Free Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse Page B

indulge your peculiar tastes,’ he said, and he, too, passed into the night.
    Stiffy looked after him with a thoughtful eye.
    ‘I don’t believe Uncle Watkyn likes you, Bertie. I noticed the way he kept staring at you at dinner, as if appalled. Well, I don’t wonder your arrival hit him hard. It did me. I’ve never been so surprised in my life as when you suddenly bobbed up like a corpse rising to the surface of a sheet of water. Harold told me he had pleaded with you to come here, but nothing would induce you. What made you change your mind?’
    In my previous sojourn at Totleigh Towers circumstances had compelled me to confide in this young prune my position as regarded her cousin Madeline, so I had no hesitation now in giving her the low-down.
    ‘I learned that there was trouble between Madeline and Gussie, due, I have since been informed, to her forcing him to follow in the footsteps of the poet Shelley and become a vegetarian, and I felt that I might accomplish something as a raisonneur?’
    ‘As a whatonneur?’
    ‘I thought that would be a bit above your head. It’s a French expression meaning, I believe, though I would have to check with Jeeves, a calm kindly man of the world who intervenes when a rift has occurred between two loving hearts and brings them together again. Very essential in the present crisis.’
    ‘You mean that if Madeline hands Gussie the pink slip, she’ll marry you?’
    ‘That, broadly, is about the strength of it. And while I admire and respect Madeline, I’m all against the idea of having her smiling face peeping at me over the coffee pot for the rest of my life. So I came along here to see what I could do.’
    ‘Well, you couldn’t have come at a better moment. Now you’re here, you can get cracking on that job Harold told you I want you to do for me.’
    I saw that the time had come for some prompt in-the-bud-nipping.
    ‘Include me out. I won’t touch it. I know you and your jobs.’
    ‘But this is something quite simple. You can do it on your head. And you’ll be bringing sunshine and happiness into the life of a poor slob who can do with a bit of both. Were you ever a Boy Scout?’
    ‘Not since early boyhood.’
    ‘Then you’ve lots of leeway to make up in the way of kind deeds. This’ll be a nice start for you. The facts are as follows.’
    ‘I don’t want to hear them.’
    ‘You would prefer that I recalled Bartholomew and told him to go on where he left off?’
    She had what Jeeves had called a talking point.
    ‘Very well. Tell me all. But briefly.’
    ‘It won’t take long, and then you can be off to beddy-bye. You remember that little black statuette thing on the table at dinner.’
    ‘Ah yes, the eyesore.’
    ‘Uncle Watkyn bought it from a man called Plank.’
    ‘So I gathered.’
    ‘Well, do you know what he paid him for it?’
    ‘A thousand quid, didn’t you say?’
    ‘No, I didn’t. I said it was worth that. But he got it out of this poor blighter Plank for a fiver.’
    ‘You’re kidding.’
    ‘No, I’m not. He paid him five pounds. He makes no secret of it. When we were at Brinkley, he was showing the thing to Mr. Travers and telling him all about it… how he happened to see it on Plank’s mantelpiece and spotted how valuable it was and told Plank it was worth practically nothing but he would give him five pounds for it because he knew how hard up he was. He gloated over how clever he had been, and Mr. Travers writhed like an egg whisk.’
    I could well believe it. If there’s one thing that makes a collector spit blood, it’s hearing about another collector getting a bargain.
    ‘How do you know Plank was hard up?’
    ‘Well, would he have let the thing go for a fiver if he wasn’t?’
    ‘Something in that.’
    ‘You can’t say Uncle Watkyn isn’t a dirty dog.’
    ‘I would never dream of saying he isn’t - and always has been -the dirtiest of dogs. It bears out what I have frequently maintained, that there are no depths to