All these words were so unlike Aunt Agatha. I felt a suspicion. And I was right.
“Aline[54] Hemmingway,” said Aunt Agatha, “is just the girl I should like to see you marry, Bertie. You ought to be thinking of getting married. Marriage might make something of you. And I could not wish you a better wife than dear Aline. She would be such a good influence in your life.”
“But, I say—” I began.
“Bertie!” said Aunt Agatha, dropping the motherly manner for a bit and giving me the cold eye.
“Yes, but I say—”
“It is young men like you, Bertie, who spoil the society. Cursed with too much money, you lead an idle selfishness life which might have been made useful, helpful and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone. Bertie, it is imperative that you marry.”
“But—”
“Yes! You should have children to—”
“No, really, I say, please!” I said, blushing richly. Aunt Agatha belongs to two or three of these women’s clubs, and she often forgets she isn’t in the smoking-room[55].
“Bertie,” she resumed. “Ah, here they are!” she said. “Aline, dear!”
And I perceived a girl and a fellow. They were smiling in a pleased sort of manner.
“I want you to meet my nephew, Bertie Wooster,” said Aunt Agatha. “He has just arrived. Such a surprise! I did not expect to meet him in Roville.”
I was feeling like a cat in the middle of a lot of hounds. An inner voice was whispering that Bertram[56] was in trouble.
The brother was a small round man with a face rather like a sheep. He wore pince-nez[57], his expression was benevolent, and he had on one of those collars which button at the back.
“Welcome to Roville, Mr Wooster,” he said.
“Oh, Sidney[58]!” said the girl. “Doesn’t Mr Wooster remind you of Canon Blenkinsop[59], who came to Chipley to preach last Easter?”
“My dear! The resemblance is most striking!”
They peered at me for a while as if I were something in a glass case, and I had a look at the girl. There’s no doubt about it, she was different from what Aunt Agatha had called the bold girls one meets in London nowadays. No bobbed hair[60], no cigarette. I don’t know when I’ve met anybody who looked so respectable. She had on a kind of plain dress, and her hair was plain, and her face was sort of saintlike. I don’t pretend to be a Sherlock Holmes[61] or anything of that order, but the moment I looked at her I said to myself, “The girl plays the organ in a village church!”
Well, we gazed at one another for a bit, and there was a certain amount of chit-chat[62], and then I went away. But before I went I had been told to take brother and girl for a drive that afternoon. And the thought of it depressed me to such an extent that I felt there was only one thing to be done. I went straight back to my room, took out the cummerbund, and draped it round myself. I turned round and saw Jeeves.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said. “You are surely not proposing to appear in public in that thing?”
“The cummerbund?” I said in a careless way. “Oh, yes!”
“I should not advise it, sir, really I shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“The effect, sir, is unpredictable.”
I looked at him. I mean to say, nobody knows better than I do that Jeeves is a master mind and all that, but, damn it, a fellow must call his soul his own. You can’t be a slave to your valet. Besides, I was feeling pretty low and the cummerbund was the only thing which could cheer me up.
“You know, the trouble with you, Jeeves,” I said, “is that you’re too—what’s the word I want?—too isolated. You can’t realize that you aren’t in Piccadilly[63] all the time. In a place like this something colourful and poetic is expected of you. Why, I’ve just seen a fellow downstairs in a suit of yellow velvet.”
“Nevertheless, sir—”
“Jeeves,” I said firmly, “my mind is made up. I am feeling a little low-spirited[64] and need cheering. Besides, what’s wrong with it? This cummerbund seems to me to be quite right. I consider that it has rather a Spanish effect. The old hidalgo and the bull fight.”
“Very good, sir[65],” said Jeeves coldly.
If there’s one thing that upsets me, it’s unpleasantness in the home. Aunt Agatha, the Hemmingway girl … I felt though nobody loved me.
The drive that afternoon was boring as I had expected. The curate fellow prattled on of this and that; the girl admired the view; and I got a headache. I went back to my room to dress for dinner, feeling like a toad under the harrow. I tried to talk to Jeeves.
“I say, Jeeves,” I said.
“Sir?”
“Mix me some brandy and soda.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Jeeves, not too much soda.”
“Very good, sir.”
After it, I felt better.
“Jeeves,” I said.
“Sir?”
“I think I’m in a big trouble, Jeeves.”
“Indeed, sir?”
I looked at him. He still remembers the cummerbund.
“Yes,” I said, suppressing the pride of the Woosters. “Have you seen a girl here with a parson brother?”
“Miss Hemmingway, sir? Yes, sir.”
“Aunt Agatha wants me to marry her.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Well, what about it?”
“Sir?”
“I mean, have you anything to suggest?”
“No, sir.”
His manner was very cold.
“Oh, well, tra-la-la!” I said.
“Precisely sir,” said Jeeves.
And that was all.
4
Pearls Mean Tears
I remember—it must have been when I was at school—reading a poem or something about something or other in which there was a line which went, “Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy.” During the next two weeks that’s exactly how it was with me. I mean to say, I could hear the wedding bells chiming faintly in the distance and getting louder and louder every day, and I could not imagine how to slide out of it. Jeeves, no doubt, was offended, and I couldn’t ask him directly. He could see easily enough that the young master was in a bad way and, if that wasn’t enough, well, it meant that the old feudal spirit was dead in his bosom and there was nothing to be done about it.
It was really funny how the Hemmingway family had taken to me[66]. I wouldn’t have said that there was anything particularly fascinating about me—in fact, most people look on me as rather an ass; but this girl and her brother didn’t seem happy if they were away from me. In fact, I’d got into the habit now of retiring to my room when I wanted to rest a little. I got a rather decent suite on the third floor, looking down on to the promenade.
I had gone in my suite one evening and for the first time that day was feeling that life wasn’t so bad after all. Right through the day from lunch-time I’d had the Hemmingway girl nearby. The result was, as I looked down on the lighted promenade and saw all the people walking happily to dinner and the Casino, a kind of wistful feeling came over me. I thought how happy I could have been in this place if only Aunt Agatha and her friends had been elsewhere.