of one of the piles of paper on the desk. "Partly, I suppose." He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another immediately. "The thing of love is, it can sort of creep up. Thief in the night and what all. You see somebody every day, and they're just there, and you can't imagine them not being there, but you don't really think any more about it. And then one day it's 'sayonara, Bertram,' and you're left feeling rather as though this someone has ripped your very guts out and packed them in along with the shoes and socks. And there you are cold and alone, and there your guts are in a steamer trunk trundling across the broad Atlantic."
"She went to America?"
"Never mind about the old Wooster heart. Who's snared yours, or so you suspect?"
I looked down at my hands. "I think I shouldn't tell you."
When I looked back up, he was staring at me. I don't know if he looked pitying or just sad, but at least he wasn't angry since I was far more obvious than I thought. "It's Colin, isn't it?"
"Yes." It was just sort of a peep, it was so quiet. "It won't matter after next term. He'll be at Cambridge and I'll be at Oxford and we'll never see each other."
"It matters, Tom, if he feels the same thing." He never calls me Tom.
"I thought he did, till The Boil," I said miserably.
"Well, The Boil's The Boil. I'd think it would take more than that to split up The Fantastic Tom Collins Revue."
I covered my face and groaned. "You just had to bring that up." He referred to a vaudevillian travesty the pair of us, aged ten, had put on at a village concert. If I ever found the photographs, they would be burnt.
"The point I was making is that there's a sort of brotherhood formed when one chap and another are wee lads together. Thicker than water, or as good as."
"But I don't want to be his brother."
"The hard truth is that you may be forced to settle for it. And you're young, Topper. So very young. You forget you're talking to an Old Boy here. If I could count all the times I thought I-- well, I know what you don't put in your letters home."
"You? Really?" Not that I wanted to imagine it for a moment, but one likes not to be alone in these things.
"Good lord, yes. Everyone did it, more or less. As I understand it things have rather calmed down a bit. But not more than one or two of the birds I was at school with stuck to the Etonian spirit, if you know what I mean. On the one hand I want to say give it a bit, see if it sort of wears off once you're out in the world. But the steamer-trunked guts are saying carpe diem, if that's the thing I mean."
I may have got through maths mostly by cribbing, but I can put two and two together when I must. "And did you? Stick with the Etonian spirit, I mean?"
He sighed loudly. "I thought I hadn't. And I hadn't, not in the strictest sense of the thing. Once the guts were shipped off I did some things that you're really too young to hear about, and it became pretty clear it was nothing to do with the m. or the f. of the species and everything to do with one unique specimen."
"And you never saw him again? Do you know where he is?"
"No. And last I heard he'd inherited a business from some uncle. Last being the day he gave his no-- er, told me he was leaving."
"You never tried to find him, once you worked it out?"
"We sent the odd postcard at first, but it never amounted to much. Just 'what ho, still kicking,' all that sort of thing. I've had a long time to think about it, and he was too bally clever not to have known."
"How long?"
"Oh, I suppose it's about ten years now?"
"Ten years? Then I would have known him, wouldn't I?"
"You may not remember. He used to teach you card tricks."
It was a good job I was sitting in a chair, because if I'd been standing I would have toppled right over. "Jeeves? Jeeves, your valet, Jeeves?"
"That's the one." He pulled something out of his billfold and handed it to me. It was a worn and faded photograph of Jeeves more or less as I remembered him, and Uncle Bertie a good bit younger, both in their Army uniforms. He seemed to be trying not to laugh, and behind him Jeeves stood somberly with a hand on his shoulder. "Be careful with it. It's the only one I've got."
I've been told on the odd grudging occasion that I'm clever, but I'd never felt cleverer than at this moment. "Remember when you said you'd take me to New York?"
"Oh, Tommy, no."
"Oh, Tommy, yes. Code of the Woosters. You promised."
He took the photo back with trembling hands and stared at it. "I suppose I did, at that."
"Do you suppose Colin would come?" I asked hopefully. Maybe a happy ending for both of us was possible.
Previous efforts || Table of doom
15. G, a piddling 245 words
Which is tiny and evil, like a White Castle burger. OFC warning.
Maliciously
16. Briefly NC-17, 591 words
In which even sleeping Berties can't shut up, and Jeeves muses.
Snore ( Snore )
17. PG, 1544 words
In which we are in a not-so-bright future, and there is a nephew.
Somebody ( Somebody )
15. G, a piddling 245 words
Which is tiny and evil, like a White Castle burger. OFC warning.
Maliciously
"Have you any idea what you are suggesting, girl?" McIntosh tumbled to the floor with an affronted yip at the sharpness of his mistress's movement as she leaned forward. "My entire family's reputation is at stake, not merely yours. Mark my words, the moment it goes wrong, I will not hesitate to paint you as the loosest, blackest--"
"But you must see it's the only way, Your Ladyship," the other party interrupted airily. "Even that Jeeves won't dare try to get him out of it. He can't, not once it's gone that far. No one can."
Lady Worplesdon took a considering sip of sherry. The girl was determined, one had to allow. Her nephew needed someone with a firm hand and a bit of spine. The problem with the others was that they had been inconstant and flighty, too easily swayed towards handsomer prospects or put off by faults. It was drastic, yes, and dangerous, but drastic measures were the only thing left. She sat back and smiled, an acid, needling thing. "Please, my dear, call me Agatha. We shall be family soon enough, after all."
The guest's lips turned upwards like those of a satisfied cat as she took her leave. Bertie Wooster would never know what hit him, and by the time that cursed valet of his returned from wherever he was, it would all be set in stone. A lady's virtue, after all, was not a thing to be toyed with.
16. briefly NC-17, 591 words
In which even sleeping Berties can't shut up, and Jeeves muses.
Snore
Out of long habit I wake at five, though it has been some time since the notion was very vocally frowned upon and any thought of my rising at such an hour dispensed with.
The only sounds in the room are the distant clang and clap of a milkman's cart and something akin to a wheezing drain. There will be the occasional nonsensical mutter, perhaps a pleased 'hmm' depending on how I choose to occupy my hands.
In time I may come to find the loud and constant snoring a nuisance and endeavour to affect some remedy, but as yet every foible and twitch is a gift in the process of knowing him wholly. Even long and careful study of Mr Wooster the devoted employer did not prepare me for the full force of adoration from the extraordinary creature who smiles to shame sunrises each time I address him as Bertram.
The effervescent man with questionable taste in clothing and the one who last night haltingly confessed a long-harboured wish to dance with me are one and the same, but for all that anyone who knows him would say he is an open book, these little discoveries are mine alone.
No one knows that three times a year without fail-- on their birthdays and on the anniversary of the accident-- he travels to where his parents are laid to rest and spends hours talking to him as though they have simply met for luncheon. His joy in music, such as the music is, may be observed by anyone who happens into his presence, but his face contorted in ecstasy is my secret to keep. He professes to lack hidden depths, but declared himself with a page marked in a book of poetry.
It has been said that no man is a hero to his valet, but if I could bottle his selfless good humour, his faith and optimisim, and take it as an elixir for my own bittered heart, I would. He frightens me. He is doors suddenly flung wide; I remain a column of stuck locks. He pries at them diligently. His delight at each dislodged pin elates and shames me. Why can I not give him the keys he deserves?
Mysteries all unravelled, would he tire? He gave his promise in earnest, as with all he gives, but his mind has changed before. If there were two of me, would the other enumerate my faults? Deem me unsuitable and engineer some elaborate scheme to push me out of favour? Or would I give myself my blessing and sadly go? After a fashion, there are two of me. One in public, and one behind closed doors.
I decide that there is no use in further examination and press my face into a warm shoulderblade. The snoring quiets and he presses back against me with a sigh. When I move a hand down between his legs I find him already half-erect, and shiver with the thrill of his cock swelling in my palm. I tease a tiny drop from it and bring my finger to my lips to taste, but a low whine of loss has my hand swiftly back where it was. I suck the sleep-salted skin of his neck and stroke him slowly. I know the moment he has woken enough to know what is happening, because he sighs, "Oh, Jeeves."
For all his clawing for shreds of the man, it's still only the faithful servant he knows. I make him a silent promise that I will try to give as he does.
17. PG, 1544 words
In which we are in a not-so-bright future, and there is a nephew.
Somebody
I squinted through a haze of cigarette smoke as I poked my head through the cracked door. "Uncle Bertie?"
The clacking of typewriter keys stopped and my self-proclaimed favourite uncle squinted back. His face exploded into a smile and he popped up from his chair. "Topper!" he exlclaimed, hopping over a pile of papers to shake my hand heartily. "I thought you weren't coming down till next week."
"I wasn't." I did my best not to sigh it. "Colin decided at the last moment that he wanted The Boil along as well, and I can't stand him for five minutes. If Lady Weatherley asks you were absolutely at death's door."
"Oh, I doubt she will. She's not speaking to me at the moment. Something about an evening gown and some beaujolais. Who's this Boil chappie again?"
"Monty Doyle. He's a tosser."
"Your dear mother would tell you not to use language like that, but I won't bother. Wasn't he the one-man crusade to keep you out of Pop?"
"And failed miserably." I moved to lift a stack of files off a chair and he fumbled them out of my hands. "Colin hated him too until a few weeks ago. Everyone did until the bloody cricket. There should be some law against a number eleven playing like that." I fell despondently into the cleared chair. "Not that I want Harrow winning, and good on him, I suppose, but...."
"You'd rather it had been someone else," he said understandingly.
I nodded with relief. Dad never understood these things (I sometimes wondered if Dad could understand anything that didn't come in a pie-crust), but Uncle Bertie always did. He didn't stop me from liberating a cigarette from the case on the desk, or from lighting it. "What is all this?" I asked instead of what I'd really come to ask.
"Oh, this and that. Memoirs, you know. I think it's a lot of gibber, but Angela seems to think it'd be good for me."
Mum had funny ideas of what was good for people, I knew first-hand, but Uncle Bertie rarely mentioned anything that hadn't happened in the last seventeen or so years and I couldn't help feeling curious. "Memoirs? Can I read them?" I picked up a crumpled sheet of paper off the floor. He lunged forwards and snatched it back.
"It's not finished," he said. "Why don't you have Colin up here when he's rid of his Boil? I don't think we've set eyes on him since he was in short trousers."
"Yes you have. You took us to lunch last term, remember?"
"I spoke metaphorically."
There was nothing I would have liked better than to have Colin... well, anywhere at all, really. And that was the problem. I blushed just thinking of it. "Uncle B?"
"Yes, young blot?"
"Young blot?"
He smiled, wistfully I thought. "Your gran used to call me that. What is it?"
"Do you remember when I was fourteen and got blotto on Dad's good scotch?"
"Oh, fondly."
"And you didn't tell?"
"I still haven't."
"And you said I could tell you things, if I was in a scrape? And that you wouldn't tell as long as it wouldn't hurt anybody?"
"What've you done?" he asked, every inch the trusty uncle.
"Nothing yet."
"Well, what's the scheme, then? Frogs in old Boily's cricket cap?"
"No, nothing like that, as much as I'd like to. It's just-- well, the thing is--" I took a deep breath. "How do you know you're in love?"
Something odd went over him, like shutters all shutting up. "I'm the wrong bird to ask, Tops. I hadn't a clue I'd loved till I'd already loved and lost."
I forgot all about Colin for the moment with this revelation. "Is that why you never got married?"
He picked at the corner of one of the piles of paper on the desk. "Partly, I suppose." He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another immediately. "The thing of love is, it can sort of creep up. Thief in the night and what all. You see somebody every day, and they're just there, and you can't imagine them not being there, but you don't really think any more about it. And then one day it's 'sayonara, Bertram,' and you're left feeling rather as though this someone has ripped your very guts out and packed them in along with the shoes and socks. And there you are cold and alone, and there your guts are in a steamer trunk trundling across the broad Atlantic."
"She went to America?"
"Never mind about the old Wooster heart. Who's snared yours, or so you suspect?"
I looked down at my hands. "I think I shouldn't tell you."
When I looked back up, he was staring at me. I don't know if he looked pitying or just sad, but at least he wasn't angry since I was far more obvious than I thought. "It's Colin, isn't it?"
"Yes." It was just sort of a peep, it was so quiet. "It won't matter after next term. He'll be at Cambridge and I'll be at Oxford and we'll never see each other."
"It matters, Tom, if he feels the same thing." He never calls me Tom.
"I thought he did, till The Boil," I said miserably.
"Well, The Boil's The Boil. I'd think it would take more than that to split up The Fantastic Tom Collins Revue."
I covered my face and groaned. "You just had to bring that up." He referred to a vaudevillian travesty the pair of us, aged ten, had put on at a village concert. If I ever found the photographs, they would be burnt.
"The point I was making is that there's a sort of brotherhood formed when one chap and another are wee lads together. Thicker than water, or as good as."
"But I don't want to be his brother."
"The hard truth is that you may be forced to settle for it. And you're young, Topper. So very young. You forget you're talking to an Old Boy here. If I could count all the times I thought I-- well, I know what you don't put in your letters home."
"You? Really?" Not that I wanted to imagine it for a moment, but one likes not to be alone in these things.
"Good lord, yes. Everyone did it, more or less. As I understand it things have rather calmed down a bit. But not more than one or two of the birds I was at school with stuck to the Etonian spirit, if you know what I mean. On the one hand I want to say give it a bit, see if it sort of wears off once you're out in the world. But the steamer-trunked guts are saying carpe diem, if that's the thing I mean."
I may have got through maths mostly by cribbing, but I can put two and two together when I must. "And did you? Stick with the Etonian spirit, I mean?"
He sighed loudly. "I thought I hadn't. And I hadn't, not in the strictest sense of the thing. Once the guts were shipped off I did some things that you're really too young to hear about, and it became pretty clear it was nothing to do with the m. or the f. of the species and everything to do with one unique specimen."
"And you never saw him again? Do you know where he is?"
"No. And last I heard he'd inherited a business from some uncle. Last being the day he gave his no-- er, told me he was leaving."
"You never tried to find him, once you worked it out?"
"We sent the odd postcard at first, but it never amounted to much. Just 'what ho, still kicking,' all that sort of thing. I've had a long time to think about it, and he was too bally clever not to have known."
"How long?"
"Oh, I suppose it's about ten years now?"
"Ten years? Then I would have known him, wouldn't I?"
"You may not remember. He used to teach you card tricks."
It was a good job I was sitting in a chair, because if I'd been standing I would have toppled right over. "Jeeves? Jeeves, your valet, Jeeves?"
"That's the one." He pulled something out of his billfold and handed it to me. It was a worn and faded photograph of Jeeves more or less as I remembered him, and Uncle Bertie a good bit younger, both in their Army uniforms. He seemed to be trying not to laugh, and behind him Jeeves stood somberly with a hand on his shoulder. "Be careful with it. It's the only one I've got."
I've been told on the odd grudging occasion that I'm clever, but I'd never felt cleverer than at this moment. "Remember when you said you'd take me to New York?"
"Oh, Tommy, no."
"Oh, Tommy, yes. Code of the Woosters. You promised."
He took the photo back with trembling hands and stared at it. "I suppose I did, at that."
"Do you suppose Colin would come?" I asked hopefully. Maybe a happy ending for both of us was possible.