Free Expecting Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse Page B

spoke from the darkness on my right.
    â€œPop!”
    Old Blumenfield clapped his hands, and the hero, who had just been about to get the next line off his diaphragm, cheesed it. I peered into the shadows. Who should it be but Jeeves’s little playmate with the freckles! He was now strolling down the aisle with his hands in his pockets as if the place belonged to him. An air of respectful attention seemed to pervade the building.
    â€œPop,” said the stripling, “that number’s no good.” Old Blumenfield beamed over his shoulder.
    â€œDon’t you like it, darling?”
    â€œIt gives me a pain.”
    â€œYou’re dead right.”
    â€œYou want something zippy there. Something with a bit of jazz to it!”
    â€œQuite right, my boy. I’ll make a note of it. All right. Go on!”
    I turned to George, who was muttering to himself in rather an overwrought way.
    â€œI say, George, old man, who the dickens is that kid?”
    Old George groaned a bit hollowly, as if things were a trifle thick.
    â€œI didn’t know he had crawled in! It’s Blumenfield’s son. Now we’re going to have a Hades of a time!”
    â€œDoes he always run things like this?”
    â€œAlways!”
    â€œBut why does old Blumenfield listen to him?”
    â€œNobody seems to know. It may be pure fatherly love, or he may regard him as a mascot. My own idea is that he thinks the kid has exactly the amount of intelligence of the average member of the audience, and that what makes a hit with him will please the general public. While, conversely, what he doesn’t like will be too rotten for anyone. The kid is a pest, a wart, and a pot of poison, and should be strangled!”
    The rehearsal went on. The hero got off his line. There was a slight outburst of frightfulness between the stage-manager and a Voice named Bill that came from somewhere near the roof, the subject under discussion being where the devil Bill’s “ambers” were at that particular juncture. Then things went on again until the moment arrived for Cyril’s big scene.
    I was still a trifle hazy about the plot, but I had got on to the fact that Cyril was some sort of an English peer who had come over to America doubtless for the best reasons. So far he had only had two lines to say. One was “Oh, I say!” and the other was “Yes, by Jove!”; but I seemed to recollect, from hearing him read his part, that pretty soon he was due rather to spread himself. I sat back in my chair and waited for him to bob up.
    He bobbed up about five minutes later. Things had got a bit stormy by that time. The Voice and the stage-director had had another of their love-feasts—this time something to do with why Bill’s “blues” weren’t on the job or something. And, almost as soon as that was over, there was a bit of unpleasantness because a flower-pot fell off a window-ledge and nearly brained the hero. The atmosphere was consequently more or less hotted up when Cyril, who had been hanging about at the back of the stage, breezed down centre and toed the mark for his most substantial chunk of entertainment. The heroine had been saying something—I forget what—and all the chorus, with Cyril at their head, had begun to surge round her in the restless sort of way those chappies always do when there’s a number coming along.
    Cyril’s first line was, “Oh, I say, you know, you mustn’t say that, really!” and it seemed to me he passed it over the larynx with a goodish deal of vim and
je-ne-sais-quoi.
But, by Jove, before the heroine had time for the come-back, our little friend with the freckles had risen to lodge a protest.
    â€œPop!”
    â€œYes, darling?”
    â€œThat one’s no good!”
    â€œWhich one, darling?”
    â€œ The one with a face like a fish.”
    â€œBut they all have faces like fish, darling.”
    The child seemed to see the