Joy in the Morning Page 2

  But when details began to come in, and I discovered that the bimbo who had drawn the short straw was Lord Worplesdon, the shipping magnate, this tender commiseration became sensibly diminished. The thing, I felt, would be no walkover. Even if in the fulness of time she wore him down and at length succeeded in making him jump through hoops, she would know she had been in a fight.

  For he was hot stuff, this Worplesdon. I had known him all my life. It was he who at the age of fifteen – when I was fifteen, I mean, of course – found me smoking one of his special cigars in the stable yard and chased me a mile across difficult country with a hunting crop. And though with advancing years our relations had naturally grown more formal, I had never been able to think of him without getting goose pimples. Given the choice between him and a hippogriff as a companion for a walking tour, I would have picked the hippogriff every time.

  It was not easy to see how such a man of blood and iron could have been reduced to sending out S O S’s for Jeeves, and I was reflecting on the possibility of compromising letters in the possession of gold-digging blondes, when I reached my destination and started to lodge my order.

  ‘Good morning, good morning,’ I said. ‘I want a book.’

  Of course, I ought to have known that it’s silly to try to buy a book when you go to a book shop. It merely startles and bewilders the inmates. The motheaten old bird who had stepped forward to attend to me ran true to form.

  ‘A book, sir?’ he said, with ill-concealed astonishment.

  ‘Spinoza,’ I replied, specifying.

  This had him rocking back on his heels.

  ‘Did you say Spinoza, sir?’

  ‘Spinoza was what I said.’

  He seemed to be feeling that if we talked this thing out long enough as man to man, we might eventually hit upon a formula.

  ‘You do not mean “The Spinning Wheel”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It would not be “The Poisoned Pin”?’

  ‘It would not.’

  ‘Or “With Gun and Camera in Little Known Borneo”?’ he queried, trying a long shot.

  ‘Spinoza,’ I repeated firmly. That was my story, and I intended to stick to it.

  He sighed a bit, like one who feels that the situation has got beyond him.

  ‘I will go and see if we have it in stock, sir. But possibly this may be what you are requiring. Said to be very clever.’

  He pushed off, Spinoza-ing under his breath in a hopeless sort of way, leaving me clutching a thing called ‘Spindrift’.

  It looked pretty foul. Its jacket showed a female with a green, oblong face sniffing at a purple lily, and I was just about to fling it from me and start a hunt for that ‘Poisoned Pin’ of which he had spoken, when I became aware of someone Good-gracious-Bertie-ing and, turning, found that the animal cries proceeded from a tall girl of commanding aspect who had oiled up behind me.

  ‘Good gracious, Bertie! Is it really you?’

  I emitted a sharp gurgle, and shied like a startled mustang. It was old Worplesdon’s daughter, Florence Craye.

  And I’ll tell you why, on beholding her, I shied and gurgled as described. I mean, if there’s one thing I bar, it’s the sort of story where people stagger to and fro, clutching their foreheads and registering strong emotion, and not a word of explanation as to what it’s all about till the detective sums up in the last chapter.

  Briefly, then, the reason why this girl’s popping up had got in amongst me in this fashion was that we had once been engaged to be married, and not so dashed long ago, either. And though it all came out all right in the end, the thing being broken off and self saved from the scaffold at the eleventh hour, it had been an extraordinarily narrow squeak and the memory remained green. The mere mention of her name was still enough to make me call for a couple of quick ones, so you can readily appreciate my agitation at bumping into her like this absolutely in the flesh.

  I swayed in the breeze, and found myself a bit stumped for the necessary dialogue.

  ‘Oh, hullo,’ I said.

  Not good, of course, but the best I could do.

  CHAPTER 2

  Scanning the roster of the females I’ve nearly got married to in my time, we find the names of some tough babies. The eye rests on that of Honoria Glossop, and a shudder passes through the frame. So it does when we turn to the B’s and come upon Madeline Bassett. But, taking everything into consideration and weighing this and that, I have always been inclined to consider Florence Craye the top. In the face of admittedly stiff competition, it is to her that I would award the biscuit.

  Honoria Glossop was hearty, yes. Her laugh was like a steam-riveting machine, and from a child she had been a confirmed back-slapper. Madeline Bassett was soppy, true. She had large, melting eyes and thought the stars were God’s daisy chain. These are grave defects, but to do this revolting duo justice neither had tried to mould me, and that was what Florence Craye had done from the start, seeming to look on Bertram Wooster as a mere chunk of plasticine in the hands of the sculptor.

  The root of the trouble was that she was one of those intellectual girls, steeped to the gills in serious purpose, who are unable to see a male soul without wanting to get behind it and shove. We had scarcely arranged the preliminaries before she was checking up on my reading, giving the bird to ‘Blood on the Banisters’, which happened to be what I was studying at the moment, and substituting for it a thing called ‘Types of Ethical Theory’. Nor did she attempt to conceal the fact that this was a mere pipe opener and that there was worse to come.

  Have you ever dipped into ‘Types of Ethical Theory’? The volume is still on my shelves. Let us open it and see what it has to offer. Yes, here we are.

  Of the two antithetic terms in the Greek philosophy one only was real and selfsubsisting; that is to say, Ideal Thought as opposed to that which it has to penetrate and mould. The other, corresponding to our Nature, was in itself phenomenal, unreal, without any permanent footing, having no predicates that held true for two moments together; in short, redeemed from negation only by including indwelling realities appearing through.

  Right. You will have got the idea, and will, I think, be able to understand why the sight of her made me give at the knees somewhat. Old wounds had been reopened.

  None of the embarrassment which was causing the Wooster toes to curl up inside their neat suède shoes like the tendrils of some sensitive plant seemed to be affecting this chunk of the dead past. Her manner, as always, was brisk and aunt-like. Even at the time when I had fallen beneath the spell of that profile of hers, which was a considerable profile and tended to make a man commit himself to statements which he later regretted, I had always felt that she was like someone training on to be an aunt.

  ‘And how are you, Bertie?’

  ‘Oh, fine, thanks.’

  ‘I have just run up to London to see my publisher. Fancy meeting you, and in a book shop, of all places. What are you buying? Some trash, I suppose?’

  Her gaze, which had been resting on me in a rather critical and censorious way, as if she was wondering how she could ever have contemplated linking her lot to anything so sub-human, now transferred itself to the volume in my hand. She took it from me, her lip curling in faint disgust, as if she wished she had had a pair of tongs handy.

  And then, as she looked at it, her whole aspect suddenly altered. She switched off the curling lip. She smiled a pleased smile. The eye softened. A blush mantled the features. She positively giggled.

  ‘Oh, Bertie!’

  The gist got past me. ‘Oh, Bertie!’ was a thing she had frequently said to me in the days when we had been affianced, but always with that sort of nasty ring in the voice which made you feel that she had been on the point of expressing her exasperation with something a good deal fruitier but had remembered her ancient lineage just in time. This current ‘Oh, Bertie!’ was quite different. Practically a coo. As it might have been one turtle dove addressing another turtle dove.

  ‘Oh, Bertie!’ she repea
ted. ‘Well, of course, I must autograph it for you,’ she said, and at the same moment all was suddenly made clear to me. I had missed it at first, because I had been concentrating on the girl with the green face, but I now perceived at the bottom of the jacket the words ‘By Florence Craye’. They had been half hidden by a gummed-on label which said ‘Book Society Choice of the Month’. I saw all, and the thought of how near I had come to marrying a female novelist made everything go black for a bit.

  She wrote in the book with a firm hand, thus dishing any prospect that the shop would take it back and putting me seven bob and a tanner down almost, as you might say, before the day had started. Then she said ‘Well!’ still with that turtle dove timbre in her voice.

  ‘Fancy you buying “Spindrift”!’

  Well, one has to say the civil thing, and it may be that in the agitation of the moment I overdid it a bit. I rather think that the impression I must have conveyed, when I assured her that I had made a bee-line for the beastly volume, was that I had been counting the minutes till I could get my hooks on it. At any rate, she came back with a gratified simper.

  ‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am. Not just because it’s mine, but because I see that all the trouble I took training your mind was not wasted. You have grown to love good literature.’

  It was at this point, as if he had entered on cue, that the motheaten bird returned and said they had not got old Pop Spinoza, but could get him for me. He seemed rather depressed about it all, but Florence’s eyes lit up as if somebody had pressed a switch.

  ‘Bertie! This is amazing! Do you really read Spinoza?’

  It’s extraordinary how one yields to that fatal temptation to swank. It undoes the best of us. Nothing, I mean, would have been simpler than to reply that she had got the data twisted and that the authoritatively annotated edition was a present for Jeeves. But, instead of doing the simple, manly, straightforward thing, I had to go and put on dog.

  ‘Oh, rather,’ I said, with an intellectual flick of the umbrella. ‘When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza’s latest.’

  ‘Well!’

  A simple word, but as she spoke it a shudder ran through me from brilliantined topknot to rubber shoe sole.

  It was the look that accompanied the yip that caused this shudder. It was exactly the same sort of look that Madeline Bassett had given me, that time I went to Totleigh Towers to pinch old Bassett’s cow-creamer and she thought I had come because I loved her so much that I couldn’t stay away from her side. A frightful, tender, melting look that went through me like a red-hot bradawl through a pat of butter and filled me with a nameless fear.

  I wished now I hadn’t plugged Spinoza so heartily, and above all I wished I hadn’t been caught in the act of apparently buying this blighted ‘Spindrift’. I saw that unwittingly I had been giving myself a terrific build-up, causing this girl to see Bertram Wooster with new eyes and to get hep to his hidden depths. It might quite well happen that she would review the position in the light of this fresh evidence and decide that she had made a mistake in breaking off her engagement to so rare a spirit. And once she got thinking along those lines, who knew what the harvest might be?

  An imperious urge came upon me to be elsewhere, before I could make a chump of myself further.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I must be popping,’ I said. ‘Most important appointment. Frightfully jolly, seeing you again.’

  ‘We ought to see each other more,’ she replied, still with that melting look. ‘We ought to have some long talks.’

  ‘Oh, rather.’

  ‘A developing mind is so fascinating. Why don’t you ever come to the Hall?’

  ‘Oh, well, one gets a bit chained to the metropolis, you know.’

  ‘I should like to show you the reviews of “Spindrift”. They are wonderful. Edwin is pasting them in an album for me.’

  ‘I’d love to see them some time. Later on, perhaps. Good-bye.’

  ‘You’re forgetting your book.’

  ‘Oh, thanks. Well, toodle-oo,’ I said, and fought my way out.

  The appointment to which I had alluded was with the barman at the Bollinger. Seldom, if ever, had I felt in such sore need of a restorative. I headed for my destination like a hart streaking towards cooling streams, when heated in the chase, and was speedily in conference with the dispenser of life savers.

  Ten minutes later, feeling considerably better, though still shaken, I was standing in the doorway, twirling my umbrella and wondering what to do next, when my eye was arrested by an odd spectacle.

  A certain rumminess had begun to manifest itself across the way.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Bollinger bar conducts its beneficent activities about halfway up Bond Street, and on the other side of the thoroughfare, immediately opposite, there stands a courteous and popular jeweller’s, where I generally make my purchases when the question of investing in bijouterie arises. In fact, the day being so fine, I was rather thinking of looking in there now and buying a new cigarette case.

  It was outside this jeweller’s that the odd spectacle was in progress. A bloke of furtive aspect was shimmering to and fro on the threshold of the emporium, his demeanour rather like that of the cat in the adage, which, according to Jeeves, and I suppose he knows, let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’. He seemed, that is to say, desirous of entering, but was experiencing some difficulty in making the grade. He would have a sudden dash at it, and then draw back and stand shooting quick glances right and left, as if fearing the scrutiny of the public eye. Over in New York, during the days of Prohibition, I have seen fellows doing the same sort of thing outside speakeasies.

  He was a massive bloke, and there was something in his appearance that seemed familiar. Then, as I narrowed my gaze and scanned him more closely, memory did its stuff. That beefy frame . . . That pumpkin-shaped head . . . The face that looked like a slab of pink dough . . . It was none other than my old friend, Stilton Cheesewright. And what he was doing, pirouetting outside jewellery bins, was more than I could understand.

  I started across the road with the idea of instituting a probe or quiz, and at the same moment he seemed to summon up a sudden burst of resolution. As I paused to disentangle myself from a passing bus, he picked up his feet, tossed his head in a mettlesome sort of way, and was through the door like a man dashing into a railway-station buffet with only two minutes for a gin and tonic before his train goes.

  When I entered the establishment, he was leaning over the counter, his gaze riveted on some species of merchandise which was being shown him by the gentlemanly assistant. To prod him in the hindquarters with my umbrella was with me the work of an instant.

  Ahoy there, Stilton!’ I cried.

  He spun round with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk.

  ‘Oh, hullo,’ he said.

  There was a pause. At a moment like this, with old boyhood friends meeting again after long separation, I mean to say, you might have expected a good deal of animated what-ho-ing and an immediate picking up of the threads. Of this, however, there was a marked absence. The Auld Lang Syne spirit was strong in me, but not, or I was mistaken, equally strong in G. D’Arcy Cheesewright. I have met so many people in my time who have wished that Bertram was elsewhere that I have come to recognize the signs. And it was these signs that this former playmate was now exhibiting.

  He drew me away from the counter, shielding it from my gaze with his person, like somebody trying to hide the body.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t go spiking people in the backside with your beastly umbrella,’ he said, and one sensed the querulous note. ‘Gave me a nasty shock.’

  I apologized gracefully, explaining that if you have an umbrella and are fortunate enough to catch an old acquaintance bending, you naturally do not let the opportunity slip, and endeavoured to set him at his ease with genial chit-chat. From the embarrassment he was displaying, I might have been some high of
ficial in the police force interrupting him in the middle of a smash and grab raid. His demeanour perplexed me.

  ‘Well, well, well, Stilton,’ I said. ‘Quite awhile since we met.’

  ‘Yes,’ he responded, his air that of a man who was a bit sorry it hadn’t been longer.

  ‘How’s the boy?’

  ‘Oh, all right. How are you?’

  ‘Fine, thanks. As a matter of fact, I’m feeling unusually fizzy.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘Oh, I am. Well, good-bye, Bertie,’ he said, shaking me by the hand. ‘Nice to have seen you.’

  I looked at him, amazed. Did he really imagine, I asked myself, that I was as easily got rid of as this? Why, experts have tried to get rid of Bertram Wooster and have been forced to admit defeat.

  ‘I’m not leaving you yet,’ I assured him.

  ‘Aren’t you?’ he said, wistfully.

  ‘No, no. Still here. Jeeves tells me you dropped in on me this morning.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Accompanied by Nobby.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You live at Steeple Bumpleigh, too, I hear.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s a small world.’

  ‘Not so very.’

  ‘Jeeves thinks it is.’

  ‘Well, fairly small, perhaps,’ he agreed, making a concession. ‘You’re sure I’m not keeping you, Bertie?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘I thought you might have some date somewhere.’

  ‘Oh, no, not a thing.’

  There was another pause. He hummed a few bars of a popular melody, but not rollickingly. He also shuffled his feet quite a bit.

  ‘Been there long?’